Bulletins

Facebook wants to hire 10,000 people to build the metaverse

The company believes it will be the leader in constructing a shared future in virtual reality.

Facebook VR avatar editor

Facebook wants to build the metaverse by hiring 10,000 people in Europe.

Image: Facebook

Facebook wants to be the company that moves our lives into the shared virtual reality known as the metaverse — and apparently, the company needs to hire 10,000 engineers in the European Union to make that happen.

The company announced Monday that it's going on a massive European hiring spree over the next five years because "Europe is very important to Facebook," and "European policymakers are leading the way in helping to embed European values like free expression, privacy, transparency and the rights of individuals into the day-to-day workings of the internet," according to Monday's announcement. The statement also asks European governments to work with Facebook to find the talent it needs.

Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing the idea that Facebook will be the leader in creating the metaverse over the last year, and Facebook recently appointed Andrew Bosworth, its longtime AR/VR leader and expert, as Facebook's new incoming chief technology officer.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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