I really dislike the trend of calling employees by some nickname. "Googler" may have been cute back in the day. Zoomies is pure cringe.
Ah, but as a pro-union crowd, you love terms like Teamster, Brotherhood, right?
Zoom lays off 15% of employees
121–130 of 596 posts
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#122> 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…
short of giving shares away to laid off employees there isn't much a founder can do, majority of their net worth is equity. Even for the CEOs their income is mostly tied to stock performance. If the CEO was much worse than the average tech CEO the board would fire them the biggest reason these companies are getting flak is due to pretending they weren't like other industry "soulless corporations". People naturally do…
> short of giving shares away to laid off employees there isn't much a founder can do
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?
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#123I find it kind of funny, kind of disappointing how in every one of these threads a bunch of the highly voted comments are complaining about some aspect of the layoff, like the goalposts keep moving.
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.
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#124TLDR: 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. 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.
>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.
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#125"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 infrastru…
> 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.
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.
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#126Given that no-one here is talking about Keybase, I am going to assume they were significantly affected.
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#127> 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…
short of giving shares away to laid off employees there isn't much a founder can do, majority of their net worth is equity. Even for the CEOs their income is mostly tied to stock performance. If the CEO was much worse than the average tech CEO the board would fire them the biggest reason these companies are getting flak is due to pretending they weren't like other industry "soulless corporations". People naturally do…
Goalpost moving. The people who complain that CEO's don't show any accountability, will then complain that whatever consequences the CEO's face (or self impose) are insignificant.
Would you like this guy to commit hara-kiri?
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? 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…
Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift. As it turned out, things reset to be more like pre-pandemic than many thought--especially outside the tech bubble--and Google and Microsoft were probably better able to capitalize on an overall increase in videoconferencing as part of their office suites.
> Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift.
I agree from the perspective of, how much travel related to business is non-essential (could be solved over Zoom/equivalent but instead isn't)?
Face to face with clients, seminars
Maybe I'm missing data on the intangibles of in-person meeting vs digital meeting
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#129I feel like Zoom is the Coca-Cola to Google and Microsoft's Pepsi. Zoom is the "OG" product (in the post-March-2020 remote working world), and probably most people's personal favorite. But their competitors have caught up, and they are getting a significant portion of corporate contracts now. And unlike with soda, I don't think there is a lot of direct-to-consumer opportunity in this field.
Zoom is trying to compete by launching Zoom email, calendar, and group chat. Probably a lot of the headcount increases are due to moving fast and trying to get to market as fast as possible.
Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees
#130> 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.
Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room.
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.