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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Ten percent of all engineers is pretty significant. Curious what the motive is.

I can posit a few things. My work is "down the street" from them and they hired extremely quickly. From murmurs I've heard that seemed to actually work out ok. Having experienced really fast growth at my work, but not their rate of fast growth, I can trow some spaghetti on the wall that will probably hit somewhere near the mark for some set of the 100 firings.

1. Managing out.

If you hire quickly and perhaps not carefully, you'll hire people who don't necessarily perform as well as you thought (generally), don't perform well in your environment in spite of their talents (i.e. Chris Lattner's short stint at Tesla), or don't get along with the team and hurt culture.

2. Under the same fast growth, you may also hire a specialist for some technology you decide to get rid of.

While the ideal situation is finding a new role or moving them to a different team with a similar technology (i.e. one NoSQL DB to another), you may not be able to do that if you hired lots of folks all at once.

3. They simply over hired.

This can mean they don't have enough managers and people are being poorly utilized, they hired opportunistically, or they were just poorly coordinated.

4. They need to make their accounting look better.

People cost money, until you stop paying them. Not much to say here.

2. Under the same fast growth, you may also hire a specialist for some technology you decide to get rid of.

This would only lead to a very small (less than 3-5), if any, part of the 100 engineers getting fired.

3. They simply over hired.

I guess some part of this could also have been because they de-prioritized some big features, that led to some engineers not having enough work.

Right. I’m not saying these suggestions cover every person being let go. My position is that rather than this being a doom and gloom event for Snap, like some other comments have suggested, there are many reasons. These are the ones I’ve seen happen personally.

Insightful...thanks for sharing. It's a shame companies don't consider the personal turmoil they create when moving that fast.

Meh. Remember, they're paying you for a service, and they can terminate the relationship largely at-will when that service is no longer required.

I'm not saying I agree with how the US employment system currently functions, but them's the facts. If you value stability or loyalty, definitely don't join a hyper-growth startup.

> Ten percent of all engineers is pretty significant

Not if 20% or even 30% was from 'fat' / over-hiring -- they TRIPLED their staff from 600 to over 1,800 within a year[1] -- in the year leading up to their splashy IPO

[1] Source: https://marketingland.com/snap-reportedly-lays-off-18-employ...

> The company, which went public in March 2017, has been on a hiring spree over the past couple of years.

> Between December 31, 2015, and December 31, 2016, the company’s full-time employee base rose from 600 people to 1,859, according to the company’s most recent earnings report.

Thanks. That's pretty crazy growth. Just onboarding and training them on how things work seems impossible at that growth rate.

Also shows how little they care about the personal/family turmoil they create when doing that.

Given the number, there is probably zero on boarding and training. Only a new employee surrounded by other new employees.

The motive is probably to save money.

Well, sure. But there's a higher level motive there. Like prepping for a takeover, pivot, etc. Reducing engineer capacity also means reducing pace of innovation.

Reducing engineering capacity does not necessarily mean reducing the pace of a companies innovation.

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