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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

blog.zoom.us

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#211

Post by rbetts »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #94
ketzo wrote: 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?

The ratio is likely closer to 20-30%. I searched the internet until I found data that confirmed my guess ;-). https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/the-makeup-of-saas-....

Zoom includes network, compute, video, voice, recording, recording-storage, transcription, mobile clients, telecom/phone-in, meeting controls, webinar controls, in app messaging, presumably global data centers, calendars, whiteboards, 3rd party app integrations for calendars and schedule, zoom-rooms/hardware, "zoom apps" - 3rd party application integration, bot integration, and a whole enterprise VOIP business on top of it all.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#212

Post by tgma »

brycewray wrote: post #155
tgma wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep talking about this as if it is preACA. With COBRA you can keep your health insurance for a while and you can get similar plans from the exchanges. It shouldn’t be a huge deal considering the severance frequently also includes some lump some to cover it.

The existence of the ACA is no panacea. Many physicians and clinics purposely refuse to honor any ACA plan (for political reasons, in at least some cases of which I unfortunately know from personal experience). And everyone who’s been on COBRA for any length of time knows it is God-awful expensive since you’re now paying for the whole piece.

It’s good to put a number out for people who don’t know: I estimate ~500/month for the employer portion for an individual coverage. Whether that’s considered “God awful” or “peanuts” is dependent on one’s situation but most probably for the average tech employee in California it shouldn’t be the end of the world compared to their other expenditures.

Sure, I also prefer disassociation of health care from employment but I think it’s important not to scare people away from layoffs or discourage exploration of other opportunities because they’d be scared of losing health coverage.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#213

Post by nradov »

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…

If it was so obvious then I assume you purchased puts on $ZM during the pandemic?

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#214

Post by gregschlom »

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…

Now if they could please stop using "to say goodbye" as a euphemism for "to layoff", that would be great.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#215

Post by anonymouskimmer »

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.

A distinction needs to be made between firings (which are for cause) and mass layoffs.

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?

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#216

Post by lazide »

ren_engineer wrote: post #96
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…

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…

Eh, they’ll get flak by someone no matter what they do. It’s a matter of degrees, and general expectations, and where they chart their course relative to that.

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.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#217

Post by dahfizz »

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…

I don't understand this position. You imply that any layoff is a fundamental and serious mistake.

Zoom's revenue grew like 10X over the past two years. They had a legitimate need to hire and grow the business, and now the market has corrected and they don't need as many employees. The hiring and firing decisions are exactly what I would expect from someone optimizing solely for the well-being of the company.

It sucks for the people fired, but that doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job. It means you need to be realistic about what your relationship is to your employer.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#218

Post by scruple »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #199
frankc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 snark…

> 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. 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?

Yes, from what I recall, from working in retail in highschool and beyond, it's specifically temp work and typically staffed through a temp agency.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#219

Post by kerpotgh »

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.

I think google meet is way cleaner feeling and I would pick it over zoom or teams. We do continue to use Zoom for very large 200+ meetings with the idea being that Zoom handles those better than Meet. Not sure if that information is outdated at this point.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#220

Post by elforce002 »

secondcoming wrote: post #143
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.

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

Add to that the "AI" revolution we're living rn and voilà ! Fear a a service.
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