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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#251

Post by heleninboodler »

frankc wrote: post #73
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…

"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 think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs, but these weren't billed as temporary jobs, so I think some shame is warranted. People probably relocated for these jobs, expecting them to be stable. I don't really want to become complacent to working in an industry where major players just lay off thousands of people periodically.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#252

Post by smueller1234 »

kerpotgh wrote: post #219
chazeon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Not sure if that information is outdated at this point.

No idea about Zoom scaling but I can say with confidence that Meet works perfectly fine with >200 these days. (I work at Google, use Meet 8+h per day in meetings small and large.)

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#253

Post by neon_electro »

jo6gwb wrote: post #235
HollywoodZro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the reason we don't see other CEOs acting like Mr. Yuan is because of this sentiment. Whatever you do, it will never be enough.

Perhaps "we" need to do a better job defining what "enough" is, then? So that we don't allow the goalposts to be moved.

People lost their livelihoods, and in the US, their access to affordable healthcare until they figure out a new solution or get a new job.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#254

Post by bitL »

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…

Most of the comp comes from stocks so he should also renounce any stock-related gains to make it more than cosmetic.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#255

Post by nazka »

fatnoah wrote: post #239
HollywoodZro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They haven't released 2022 financials, but for 2021 base + bonus for Mr. Yuan was about $313,000 and he received ~8400 RSUs (about $670k at today's price), which fully vest on April 8. Additionally, it looks like he received an RSU grant of 612,000 shares on July 8, that vest quarterly over 4 years. So, for those keeping track, Mr. Yuan is giving up about $300k in cash, but still receiving about $13M in stock. That's…

Wow ok.. Your comment should be on the first node all the way up. That’s really different from what I was imagining!

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#256

Post by Kankuro »

gregschlom wrote: post #214
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.

If find "let [people] go" much worse euphemism. I was shocked the first time I heard it, like if it was just the fate and the people deciding were not involved in this situation. In France, the local euphemism is to say that someone has been thanked ("remercié").

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#257

Post by to11mtm »

hef19898 wrote: post #190
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?

Course not, the polite way is sepuku! But seriously, once MS Teams rolled out video conferencing, I wondered how long Zoom will manage to stay around at all.

Zoom still does a lot of stuff better.

At least the last time I used MS teams, Zoom had a much better 'upper limit' for participants in a call. Both from a 'hard limit' standpoint as well as an 'after this number the experience degrades'.

To say nothing of dealing with an outage of microsoft services and needing to get on a call to resolve...

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#258

Post by blululu »

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…

Symbolic gestures mean a lot - especially when you are in a position of leadership. It will not break the bank for him (I would be surprised if the effected employees will be ruined by this either), but it is important for the people making decisions to have a bit of skin in the game. None of the other CEO's who "took full responsibility" (running tally here: https://www.itakefullresponsibility.fyi) did anything close to this. I have to give a some respect that this man didn't just pass the pain off onto his subordinates.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#259

Post by squokko »

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…

He owns billions in founder's stock so this is immaterial. It's not like Satya Nadella or another hired CEO.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#260

Post by neon_electro »

dahfizz wrote: post #217
phtrivier wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>someone optimizing solely for the well-being of the company

Is this how we're going to forever define an "employer"? I agree with your sentiment broadly, but what a terrible system we've created for ourselves.

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