241–250 of 596 posts
TLDR: 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.
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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?
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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.
I think an executive who REALLY means it should forgot EQUITY GRANT and distribute that as compensation to the departing individuals. For some orgs it can mean millions more in severance for the individuals whose lives are impacted because of the decisions of those company executives.
> 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…
Also we have to understand that sometimes the callous decision to do this deliberately (better to hire fast and grow faster now and then lay off the bottoms X%) is made.
In my experience in tech its hard for me to see how that makes sense considering the resources + time it takes for a new engineer to become productive but perhaps in FAANG level companies the onboarding process is good enough for that to work at scale i.e. getting 0.5x of a new engineer for 6 months is still better than the costs to train and pay em for that time.
> 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.
> 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…
> If you are a US-based employee who is impacted, you will receive an email to your Zoom and personal inboxes in the next 30 minutes that reads [IMPACTED] Departing Zoom: What You Need to Know. This is the way to notify people of a layoff. Immediate binary yes/no. Although there is no great way to do it, this layoff seems pretty respectful and well done.
- invite everyone 2 weeks before to a townhall named [REQUIRED] An update on your employment
- read the names of the fired people from a fancy envelope
- when someone is called, their corp access is revoked in real time and they are kicked off the call
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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
That's not really a surprise to most people but there was still a pretty broad assumption that the practicalities of reducing travel in favor of video would win out to a significant degree. And that mostly hasn't happened.
It's probably also the case that a lot of people in companies, including execs, complain about business travel but actually really like the change of scenery so they find excuses to do it.
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Some of them are legitimate, but even then there should be a form of respect where the term isn't used (though I observe they avoided the "hard-r" Zoomer because of the connotations). And especially shouldn't be used in a case where you're laying off some of them.
I would find it odd if the only time you don't use that term on emails then happens to be layoffs.
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Also he and the C-suite are foregoing their bonuses but giving them out to departing employees. Pretty decent.
It's a gesture, but the issue is that salary and bonus are often a smaller part of executive compensation. The equity grant that they receive is often millions more than the salary and the company performance bonus. I think forgoing the equity and instead adding it to the severance pool would be truly owning up to the decisions made by executive management.