Digg Cuts 10% of Staff | Hacker News Reader

Digg Cuts 10% of Staff

techcrunch.com

44 pointsrosshudgens42 comments

I'm surprised they cut so little. I could never understand, for the life of me, why they had such a big staff. It seems to me Kevin Rose could have made himself a very nice living off the site with a staff of around 5 people maintaining the site, but instead they had to get all "future of news" and overstretch themselves.

It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.

This would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a standard because of this.

Jack Welch strongly advocates for this approach, and it's how GE operated when he was CEO (I don't know if they still do or not). NetFlix also does something similar.

Why do you think it would be a morale nightmare? If you're doing well at your job, wouldn't you take comfort in knowing the person down the line who isn't pulling his weight will be cut out of the company at some point? High expectations are motivating.

Well you could be pushing people to only be about themselves and their team and not the company as a whole. Why would I want to work with and help another team if it means I may move them above the 10% line and me below?

So while you're right that it would push people to do their job well it could also push them to submarine others.

The point is that companies shouldn't waste a lot of time trying to salvage or put up with people who aren't helping them succeed. If a person is hovering around the bottom 10% and they think the solution is to screw someone else over, they probably should go. I know I wouldn't want to work with them.

The idea is the manager doesn't know the sabotage happened, and only sees the results. The failed sabotages, yeah, of course those don't help.

It wouldn't be a morale nightmare for me, but for those people who aren't as motivated and are just sitting at the poverty line in terms of their progression in the workplace, knowing about stuff like this can loom over their head and create a plague of gossip and backtalk in the workplace.

If I recall correctly, Netflix does this: cutting n percent of the workforce on a yearly basis ("adequate performance gets you a generous severance package").

It's countered by paying above market salaries and ensuring that these salaries _remain as such_ (even going to the point of where employees aren't discouraged from interviewing elsewhere to "sample the market").

Microsoft, I believe, does something similar. Whether it's the right approach is another matter.

As I recall Intel did and maybe still does this. At one point it got over 10% a year....

It would only be a morale nightmare if the decisions were made randomly (or for political reasons), and not based on performance/job fit. My experience is that people tend to view letting underperformers go as a positive. It's far more damaging to morale to keep the underperformers around.

For very large companies with hundreds of projects, figuring out the "bottom 10%" can be challenging. An average developer on a poor team will look like a rockstar to his/her manager, while a really good developer on a stellar teams will look average at best.

You're talking about average and good. I'm talking about firing "terrible." I find cowardice often prevents hiring mistakes from being corrected quickly, and the accuracy of the interview process is not high enough to prevent those bad hires consistently at most companies.

Enron did something like that IIRC. It may have even been based on peer reviews.

Intel also.

Guilt by association doesn't make a case either way.

That's also a great way to ensure that your employees never take risks, ever, and spend most of their time marketing their work rather than improving it.

Not really, in my experience. At most company's I have worked at, there were some people who were either not carrying their weight, or were in support roles with poor interpersonal skills, or management roles but shirked responsibility. Marketing would not have helped the bottom rung, and very often, they were not smart enough to consider or be able to market their work in the first place.

Downturns are often an excuse to lay people off. If you do layoffs in a booming economy people immediately assume theres something wrong at your company. In a downturn its considered "acceptable", since everyone is on hard times. So it's a great excuse to cut the "fat" and get rid of dead weight.

They have 72 staff? Doing what??

next you'll say it takes no labour to goto reddit everyday and filter out things and then post on Digg for sake humanity.

It really boggles my mind till today what the hell do they do with so many employees?

Is it a standard practice for startups for keep many employees to justify raising more funds?

They have no significant changes in how the site works, at-least in the last 2 years or so. The site speed, though better, still sucks. No new features. Site gaming is rampant (just look at the comments).

What are they doing?

"What are they doing?"

Right now? Layoffs.

But they are also hiring for quite some time now, its not like they are laying of people because of money crunch.

What are they doing?

Ad sales. It isn't a very headcount-efficient endeavor once you get past self-served options. A lot of the big corporate branding accounts who have huge amounts of money to burn and don't track conversions (I believe in poker these are referred to as "fish") require someone to chat up the media buyer for a while.

Branding campaigns are only a backup strategy, mind you, in case that Digg doesn't sell out their inventory of inflated page views by rabidly anti-commercial poor adolescents. For some unfathomable reason.

Once you get past a certain # of core staff (programmers and a few designers), you start to have overhead. Its almost unavoidable.

HR, legal, finance, PR, business dev, management, senior management, QA, tech support

For comparison, reddit has four people (I think).

Reddit is owned by a larger company, which presumably handles all the business stuff.

I really hope Digg doesn't have 68 people working in HR, Legal, and Marketing

No, they're all in the database team.

I knew they went NoSQL, but I wasn't expecting human brains as JBODs.

It is larger than Reddit. I'd guess around 25-30 engineers.

True, but reddit has less traffic, less users, and less features. For example, Digg shows you which of your friends dugg a story, which is far from trivial.

I like reddit better, but the digg guys are also doing some cool stuff.

I may be mistaken, but it seems like Digg is broken far less often. Just yesterday, people couldn't login to Reddit for nearly the whole day.

And about 10% of the traffic. This isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/

Reddit also has considerable more uptime and speed issues than digg. I like Reddit, but it is slow and recently often experiencing issues.

>They have 72 staff? Doing what??

Browsing reddit.

Looking at edges between users takes AMAZING database skills, and tons of people working on it to speed it up. Any new feature has to fit that, which is pretty crazy to do with the users, traffic, and data that they have. They also give a ton back to OSS, which is key for me.

I haven't used Digg much in about a year...it lost its charm when they started to make the site too complex with unnecessary features and ever-so-slightly related vertical topics.

K.I.S.S. like HN !!

The site was slow and if you read via RSS you couldn't get to the article without going to digg first.

That alone drove me to Reddit.

Does anyone know what kind of revenue they have?

Last report was around $15m. Presumably the new shady ads have bumped that up some.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com