Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zoom lays off 15% of employees

blog.zoom.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 596 posts

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#411

Post by riceart »

memonkey wrote: post #410
speby wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs? "Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this make…

Who is saying that?

Implied in the second sentence of the comment being replied to.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#412

Post by lkrubner »

speby wrote: post #390
vsareto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs? "Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this make…

"Because of that, I am firing myself"

A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to the Board Of Directors, the Board responded by firing both the CTO and the CEO. This seems normal to me.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#413

Post by xtracto »

SilverBirch wrote: post #279
BurningFrog wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. Both sides got what they needed. The company got work done, and the employee got paid. Calling either side "used" makes no sense to me. Employment is always a temporary relationship that can be ended by either side at will.

And in fact almost certainly what happened was the employees got paid to work on a bunch of new exploratory, speculative work that now all needs to get canned.

There's an AMAZING managing podcast that I never get tired of recommending called Managers Tools [1], where in one of their episodes they talk about hiring/firing: They correctly mention that, as a manager, you should be able/willing to FIRE people when you are asking to HIRE. If you say you need more headcount and thus more money for it, be ready to shrink it when you don't need it anymore. Nothing is forever.

That's what a lot of people fail to internalize: If a company is able to grow, then it must equally be able to shrink. Otherwise, you hire contractors or third parties.

[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#414

Post by cpncrunch »

moduspol wrote: post #346
cpncrunch wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-tri…

Janus gateway and webrtc in general has encryption as well, so I wouldn't say that is a major engineering problem. It just requires a certain amount of hardware to be thrown at it.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#415

Post by lazide »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #396
lazide wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to 'falling on your sword', or 'accountability' in your response? Some of your examples are not equivalent to falling on their sword. Notably, going down with the ship is the opposite (in some ways), as it is 'fighting to the end to save the ship and it's people'. If someone (going down the ship wise) doesn't get on a lifeboat when everyone else has already gotten off, then yeah it's probably more a…

I am addressing what you said here: >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. Yes there are differences in my examples. Captains are on boats, and Samurai are in Japan. I'm not trying to say they are…

You got a very different take than what I wrote - especially in the captain going down the ship example.

Unless the Captain saw everyone off in lifeboats and then stayed on the ship (very unlikely), it’s far from what you are describing and I was clear on that.

I also pointed out that the actual reality on the ground is almost never what the mental image or PR is meant to instill, and is often (in reality) a way to take someone out somewhere and pin all the blame on them.

I very much doubt, for instance, in ANY of those examples I gave, they actually did what they were said to have done in the way and for the reasons they were said to have done it.

But there are situations where it definitely is the easier way out to do it that way literally.

Someone who gets into an obstinate fight with a boss over a minor issue, or who does something common and then when it turns out it’s a problem stands up and tries to defend it, and then gets fired, would be a common use of the idiom in my experience.

A Phyrric victory, ‘he picked that hill to die on’, he died tilting at windmills’, etc. could also be used.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#416

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

lamontcg wrote: post #384
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, we all do that to an extent. Pick a label and make it good or bad, but something you can use as a yard stick. You are on the money, but oddly fall into the same trap by using label 'millenials' in a tribalistic manner ( the term has been largely made up to describe a giant cohort, and as most giant population terms, it shares the same flaws ). I do not think you are wrong in general. I am not sure, however, if…

Qualitatively I think there's something different about the way that people under-40 tend to think about identity, particularly the people working in tech that we're discussing here. We used to have thirtysomethings and yuppies and other groups like that. But it hadn't infested everything the same way that Zoomies and Googlers and Pythonistas/Rubyists/Rustaceans has.

Ahh, I think I see what you mean. Based on that, I think I agree.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#417

Post by paxys »

nunez wrote: post #364

> 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 FY23 corporate bonuses. Eric is probably already wealthy and can withstand a 98% cut to his base, but I definitely respect him more for doing that than the nothing other exec…

I have greater respect for him for reducing executive pay by 20% and cutting their annual bonuses to 0.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#418

Post by frellus »

lkrubner wrote: post #412
speby wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs? "Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this make…

"Because of that, I am firing myself" A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to th…

That seems like the call of the board, no? Certainly, CEOs at any substantial level are accountable to a group of people. Everyone answers to someone.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#419

Post by moduspol »

cpncrunch wrote: post #414
moduspol wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-tri…

Janus gateway and webrtc in general has encryption as well, so I wouldn't say that is a major engineering problem. It just requires a certain amount of hardware to be thrown at it.

I don't just mean encryption--I mean end-to-end encryption.

That means you can't throw hardware at it. You're limited to the hardware end users are using. Every client needs to be able to meet the needs of every other client, when each could be on a flaky cellular connection, or on a Raspberry Pi, or on a high-end PC with dedicated bandwidth. And how much CPU / memory / bandwidth / latency you have will often change during the call.

You can't just have the client send out the best video / audio it can and transcode it to meet other clients' capabilities server-side because of the end-to-end encryption. Getting it to work as seamlessly as Zoom does is an accomplishment.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#420

Post by karaterobot »

lkrubner wrote: post #412
speby wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs? "Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this make…

"Because of that, I am firing myself" A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to th…

It's not that Zoom has done terrible for a while, in fact the opposite is true. Yuan is the founder, and the company went from nothing to being pretty huge under his leadership. On the other hand, he signed off on hiring a lot of people because the company grew really fast during the pandemic — too many, as it turns out. What do you make of that? Should the CEO be considered a failure because too many people were hired, or a success because the company's revenue grew by like 1000% in the last three years? Both are really responses to the pandemic, and it may be that neither are really his fault, even if they are on his plate to deal with.
Post reply on HN