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LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

bbc.com

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Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#201

Post by pm90 »

bbarn wrote: post #191

The downward spiral for all industries that are primarily US based because of the overreaction to COVID has not even begun to be felt. But you know, keep posting about how this side won't wear masks and people are jerks all day instead of facing the fact that haircuts aren't the goal - a stable economy is essential, not secondary, to a country's survival.

A stable economy requires its healthcare systems to not overflow. It needs to be able to provide its citizens with healthcare. The US response has been the opposite of overreaction and the economy will pay the price.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#202

Post by peter303 »

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?

I a medium size vertical software company I worked at no more than 20% were software engineers when it reached the mature stage. Some were software support people like program managers, testers, technical writers, Training. Some were company support like executive, HR, sales, IT. And then were services side of People who used the software embedded within customer companies because the customers wanted to outsource that role.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#203

Post by briansteffens »

bbarn wrote: post #191

The downward spiral for all industries that are primarily US based because of the overreaction to COVID has not even begun to be felt. But you know, keep posting about how this side won't wear masks and people are jerks all day instead of facing the fact that haircuts aren't the goal - a stable economy is essential, not secondary, to a country's survival.

As is tradition, we managed to get all the downsides of both shutting down and not shutting down, with none of the benefits of either.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#204

Post by gowld »

supernova87a wrote: post #187
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.

To pull in a side topic on this very idea -- it's crazy that Congress chooses to defund and target the IRS, their own tool for revenue generation. Can you imagine how much money each IRS employee can bring in? I know there's stealth doctrinal reasons for engaging in the shenanigans, but at a practical level, cmon, we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

Congresspeople aren't paid a commission on tax revenue. The have no particular incentive to raise funds via text enforcement vs raising rates vs raising debt.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#205

Post by gowld »

twblalock wrote: post #171
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…

FAANG companies can't move fast and break things like startups. If their services go down, it might be mentioned on the evening news, and it would certainly cost a lot of money. FAANGs have huge existing revenues to protect, large customer bases to keep happy, and laws to obey in all of the countries where they operate. A "simple" feature change is not so simple for companies with those concerns.

"move fast and break things" is literally Facebook's motto, the F in FAANG. It's why you know the motto.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#206

Post by jldugger »

jaywalk wrote: post #165
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…

> 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.

Right, but literally the next bullet point covers that event.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#207

Post by jldugger »

three_seagrass wrote: post #126
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.

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.

Sure, it's a simplification, but the point kind of stands -- if you have a net positive outcome after adjust for cost of capital, you should seek that capital out to make it happen. Or maybe decrease a dividend or buyback program.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#209

Post by twblalock »

gowld wrote: post #205
twblalock wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG companies can't move fast and break things like startups. If their services go down, it might be mentioned on the evening news, and it would certainly cost a lot of money. FAANGs have huge existing revenues to protect, large customer bases to keep happy, and laws to obey in all of the countries where they operate. A "simple" feature change is not so simple for companies with those concerns.

"move fast and break things" is literally Facebook's motto, the F in FAANG. It's why you know the motto.

They used that motto when they were a startup and changed it a while ago.

> On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc.#History

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#210

Post by pavas »

decafninja wrote: post #70
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?

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…

The features may have limited scope but if they have an entire team dedicated to them they usually deal with large enough scale that it's worth it.

When you're dealing with distributed systems at large scale you can no longer have services be down for longer periods of time because it's a lot of money you're losing.

The business decision for employing an engineer or engineering team should be made at the margin -- that is, if the marginal revenue increase is higher than the cost of employing that team you should definitely employ them.

At large scale, a sub 1% increase in revenue or decrease in revenue lost can be multiple $M, so it would be worth having a team that only increases productivity across the company by an average of <1%.

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