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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#351

Post by deathanatos »

password11 wrote: post #152
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…

> 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.

Hopefully they're also sending a NACK email too.

Having been through it, let me tell you that's a gut wrenching n minutes to wait, though.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#352

Post by domber »

password11 wrote: post #152
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…

> 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.

Are you kidding? Passing the message that you're CANNED in the SUBJECT of the email is now considered respectful?

No, it's robotic, and pathetic.

They'll soon be writing these lovely messages to their employees, as well as you're fired emails with ChatGPT.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#353

Post by mbesto »

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.

> The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip.

I'm sorry, but this is the most hindsight is 20/20, armchair CEO thing I've ever heard. Unless you have some sort of magic 8 ball, there was nothing clear about it being temporary, a blip, or any timeline of such.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#354

Post by missedthecue »

georgeg23 wrote: post #342
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.

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

Against the backdrop of losing like $5 billion over the past 12 months.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#355

Post by Quikinterp »

boring_twenties wrote: post #333
keithnz wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while there is some high profile layoffs, is the actually job market that bad? It still seems quite active still to me.

Jobs are plentiful. Jobs that pay $400k+ ... less so.

Jobs that hire new grads or juniors in general seem to be a lot harder to find as well

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#356

Post by thehappypm »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #266
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.

Teams & Meet are improving rapidly; I can't help but ask why when it comes to Zoom these days.

I like Meet best. It never tries to force me to download an app, it just works in the browser.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#357

Post by gnaritas99 »

heleninboodler wrote: post #251
frankc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

[dead]

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#358

Post by missedthecue »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #74
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…

> 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.

Video conferencing is hard, but putting 4200 engineers on that problem reminds of the analogy of trying to make a baby in 1 months with 9 women.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#359

Post by s1artibartfast »

georgeg23 wrote: post #342
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.

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

He didn't make the money because it's unrealized gains, but your point still stands. The market certainly agrees that this is a good direction for the company, and if the market is correct, he will stand to benefit eventually

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#360

Post by commandlinefan »

vsareto wrote: post #119
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…

This is probably the best you can hope for in terms of fairness right now. You'll never see executives put themselves financially in the same situation as the lowest level people they are letting go. This is actually a pretty big step, but the move will need some benefit to the company for it to become more common-place. They might roll these bonuses into subsequent bonuses, but that may actually end up being a motiv…

> probably the best you can hope for

The cynic in me suspects that this is going to trickle down - there will be 20% salary reductions for everybody, and this will become a trend just like the layoffs did.

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