Facebook creates 10,000 jobs for Metaverse: EU should participate

For the social media giant, it’s an escape forward. In the past few weeks, Facebook has not only made headlines due to a massive failure of its platforms. More serious are the allegations that the group puts growth and profits above the safety of users and society, as former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen publicly claims.

Some observers describe the situation for the company as the most critical since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a data analysis company evaluated the personal data of 87 million people in order to manipulate them politically. There is much to suggest that Facebook now also wants to send political signals with its Metaversum offensive.

The group is now approaching the EU, where Facebook has come under massive criticism in recent years because of its market power and problems with data protection and data security. Managers Nick Clegg (Vice President Global Affairs) and Javier Olivan (Vice President Central Products) write in the press release: “We look forward to working with governments across the EU to find the right people and markets, and ours to build an exciting project. “

Other technology giants believe in the expansion of the Internet into a metaverse. These include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Tim Sweeney, head of the computer game developer Epic Games. At an analyst conference at the end of July, Zuckerberg described the Metaverse as “a virtual environment in which you can be with people in digital spaces”.

For example, users should be able to project themselves to other locations in the form of a hologram. One can imagine the metaverse “like an embodied Internet in which one is staying instead of just looking at it”.

Facebook, which also includes the WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger services and which, according to its own statements, has around 2.8 billion users every day, does not want to create the new digital world on its own, but it wants to play a central role in it. He expected that people would increasingly see Facebook as a “metaverse company” in the coming years, Zuckerberg said. Almost a fifth of the currently more than 63,000 employees are said to be working on the necessary technologies.

Why Facebook relies on the EU for Metaverse

The company assumes that this will be the most important topic for the next ten to 15 years. It is all the more remarkable that, after the start of an internal “Metaverse product group” in July, Facebook is now first announcing a related wave of recruiting in the EU.

“We have worked hard to create new jobs and a new ecosystem here because there is very good access to talent and a distinctive internal market,” says Europe boss Gifford. Above all, development engineers and product managers are wanted. In particular, expertise in the field of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) is in demand.

According to the manager, it is not yet clear exactly where the new jobs will be created – it could theoretically be everywhere at the same time: “The great thing is that thanks to our hybrid working model and remote work, we can also hire people where we don’t have any offices . “

Mark Zuckerberg is a big proponent of the home office. Shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, he considered allowing employees to work from home on a permanent basis. He referred to the great opportunity to be able to hire staff all over the world.

Angelika Gifford does not want to reject a possible new location. “Of course we don’t want all of our employees to work remotely,” she says. But the discussion about the most suitable place still has to be conducted.

It is also noteworthy that the company’s communication explicitly refers to the EU. Because Facebook’s largest location in Europe is so far London, where the group operates its largest software development center outside of the USA. At the beginning of 2020, Facebook announced that it wanted to increase the number of employees there to 4,000.

And in Zurich, Facebook’s subsidiary Oculus is already working on VR and AR technologies, which will be central to Metaverse. According to the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, the number of employees at the location will soon rise from 200 to 350.

When it comes to the number of current employees in EU countries, Facebook is keeping a low profile. There are “several thousand,” says a spokesman on request. In the LinkedIn career network, 3,900 members stated that they work for Facebook in the EU. Of these, 2300 name Ireland as a place of employment, where Facebook has its European headquarters.

A look through the profiles shows that Facebook mainly employs sales experts, marketing staff, data protection experts and lobbyists across the EU – even if it emphasizes in its latest announcement that it has already invested a lot in tech talent here: In France, the US has -Group opens its first European AI research laboratory, there is an office for virtual and augmented reality in Cork, Ireland, and research is being funded at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Specifically, the US company is financing the TUM Institute for “Ethics in Artificial Intelligence” over a period of five years with a total of 6.5 million euros. When it was announced in 2019, the engagement was heavily criticized in part because of independence concerns.

At Metaverse, the company has now repeatedly emphasized that it does not want to shape the development alone. Among other things, it has provided a fund with more than 43 million euros for programs and external studies. The money is to be used to find out with partners from industry, science, politics and civil society how the technology for a metaverse can be developed responsibly.

How Facebook wants to make money in the next internet era

With a look at the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg also sees new “economic opportunities” – even if nothing is supposed to change in the basic, advertising-based business model. “I think trade will be increasingly important,” Zuckerberg told analysts at the end of the second quarter. In addition, avatars, digital clothing and digital objects would play a major role that people could take with them from place to place in the apps. The Facebook boss predicts that people will spend a lot of money to teleport their digital things and inventories.

Organizationally, the development of the Metaverse will be carried out under the new Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who will take office in 2022. As head of hardware, he has headed the Facebook Reality Labs, among other things. Their latest products include the recently presented “Ray Ban Stories” data glasses, on which Facebook is cooperating with the European glasses giant Essilor Luxottica. With the glasses, users could, for example, take photos and videos and share them directly on Facebook channels. Bosworth is also responsible for the further development of Facebook’s VR glasses “Quest 2”.

The incumbent CTO Mike Schroepfer announced his retirement at the end of September. He has been responsible for the technical infrastructure at Facebook since 2013 and has also led the development of algorithms to prevent hate messages, false reports and social manipulation. The revelations made by the whistleblower Frances Haugen show that Facebook has not consistently pursued this endeavor over the past few years.

“We don’t have the most positive press at the moment,” says Gifford and is optimistic that we can still find 10,000 highly qualified new employees: “But we have a powerful innovation engine, an incredibly inspiring CEO and a fantastic product team that is leading in many areas. “

More: Whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Facebook weakens our democracy.”