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LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

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Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#161
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. G…

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Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#162
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…

> 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.

The reason for your head-scratching is unclear. Your previous company had about the same headcount as LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, being an international company even before Microsoft’s acquisition, probably has a similar level of necessary personnel, including internal and external software development teams.

I don’t see the reason for your confusion from what you’ve written. Perhaps explicitly stating a point of difference between your previous company and LinkedIn would clarify?

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#164
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 persona…

Testing platforms charge the company tens of dollars per test, so it makes a lot of sense to have a person double check that the resume is relevant rather than sending tests automatically.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#165
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…

> deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS

I feel like their parent company has a pretty good handle on that, and going to AWS wouldn't really be an option.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the "turnaround effect"?

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#168
post #143

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?

GE under his successor Jeff Immelt was definitely a mess. Under Jack Welch the situation was much more subtle. Source -- a book "Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success" that was published a few days ago. I coincidentally read the chapters on GE yesterday, which was written by somebody with extensive personal experience with the CEO's of GE. https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Titans-Companies-Industrial-S...

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That shift usually happens around year 1-2 for every software developer.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#170

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 small features are needlessly complicated at a FAANG because they reinvent the wheel.

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