221–230 of 312 posts
960 is 6% of the global LinkedIn workforce. I am baffled by how many people work for LinkedIn.
They need that many to keep up with the sheer volume of emails they are sending out each day /s
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Last year LinkedIn made $6.8B in revenue. If they hire someone who can make a process .01% more efficient, they would save $680,000. If they pay that person even $400,000/yr plus benefits, they are coming out ahead. If you find someone who can make things .002% more efficient and pay them $100,000 a year, you've still come out ahead. At that revenue, it doesn't take much to get an ROI on a new employee.
Making "a" process .01% more efficient is not sufficient in your example. You need (the weighted average of) everything to become that much more effective. Somebody improving e.g. the build speed by that amount will not be paying back their salary in improved productivity of other developers. While a person who increases the click through rate on ads by 0.02% probably does.
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> a From what I've read, this was standard practice at Microsoft for over a decade. I think this makes sense during a downturn, but probably wears on morale if it happens every year.
I've heard from people who worked there at the time that as part of the stack ranking system, it contributed to a culture of mediocrity and stagnation. The high performers did not want to excel in fear of retaliation from teammates that this was putting at risk, and no one wanted to be at the bottom. So the result was that everyone tried to be mediocre, do exactly as told, not more and not less. I would never want to…
I find it a little disappointing how when any large company reduces staffing it always makes the news. I'm not at all saying these people at LinkedIn deserve this, I bet they're smart people and I hope they find new employment very soon. But speaking generally ... many of us have worked at or worked with big bloated companies. We all know that many of them could be improved by slimming down. But we report on it like…
I always think "Those 960 people had jobs there for a while - that's a positive". I've worked for myself the last 20 years so I'm occasionally jealous of anyone who's had even a year of stable, predictable income.
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?
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I always think "Those 960 people had jobs there for a while - that's a positive". I've worked for myself the last 20 years so I'm occasionally jealous of anyone who's had even a year of stable, predictable income.
How does your self-employed career compare to a parallel salaried career in your industry across 20 years? (In terms of year-averaged income, hours worked, etc.)
It's starting to feel like getting rich is overrated when it requires so much of your life to make it happen. Hearing from someone who ended up with similar freedoms (working for yourself is no small one!) would be cool.
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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…
I believe the shift in meaning came about because decimation was an incredibly brutal punishment -- it was the most severe sanction that a general could impose. What is often overlooked is not just that it was "one in ten" executed, but that they were executed by being clubbed to death by the other nine men who were not chosen to die. So "decimation" spread from the literal procedure to "worst outcome imaginable". Mu…
To be clear, "literally" still means the original definition, but now there is an additional colloquial definition which can be used as the opposite of the original meaning[1].
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> 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?
I've read "At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit" and I consider him a con man. Stack ranking was just a nice veener to justify layoffs whose primary motivation were to inflate the valuation of GE and increase its perceived profitability.
To be fair, Welch gave what the investors wanted, but he corrupted everything in pursuit of that. If the primary proof of stack ranking's "wisdom" was that GE's stock went up then that is a sad indictment of the state of business culture in the West.
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>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 a…
For example, I took it for granted that when I said there were 1500 retail locations that readers would realize that meant probably close to 10,000 out of the 13,000 were just dedicated to running those retail locations (that's going by back of the envelope math, as well as hazy memories of actual numbers).
Add to that probably another 1000 for the warehouses and associated logistics, and you're looking at a pool of maybe 2000 actual knowledge workers split among all of the functions listed above (sales, marketing, support, legal, real estate, merchandising, development, IT, etc, etc).
I also made perhaps an invalid assumption that the software being written to manage and optimize the: 1) design of a product 2) sending it off to China for manufacture 3) shipping it back to the states 4) storing it in a warehouse 5) letting it be found, ordered and paid for online by anyone in the world 6) and finally shipped to the end consumer.... is all somehow more complicated than the development being done by LinkedIn, and being done by only a couple hundred dev and infrastructure people.
In my mind, that felt like evidence LinkedIn might be bloated. But as others have pointed out, I'm sure there are dev challenges I'm taking for granted. And of course you need a healthy headcount to deal with the legal, support and sales operations of a company with the international footprint of LinkedIn.
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How does your self-employed career compare to a parallel salaried career in your industry across 20 years? (In terms of year-averaged income, hours worked, etc.)
Seconding this question. It'd be fascinating to hear a detailed perspective from someone who has spent 20 years working for themselves, without also reaching traditional "success" (i.e. getting rich). It's starting to feel like getting rich is overrated when it requires so much of your life to make it happen. Hearing from someone who ended up with similar freedoms (working for yourself is no small one!) would be cool…
If you’re savvy, good at networking and self motivated, you can make money which is comparable to most full time jobs. Just gotta be careful about the taxes and make sure you save for the lean times.