Zuckerberg urged employees who couldn’t take the pressure to leave the company.

Compared to the likes of Twitter and TikTok, social media platform Facebook has been stagnating in recent years, losing users and generally falling out of style. The company’s rebranding to Meta and focus on the so-called Metaverse is an extremely long-term goal with no short-term moneymaking prospects, leaving it in a somewhat precarious position. This position, apparently, has been wearing on CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is urging employees to be prepared for heavier work conditions to make up the difference.

In a recording of a weekly company Q&A session from the end of June obtained by The Verge, Zuckerberg expressed exasperation at the notion of expanded days off, announcing that the company will begin pushing productivity harder and discarding certain incentives.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said in the recording. “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”

Zuckerberg expressed concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic caused Meta employees to expect too much in the way of accommodation, and he plans to end that. “Given the intensity of the environment that we’re in right now,” he said, “I think now the right way to bias is more towards ‘let’s try to make the decision today, not wait until next week.’”

““I get that it can be painful when there’s volatility in the middle of the year,” Zuckerberg said. “But I think, frankly, I want the teams working on products and the things that we need to ship right now.”