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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#201

Post by vineyardmike »

phtrivier wrote: post #181
credit_guy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of course no ! We want him to resign. (I meant some people will, I personally don't expect anything, and don't really care - none of this is in my power in any way, shape or form.) Or at least, to give the rough date at which he will resign, so that someone more competent will run the company, avoiding the mistakes that brought it so bad that it has to lay off 15%. There are mistakes that you can recover from, and yo…

So I totally get your position, and I think many of the big tech companies that are laying off are doing it because “we made an oopsies” or as a me-too tag-along, but zoom seems unique in that their business and it’s place in society truly was transformed in the last few years. They tripled their headcount, because they needed more staff to keep up, and overshooting long-term sustainability by 15% when you grew 300% doesn’t seem so reprehensible.

Disclosure: I was laid off by a big tech company and I think it was BS.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#202

Post by MuffinFlavored »

mjr00 wrote: post #160
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long is it expected for the expensive money era to end? aka, don't we have SOME insight into the fact that the fed will probably be done hiking around the 5.00%-5.25% range soon, and then either hold it there for maybe 6 months before doing cuts? how long can the Fed really keep rates at 5% despite the pressure of... wall street? the economy's well being (despite it being too dependent on cheap capital)? how much…

Nobody has a crystal ball. The last time inflation was this big of a problem in the west (~1980) rates touched over 20% and stayed above 10% for multiple years. What makes you so sure that 5% is the limit, or that there will be cuts after 6 months?

https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...

This stupid, basically gambling insights tool.

> The CME FedWatch Tool is a tool used by traders and investors to track the probability of interest rate changes by the Federal Reserve (Fed). It uses Fed funds futures prices traded at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to calculate the market's expectations for the future direction of interest rates.

> The data represented by the CME FedWatch Tool represents the market's perception and expectation of future Fed decisions on interest rates. It is not a prediction made by the Fed, nor is it an official statement by the Fed on future interest rate plans.

> It is difficult to assess the accuracy of the CME FedWatch Tool overall as it can be influenced by many factors including market speculation, economic data releases, and changes in global events. Some market participants may find it to be a useful tool to understand market sentiment, while others may consider it to be speculative at best. Ultimately, the accuracy of the tool can only be determined in hindsight, after the Fed has actually made its interest rate decisions.

I believe the Fed also releases what they call a dotplot

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomcproj...

On page 4 you can see that they have rates forecasted as coming down 2024, 2025, etc.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#203

Post by falcolas »

mardifoufs wrote: post #136
falcolas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 3B in profit , actually. > 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...

Gross profit is not profit as we commonly understand it.

A good point. TIL gross profit only counts the cost of producing the product, but not payroll, taxes etc.

That same link does show a $900M traditional profit on $4B of revenue, so roughly a 20% profit margin. It is a decrease year over year, but still remarkably good.

At an estimated 12k employees, it's also around $360k in revenue per employee, which is pretty decent (though not top-10 for the tech industry).

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#204

Post by jeffbee »

deltree7 wrote: post #161
ITB wrote: 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.

Yep, The amount of 'intelligent' people who are so out of touch with reality of economics, supply/demand, interest rates is mind-boggling. 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.

Hello, typically misinformed internet person. The "entire generation" as currently understood are the least-mobile generation of employees ever recorded. A 30-year-old Millenial was only half as likely in 2020 to have switched jobs in the prior year than a 30-year-old Boomer was in 1990. Millenials of all ages had all-time-lowest probability of multiple employers in a year, compared with Gen X, Boomers, and Silent.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#205

Post by ec109685 »

jeffbee wrote: post #186
sct202 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That ... does not sound like it would work. Zoom is a success because the founder and the founding team came with decades of video conference experience and really just re-implememted webex/cisco products without any bullshit. What do any of these people know about hosting email?

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

I'd add that Chat seems like a modern day corollary.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#206

Post by braingenious »

The “How We Got Here” paragraph is a great example of opaque nonsense.

> 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

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#207

Post by jeffbee »

ec109685 wrote: post #205
jeffbee wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ... does not sound like it would work. Zoom is a success because the founder and the founding team came with decades of video conference experience and really just re-implememted webex/cisco products without any bullshit. What do any of these people know about hosting email?

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html I'd add that Chat seems like a modern day corollary.

Remember the time Facebook tried to take on Gmail? Neither does anyone else.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#208

Post by whimsicalism »

prewett wrote: post #188
whimsicalism wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He owns 22% of the company. He literally just made ~1 billion on this decision and is foregoing a salary of ~1 million.

Only if he sells right now, otherwise he literally hasn't made any money, just his current potential-money (like potential-energy) has increased. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future. He is also exposed to all sorts of other things, like he could lose a billion dollars of the course of a year because the Fed decides to hike interest rates 4%.

Sure, it also remains to be seen what the value of the dollar is in the future. You could lose a billion in real dollars just holding cash.

Don't really think it diminishes my point.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#210

Post by lazide »

HollywoodZro wrote: post #182
vsareto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the best you can hope for in terms of fairness right now. You'll never see executives put themselves financially in the same situation as the lowest level people they are letting go. 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 motiv…

The big thing would be for Mr. Yuan to forgo his equity grant for FY23 and also take his equity grant from FY22 and distribute that as severance for the employees who lives are impacted negatively due to the decisions of executives in the organization. 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 v…

That isn’t taking ownership, that’s falling on your sword.

There is a difference.

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