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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#291

Post by ghaff »

JohnFen wrote: post #262
ketralnis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? It's easy to feel superior with hindsight, but possibly, yeah. Maybe it's not the right bet but it's not totally crazy to think that companies shifting to working from home might continue to work from home after trying it out. I can certainly think of some "they should have known" examples but this isn't…

At the very least, it was (or should have been) very clear to everybody that the future was uncertain. Permanently hiring people is a thing you do when you're certain. Why did they not hire on time-limited contracts until they could be more sure of how things would shake out? If it turned out that the growth was permanent, you offer permanent jobs to the contractors. If it turned out it was temporary, you haven't mad…

There are very few certainties in business. In the US, it's generally not even legal to just hire everyone as a contractor--and many people wouldn't even take a 12-month contract job, perhaps with no benefits.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#292

Post by s1artibartfast »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #233
adrianmonk wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best case I can make is that their reasoning might have been like this: (1) Permanent or not, right now the pandemic is clearly generating huge interest in videoconferencing. (2) Our big competitors (Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc.) can afford to speculatively invest heavily into their products just in case it does take off, remote work really is the future, etc. (3) For us, things are unlikely to ever go back…

Very insightful, thank you. For "fun", a counter argument I would make is, if you took the Zoom product right when the pandemic hit and lockdowns started, and just did the bare minimum necessary to make it stable, performant, and scalable to handle HUGE influx in demand would that have been good enough? with focus on, other than improving latency/audio quality/video quality and supporting small meetings all the way u…

What is good enough?

I think the relevant question is if the company would be in a better position today if they did the minimum vs loading up on staff and then laying them off.

How much did it actually cost them to pay the extra employees? How much market share is worth paying ~1500 employees for two years?

If Zoom fails, will it be because of this cost, or because they couldn't do more.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#293

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #202
mjr00 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. >…

This is a big discussion in the financial news at present. Essentially the central banks keep saying that they will keep rates high for a while, and the market doesn't believe them.

Personally, I never bet against people who run the money printers, but you do you.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#294

Post by bismark »

jeffbee wrote: post #207
ec109685 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

uh, I do? https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-killer/

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#295

Post by cycomanic »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #261
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…

Didn't look super deeply, but from an SEC filing dated 2018 - he was making a base pay of $300k/year. Some research online indicated his most recent bonuses were nearly the million mark. So he goes from making over $1mil USD to $6,000/year. If the above is correct. The salary alone should be enough to keep a couple people around. Yes, that doesn't make a big dent in ~1300 people laid off. But I imagine for those bein…

See comment above he is making another $10M in stock.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#296

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

lxgr wrote: post #66
ActionHank wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is fat to cut that means they were paying staff to do work that was unnecessary or wasteful which is money out of investor's pockets.

"Unnecessary or wasteful" is as subjective and context/environment-dependent a judgement as it gets. Other than that, the sometimes toxic dynamics of sudden windfalls in funding have also been discussed here at length: Paradoxically, not spending investors' money can sometimes be considered worse than wasting it on moonshot projects (or even outright on fancy office furniture and eye-catching employee perks).

I work for a startup that raised a bunch of money and hasn't spent most of it. It might have seemed bad last year, but I'm sure their investors have come round to the idea now ;)

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#297

Post by mjr00 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #202
mjr00 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. >…

Projections are just projections and subject to change. Check out the projections the Fed made in 2020: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomcprojtabl20...

In 2020 they were projecting that 2022 inflation would be less than 2%, and rates continuing to be near-zero into 2023.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#298

Post by sunaurus »

rvz wrote: post #126

Given that no-one here is talking about Keybase, I am going to assume they were significantly affected.

Keybase was such a great project that didn't deserve its fate. If Zoom really just acquired Keybase to effectively kill it and then later laid off the engineers... that would be horrible.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#299

Post by neilv »

Is layoffs in the neighborhood of 15% right now because it's an amount that large companies think is safe to trim, in terms of work to be done or their capacity to get work done?

Or is it a psychological number that's high but not too high for some party?

Or something else?

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#300

Post by dymk »

JohnFen wrote: post #278
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I cannot judge how Zoom works internally but a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees. They are usually not born out of some leader making up a ridiculous term, but out of some sort of chaotic process where the origin of…

I honestly think it's a red flag when companies do this.

The bigger red flag is Stripe not allowing its employees to use the term "Stripper"
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