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LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

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Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#151

Post by decafninja »

ptmcc wrote: post #105
decafninja wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed for roles at several top tech companies and what surprised me was that there were entire teams dedicated to working on what seemed like a tiny feature or functionality. In some cases, two entire teams - one for frontend, one for backend. Granted, I understand there is a HUGE mind boggling level of scale involved. But still, after going on such interviews, and talking with friends who work at FAANG, e…

A lot of FAANG and FAANG-adjacent dev jobs are not any more glamorous than other dev jobs. A lot of the day to day looks the same, just keeping the lights on. Sometimes a really interesting technical problem does come up, but a lot of the complexity of the job is working within a huge complicated environment, both technically and organizationally. I will say, completely anecdotally, that the average bar for competenc…

Yeah, I imagine day to day work isn't profoundly different wherever you go, but rather it's intangibles like culture and work environment and working mentality that make the difference.

Most of my coworkers are simply there to collect a paycheck. Not that there's anything strictly wrong with that, but there is distinctly a lack of interest in doing anything beyond the bare minimum to satisfy technical requirements. Grass is greener on the other side, but my interactions with employees of tech companies has given me the impression that they're just a lot more enthusiastic about their work than many equivalent SWEs at companies where tech is a cost center.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#152

Post by notyourwork »

kube-system wrote: post #133
notyourwork wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, I feel like developers tend to evaluate tech businesses from the perspective of the tech that they generate, since that is the goal of a developer. It's sometimes hard to remember that making tech is simply the means to an end.

Takes a bit of perspective shift to realize tech is a means to end and not the end itself.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#153

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Zafira wrote: post #143
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…

> It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. Hasn't it been demonstrated that GE under Jack Welch was basically a massive fraud?

You might be right, but source?

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#154

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#155

Post by simonebrunozzi »

symlinkk wrote: post #108
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.

Yeah doesn’t Amazon lay off 10% of devs every year as part of their stack ranking?

No, never heard of this systematic approach while I was there (AWS, 2008-2014), although the turnaround effect might have been somewhat close to that number just coincidentally.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#156

Post by bitbuilder »

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…

>This question comes up on every post about a big tech company.

And in turn, there are always replies that justify these head counts in ways that I still have a hard time buying into.

All I have to go off is on my own experience, but I worked at a large retailer/wholesaler that had:

  - 1500 retail store locations.
  - Probably a half dozen warehouses. 
  - A couple high volume ecommerce sites (not at LinkedIn scale, but scale was a concern).
To support those operations, they employed people for:

  - Staffing the retail stores and warehouses.
  - Call centers for customer support.
  - Sales for the wholesale division.
  - Advertising/marketing for the retail division, all run internally.
  - Logistics/shipping.
  - Real estate.
  - Merchandising.
  - Inventory management.
  - Product design.
  - Sourcing product manufacture.
  - All of the boilerplate corporate crap (HR, recruiting, accounting, etc.)
Almost all of the above had software to support it that was written and maintained in-house, including a custom built ecommerce stack.

All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.

So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#157

Post by missedthecue »

Zafira wrote: post #143
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…

> It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. Hasn't it been demonstrated that GE under Jack Welch was basically a massive fraud?

if youre referring to that hit piece that came out last year about long term care insurance, no. That was a bunch of crap. The guy who published it burned his reputation as the Madoff whistleblower to make some quick money.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#158

Post by ultraluminous »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #153
Zafira wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. Hasn't it been demonstrated that GE under Jack Welch was basically a massive fraud?

You might be right, but source?

Not OP but - https://qz.com/1811291/jack-welch-was-the-best-and-worst-thi...

GE’s breathtaking growth under Welch was fueled in large part by its transformation into a financial services superpower. By 2000, nearly half of the company’s revenue—$96 billion—came from GE Capital

GE’s exposure to finance proved to be an enormous vulnerability after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly during the financial crisis of 2008. While Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to diminish GE’s reliance on finance, his efforts came too late.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#159

Post by codegladiator »

jldugger wrote: post #92
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?

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…

Now multiple that by X (=20 ?) regions.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#160

Post by grecy »

bitbuilder wrote: post #156
mason55 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>This question comes up on every post about a big tech company. And in turn, there are always replies that justify these head counts in ways that I still have a hard time buying into. All I have to go off is on my own experience, but I worked at a large retailer/wholesaler that had: - 1500 retail store locations. - Probably a half dozen warehouses. - A couple high volume ecommerce sites (not at LinkedIn scale, but sc…

Across how many countries & continents was that company operating?

How many currencies, and differing legal requirements did they have to deal with?

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