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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

blog.zoom.us

141–150 of 596 posts

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#141
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…

MFer made > 1000 million dollars just by putting out this press release.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#143
post #87

Why do people in HN get so upset that companies hire and fire employees? It sucks as an individual to have to deal with a layoff, but it’s the dynamic of an economy. Optimal growth comes from over and under dampening, not from steady state.

Fear most likely. ‘Learn to code’ won’t help coders who’ve been laid off.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#144
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…

Salary and bonus are tiny part of the compensation for folks at their level. Are they also forfeiting their equity grants for FY23?

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The most ethical way to do it would have been to tell your candidates "We're hiring for excess capacity, so this would be a contract to hire position."

Then candidates might have made different decisions, like "Maybe this job isn't worth relocating my family internationally for."

It's pretty Machiavellian to present the role as otherwise, when HR had strong suspicions it'd be first on the chopping block.

Does a company have to telegraph the nature of the position this? No. Of course not! And it's not even in their best interest to do it.

But does it make them ethically shitty to optimize their offer attractiveness at the expense of people's lives? In my book, yes.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#146
post #46
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing jobs should not be life-changing.

It’s shouldn’t but when your health insurance relies on it , it pretty much is

but they're statement was it shouldnt. They shouldnt be downvoted for what they didnt say.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#148
post #108

Zoom has become an indispensable source of connection for businesses 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.

MS Teams or Google Meet also feels to be working much better with better features.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#149
post #78

"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…

[deleted]

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#150
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a company that focuses on enterprise sales as hard as Zoom does, I think a super rough ballpark is that all-in engineering staff are not more than 50% of headcount.

agree, so let’s move the goal post in an engineering org what’s the ratio of engineers (hands on keyboard) to non engineers? 50-50? 8 hours a day 5 days a week 20 days a month what are 2000 engineers working on related to zoom?

It's a good question, honestly. My go-to answer is just "scale" -- the number of people required to go from "1,000 video calls that are pretty good" to "1,000,000 video calls that are close to perfect" is probably insane, for a lot of reasons that I won't even speculate on.

But 2,000 still seems like a LOT.

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