LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

Post by creaghpatr » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

realtalk_sp wrote: post #112

war1025 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently "decimate" is having a moment on HackerNews lately. It came up over the weekend as well [1], with the same disagreement between people on what it actually means. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878605

There shouldn't be a debate at all since both sides are technically correct. Here's the definition from Google: > dec·i·mate /ˈdesəˌmāt/ verb 1. kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of. "the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness" 2. HISTORICAL kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group. There are many words and phrases that have changed…

Post by kube-system » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:19 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.

Post by monadic2 » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #113

curiousllama wrote: post #8

Companies commonly use layoffs as an easy way to get rid of under-performing staff, realize cost savings from previous investments (e.g., automation) ahead of schedule, or efficiently reorganize divisions whose execs fall out of favor. Not going to say this is good, but a However callous it is, roles on the margin get cut when prospects for growth dim.

In this case, they make a disproportionate amount of their revenue on jobs postings and selling recruiters the right to spam us. With less jobs their revenue goes away. They don’t need as many salespeople and internal recruiters. Microsoft has historically been pretty ruthless about annual culls. It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. More recently it’s more quiet. I don’t begrudge compan…

Post by michelb » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

monadic2 wrote: post #135

mathattack wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, they make a disproportionate amount of their revenue on jobs postings and selling recruiters the right to spam us. With less jobs their revenue goes away. They don’t need as many salespeople and internal recruiters. Microsoft has historically been pretty ruthless about annual culls. It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. More recently it’s more quiet. I don’t begrudge compan…

I imagine at some point a reputation like this affects hiring ability.

Post by mulander » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #134

mulander wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort That is a 10% reduction. Killing nine out of ten would be a 90% reduction but 'in the classical sense' it would also mean that the lucky guy would have to kill the 9 remaining people.

Why did you put 'in the traditional sense' in quotes, as if you were quoting the parent poster, who clearly wrote "in the classical sense"?