LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide • Hacker News Board

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#121

Post by yibg » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

12xo wrote: post #78

yibg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither craigslist nor POF generates 7 billion in revenue. Latest number I can find for craigslist is around 700m in 2016, let’s assume it’s 1b now. And let’s assume they have 1 employee. You don’t think hiring an additional 10k employees to get an extra 6b in revenue is worth it?

CL has approx 50 employees, operate around the globe and are on track to do in excess of 1b in revenue this year... So I disagree with your assessment. There are many businesses that operate in the 10figure range that dont require 10's of thousands of employees. To me LI is more indicative of bloat. Especially since they are owned by MSFT.

Yes but can they scale to 7B with 50 employees? And specifically can they run a business like LinkedIn with 50 (or 500 or whatever small number) employees.

I would argue the answer is no. If CL has a way to scale to that kind of revenue you'd think they would be doing it. One possible answer is the business they run just doesn't scale like that regardless of how many employees they have so it's better to keep things lean.

I'm all for running a lean business, and there are certainly plenty of examples. CL, Stack overflow, POF etc, and they have impressive revenue to employee ratios. But they don't necessarily scale linearly, and they don't have to. CL has 20m revenue per employee, that's impressive. But they likely won't be able to carry that ratio up to 10b in revenue. They also don't need to. The additional employee just need to bring more revenue than they cost.

If someone knows how to run a multi billion dollar global business with 50 people (and more specifically if they know how to do it with linkedin), there will be plenty of people lining up to talk with them and giving them money to do it.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#122

Post by nickysielicki » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #18

duxup wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you stay in business long paying folks that ... you don't want / need working for you anymore.

Yeah. But the economies are going to recover right? I don't think a few more months of pay slips for 1000 people is going to make any dent in MS bank account. But it sure makes a dent in the life of people who were let go in the middle of a pandemic. If they were not needed in the first place, then the management who hired them in the first place should be also fired for incompetence and letting them all go in middle…

> But the economies are going to recover right?

A lot of people are hoping it will. A lot of people are even expecting it will. But you’d still be stupid to bet on it. The conservative move is to wait and see.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#123

Post by three_seagrass » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

mason55 wrote: post #59

12xo wrote: post #37

What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why does this site/company require 10k people?

This question comes up on every post about a big tech company. LinkedIn in a global company operating commercially in probably almost every country. The "social network for work" part is easy but when you start talking about things like job listings across the world and then the sales and account management and local office management and compliance and the internal tools and billing and everything else, it's quite e…

It's the perennial HN question that ignores how much global companies need in-market sales, marketing, and support teams to grow.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#124

Post by vasco » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

12xo wrote: post #37

What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why does this site/company require 10k people?

Look at an up to date org chart of a tech company of 1.3k people and what they do: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/

If you now think that all business divisions have more work to perform due to scale, and that for development, you want to have more parallel streams of work, this should give you an approximate idea of what an order of magnitude larger company uses 10k people for.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#125

Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #35

Nextgrid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is. It has a lot of potential, but is completely ruined by the social media aspect and their attempt at making it yet another cesspool like Twitter or Instagram, all the way down to the algorithmic feed, likes and reactions. They should step away from the nonsense and make the tool (because yes it should be seen as a tool and not a lifestyle) easier to use, not har…

The feed is really quite awful. All social media is somewhat performative by nature, but LinkedIn's feed takes it to another level. It's not just performing for peers, but also performing for current and potential future employers. Never have so many words been written that mean so little.

I find the performative aspect to makes LinkedIn the most charming out of social media "cesspools", actually. The often vapid content and the professional personal branding exercises and optimism narratives are at least positive compared to the culture wars being fought on Facebook and Twitter.

Quora is just as much of a cesspool, except more frustrating because casual users are actually expecting to get something out of it, as opposed to people posting productivity listicles on LI.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#126

Post by three_seagrass » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #118

jldugger wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ , 10k people aren't required per se, they're there to make more money than they cost. Specifically: - sales & billing for linkedin premium, lynda, and other paid products - billing fraud detection, to cut the cost of chargebacks - security, to prevent that one leak from happening again, to keep PCI compliance, etc. - spam filtering, tuned to balance keeping paying customer…

> they're there to make more money than they cost. This is the key most people ignore. If each employee generates revenue greater than their cost of employment, why not keep them around? The goal isn't keeping the lights on, its making money.

It's not just about profitability though.

I'm a bit rusty with my corporate finance, but internal rate of return (IRR) and weighted average cost of capital (WACC) can dictate that even if an employee is making more than what they cost, the money could still be better allocated elsewhere.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#127

Post by kjeetgill » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #41

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feed is really quite awful. All social media is somewhat performative by nature, but LinkedIn's feed takes it to another level. It's not just performing for peers, but also performing for current and potential future employers. Never have so many words been written that mean so little.

From my experience you can opt-out of the bullshit with no ill effects, at least in the software industry. My activity is completely empty, no posts, no likes, etc and that doesn't seem to hurt me. I mostly use the tool as a rolodex to keep in touch with professional connections and be reachable by recruiters. The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourag…

Posts like this baffle me.

This tool seems to function perfectly well as a rolodex and as a recruiter contact for you (its primary function for myself and most others) but somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users.

> The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?

What a strange personification of a vast social network. Who is it that you think is up awake late at night, desperate and pathetic? What middle finger? Recruiters can reach you, LinkedIn got paid for that.

They have metrics for conversions when they push for engagement. It works well enough. Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically. It would take more work to exclude you.

Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#128

Post by varjag » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #117

varjag wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that a significant portion gets swiftly laid off with seemingly no consequence suggests these complexity concerns are overstated.

> seemingly no consequence This is the same fallacious statement in reverse. You couldn't build LinkedIn in a weekend because they do a lot of things you don't see. Also, when they fire a bunch of people, it will affect a lot of things you also don't see. Could someone compare today's and yesterday's Wayback Machine results for your company's website and demonstrate the value everyone at your company generated today?

The GP post was a wall of text basically explaining how you can't run a large website without tens thousands of staff. Surely it would fall apart if you suddenly cull 10% one fine Friday?

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#129

Post by bonestamp2 » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #75

Nextgrid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is. It has a lot of potential, but is completely ruined by the social media aspect and their attempt at making it yet another cesspool like Twitter or Instagram, all the way down to the algorithmic feed, likes and reactions. They should step away from the nonsense and make the tool (because yes it should be seen as a tool and not a lifestyle) easier to use, not har…

> I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is. That's because the "product" isn't the social network. The "product" is insight and access to much of the professional workforce. Sales and HR use it extensively. The social network aspect is likely to keep people semi-engaged with the platform and voluntarily disclosing things that Sales and HR can use as signals.

Salespeople using the platform to try to sell me their products is what makes linkedin awful to me. It's one thing to buy ads, but it's awful to spam people's inboxes with messages.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#130

Post by sushshshsh » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #99

vcanales wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removal of the recruiter from remote roles What does this mean? What issue is this?

Many remote roles are direct apply/hire from job boards with leetcode tests that act as a filter. Recruiters are being used less.

As a counterpoint to your post, I was recently hired by a 3000 person company who paid an external recruiter to post a job on LinkedIn and do the initial screening of me, which was extremely light.

8 rounds of interviewing with the company virtually later, I was hired. The interviews involved a mix of live coding, system design, and general questions about commonly used programming languages and frameworks.

I personally feel like the recruitment firm was beneficial to the process in getting my foot in the door and accelerating everything. I've seen many people have much worse experiences, but mostly from companies that aren't serious about hiring.