Zoom lays off 15% of employees
blog.zoom.us
blog.zoom.us
It’s nice to see the phrase “I am accountable” followed by a description of what that accountability entails.
Whether or not the steps taken seem fair is a separate conversation, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.
This is actually a pretty big step, but the move will need some benefit to the company for it to become more common-place.
They might roll these bonuses into subsequent bonuses, but that may actually end up being a motivator if these bonuses are truly forfeit until things are improved by the executives.
"Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this makes everyone feel vindicated and that the scales of justice remain balanced. God Bless."
That truly means "taking ownership" of what happened.
The individuals leaving were not the ones who hired or authorized the hires without the evaluation of long-term viability for the organization. They were just doing their jobs.
Any CEO in his position is accountable by default. They lose a literal fortune when the company doesn't perform. This meme of "but how are you taking accountability" confuses the heck out of me given this context.
The cynic in me suspects that this is going to trickle down - there will be 20% salary reductions for everybody, and this will become a trend just like the layoffs did.
Except, lately anyway, those people were probably already living close to paycheck-to-paycheck, as many low six figure earners are in this horrible economy. Whereas, the CEO and other execs will likely not even miss the money.
This is the way to notify people of a layoff. Immediate binary yes/no.
Although there is no great way to do it, this layoff seems pretty respectful and well done.
- invite everyone 2 weeks before to a townhall named [REQUIRED] An update on your employment
- read the names of the fired people from a fancy envelope
- when someone is called, their corp access is revoked in real time and they are kicked off the call
Having been through it, let me tell you that's a gut wrenching n minutes to wait, though.
No, it's robotic, and pathetic.
They'll soon be writing these lovely messages to their employees, as well as you're fired emails with ChatGPT.
the biggest reason these companies are getting flak is due to pretending they weren't like other industry "soulless corporations". People naturally don't like hypocrisy, you can't LARP like your employees are family to squeeze productivity out of them and then drop them at the slightest downturn in profit.
the social contract has been broken for the worse between employees and companies, people just need to act accordingly
Would you like this guy to commit hara-kiri?
Zoom has little control over the overall societal state of ‘social contract’, they can just pick where they are relative to it and then reap the effects of that.
If they never laid off anyone, in this environment that has effects too, and it will look different than if this was the 50’s or 60’s or whatever idealized situation we might imagine.
is it realistic to ask a company not to hire if they think they're just going to lay people off 12-18 months later or is that too perfect of a science?
obviously you don't want to ask companies not to try to grow/be conservative because then we'll have too much unemployment... i think?
it's just so "convenient" the timing of all of these layoffs. it's like because one company did it, the climate is "ok, it's acceptable, let's do it now while we can squeeze it in with everybody else doing it so we don't look so bad/get singled out"
i get it, monetary rates/fiscal policy changed. but the fed has been signaling this change for months, going slow. how long has zoom known they need to layoff 15% of people? they've probably been carrying this "weight"/burden for a while?
Even symbolic gesture is more than I have come to expect these days. While it may not be what is demanded, I welcome it as a welcome change.
That said, I disagree with the categorical phrasing. Clearly some reduction would make an impact ( I think we agree that 100% would; if so, at this point it only becomes a question of what is reasonable ).
To your point, if one has a habit of spending lavishly, it seems fair that the source of funding has to come from somewhere that isn’t this year’s paycheck, but it seems like the end result would be a faster-than-planned depletion of resources rather than impacting day to day living. And he’s presumably back to making normal salary within a year.
If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs had a $1 salary.
And a Learjet.
A lot of these folks don't make most of their money from salary. If his main income is from stocks, then he may actually be doing fairly well.
Unlike Steve Jobs though, the Zoom CEO won't be able to back-date his options to collect a cool $20 mill in capital gains [0]
[0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/443542/steve-jobs-apple-stock-back...
But on the other, as you note, it’s just a symbolic thing. As such, a large part of me feels, do we really benefit as a society for those increasing even more the extent to which virtue signaling is institutionalized?
So I agree in spirit, but worry that this is an under appreciated long term risk to business culture specifically, and society more generally. “Symbolic” on some level really just translates to “BS” and we have more than enough of that already.
Doing this and saying nothing might have had a similar degree of sanctimoniousness. I guess I think that if he thought this was a good idea he should have waited a few days to do it quietly, instead of pretending to understand the struggles of the employees in his own personal financial life.
However, if it helps some employees process it maybe it's worth it even if it rubs some the wrong way, like it would me.
wouldn't be surprised if is a white lie or straight lie.
with corpo-speak it's often more about what isn't said then what is.
No big corp CEO will ever be accountable for anything.
It's completely not comparable to a CEO hired with no initial equity stake.
Just for illustration. The 10% stock price jump this message caused just earned him $500+ million
What about equity grants?
So he goes from making over $1mil USD to $6,000/year. If the above is correct.
The salary alone should be enough to keep a couple people around. Yes, that doesn't make a big dent in ~1300 people laid off. But I imagine for those being laid off it's slightly less shitty (still super shitty) knowing that the CEO isn't still making 7 or 8 figures, like at most companies.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...
Zoom had a use for you during COVID, now they don't: bye-bye. You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that. You are not George from Engineering, you are employee #3223 and you cost $x per year. Past maybe 20 - 25 people, you are nothing but a number and quickly after you no longer create more value than you are paid, you are out.
Unlike others cough Facebook cough Google cough, Zoom actually a reason to scale during COVID; they were relatively new, they had crazy demand, and the access to money to do it. Zoom was given a blank check and leadership would've been worse for _not_ taking it.
That happened, now it is waning and it is time to 'right size' (barf) and continue what they were doing before.
Good on him for cutting his own salary and comp even if I don't think he is as dumb as Zuckerberg or others for their company's paper growth.
I can't tell if all of this is due to the age of people who have joined the workforce over the last decade, when we were in a constant uphill swing.
Markets go through cycles, boom and bust. We happen to be in part of the cycle where interest rates are rising, inflation is high, profits margins are tightening and companies are laying off.
"You were used" is a bit much. You go to work to earn a paycheck. I'm not sure how many people bought into the whole "we're a family" stuff, but obviously these are for-profit corporations and they are beholden only to their shareholders. There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.
I'm older so I've been through a number of these cycles, including having been laid off. Perhaps the decade+ of constant upward tragectory had people disillusioned that this was "normal". It wasn't, and now companies are downsizing.
I'd generally agree. I think my sentiment was a counter-point to the whole "we are a family", "we care about you" that companies put out to employees.
Employees especially need to understand that's fine and good, but companies exist to make money. They _can_ care about you but only to the extent that it makes them money through your continuing loyalty. Your manager as a human can care about you, your manager as a boss cannot.
I don't think many top-level managers is fooling themselves into thinking this behavior is anything but company loyalty.
I am not quite entirely jaded, but I would certainly have choice words for my 24 year old self being overjoyed about my company buying me dinner at the office. It's a fun gesture but you need to understand as an employee what your company's priorities are and not get fooled into it being anything but a monetary transaction.
But yes, to summarize, my language was a bit more coarse and pointed than the situation probably calls for.
I've lived through four recessions now and worked through two. My first working recession was while I was putting myself through college. We used to average one per decade, but now we're bordering on two. To understand the magnitude, my first working recession was a complete life reset for me. It's hard to look at businesses that are cash rich, posting record profits, and then doing layoffs as a result.
Recession timelines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Un...
There is a lot of corporate ink spilled trying to convince people of exactly this. The counter to this kind of treatment is a strong union. Hopefully this goes a ways toward convincing people they need that level of protection.
That's "You were used" with extra steps. Why are you trying to rebrand this?
> There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.
Just because people knew it was happening doesn't mean it's consensual or okay. Workers know that a system beholden only to shareholders isn't good for them, but they can't exactly go work elsewhere.
Not even close for many corporations.
Both sides got what they needed. The company got work done, and the employee got paid.
Calling either side "used" makes no sense to me. Employment is always a temporary relationship that can be ended by either side at will.
Similarly most non-marriage romantic relationship can be trivially ended "at will", but people get plenty upset when those end early than one party had anticipated.
More important though is the inherent asymmetry: it hurts employees much more to be terminated from an employer than the employer hurts when employees leave. You know, unless those employees organize and all leave at the same time. And we know well that companies put a fair bit of energy keeping that from happening.
Historically the way to resolve this asymmetry was an implicit understanding that you won't arbitrarily get terminated unless the employer has no other choice. This implicit assumption has been weakening over time.
For all the companies like Zoom and Shopify claiming they thought the COVID gravy train would never end, there was never a chance of that. But they hired as if that was the reality because because of the asymmetry: Your output is .000001% of what the company needs to function.
Meanwhile even if you're saving 50% of your pay and living on the other 50%, that's many orders of magnitude more need
-
So yes, either side can walk away tomorrow morning, but who's more likely to be hurt? Definitely not the company, so there's no real punishment for overhiring knowing you'll need to fire.
If anything you get rewarded by the market: If company A hires in a sustainable way that can weather headwinds (believe it or not, this used to be somewhat common) and company B goes full "feast or famine", the market rewards B for their growth, then rewards B when they lay off a bunch of people. Meanwhile A is punished for limiting growth, and not really rewarded for not having fired people, since valuations are bad at capturing nuanced ideas like "B just fired their best minds, while A has cultivated an effective workforce" (just check out Zoom's ticker today)
I use a worker to build my house, but that doesn't mean I am abusing them. They are using me too. no hard feelings.
No one is confused about this.
The disagreement is whether this is how it should be.
I used to work for a company with nearly 300,000 employees. Our user names in Active Directory were randomly generated. So our user names were just gibberish, like "ughwyrt"
I always thought that was a bad PR move on their part, but whatever
I don't know who you're talking about but it should have only taken common sense to know you're disposable as an employee.
Workers get paid along the way, not sure that constitutes being "used". I think worker rights aren't great in the United States, but characterising US tech workers who are paid extremely well as having been used is a bit much.
If you own 51% of the company, not only are you disposable, but unlike any employee on earth, you can actually lose money by working.
You can also work and make $0 for your efforts, and that's not the worst outcome.
And there are no worker's rights or Marxist organizations ready to organize a riot for you. There are no shareholder unions either, just increasingly absent regulators, comically incompetent courts, and lengthy legal processes.
1. Layoffs would be less painful is major aspects of your life (read: health insurance or your visa) wasn’t tied to employment. Yes the layoffs would still hurt but it wouldn’t be such a catastrophe for the actual workers. This is a discussion for another thread but it’s at least worth mentioning here.
2. Unions could certainly provide some protection and security for affected workers. There’s obviously a lot of pluses and minuses about “US” unions but workers guilds, the AMA and bar associations show that there’s other ways for professionals to protect their employment while still providing training, certification, and quality workers.
3. The bigger issue seems to be lack of employee ownership in the company. Yes you can purchase stock on the market or through equity grants but they are an optional expense. If these laid off employees were earning actual vested stock from their start date they’d at least leave the company with some tangible asset and be in the same boat as these executives. If laying off workers is a good financial move for the company then at least they will get a softer landing. Employees will also have the same incentives as executives to boost stock prices and could flex their power to punish poorly performing executives. That last reason is likely why employees have to buy their way in instead of just getting stock as part of their comp. Obviously it isn’t as simple as giving away stock and hoping everything works out alright but you’d cut down on a lot of these discussions about executives not feeling the pain.
#2, however, is way off base. The AMA played a significant role in our current health system's mess. It recently backed off of some of its previous bad decisions (i.e. in 2019 it lobbied to remove the caps on medicare-funded residency slots that it had originally gotten put in place), but it still spends a ton lobbying on "scope of practice" laws that keep doctors overburdened and limited in supply.
Becoming a doctor in the US requires far more years of education than many other countries, drastically driving up salary requirements (how else do they pay for all of that schooling?), limiting supply and providing only comparable care.
The AMA managed to avoid what the bars failed- we didn't experience a glut of doctors like we did lawyers. Unfortunately, we're experiencing the flip side to that coin- doctor shortages may be good for doctors, but it is profoundly bad for everyone else.
It's worked out well for the doctors in the USA though so you can't blame them.
Eric is probably already wealthy and can withstand a 98% cut to his base, but I definitely respect him more for doing that than the nothing other execs have done (at least publicly).
I don't think I would fault him even if he didn't take any pay cut. Founders and professional CEO are different beasts.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-comm...
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2022 was 6,787, a 53.48% increase from 2021.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2021 was 4,422, a 74.64% increase from 2020.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2020 was 2,532, a 48.77% increase from 2019.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2019 was 1,702, a INF% increase from 2018.
Probably not the most up to date/accurate info.
If 1300 is 15% of their workforce, they are up to 8.6k employees, headed back down to 7366, still all time high.
Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever?
What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%?
4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?
> Zoom has 300 million users in meetings daily. 89% of zoom users use it for work meetings. 73.41 million downloads of the Zoom app were recorded worldwide in the first quarter of 2022.
https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+daily+active+users
What new features have they rolled out past 12 months that justify needing 4,000 engineers/project managers/product managers/QA team/dev ops/whatever fulltime?
I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: "The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off"
Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing?
I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. They are going to have to lay many or most of them off after. Couldn't they see that Christmas wouldn't last forever?
Think of it this way - if there is a huge market/demand expansion, and you don't meet that need/demand, someone else will. Even if you think that much of that expansion is temporary, you will have fallen behind competitors in technology and market share. When the boom ends, they lay people off and you don't have to, but you are still behind now.
You aren't wrong, I'd say the only subtle difference there is, when you are hired for a Christmas seasonal job, you're informed that it's seasonal and are expected to be laid off, right?
It's easy to feel superior with hindsight, but possibly, yeah. Maybe it's not the right bet but it's not totally crazy to think that companies shifting to working from home might continue to work from home after trying it out.
I can certainly think of some "they should have known" examples but this isn't one of them. Nobody knew one way or the other. Heck my company is now majority remote so I'd say we still don't know.
Why did they not hire on time-limited contracts until they could be more sure of how things would shake out? If it turned out that the growth was permanent, you offer permanent jobs to the contractors. If it turned out it was temporary, you haven't made a promise to anyone that you could keep.
Either way, nobody gets burned.
Low latency video in general is an extremely hard problem to get right. Video conferencing is that, and more.
Is the number of employees likely overinflated? Clearly as they just had layoffs. But let's not pretend the problem space is some super easy thing that can be handled by one engineer in their basement.
We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same room.
Having said that, I think they have already solved all those problems now, so I don't really see the need for a huge number of engineers at Zoom, other than what is required to keep the whole shebang running.
Given the changes from Mac OS 12 to Mac OS 13 of the photos app (and other parts of the OS), there is no way Apple has as big of a team on Photos as they once did. Companies have a terrible problem perpetually funding teams, despite the impact of the team's work naturally diminishing as things get to a "good enough" state.
i don’t hear any release notes about it getting any faster or better quality
i’m sure they have scaling semi solved now at 300m+ daily users (if that’s true)
(1) Permanent or not, right now the pandemic is clearly generating huge interest in videoconferencing.
(2) Our big competitors (Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc.) can afford to speculatively invest heavily into their products just in case it does take off, remote work really is the future, etc.
(3) For us, things are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before the pandemic. If we do nothing, we risk getting left behind. If we invest heavily too, although it may turn out badly, at least we're giving ourselves a fighting chance. We are betting the company on something; it's just a matter of choosing what to bet it on.
It's hard to evaluate the risk of getting left behind. Network effects (don't want to ask all your friends who have Zoom set up already to switch technologies) might be a big enough moat that they never even needed to worry. Or maybe not.
For "fun", a counter argument I would make is,
if you took the Zoom product right when the pandemic hit and lockdowns started, and just did the bare minimum necessary to make it stable, performant, and scalable to handle HUGE influx in demand
would that have been good enough? with focus on, other than improving latency/audio quality/video quality and supporting small meetings all the way up to 500 person meetings, did you need to double engineering staff to achieve this, or could you have gotten away with less and the rest of the engineers got stuck working on random useless features just because it was cheap to borrow money and finance their salary at the time?
> Basic (free or free with credit card): 100 participants. Pro: 100 participants. Business: 300 participants. Enterprise: 500 participants.
Also we have to understand that sometimes the callous decision to do this deliberately (better to hire fast and grow faster now and then lay off the bottoms X%) is made.
In my experience in tech its hard for me to see how that makes sense considering the resources + time it takes for a new engineer to become productive but perhaps in FAANG level companies the onboarding process is good enough for that to work at scale i.e. getting 0.5x of a new engineer for 6 months is still better than the costs to train and pay em for that time.
I feel like the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen and there should be further investigations into how they even arrived at this point because this is just bananas.
The board will review the CEO and say "yes this is exactly what we wanted you to do, thank you."
Unfortunately, "all the other CEOs were doing it too" will probably hold up extremely well as a justification – in the unlikely case it ever comes to that.
Does he?
Perhaps this is what you're missing: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5927165/chart-the-weak-relatio...
I have no idea, but it's the most salient thing I know about CEO pay having never been one.
I can steel man that.
The pandemic was a once in a lifetime moment for the the adoption of video meetings. Market share captured during those couple years will largely define the players for decades to come. It would be financially responsible not make every effort to seize the opportunity. If this means massive temporary staffing, so be it.
Instead, air travel is pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels in spite of economic headwinds.
Thinking of Covid as forever seems surprisingly common- all the people who full-on moved houses. The people still indefinitely isolating and masking. People expecting the pandemic emergency working arrangements to continue forever
If you think 4200 is an absurd number of engineers, why did you use that number as your estimate? Maybe it's 90% sales and customer support.
Very likely not, but what else could they have done to deal with demand other than hiring more people for a few years?
I presume competition by the likes of Microsoft teams is a bigger factor.
Sales 21% Engineering 18% Other 12% IT 10% Support 5% PM 3%
The rest is split between finance, BD, education and admin roles. This seems pretty typical for a public company with lots of compliance and red tape.
Highest growth areas in the last year are admin, operations, PM and engineering.
Sucks to be a new CS grad this summer
But yeah nothing is secure.
I'd worry more about the Youtube influencers you mention. They've littered my YT front page with all kinds of promises that just remind me of previous gold rushes...dropshipping, crypto, and now AI.
At one point we broadened our hiring pipeline to grads of a local bootcamp (their sales rep were apparently very convincing).
About two thirds of the candidates couldn't write three lines of code on a whiteboard.
I know some older people who started off in software and after the dotcom bust switched to a trade for more reliable work.
And I know I'm a big hypocrite for saying this but I really feel like a lot of places need less software developers building social media or video chat code and more nurses/teachers/trades-people/etc .
Overtime if we continue to overproduce CS grads the defacto age limit will drop lower and lower. So maybe in a decade or two there won't be many ICs over 30 (obviously some will survive).
At least that is how it seems to this unemployed near-50 programmer. My job leads started to dry up at around 41 or 42. Now its crickets. LinkedIn telling me I appeared in 2 search this week, if I get that message at all.
Zoomies??? stop using this language, these are people with a life outside your company. Refer to them as such, not fck zoomies….
You aren’t family, you are workers.
I'm not sure I buy this, Microsoft and Google were into video conferencing well before Zoom existed. Zoom was well positioned to eat Microsoft's lunch with their product when the pandemic hit. But MS is catching up a bit, and the WFH pressure is easing a bit. This seems like a normal contraction after a Zoom boom.
> Zoom is the "OG" product (in the post-March-2020 remote working world)
I haven't been to an online meeting that wasn't MS Teams or Google Meet in three months. Sadly, Slack, Zoom, and other similar nice-to-have corporate tools seem bound to get eaten by the integrated productivity suites.
I mean, it seems like the stock price would go up too if they laid off 20 or 25, or maybe 50%, and maybe some bold CEO is going to get a huge bonus by taking the full responsibility of firing everyone except the accounting department ?
I mean, it seems like the stock price would go
up too if they laid off 20
...or, uh, I should say their stock price, because I was one of the 20%...
...did go up.
If you lay off too many, it starts to look like panic and/or it starts to look like you were running your business in an clueless way, with tons of dead weight and/or bad hires.
10-20% seems "safe" to me. It doesn't spook investors too much. Generally, if you look at almost any team, at least 1 in 5 are not performing amazingly. IMO this happens even in well run companies and is often purely a fit issue and is not necessarily an indictment of either employer or employee. It also means you're not necessarily destroying any particular team
(Example: you have a talented front end engineer, but they've been pressed into more of a "full stack" role and they're forced to do a bunch of backend work that is far from their strengths. No, I'm not describing myself. Not a front end guy.)
This wave of 10-20% cuts feels like an opportunistic version of the notorious "stack ranking" that Microsoft used to do.
I'm not defending any of this. I'm not really criticizing it either. It's just my strong impression of what it is. I'm f'ing numb to this industry at this point, honestly.
Would they have joined if Zoom had disclosed on hiring them, "We're experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime growth spurt because of COVID. If and when that ends, we may have to lay you off." ??
We shouldn’t punish employers for leaning into strong markets, because unemployment is much worse when they’re reluctant to ever hire even at the best of times.
It would be like a "survival supplies" store hiring 10,000 "permanent" employees when there's threat of a nuclear apocalypse.
You could argue that the Zoom employees knew, or should have known, that they were really temp hires.
Or is it a psychological number that's high but not too high for some party?
Or something else?
By "necessary", do they mean "we'd go out of business if we didn't do this" or "we'd still be profitable if we didn't do this, just not as profitable as we want to be"?
Here’s another which would be impossible for them to implement correctly — let me see my screen when I’m presenting and don’t cover it with stupid controls, or maybe if you can’t do that, let me see the useful controls too
when first reading this i realized that i had just assumed that zoom had already done layoffs as they were one of the big profiteers of the pandemic.
the way they're handling this however gives me a lot of respect for the company.
> Zoom Video Communications gross profit for the twelve months ending October 31, 2022 was $3.283B, a 15.34% increase year-over-year.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-comm...
Companies are noticing that every time they do a layoff, their stock skyrockets. Decreasing expenses is the icing on the cake.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-just-said...
This will be the new standard and Zoom needs to get on the train or people will stop using it.
Yay.
Insane
I would also strongly discourage referring to impacted employees as “Zoomies” or “Latticians” or “Microsofties” in these types of correspondence.
> We regret to inform you that the Keybase.pub web hosting service will be shutting down on March 1, 2023. Although the service was a great showcase for the kinds of cool things that could be built with Keybase, the usage of this product never took off.
That doesn't bode well.
Pre-notice only really matters if you are letting people go with nothing.
I don't pay the workers that built my house after the job is done.
Google Meet is free with G Suite/Workspace/Gmail which everyone already has.
Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515267
ZM stock: 83.26 +6.19 (+8.03%) - thats a profit of 400mil on the day for the CEO.
He was the one that sold that much? If not, it's not his profit.
can we please stop with all the pet name bs? a large corporation is not a "big family". it's simply degrading. you're a number -- you get hired when money is plentiful and the company is expanding, and you get fired when the economy contracts and/or shareholders demand even more profits. period.
- Comments about how this is a good thing and bravo to the CEO for actually taking accountability
- Replies saying how it's never enough and the CEO should be fired for doing something as stupid as hiring people during an economic boom
- Comments off ^^^ talking about how much net worth the CEO has based on stock that he hasn't liquidated, and how much he made off this temporary stock bump from cutting "cruft"
- Comments questioning why <Company> needs # employees to do <overly-reductive description of their product>
- Comments pointing out that they still have more employees than pre-covid
- Comments assuming that every person laid off was an engineer because why would a tech company hire anything else.
- Comments off of ^^^ talking about how it's a rough time to be job hunting despite the massive labor shortages in many sectors including tech
- Comments about how stupid the demonym for the employees was/is
EDIT: I always get HN list formatting wrong.
I'm so done with these. I sort of agree but jesus christ they are so pervasive. Maybe I had bad timing but today on the discussion about layoffs at Zoom fully more than 5 of the top 10 comments were about it. We get it! I hate it too! It's boring to talk about though, for the twentieth time in 2023.
Just fucking stop with this already. Quit pretending like your employees are so aligned with the company that some kind of special terminology is needed, or even logical.
The recent tech layoffs have clearly demonstrated, again (again, as in we've seen this play out a few times in the 2000's), that employees are basically assets that are scaled up and down as needed, like all the rest of corporate infrastructure these days.
Also, when your company is something that more or less is a B2B or B2C app (like zoom) and 1,500 employees is a number that you can lay off and still keep operating, you should have recognized this massive over staffing a LONG time ago and made more gradual corrections to get to a logical and supportable number. Note, this could be slowing down hiring, or charging a lot more for your product, but given the lingering freemium pricing, it's mostly going to be hiring less and not charging more.
These layoff emails are almost parody at this point.
I cannot judge how Zoom works internally but a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees. They are usually not born out of some leader making up a ridiculous term, but out of some sort of chaotic process where the origin of that term is often not found.
Scaliens, Stripes, Tweeps
As part of their compensation package, they receive a diminutive pet name, like a child would.
The way the layoffs were communicated, the fact that they were staggered, the fact that they weren’t staggered, that the ceo/founder doesn’t take responsibility, that they do but they don’t take action to punish themselves/their team, that the packages weren’t good enough, or as in this case, that the company (that they don’t even work for) has a name for their employees.
Endless whinging. And it’s exhausting to read.
They seem to embrace it: https://xoogler.co
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Yuan
Fun trivia: Six billion divided by 1,300 is 4,615,384.62
You mean you actually like your job and your company and aren’t a cold cynic who thinks that being emotionally detached from the thing you do for the majority of your waking hours and deciding that anything cute and fun is childish makes you somehow superior — haha criiiiiinge.
https://gerryanderson.fandom.com/wiki/Zoonie
Good luck for those looking for work now as a consequence of this
Not fun for those laid off, but this is a great life lesson for all those people who have given "loyalty" to their employer.
We - the people who you often view as cynical and negative - live by the following rules:
- People at work are not your friends. You can have friendly relationships, but they ain't your real friends. You will only know if they can become your real friends once you don't work at the same company anymore.
- NEVER accept less pay for your work than the market rate. If they don't pay 100% you never work 100%. Take a second job and do only 50% or less for a company that doesn't pay you market rate.
- Don't work as a full time employee if you can make twice as much as a contractor. Employees have supposedly the benefit of "job security". LOL. Contractors get paid more because they need to factor in dry spells. Also there are tax benefits for companies to use contractors. The software industry is so robust and even despite all the layoffs the demand for devs is higher than the supply. There is no reason to take on full employment if you can contract with the same level of job security for much more money and much less internal politics.
- Shares don't mean anything if the company never IPOs. Fuck shares. Ask for hard cash. If you want to have shares and become a millionaire over night then start your own startup. Why suck up to some stranger who gives zero shit about you. You didn't invest money into the startup, you didn't found it, you are a nobody to them. You do a job for them and they fool you to take on company shares so they can massively underpay you. If you want to earn little and have lots of shares then start a startup yourself. In every other case tell them to get fucked and ask for hard cash.
That said, I agree with your essential point that loyalty is not owed to your employer. It's a tool an employee can sometimes use for career purposes, but that's it. Your employment is a business arrangement and needs to be treated as such. Employers will talk as though they see it otherwise, but when times get tough, those pretenses are revealed for what they are. I really wish we could dispense with this "we're a big family with a mission" crap as it makes the whole thing more painful than it needs to be.
But please never call us family, unless you're going to back it up with what a healthy family does. Else, That's just psychological abuse.
Companies that don't lay off employees do exist: https://www.ajobthing.com/blog/this-company-has-never-laid-o...
Being "laid off" is a novel concept that primarily exists with the formation of corporations. Prior to that most people who lost jobs knew that the job was temporary going into it. Or lost due to factors such as disability (which, admittedly, would be far worse than a modern layoff).
This more modern concept of losing a job is typically very stressful, as most people's wealth support is fairly precarious. Given that there are often alternatives for a corporation there's the fact that the stress is inflicted when it need not be.
So yeah, people get upset. Just like people get upset about things like cancel culture, lack of healthcare, what have you.
It used to be that getting kicked out of the tribe was a last resort for the most serious of crimes. Now petite expulsions happen all of the time and we're supposed to just be okay with it?
How did an entire generation become so entitled? Yep, these are the same people who jump companies if the other company offers $10k extra TC. So, it's not that they are saints when it comes to loyalty or money.
Really? Then why are people hoping for a "soft landing" from the Fed's interest rate dance?
With that said, seems like admittance of this level of error at a leadership level should be grounds to lose your job and be replaced, so the CEO should also be replaced in this process. I realize there are stability issues where you need to bring someone else in and catch them up to speed before doing this since the role likely requires a lot of contextual awareness but none the less, that process should be (but almost certainly isn't) underway at most these organizations.
If anyone not in the c-suite made these levels of errors and clearly admitted to them, they'd be gone yesterday.
The amount of entitlement among HNers is mind-boggling.
Newsflash: I fired my grass-cutter and snow-remover this year. According to the dumb logic presented on all social media, I should have fired myself for not seeing inflation and having to cut costs on a few things.
For some orgs it can mean millions more in severance for the individuals whose lives are impacted because of the decisions of those company executives.
Every fucking time. I just can't anymore.
> We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities.
This is… a completely meaningless sentence. All of these ridiculous layoff emails are so condescending (the PagerDuty CEO quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in one of them was a fantastic example of how full of themselves these tech C-level people are)
It would be refreshing for one of them to come out and just say “We never planned on employing you longer than we were on the train of sweet sweet covid relief money. We absolutely could afford to keep you, but we plan on doing stock buybacks/buying a company yacht for me and my dog.
Fuck you, got mine!
Sincerely,
Guy Who Genuinely Believes Saying “Disruptive” Is An Immeasurably Valuable Skill