LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide • Hacker News Board

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#291

Post by jb775 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

0xy wrote: post #261

prawn wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A stable job invariably means you're underpaid -- usually substantially. I might get a 10% raise at a job if I'm amazing at my job, but if I left that job for a new company I might get 30%+ more.

Completely agree, especially in tech. Except most companies will only give a 3-5% raise even if you're amazing.

It only makes sense to hire an employee if they create more value than they cost, or if they reduce more expenses than they cost. Most commonly, it's a combination of the two.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#292

Post by shap3 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

smabie wrote: post #287

irjustin wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say you've fucked up in the face of a global pandemic seems a bit obtuse. The current state of normal is not the same way to operate when there is no COVID. Sort of like saying we should have always operated like the bubonic plague never went away even after it did. Treating the situations the same is too dogmatic.

A company should be responding to new information as it comes in and immediately act. People should have been gradually been fired since the start of covid, not all at once months later.

Firing people in a continual, drip-feed fashion is devastating to morale of the remaining workers who are fearful they may be next, and sends a message of a slow, rotting decline.

Conventional wisdom if you're going to let a large number of people go is to do it once, do it correctly, and act decisively.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#293

Post by jldugger » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

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…

>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.

Bear in mind that organizations, by default, scale superlinearly. If you add a team of 5 engineers, you need to add a manager. If you do that 5 times, you need to add a manager-of-managers. So to double the amount of labor to be done, you need to more than double headcount.

Beyond that, most of the big tech companies have a fleet of engineers building a product and a team 10x that for analyzing the customer experience. They're building streaming processing tools to move the data warehouse batch processing jobs into, so that an a/b experiment start and have statistically valid results within hours. Your retail operation likely can't build and deploy a planogram experiment that quickly, so there's no need to make the analysis pipeline faster.

Or they're analyzing page load times to shrink them down -- over and over again I've seen experiments proving that customers love fast UI, and hate waiting. The smaller the perf opportunity, the more effort it takes to find and fix. Where you dial in at depends on part in how big your customer base is; a 10ms perf fix is more valuable when you have 10million customers a day versus 100k.

And LinkedIn does this on like 3 platforms: web, iOS and Android. Then there's the web properties they bought like Slideshare and Lynda.com.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#294

Post by fishywang » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #16

LaundroMat wrote: post #4

960 is 6% of the global LinkedIn workforce. I am baffled by how many people work for LinkedIn.

I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is. It has a lot of potential, but is completely ruined by the social media aspect and their attempt at making it yet another cesspool like Twitter or Instagram, all the way down to the algorithmic feed, likes and reactions. They should step away from the nonsense and make the tool (because yes it should be seen as a tool and not a lifestyle) easier to use, not har…

I was an early user of LinkedIn, got my account on 2005. I delete my account on 2010, when I started working for Google. The logic then was simple, with Google on my resume I would hardly need LinkedIn to find another job, and the noise is just too much. Now 10 years passed (I worked for Google for 6 years) and I never missed it.

I really don't find any value of LinkedIn on the employee side (for the 5 years I had a LinkedIn account, there's zero job I got through LinkedIn). I know some of my colleagues (engineering managers) use LinkedIn as a recruiting/sourcing tool, but if talents don't find value on it, it's value as a sourcing tool will decline quickly. There are already a lot of interesting new ideas/companies in the sourcing market to eat its cake.

My guess would be that it's still riding the inertial wind. After a few years, if they still can't figure something new out, it will fail badly.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#295

Post by ksec » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 5:46 AM UTC

mavelikara wrote: post #198

jiofih wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IME, you are over estimating how quickly this happens. For me, I was well past my 10th year into the profession when this realization struck. And now, as a hiring manager, I frequently interview senior developers who are not able to explain the business goals of their software. I consider it an important part of my job to coach engineers in my org to understand the business context of their work - a benefit I got onl…

Agree. I think the general shift in perspective and how the world works ( with respect to money, business, economy and people ) happens somewhere around 8 - 12 years into the society.

So for those who joined the Work force or has some work experience earlier in age that tends to happen sooner / younger.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#296

Post by rishav_sharan » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

habosa wrote: post #214

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 agree with you in general, but the timing is what concerns a lot of people. With the whole Covid situation and considering that many economies are in free fall, its hard not to get a bit worried - Can my company also do this? could I be next?

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#297

Post by smabie » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:15 AM UTC

shap3 wrote: post #292

smabie wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company should be responding to new information as it comes in and immediately act. People should have been gradually been fired since the start of covid, not all at once months later.

Firing people in a continual, drip-feed fashion is devastating to morale of the remaining workers who are fearful they may be next, and sends a message of a slow, rotting decline. Conventional wisdom if you're going to let a large number of people go is to do it once, do it correctly, and act decisively.

You may be right, I hadn't considered the human element. But to clarify, the point of letting go small groups at a time isn't to eventually fire 900 people. It's that you're taking a Bayesian approach and constantly charting a new course for your business.

The risk with firing 900 people all at once is what if, in a month, everything is good and they need them all back? By only letting go of small groups of people at a time, you both hedge yourself to future risk while also staying open to future up swings.

It's like rebalancing a portfolio: you adjust your allocations gradually as new information comes in. This is better than one day deciding its time to sell everything or buy everything.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#298

Post by irjustin » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

smabie wrote: post #297

shap3 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing people in a continual, drip-feed fashion is devastating to morale of the remaining workers who are fearful they may be next, and sends a message of a slow, rotting decline. Conventional wisdom if you're going to let a large number of people go is to do it once, do it correctly, and act decisively.

You may be right, I hadn't considered the human element. But to clarify, the point of letting go small groups at a time isn't to eventually fire 900 people. It's that you're taking a Bayesian approach and constantly charting a new course for your business. The risk with firing 900 people all at once is what if, in a month, everything is good and they need them all back? By only letting go of small groups of people at…

Agreed on the parent comment, the human element is very real. Morale especially during a time of global pandemic is a knife edge to manage.

> The risk with firing 900 people all at once is what if, in a month, everything is good and they need them all back? By only letting go of small groups of people at a time, you both hedge yourself to future risk while also staying open to future up swings.

Again you're looking at it too closely to a machine. Machines don't care and pure efficiency says this statement is correct/better.

If you treat your staff like a portfolio, you are not carrying the tenants of being a good leader.

That's not to say that people don't do that. It happens all the time - treating employees sub-human, merely pawns to be sacrificed.

A portfolio is a portfolio and the analogy does-not/should-not carry well to staff lest we all be slaves where literal ownership of other humans is acceptable again.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#299

Post by gregjor » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 7:19 AM UTC

weka wrote: post #281

gregjor wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full freelance since 2013. I traveled and lived abroad for six years. I wrote some articles about my experience on typicalprogrammer.com. I make more than many salaried programmers I know, less than quite a few. I work 4 hrs/day, 5 days/wk on average, so by hourly income I do about as well as my friends at Google and Apple.

what is your tech stack? I am interested.

I don't have a "stack." I've been writing software for 40 years, too many languages, tools, etc. to list.

My freelance practice mainly involves taking over web applications that the original developer didn't finish or abandoned, leaving the customer holding the bag. There's plenty of this kind of work, lots of development relationships go sour, but the software is salvageable. Fixing a few problems without complaining that I have to rewrite it from scratch in Rust gives me long-term clients who trust me, and my 40 years of expertise in multiple business domains gives me consulting work.

That's my niche now that I'm too old to get hired at a cool company, and too cranky to submit myself to a bullshit interview.

Most of the time I work with PHP, MySQL, some WordPress, Zendesk, Shopify, Hubspot. I get some Go, Ruby, Python, other stuff once in a while. I can learn pretty much any "stack" because I have done web dev since web development started (ASP, ColdFusion, Perl back then). I also do a lot of system admin on AWS, Google Cloud, etc.

Re: LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

#300

Post by monadic2 » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 7:25 AM UTC

michelb wrote: post #137

monadic2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems to not be a problem for Facebook

I don’t know of many industry veterans who look lovingly over that fence. My impression is that they use an “overwork the eager graduate” style of hiring, like many in the top ten tech companies do.

Meanwhile the careerists at Microsoft seem pretty happy, fwiw. My closest friend there seems content to work there for the rest of his life and he seems to be producing good quality work, even if they are pushing him into management.