321–330 of 596 posts
How quickly times can change. A few years ago a CS degree and software job seemed like the most secure and easy way to a guaranteed high paying job while everything else was harder. Now it seems every software company is laying people off while the overall job market outside of tech is stronger than ever. Sucks to be a new CS grad this summer
> 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…
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> I think "used" is fine, but it doesn't imply any gross injustice. One of the primary definitions of that word describes a scenario where one person exploits another person for their own gain. Any time the word is used to describe the nature of one’s relationship with another person, that definition is going to come to mind. I can’t agree that there is no implication of injustice.
That is one definition, but not the only. I think it is interesting how people chose which definition to go with. It all comes down to social expectations of if the nature of the transaction. "I used Bob the contractor to build my house" has no implication of injustice. "My ex-wife used me for money" has significant implications. Used has no negative implication if used to describe a honest and mutually beneficial tr…
I honestly wish HN would adopt a "no semantics arguments" rule. These debates over what one person thinks a word means vs what another person thinks they mean are just uninteresting and really never lead anywhere, especially when all sides pretty much agree on the underlying issue.
A couple days ago I made a comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656626 , where I even started off by saying "well, perhaps word X isn't exactly the right word", and still the original commenter felt compelled to reply in 6 different comments why he was so sure his definition of that word was the right one and it was important that everyone else agree with him. :shrug:
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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…
I think it does mean that the CEO did a bad job. The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip. Hiring theoretically permanent employees in response is simply bad judgement. There are plenty of companies that exist in very cyclic industries who show the right way to handle this sort of thing. It's not like it's all a big mystery.
The companies I'm aware of that exist in cyclic industries (game dev, retail) tend to either have brutal cyclical layoff periods, leverage a ton of contractors, outsource their work to other firms, or hire seasonal workers.
What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?
I feel like Zoom is the Coca-Cola to Google and Microsoft's Pepsi. Zoom is the "OG" product (in the post-March-2020 remote working world), and probably most people's personal favorite. But their competitors have caught up, and they are getting a significant portion of corporate contracts now. And unlike with soda, I don't think there is a lot of direct-to-consumer opportunity in this field.
We are at the point where every org is going to pay for zoom anyhow like they pay for both ms office and gsuite for the same set of workers. People send meeting links on zoom to clients and collaborators at other orgs. Its the standard now. Try sending a teams link and your clients will say “well we dont use teams can you send a zoom link?”
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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…
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…
But at the end of the day, he won't work for nothing if you took all of his comp, so fair accountability is not really possible in this light.
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My thought exactly. How about resetting unvested equity to zero or some similar “I got all these grants while apparently mismanaging the company so maybe I should not have”
so binary. he still ran the company. overhiring doesnt necessarily equate to mismanaging.
But apparently we're ok with the binary of "management screwed up" -> "individual employees no longer have a job or health insurance".
"Zoomies" 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. The recent tech layoffs have clearly demonstrated, again (again, as in we've seen this play out a few times in the 2000's), that employees are basically assets that are scaled up and down as needed, like all the rest of corporate infrastru…
> 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…
Why? Employee is a perfectly suitable and applicable term. You're not "associates" or anything else that implies there is some kind relationship that is anything other than work for hire.
Granted, if you have some kind of internal way to refer to yourselves or your teams, that's great. But like politics or religion, it should probably be a thing that is internal only and not referred to in the outside world/public comms.
Terms like "Zoomies" are just childish. If some chain of events led you to be calling yourselves "The Ruby Death Squad", and you use that publicly, then I might change my perspective.
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Falling on your sword is literally exactly what accountability used to be. …and the stakes are even higher today if you count the number of people impacted by poor decisions.
Cite? Accountability means (from every definition I’ve found!) taking responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences. Falling on one’s sword has, from what I’ve always read, has been portrayed as someone accepting too much responsibility, to the point they actually avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions and make the situation worse overall by killing themselves. After all, no need to actually w…
My connotation has always been ritual suicide.
E.g. Seppuku in Japan, captains going down with the ship, ect.
The origin of the phrase in the west stems from the roman practice of military ritual suicide following defeat. It was more a matter of honor than seeking victimhood.
A captured general represented an embarrassment to the empire, provides the enemy with a hostage, and would likely be tortured to give up information. Suicide in defeat was honorable as it served the empire and denied the enemy leverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Roman_militar...