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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#341

Post by s1artibartfast »

jonas21 wrote: post #337
s1artibartfast wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is all in the noise financially. Mr. Yuan owns 22% of the company. He owns 22% of the salary savings on the balance sheet.

In other words, he's lost $30B in the last ~2 years. Seems like a fair amount of accountability to me.

Yes, I agree that his ownership position gives him direct financial accountability for the performance of the company. He does well when it does well.

That said, the swings tech stock over the last couple years have very little to do with his leadership. Yuan is not responsible for the tech bubble and its deflation. No human on the planet could have made zoom hold its peak stock price.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#342

Post by georgeg23 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #319
fatnoah wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is all in the noise financially. Mr. Yuan owns 22% of the company. He owns 22% of the salary savings on the balance sheet.

Given the stock went up 9% on this announcement, he just made $500M.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#343

Post by EMM_386 »

madamelic wrote: post #86

This sucks but something like COVID should normalize the idea in the minds of workers that all workers are disposable regardless of education or skill. If you don't own 51% of the company, you are disposable. Zoom had a use for you during COVID, now they don't: bye-bye. You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that. You are not Geor…

> You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that.

I can't tell if all of this is due to the age of people who have joined the workforce over the last decade, when we were in a constant uphill swing.

Markets go through cycles, boom and bust. We happen to be in part of the cycle where interest rates are rising, inflation is high, profits margins are tightening and companies are laying off.

"You were used" is a bit much. You go to work to earn a paycheck. I'm not sure how many people bought into the whole "we're a family" stuff, but obviously these are for-profit corporations and they are beholden only to their shareholders. There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.

I'm older so I've been through a number of these cycles, including having been laid off. Perhaps the decade+ of constant upward tragectory had people disillusioned that this was "normal". It wasn't, and now companies are downsizing.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#344

Post by dagw »

theusus wrote: post #110

I don't understand, Zoom for my perspective is everywhere today. What business issues are they facing?

Here in Sweden I'm in 20 Teams meetings for every Zoom meeting. Outside of academia I can't think of any company I regularly deal with that uses Zoom.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#346

Post by moduspol »

cpncrunch wrote: post #130
mynameisvlad wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing? Low latency video in general is an extremely hard problem to get right. Video conferencing is that, and more. Is the number of employees likely overinflated? Clearly as they just had layoffs. But let's not pretend the problem space is some super easy thing that can be handled by one engineer in their basement.

Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room. We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same…

> Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room.

And don't forget they're often doing it with end-to-end encryption involved, and they've somehow done it without impacting the user experience much. In a vacuum, I'd expect that to introduce non-trivial latency / performance issues that would lead to "just turn off end-to-end encryption for this call so it'll work," but it really hasn't. They really deserve some praise for this.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#347

Post by SQueeeeeL »

nickff wrote: post #310
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is a weird comment. There has basically never been a CEO taking meaningful accountability for a company failing. Taking a reasonable chunk of one's wealth and giving it to fired employees is actually remarkable, even if it's not as large as it could be

Laying off employees is not 'the company failing'; he reports to investors, not employees. The employees have very little on the line with respect to the company.

Damn, whoever made a comment has probably has never had a job that's genuinely engaged them (and certainly has never been unexpectedly laid off). What a sad reality most people's jobs are :(

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#348

Post by erik_seaberg »

compiler-guy wrote: post #168
crazygringo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even weirder is Googlers being given rainbow propeller beanies during orientation week that they're expected to wear. Between that and the Lego bins and slides, it can be kind of hard to tell if you've joined an elite engineering org or a kindergarten.

Slides have been closed for almost a decade.

It wasn’t the same since https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/traveling-by-zip-lin....

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#349

Post by gnaritas99 »

JohnFen wrote: post #237
dahfizz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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