LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

It means the company is making a dramatic shift in how they do things. While this could be good (mass layoffs often mean that the company has finally realized they have a problem), what is definitely means is that they've made a lot of mistakes. It's essentially admitting that they've made suboptimal decisions.

That is why it is reported on, not because it's a morally bad thing or whatever.

1. LinkedIn has its own special problems. (Maybe I’ll sell and follow another company or sector).

2. The economy is in recession. (Should have gotten into bonds 3 months ago, oh well).

Companies often try to paint structural problems as competitive adjustments, but we know they rarely do real layoffs during flush times.

Probably most of the cuts are very political, with certain darlings being given freedom to restructure and layoff according to their whim.

I think the story that companies do this for efficiency is mostly bullshit. That’s just the excuse.

And here the answer is: because there's a big overall downturn.

When things are going well, we generally try to find ways to grow. Find new things for people to do if they aren't needed in their current roles. When we have to focus on trimming costs instead, it's usually due to negative factors.

It has a lot of potential, but is completely ruined by the social media aspect and their attempt at making it yet another cesspool like Twitter or Instagram, all the way down to the algorithmic feed, likes and reactions.

They should step away from the nonsense and make the tool (because yes it should be seen as a tool and not a lifestyle) easier to use, not harder. Stop getting in my way trying to make me use the algorithmic feed (it forgets your choice after a few hours) or nagging me to add a profile picture (I've said no for 2 years, why are you still trying?) or certain profile details I might not want to share, or "following sources" (whatever that means, I guess it's about following bullshit hashtags so you can have even more crap in your feed). The UI is absolutely terrible and slow for no good reason and makes it painful to use.

The worst is that you might think "okay well the free version for the plebs is nasty because it tries to drum up engagement, but the premium version should be better, right?" WRONG! The premium version is just as bad but instead of wasting just your time it wastes your time and your money.

16K people spanning the whole globe is not bad .

Usually with those type of comments someone replies explaining that we don't get it and that you MUST have 20000 people to support a website like LinkedIn

Microsoft has historically been pretty ruthless about annual culls. It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. More recently it’s more quiet.

I don’t begrudge companies this. They need to move resources where they’re most needed.

So, almost literally decimate in the classical sense? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)

From what I've read, this was standard practice at Microsoft for over a decade.

I think this makes sense during a downturn, but probably wears on morale if it happens every year.

This is the kind of situation where it would be good to have a union. In the tech industry, it might have to be a different kind of union than exists elsewhere (for instance, I think most of us wouldn't want to do technical work in an environment where people who aren't good at their job can only be fired in reverse order of seniority).

The way I see it, people aren't entitled to good jobs for life from private companies, but neither are companies entitled to a cheap and disposable workforce. There's probably some place we could meet in the middle that has stronger protections for workers than are currently in place in the U.S. (I don't know enough about what protections exist in other countries to comment.)

My first reaction to the headline was mild shock that 960 people even worked for LinkedIn. What do 10,000 do at Linked? Netflix has 8,600 and Twitter has less than 5,000 for comparison

Plus the lower jobs posting overall.

It needs to be this way for certain legal reasons.

  - sales & billing for linkedin premium, lynda, and other paid products
  - billing fraud detection, to cut the cost of chargebacks
  - security, to prevent that one leak from happening again, to keep PCI compliance, etc.
  - spam filtering, tuned to balance keeping paying customers (recruiters) happy with keeping suppliers (candidates with a resume) happy
  - Writing new features, to keep engagement and signups up
  - fixing things that keep breaking, like the email contact scraper
  - testing code for new features to make sure they, IDK, don't break the signup page
  - a/b testing the hell out of any and every thing
  - collecting and storing the massive analytics datasets they generate daily
  - analyzing daily datasets to determine which a/bs to promote
  - coming up with new features
  - testing anything at all
  - deploying corporate networking in all the offices buildings and such
  - optimizing infra costs
  - deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS
  - moving back to cloud (azure) because after you were acquired, the markup dropped and the calculus on on-prem vs cloud flipped
  - managing all the projects associated with above
  - recruiting staff to handle all the above
  - managing all the staff associated with above
  - acquistions (lynda, fliptop, glint, drawbridge)

I wouldn't be surprised if they have 1000 people in the US just dedicated to sales & account management for the job listings.

Granted, I understand there is a HUGE mind boggling level of scale involved.

But still, after going on such interviews, and talking with friends who work at FAANG, etc. it sounds like my boring mediocre job as a bank SWE is more involved and exciting than some of these FAANG jobs.

But I'd still jump through flaming hoops to jump ship to a FAANG or similar tech company.

The ideal is that you would have 500 people that are efficient enough to perform 20x the work, and optimize the work efficiency, and automate some things.

What I have seen personally is that employers just overload staff. They reach a crisis point and have to hire more people. That just hurts employees and there families.

I do not want to make baseless assumptions on who was laid off. People could be laid off for something as trivial as a site consolidation and the person could not relocate, or an acquisition where multiple people had the similar roles. Using laid off status as a scarlet letter is a worrisome trend and only serves to harm all of us in the long term.

I personally do not want to live in a zero sum economy.

If you now think that all business divisions have more work to perform due to scale, and that for development, you want to have more parallel streams of work, this should give you an approximate idea of what an order of magnitude larger company uses 10k people for.

If you find someone who can make things .002% more efficient and pay them $100,000 a year, you've still come out ahead.

At that revenue, it doesn't take much to get an ROI on a new employee.

> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers?

> ...

> Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There's also a wide body of research that's found that decreasing latency has a signifiacnt effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize.

> And that's just performance. Features also matter: when I talk to engineers working on basically any product at any company, they'll often find that there are seemingly trivial individual features that can add integer percentage points to revenue. Just as with performance, people underestimate how many engineers you can add to a product before engineers stop paying for themselves.

> Additionally, features are often much more complex than outsiders realize. If we look at search, how do we make sure that different forms of dates and phone numbers give the same results? How about internationalization? Each language has unique quirks that have to be accounted for. In french, “l'foo” should often match “un foo” and vice versa, but American search engines from the 90s didn't actually handle that correctly. How about tokenizing Chinese queries, where words don't have spaces between them, and sentences don't have unique tokenizations? How about Japanese, where queries can easily contain four different alphabets? How about handling Arabic, which is mostly read right-to-left, except for the bits that are read left-to-right? And that's not even the most complicated part of handling Arabic! It's fine to ignore this stuff for a weekend-project MVP, but ignoring it in a real business means ignoring the majority of the market! Some of these are handled ok by open source projects, but many of the problems involve open research problems.

> There's also security! If you don't “bloat” your company by hiring security people, you'll end up like hotmail or yahoo, where your product is better known for how often it's hacked than for any of its other features.

> Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years1. When people imagine how long it should take to build something, they're often imagining a team that works perfectly and spends 100% of its time coding. But that's impossible to scale up. The question isn't whether or not there will inefficiencies, but how much inefficiency. A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. But when doing the math on how many employees a company “should” have, people usually assume that the company is an efficient organization.

Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue.

Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify).

Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense.

And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.

Once you have that answer, you’ll know why there are so many employees.

That is not small change, even for a company the size of Microsoft.

They may have been contributing more than that to the bottom line prior to the recession--hard to know--but the recession changes quite a bit of the calculus around long-term bets.