PayPal lays off 7% of staff | Hacker News Reader

PayPal lays off 7% of staff

newsroom.paypal-corp.com

87 pointsimpish920839 comments

Has the CEO taken "responsibility" for their mistakes while increasing their bonus for improving operational efficiencies?

He has not. He has expressed his personal appreciation for the meaningful contributions they have made to PayPal. Progress?

At least he is being more honest than the CEOs in the previous tech layoffs

"While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do," Schulman said in the note. "We must continue to change as our world, our customers, and our competitive landscape evolve."

If an employee moves to a new job, was the first job a "mistake"?

If an employer lets people go, did it make a "mistake"?

Businesses are not completely static from beginning to end.

This is especially true for R&D heavy enterprises.

There are many good reasons for lay-offs, for example, in the case of Twitter, as they would have run into cash flow issues without them. However, the recent lay-offs appear to be copycat behaviour. All the companies had plenty of cash, good revenue, and staff turnover rates multiple times the lay-offs. A hiring freeze would have been sufficient. Most of the companies affected are still hiring and will likely ramp up hiring again towards the end of 2023 if a recession is avoided. As flagged up by other commenters, there is still plenty of cash for events, execute flights and other excesses.

Depends on numbers I suppose. One employee - not a mistake. Twelve thousands employees - looks like a quite big mistake?

The CEO is going to take an extra couple of weeks of paid time off and fly the corporate jet to their yacht to properly decompress and reflect on this very trying time for all parties.

It is a very trying time for all the CEO’s parties. It’s challenging and stressful to have to keep them secret because of the bad PR that would arise from the optics.

No doubt they will pour one out for all the homies laid off.

The submission is literally the message by the CEO, so you can very well see they didn't try to claim responsibility or accountability with no consequences.

I'm all for mocking this behavior when it happens, but maybe we don't need to do so when it explicitly didn't?

> macro-economic environment

Sick of seeing these words

I’m curious to know what roles they are cutting

It's not wrong. The Fed is explicitly asking for these kinds of layoffs. The fact that they are seeing more layoffs in tech opposed to other industries is part of why the interest rate hikes aren't stopping.

There’s a good chance they’ll stop this year.

ELI5 why would the Feds only want this to affect the tech sector and not other markets?

You're talking past each other. The Fed doesn't want tech layoffs in particular, they want layoffs in general to destroy aggregate demand and push wage increases down. Much to the chagrin of all parties, the Fed isn't able to keep up with folks leaving the labor force and job creation.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS#0

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UEMPMEAN

(switch to 1Y resolution for the above)

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4531829-older-workers-propp...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/the-great-retire...

> “The Fed is tightening monetary policy but somebody forgot to tell the labor market,” said Fitch Ratings chief economist Brian Coulton. “The good thing about these numbers is that it shows the U.S. economy firmly got back to growth in the second half of the year. But job expansion continuing at this speed will do nothing to ease the labor supply-demand imbalance that is worrying the Fed.

> Fed Chairman Jerome Powell earlier this week said the job gains are “far in excess of the pace needed to accommodate population growth over time” and said wage pressures are contributing to inflation.

> “To be clear, strong wage growth is a good thing. But for wage growth to be sustainable, it needs to be consistent with 2 percent inflation,” he said during a speech Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/jobs-report-november-2022.ht...

(but lets be real, wages weren't/aren't driving inflation; it was the supply chain (goods), the Ukraine conflict (energy), ZIRP and new stock not keeping up with demand (housing), and Avian flu (eggs))

Surely raising interest rates and destroying the economy will bring back those 58 million chickens, restore the supply chain, and make Russia pull out of Ukraine.

You're saying that the current inflation is transitory, and that's heresy.

They just want make enough people become broke via layoffs/debt payments so that their demand evaporates due to not having any money to spend, because that's the only thing they have power over. JPow has repeatedly implied that the average person AKA labour force is merely an expendable statistic.

Interesting. The current administration is proud of its low unemployment numbers while pulling this move.

The hypocrisy writes itself, hehe.

Politicians are most honest when they are lying it seems :)

It's the same as Trump boasting about the bull market when it was merely a continued trend line from Obama days. Politicians love presenting favourable statistics to make themselves look good regardless of whether they did something to make that happen.

The Fed enjoys some level of policy independence so they don't take every order from the administration like a dangling puppet. So the current administration's involvement in this is somewhat limited.

It doesn't seem quite the same. Instead of "praise me for what I inherited", it's more like:

"I'm proud of low unemployment. Low unemployment is valuable and is something we want." Meanwhile the Fed is seeking to increase unemployment.

The Fed isn't directly controlled by the executive branch. And when unemployment trends become serious, it will remind the Fed that the Fed's mandate includes achieving maximum employment.

Yes.

Also, can you imagine how Trump and right-wing media would have bitched if these moves by the Fed occurred during his administration?

DEep StatE Fed bureaucrats trying to win election for socialists, etc

? For one thing, the Fed isn't really part of the administration. So the executive branch can attempt to take credit for the statistic even while the Fed tries to destroy it.

The Federal Reserve is not part of “the administration”. It’s (supposed to be) an independent entity.

So Powell’s theory is: if we can limit the middle class’s purchasing power by restricting extreme wage growth, the price of consumer goods will eventually plateau or only increase at a fixed 2%.

Otherwise, if wages are allowed to increase at the actual inflation rate or higher (10%+) from a competitive job market, the price of goods will continue to increase without any levers for the Fed to stop it.

Two possibilities exist in an economy, either there are more workers, or there are more jobs. Ideally there would be an equal number of workers and jobs, but things don't work out so exactly in real life, so an equal number isn't really an option.

Which is better, to have more workers, or more jobs?

If Powell's theory is correct, then having more jobs than there are workers results in high inflation -- not good. Thus, the only stable option for an economy is to have more workers than there are jobs? That sure sucks for the workers.

Which is why the Federal government should increase tax on (windfall) profits, to disincentivize price increases and allow real wages to increase back to 1970s levels.

The problem here is in expecting the Fed to fix the economy when all it has is an interest rate hammer.

I saw this post floating around social media. Layoffs at apple 0

The rest HN already knows.

50k+ in the other FAANGs.

Company count change in last 3 years

Apple: +20%.

Amazon: +100%.

Facebook: +94%.

Google: +57%.

Microsoft: +53%.

So there is simply the case of massive overhiring in c19 times.

Is it really so bad though that they overhired in lockdown times where unemployment and desperation soared and layoffs are now during a time where tech people usually have an offer or two within weeks?

Just playing devils advocare here.

This is hacker news, so they are going to be focusing on tech layoffs, but really there are layoffs happening in all industries, and tech is about the middle of the pack.

In terms of complaining about growth companies being too aggressive in hiring, I mean, that's the point of a growth company. Almost all companies gearing up for fast revenue growth get fast headcount growth as part of the deal.

For some data, you can look at BLS layoff by industry reports here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t05.htm

The biggest hit industry has been arts, entertainment, and recreation. The second biggest hit was construction. The third biggest hit was professional and business services, and information was fourth biggest hit. After that, transportation, trade, and utilities. The usual safe sectors like government are doing well, but mining and manufacturing as well as retail have done pretty well.

My personal theory is the reason for all these news articles is that media has been hit really hard. So the journalists writing for media are in mass panic mode -- not a good time to be working for either a news website or legacy news outlet.

Feels like companies are rushing to layoff now that inflation is cooling and the Fed is likely to pivot this year.

Unrelated, interesting how many domains they have. Of course paypal.com, but then there's their investor relations site at investor.pypl.com, and now paypal-corp for publicly available internal communication, I suppose?

That tracks. Recently got a scammy invoice _from their mail servers_. Sort of thing that works really well on boomers - looks like they've had an unreported breakin. Layoffs cover that news nicely.

Zero reason to think these things are related.

That's not a breakin. Any PayPal user can send an invoice to an email address. It's just the online version of sending a fake invoice to a company's accounts receivable department in hopes they pay it. https://www.paypal.com/us/business/accept-payments/invoice or https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/send-receive-money/...

Currently in my inbox:

> JEFFREY BRIAN GLICK sent you a money request

> Amount requested: $500.00 USD

> Note from JEFFREY BRIAN GLICK: We found suspicious activity on your account. If you did not make this transaction, call us at 18887272074 to cancel and claim a refund.

Obvious scam, but folks fall for it.

They do have a security issue, because people are sending the invoices from "PayPal Inc.".

They have some basic filters in place to disallow you from entering PayPal Inc. exactly, but scammers get around it by using similar looking characters. Like a capital I instead of lowercase l.

Still not a break-in. Forward it to phishing@paypal.com. One of the more responsive abuse addresses I've come across; only AWS's has beat it thus far.

I didn't say break-in, just "security issue". And I would be interested in how responsive their phishing address would be to a case like this simply because the email is actually from paypal, as was said before, it's just misleading because it looks like Paypal itself is requesting payment. Definitely meets the definition of phishing, but not the most common type of phishing.

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