Meta has made another round of job cuts, leaving around 4,000 employees this week, many of which have claimed that positive performance has been reviewed last year. Sorting, part of the company’s latest restructuring efforts, confusion and disappointment among the affected employees.

According to a report by Business Insider, several employees revealed that despite receiving the mid-year rating of “AT or above expectations” in 2024, they found themselves involved in the trimming. These employees, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that their rating was unexpectedly downgrated for the end reviews of the year ended, putting them at risk of termination.

Meta had earlier informed its managers to cut the company’s lowest performance about 5 percent. However, internal documents showed that the instructions allowed managers to include high-rated employees, if they could not meet their goals by closing only the lower-rated employees. This information, which was not shared with a broad set of employees, left many blinds.

An affected employee told BI, “I was mostly surprised when I got an email because I have very concrete performance history and no indicator of the last six months of performance problems,” an affected employee told the BI. Another employee echoed the feeling, saying that he was not indicated to his manager that his job was in danger as the worker received a good performance.

Another employee told BI, “The most difficult part is publicly telling Meta that they are biting fewer artists, so it seems that we have a scarlet letter on our back.” “People need to know that we are not underperformers.”

“I will definitely challenge the story of Meta about cutting only less artists,” another employee said. “I really, really difficult times that I was a low artist based on the previous response given by my manager.” A laid employee, who received a rating “more than expectations”, said he was surprised to see his performance reaction, “the most” ratings.

The Meta review process for 2024 began in December, but many employees have yet learned their final ratings. Some activists who had received strong response over the years, suddenly found themselves downgrade, making them eligible for cuts. Expressing disappointment, a worker said that they had been fulfilling expectations for years, only during this recent review cycle without clarification.

Sorting CEO Mark is part of Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to streamline the workforce of Meta as the company focuses on its investment in Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality. While Meta aims to hire more machine learning engineers, it is planned to continue trimming what he considers his lowest artists.