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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

blog.zoom.us

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#71

Post by bink »

gardenhedge wrote: post #36
gedy wrote: post #15

Given how zoom took over the universe in past 3 years, seems like a serious leadership failing to now have to cut 1300 people.

I actually think this is one of the companies where it made sense that they scaled up staff during covid and now need to let them go.

I agree. Salesforce, Meta, Alphabet? Those were already giant companies that saw a bump in traffic due to covid. Zoom was a relatively small company that became a cultural phenomenon and no doubt had to onboard a completely unexpected number of new customers. It's one company where I could see tripling the workforce as reasonable if not aiming low.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#72

Post by haswell »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #41
haswell wrote: post #8

> As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today– and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions. To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus. Members of my executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting their…

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 ).

I guess my point was that it would be very surprising if someone making that amount of money did not have finances structured such that they could stop working tomorrow and be fine through the end of their lives.

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.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#73

Post by frankc »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #5

> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues. 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. Zo…

"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"

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.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#74

Post by mynameisvlad »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #5

> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues. 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. Zo…

> 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?

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.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#75

Post by rconti »

chazeon wrote: post #56
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #5

> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues. 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. Zo…

Speaking from inside Academia, Zoom remains an important part of communication. We never used Zoom or any form of video chat before COVID, but even after COVID, Zoom is here to stay now. We meet in Zoom because it has unmatched quality and stability for video-conferencing / screen sharing compared to Skype etc. Office hour have Zoom sessions, etc.

Speaking from inside tech, we were using Zoom before the pandemic, its usage exploded during the pandemic, and our usage of it has never come back down.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#77

Post by coolbreezetft22 »

How quickly times can change. A few years ago a CS degree and software job seemed like the most secure and easy way to a guaranteed high paying job while everything else was harder. Now it seems every software company is laying people off while the overall job market outside of tech is stronger than ever.

Sucks to be a new CS grad this summer

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#78

Post by brk »

"Zoomies"

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.

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