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 its a sign of the downfall.
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.)
I imagine I've worked a lot, lot more for a lot, lot less, on average. And all while having greater tax/admin obligations. Which is why I don't have any particular sympathy for the undulations in the job market of a salaried employee - at any point, they can freelance like I have to fill the gaps. 960 people fired means 960 people were employed for a given period, but it's often viewed as a horrible and heartless gesture by the company. I've had flat periods just as others have been looking for a job. Been part of the gig economy for 20 years so I'm quite bemused when stories focus on it with Uber and their ilk like it's a 2020 thing.
I've had periods being the sole operator at my company where I've had to work through family holidays and endured extreme stress. My earnings are absolutely famine and feast; had times without paying myself for months and months.
However (and it's a massive however), the freedom has been priceless and I suspect I could never work for someone else in a typical job. I had a typical job once when I was about 20 and not since (I'm 43 now); I don't expect I will have a CV or an employer again in my life. I quit uni/college and have no degree. I don't think I'm very good at what I do.
I've had years earning less than $15k. But I've also had a year where I went around the world through 20+ countries, and many other years where I travelled 3+ months out of the year. Last year I gutted a bus overseas, renovated it (shubbo.com), and travelled with wife and three kids twice across a continent over three months - it was the greatest experience of my life and I don't think I could've done it as an employee.
I currently have a mixture of income streams including one where I photograph/film while travelling (serio.com.au); it barely feels like work. I wouldn't change it for a thing.
> Which is why I don't have any particular sympathy for the undulations in the job market of a salaried employee - at any point, they can freelance like I have to fill the gaps.
Congratulations on your successful gig career that gives you great freedom and the means to support yourself. However, not everyone can freelance. They may have skills which have zero demand right now, they are unable to work remotely, or they have mortgages or health/family situations which prevent them relocating or doing gig work.
There's a lot of sentiment on this thread that these people losing their jobs at LinkedIn are deadweight but in my experience the people let go in the midst of a great economic crisis include superstars who have the floor vanish beneath them, through no fault of their own.
I worked as an attorney for 6 years. The employer I worked the longest for is a major US law firm; you would probably recognize the name. I worked there for four years. Each year I received a high review -- averaged 4.3 out of 5. I had just received a promotion (I wasn't associate/partner track so we worked differently). Then my group started bleeding cash due to an abruptly changing market.
There was no single massive layoff. Instead there was a 6 month period of people slowly fading away. The most bizarre experience of my professional life. Then one Monday, with zero warning, I was brought into a meeting with my supervisor and HR and was told I was being let go. There was an extremely flimsy excuse related to performance; when I asked why it wasn't reflected in my reviews they had no answer.
So from feeling like I had good job stability and support to out of work in about 1 hour flat. I obviously saw the writing on the wall in general but never would have expected me to be one that was asked to leave. My only guess is the promotion made me a target due to higher salary. Luckily I took that as a sign from the universe that it was finally time to attempt the career switch to software dev that I had been planning and working towards for 4 years, and I made it, so for me it was oddly a net positive.
Now I'm not claiming I was some legal superstar. But there were a lot of very good workers that were let go. And the legal job market is brutal. The vast majority of lawyers in this country do not fit your TV view of lawyers. Most of them are your standard 9-5 types working for well under 6 figures with astronomical loan burdens. And good luck telling a lawyer to freelance.
I wouldn't call my career especially successful. I have slogged for 20 years at this. The one programming language I know how to use is probably the least fashionable and most laughed at around. I'm just saying that the focus in a "cutting x staff" thread is always on the loss of a job and not that the job was provided. I have multiple mortgages and a family that has limited my relocating. Being a small web studio getting eaten away by platforms has been seriously challenging, taking a client to court to get paid is challenging, etc.
Someone with a mortgage losing a job has to cover for the downtime, sure. I've had to cover for the peaks and troughs for 20 years. At no point have I had the safety of a predictable pay cheque.
If superstars were let go, wouldn't they often be in a position to capitalise? Or have the intelligence to up-skill or diversify skill set? My line of work has been savaged by platforms. What was once "We have a $10k budget to build a site" has become "So I've done 99% of my site on [platform] but I can't work out the last bit. My budget for the most annoying and least predictable remaining bit of the job is $100."
An employee is at the mercy of their employer just like I am at the mercy of my clients. Any individual has some responsibility to maintain their skills or diversify (against platforms) or stockpile for hard times. I absolutely have sympathy for someone losing their job but I don't have any particular sympathy given it's the flipside of a coin that sees them get a regular wage for a given period.
Consider that some of the people being let go may be here on employment visas, and this may jeopardize their (and their family's) ability to remain in the country.
And they may have got into the country with the support of that company in the first place? I'm not heartless. I'm just saying that there is rarely much appreciation of the original opportunity in discussion about it ending.
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.
I'm almost 50 and have been doing my "own thing" full time since 2004. I'm not rich, but have been able to be home while my 3 daughters have grown up. I spent 18 months traveling around the country with my wife and kids (we homeschool). I've been lucky enough to work on the things I want to work on, for the most part when I want to work on them. I have had years where my income has been under $12k and years where I've made over $300k - it's been an absolute roller coaster ride. No doubt if I had stayed employed by 401k would certainly be bigger, but the "cost" to me has been 100% worth it.
One thing that really made the decision easier for me when I left my job to do my own thing was that I could have been in many different situations around the world where I would not have even HAD the opportunity to do my own thing - and by NOT doing it I felt it was disrespectful to all those who would take the chance if given the opportunity to be in my place.
5 years experience web development/full stack/mobile here. 29 years old. I’ve never had a salaried job in my life. I’m able to pull down $150/hr for a couple months a year (8 hour days), $125/hr for another 6 months full time, then take a couple months off and I’m making a decent salary when it all shakes out. That’s fully remote and working for friends or friends of friends, occasionally taking a contract with a mega FAANG corp for a while, but usually working the contract with a buddy.
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.
I have a similar story, but my rates aren’t quite that great. What part of the country are you in and what stacks are you writing in for contracts that pay at that level? I tend to top out around 100/hr in the Midwest, just short of that post covid.
Not the OP, but the best 'tax tips' come from a tax professional in your region.
I'm in the US, and use a payroll service to pay myself a regular salary. The payroll service deducts and pays appropriate taxes and paperwork. I then also make estimated quarterly tax payments as well, to deal with any estimated overage I may earn/owe. I then pay a tax professional to reconcile everything at the start of the tax season.
Meet with a tax professional. Meet with 2 or 3. Find someone you're comfortable with who has clients like you. Or... find people like you and get referrals as to who they use.
Personally I have an offset account against my mortgage and stockpile funds there. Then live well within my means so I can handle tax when it arrives. Someone who doesn't naturally live within their means could estimate in advance and push money to a separate account to isolate it.
Don't you have to pay estimated taxes anyways? Or do you just mean within the quarter between estimated tax payments? (I am salaried and already just budget by quarter for everything)
Where I live, a salaried person will have tax automatically withheld and paid to authorities by their employer each week/fortnight. Someone self-employed usually has an estimate they pay quarterly or monthly, and then adjustments at the end of the financial year if the situation has varied from the estimate. I'm just saying I stockpile between tax bills (holding the cash against my mortgage to minimise interest) and my general style of living/spending means I can just redraw from the mortgage to make tax payments.
You don’t _have_ to pay estimated taxes. If you choose not to you just pay a penalty at tax time (essentially interest on what you didn’t pay throughout the year). It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it. I freelanced for a few years and just paid the penalty because I didn’t want to spend time thinking about taxes more than once a year. For how much I was making at the time I was fine with this trade off.
It's a complex thing over that sort of timescale. You can get a feel for what I do at my site - http://isaacforman.com.au/ - I've had a basic web business since 1998 that chews up a lot of time for often-meagre returns, then various side projects beside that along the way. I've often wondered if I would've been better off just having a job all this time, and I worry about guiding my kids from my experience.
I am not rich compared to my peers but I wouldn't ever trade my life for any of their lives. I couldn't handle having to ask for leave. I get by with less and travel more (which is something very, very important to me). A lot of the best things in life like being outdoors, hanging out with friends and family, are effectively free.
That said, if I were having to buy into the housing market now rather than 15+ years ago, the mortgage stress might be completely different, and doing it without a regular pay cheque could be a serious challenge.
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.
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.
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.
If you have to fire so many people at once, it means you've fucked up. They should have never been hired, or individually fired a while back, or whatever.
It means the company is making a dramatic shift in how they do things. While this could be good (mass layoffs often mean that the company has finally realized they have a problem), what is definitely means is that they've made a lot of mistakes. It's essentially admitting that they've made suboptimal decisions.
That is why it is reported on, not because it's a morally bad thing or whatever.
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.
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.
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.
Business is all about calculated risks. You can't tell the future, so you make decisions based on your best guess on how the future will play out.
The covid downturn happened over 3 months (feb - april). To start laying off people you have be sure there's no recovery happening around the corner. For example, you may bet that business will improve in may, june, july that will save their jobs and your business outlook. I'm obviously over simplifying since projects, release dates, projected ad revenue and a 100 other factors play into it.
It's easy to sit on the side lines and judge it with the history behind us, but reality is more complicated.
If a company like LinkedIn is doing a lay-off, that’s different from business as usual. They’re supposed to be growing. When they grow they fire people along the way. But a lay-off means they have run out of work or can’t employ people profitably. This can mean:
1. LinkedIn has its own special problems. (Maybe I’ll sell and follow another company or sector).
2. The economy is in recession. (Should have gotten into bonds 3 months ago, oh well).
Companies often try to paint structural problems as competitive adjustments, but we know they rarely do real layoffs during flush times.
Other companies just do layoffs less obviously. For instance, PayPal has been laying people off in the Bay Area even though they are doing really well to shift those jobs to Austin or Omaha or Chandler. They just don't do it all at once and often give people anywhere from several weeks or months to start looking for a job before their actual termination date, depending on how long they've been with the company and pay grade. Companies are super sneaky.
> They just don't do it all at once and often give people anywhere from several weeks or months to start looking for a job before their actual termination date, depending on how long they've been with the company and pay grade.
Sneaky? This is the nice and humane way. Instead of firing a bunch of people that might directly have to compete for new jobs.
I disagree pretty strongly. Rather than layoffs, most of these people could be retrained. Cutting costs of < 1k people is not a serious cost cutting effort, it’s juicing short term numbers.
Probably most of the cuts are very political, with certain darlings being given freedom to restructure and layoff according to their whim.
I think the story that companies do this for efficiency is mostly bullshit. That’s just the excuse.
I'd ask "why did they decide to try to get more efficient now"?
And here the answer is: because there's a big overall downturn.
When things are going well, we generally try to find ways to grow. Find new things for people to do if they aren't needed in their current roles. When we have to focus on trimming costs instead, it's usually due to negative factors.
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?
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 harder. Stop getting in my way trying to make me use the algorithmic feed (it forgets your choice after a few hours) or nagging me to add a profile picture (I've said no for 2 years, why are you still trying?) or certain profile details I might not want to share, or "following sources" (whatever that means, I guess it's about following bullshit hashtags so you can have even more crap in your feed). The UI is absolutely terrible and slow for no good reason and makes it painful to use.
The worst is that you might think "okay well the free version for the plebs is nasty because it tries to drum up engagement, but the premium version should be better, right?" WRONG! The premium version is just as bad but instead of wasting just your time it wastes your time and your money.
> I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is.
That's because the "product" isn't the social network. The "product" is insight and access to much of the professional workforce. Sales and HR use it extensively.
The social network aspect is likely to keep people semi-engaged with the platform and voluntarily disclosing things that Sales and HR can use as signals.
Salespeople using the platform to try to sell me their products is what makes linkedin awful to me. It's one thing to buy ads, but it's awful to spam people's inboxes with messages.
That's kind of a chicken and egg problem though, Linkedin never developed much features outside of recruiting activities so that's the revenue they have.
Linkedin has a much bigger potential than that though, just the social aspect and networking impact could be pretty significant.
The feed is really quite awful. All social media is somewhat performative by nature, but LinkedIn's feed takes it to another level. It's not just performing for peers, but also performing for current and potential future employers.
Never have so many words been written that mean so little.
I find the performative aspect to makes LinkedIn the most charming out of social media "cesspools", actually. The often vapid content and the professional personal branding exercises and optimism narratives are at least positive compared to the culture wars being fought on Facebook and Twitter.
Quora is just as much of a cesspool, except more frustrating because casual users are actually expecting to get something out of it, as opposed to people posting productivity listicles on LI.
From my experience you can opt-out of the bullshit with no ill effects, at least in the software industry. My activity is completely empty, no posts, no likes, etc and that doesn't seem to hurt me. I mostly use the tool as a rolodex to keep in touch with professional connections and be reachable by recruiters.
The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?
This tool seems to function perfectly well as a rolodex and as a recruiter contact for you (its primary function for myself and most others) but somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users.
> The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?
What a strange personification of a vast social network. Who is it that you think is up awake late at night, desperate and pathetic? What middle finger? Recruiters can reach you, LinkedIn got paid for that.
They have metrics for conversions when they push for engagement. It works well enough. Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically. It would take more work to exclude you.
Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.
I think it's an understandable position as an individual. Many people are frustrated that all these applications are somewhat forced on them by social and professional engagements in the first place. Even if they haven't been forced on you it has become tedious to have no option to say "STOP NAGGING ME I WILL NEVER PARTICIPATE".
Add to this that even basic OS functions on mobile devices are constantly trying to get you to subscribe to various services and I think it's reached a boiling point for a vocal segment of people who just want to be able to go about their UI in peace. Unfortunately some data analyst at every big company has decided it's ok to have a popup every time the user visits to remind them to engage, and sign them up for 25 different email lists they have to unsub from individually, and have notifications pop up on their phone for no reason other than to get them to open the app, just because it results in 2% more users signing up for some service and it hasn't yet cause the other 98% to rage quit.
Disclaimer: this kind of behavior has been driving me insane for several years but there's almost no mechanism to avoid these issues on the whole. Also this isn't targeted at you in particular but just to illustrate what I think is a growing resentment amongst a set of users.
Baffled by how defensive you are of a former employer. Linkedin emailed my contacts without asking. And the same has happened to me from my contacts. I would get emailed repeatedly to join. I don't support these dark patterns nor those who have worked for companies that build those dark patterns.
OP is just voicing annoyance at a nag feature, nothing personal, just a UX critique. I'm not sure why it would matter to them if the feature increases engagement for others.
> somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users
I think it's a fair question to raise when the other function seems out of place or almost inappropriate for what the tool is trying to achieve. I feel like a professional platform should be trying to maintain a higher standard instead of decaying into yet another Instagram-like cesspool.
> What middle finger?
The ~2 years of analytic data showing that I have zero interest in the "features" they're trying to force me to use despite hundreds of attempts? I also find it unlikely to believe that I am literally the only one in this situation, thus why I am raising the issue.
> Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically.
Not specifically, but surely the platform should be built in such a way to respect the user's decisions? The various nags can have a use to engage new users (that might indeed not be aware of some of the features), but after a certain point it seems counter-productive and annoying. Imagine if every SaaS tool out there would always give you the "new user" onboarding experience with help popups all over the place and call-outs for "new" features, would you enjoy it?
> Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.
I don't think it's personal because I very much doubt I am the only one annoyed by this. The platform has been designed with zero respect for their users and looks like it's intentionally trying to be as annoying as possible. Even Facebook is more subtle in their shenanigans.
I think at this point, for most people, LinkedIn just serves as a repository for formatted resumes. Connections add a bit of value, as you can see where co-workers end up in the future.
The real problem is that for anyone with decent-sounding title, the amount of inbound spam is incredibly high. Endless outsourced development companies, recruiters, and random people wanting to connect for no discernible reason. Add to that a bunch of low-quality blogging, and I can't see how anyone can really enjoy spending time on the service.
Does anyone have insight on those random connections?
I'm at the bottom of the pile in terms of job title, and I think my profile is open to everyone, so I struggle to understand why a wood worker from half way across the globe would like to connect with me.
And it's not like they even try to talk to you or anything, so it feels like I'm missing something.
LinkedIn the product is an expensive tool for recruiters, and the pool of people on LinkedIn they can pull from. The feed is just fluff. In that regard, before the pandemic, LinkedIn was a big success.
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.
Please add your photo so creepy people can check you out and potential employers can determine if you are ugly, wrong color, wrong sex, uncool, or other discrimination.
If you really believe it has that much impact get it photoshop'ed. Game the system if you think that you LinkedIn picture has an effect. Pick your preferred pronoun or what ever.
Would be pretty awkward once you started interviewing, I'd imagine. I wonder how long one could keep it up though... perhaps during COVID it'd be possible to fake your race/gender all the way through the offer letter? I'd read that Medium article.
Doesn't seem to be a problem for me. I mean maybe if I added one it will raise the levels of "engagement" on my profile by a lot more but that level is already high enough to give me a steady stream of new work so I really have nothing to gain.
I wouldn't actually mind adding a picture now (I had a reason not to add one at the beginning, but this is no longer a problem) but at this point I will refrain from doing so out of principle to not show them an increase in their analytics data and encouraging their terrible practices.
A lot of them are sales people. LinkedIn as a people business needs a lot of sales reps and account managers to be in contact with Recruiters and other people involved with selling .
It is not just big, it is mega big. WhatsApp had world dominance and their product had to deliver instant messages, including photos, videos and other features over crappy internet connections and they managed to build, manage and sustain an amazing consumer product with a handful of people, so 16k for an online job board is laughable and embarrassing. It's just a website after all.
LinkedIn keeps suggesting me my mother who passed away 4 years ago. Every week, without fail, I get an email telling me that I should totally connect with her. It’s highly annoying and no matter what I do to my email preferences, I keep getting the same damn email.
Agreed. A couple of times a year i go try and purge the stuff they send. I do want to see the job searches that I've asked for, i don't expect to see any job posting I've even glimpse at, or anything vaguely associated with it.
In all seriousness someone at Linkedin is getting paid per email sent.
I'm baffled as well, especially given how mediocre their website is (and yes I know they have more than just their website).
Usually with those type of comments someone replies explaining that we don't get it and that you MUST have 20000 people to support a website like LinkedIn
selling... what? or LinkedIn has become corporate IG and people receive money for all this "this is how I succeeded" and "I overcame my weaknesses" unsolicited content.
Selling the premium subscriptions for recruiters I assume. But I agree that the platform is becoming a typical social-media cesspool which is a shame because it could be really great if they toned down the "social media" aspect of it and focused more on recruitment, better job ads (most of it is garbage) and essentially be a corporate rolodex (right now it's a pain to use because all of the noise, and the UI is terrible and slow).
Such a poor outcome for this price. Once was involved in recruiting and the recruitment platform had some integration and subscribtion with LI. So many hopeless zero-effort applications from India... and some weird from China (or at least from profiles claiming to be from there).
Almost all enterprise software companies have more people in sales than engineering. Microsoft is one big exception but LinkedIn must have more sales than eng.
And they prefer you to be managed by a salesperson over letting you be self-serve as they tie you into a guaranteed spend with them.
I spent years trying to untangle us from their managed services, but couldn't as they batched all discounts company wide. I've never worked anywhere where departments shared budgets (even in a 3 person startup, my marketing "budget" was kept separate to other elements, alas the CEO had other issues...), but they basically enforced us to.
That meant I had to pay for pretty much all the LinkedIn usage company wide out of my budget (to receive the discounts on different products as they only applied to one invoice - huge savings on purchasing separately from different budget lines, but still large sums of cash), but internal systems meant other departments couldn't contribute their share back to us.
And once you're in the door, you're then given about 3 different contacts (your sales contact, a follow up sales contact, and then some kind of "content success" person whose only job I could tell was sharing the occasional case study).
Literally everything your company pays for is out of individual departmental budgets? You can't do internal chargebacks, shared services, or move budget around if needed? I've never worked anywhere w/ the kinda crystal ball required to make rigid dept budgets work year-round, personally.
The barriers for shifting cash around were really high, and only allowed at half ends where it had to be returned centrally and then reallocated based on business case.
Less than a certain amount and you literally couldn't move it out of a department (spend it or lose it) - you could shift it inside the department easily enough, but we as marketing and them as HR couldn't do it.
> the kinda crystal ball required to make rigid dept budgets work year-round
Apart from some mild quarterly reforecasting, you mean you've never had the joy of trying to flight out an entire year's marketing spend at the start of the year before? And then have to justify every "variance" ;)
I haven't had that joy, thankfully. But I do routinely have the joy of working with execs to reallocate spend for my products/services. The era of carefully planning out purchases 12 mos in advance is long past. Unplanned, 6-figure software expenditures are the norm now -- and companies that can make that happen without too much bureaucracy are reaping the rewards.
True, though I've spoken to a number of brands who had the same experience as well. Also the same experience of the quality of traffic being terrible for the cost as well.
> "Our Talent Solutions business continues to be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously."
We're in a recruitment-related field (online background checking) and we can clearly see that recruitment activity has dropped way off, even in sectors that are largely unaffected by the pandemic.
My theory is that people are clinging on to their jobs tightly as unemployment rises, so discretionary turnover is way down.
My guess would be about 50% for retail. We are in NZ, so unique circumstances apply - there is no Covid on the loose, so things are all normal as far as retail goes, but entire industries such as overseas tourism have vanished for now, so there are many candidates for every job.
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 <10% layoff is not unreasonable for a healthy company, especially when some business units may be stagnating.
However callous it is, roles on the margin get cut when prospects for growth dim.
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 companies this. They need to move resources where they’re most needed.
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...
I’m not sure on fraud but certainly it wasn’t as great as the press. He definitely made a mistake going all-in on financial services going into the financial crisis.
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.
While GE's successes under Welch are suspect at best in my opinion, I was more referring to the legacy of "stack ranking" under Welch's tenure.
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.
Basically, Jack Welch was in the right place at the right time, probably (almost definitely) played semi-legal accounting games to beat analyst estimates (a practice which later led to accounting fraud charges [2]), and pretty much mortgaged the company's future in exchange for short-term boosts by selling off many of its business units and focusing on GE Capital, which basically got annihilated a few years after Jack left. So he was also a master of leaving other people holding the bag. Also, the man was apparently (according to many people who worked with him) a massive asshole with a huge ego problem and would epitomize every negative stereotype of white male executives if he were still alive today [3].
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.
I feel like there are basically three ways to lose your job in tech.
In one, the company cuts an entire business unit, or a company shuts down, or something else cataclysmic happens. This is where you have dozens/hundreds of people let go. Outside of small startups, this seems pretty rare. I think selling/divesting a failing business unit is more common than outright shutdown in tech.
In the second, the employee does something really egregious and gets straight-up terminated for cause (fired). Absenteeism, theft of company property, sexual harassment, something so bad it's borderline illegal and potentially a legal risk for the employer if they don't do something about it.
The third, which is what we're seeing here, is a general reduction in bloat done under the guise of "the economy". In my experience, great people don't tend to get let go in situations like this--it's political cover to remove the bottom 10%. Companies, at least in tech, don't make a routine practice of doing this without "a reason".
Being in the bottom 10% can happen for a lot of reasons. Maybe you just lost interest in the work. Perhaps you don't get along with your manager, or something's going on in your personal life, or the role was never a good fit in the first place. I used to think some people were just "bad", and some indeed are, but it also seems like peoples' performance really does change over their careers. Provided there's good unemployment insurance, probably best for both parties to part ways. Not only does it give the employee a kick in the pants, but it also improves the morale of the rest of the team, because it doesn't feel like someone isn't "pulling their weight".
The fourth is the market is drying up and your line of management isn’t going to bat for you. Lots of reasons for this and many aren’t personal so no need to personalize it. Many companies try to let underperforming employees go for cause before starting a lay-off because they can avoid the repercussions in unemployment taxes.
This hasn't been my experience, but would love more info if you could provide it.
I'm actually surprised how slowly most tech companies shed staff. In general, it seems the industry is pretty hit-driven, and if you're attached to a good product that's still making money, there's rarely much attrition, even when perhaps there should be. Conversely, a lot of great people get let go when a product isn't working (misses the market or no sales). It all seems kind of arbitrary and random. It's a lot different than, say, a restaurant with really tight margins where you're a day away from getting fired if you aren't perceived to be pulling your weight.
I realized I put two separate thoughts in the same paragraph. When someone is let go in a lay-off it’s often not personal and being a better person might not have saved your position. So it’s probably better not to see it as a personal failure.
Thought 2: if you’re getting let go for performance reasons in a bad time for the company, often they really don’t have performance gripes, but they don’t want to put up with unemployment or file a lay-off, so they let go people that can possibly be fired for performance.
Lucas Arts (the game arm of Lucas Film) has been doing this since the early 2000s. Allegedly, new management came from the film industry and could not comprehend why their game studios kept FTEs between projects. So they started laying off most of the staff at the end of a project to rehire them a few months later. After a couple of iterations they started canceling projects because they could not get enough staff (e.g. the PS3/360 Indiana Jones game could not start because of this, allegedly) and eventually had to shut down their game business all together despite being one of the bigger players at the turn of the century. I have not been working there but have quite a few acquaintances who did and all of them had been out by ~2007. I also had to turn down dozens of their recruiters during those times.
For a while when I was frustrated with coworkers I dreamed of joining a company that openly said they fired the bottom x%. I think Netflix had a presentation along those lines. I’m older and less into the idea now, but it might attract young confident people who care too much about their work, which is mostly what tech companies want.
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.
Depends on the industry. Happens often enough in cyclical industries like retail, consulting and financial services. It’s more shocking when old-line stable companies lay off for the first time. One of the lessons from IBM and HP is the first cut is rarely the last.
Apparently "decimate" is having a moment on HackerNews lately. It came up over the weekend as well [1], with the same disagreement between people on what it actually means.
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 in meaning over time through popular (mis)use.
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". Much as "literal" no longer means literal.
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].
Diezmo (Spanish) and Dizmo (Portuguese) also mean "tithe", an obligatory offering of a tenth of income to churches or religious or charitable organizations. (Growing up in South America in a religious family, I heard both these words a lot.)
> Every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort
That is a 10% reduction. Killing nine out of ten would be a 90% reduction but 'in the classical sense' it would also mean that the lucky guy would have to kill the 9 remaining people.
>Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. [...] The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth".[
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 work in such a culture.
Our company (not Microsoft, but a bit larger) used this model for over 15 years; it worked better than the replacement model, where people only get fired when they are really bad, so really weak people accumulate and re-baseline the competency in the company. On top of that, the new model based on diversity removed almost completely competency from promotions, so it is very easy to stay at the top of the peer group due to lack of competitors.
There could be a model where you just define what "bad" is in concrete terms and fire people who are not up to a relatively high standard; yet you aren't required to fire the the "bottom people" if they are good enough. I believe this is what FAANGs are doing.
I agree that this is pretty normal for any company, though I do wish that there was a bit better balance of risk and reward between the employee and the employer. For instance, if an employer that laid off an employee for anything other than an ethical violation were required to pay out one month of income for every year the employee worked for the company, it would force them to weigh the costs and benefits a bit more.
This is the kind of situation where it would be good to have a union. In the tech industry, it might have to be a different kind of union than exists elsewhere (for instance, I think most of us wouldn't want to do technical work in an environment where people who aren't good at their job can only be fired in reverse order of seniority).
The way I see it, people aren't entitled to good jobs for life from private companies, but neither are companies entitled to a cheap and disposable workforce. There's probably some place we could meet in the middle that has stronger protections for workers than are currently in place in the U.S. (I don't know enough about what protections exist in other countries to comment.)
Forcing managers to wait until layoffs to get rid of underperforming (and possibly toxic/counterproductive) staff is terrible for the morale of the rest of the team and I wish it wasn't the norm. Better to fire people and just give them the severance package than to drag it out while nobody's happy and then do it anyway.
My first reaction to the headline was mild shock that 960 people even worked for LinkedIn. What do 10,000 do at Linked? Netflix has 8,600 and Twitter has less than 5,000 for comparison
Almost. 10% are put into a "Dev List" which starts with some coaching on how they should improve. It then likely leads to a "Pivot" where the employee is given the option to take a 3 month pay severance, or go on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) (likely biased against the employee, as manager and manager's manager have already put a lot of work into getting here and have made up their mind). Failing the PIP, they are likely going to be terminated soon and only get 1 month severance. So, they start with 10% but they target about 6-8% actually getting terminated.
Many of the places where I worked if they PIP'd you start looking. They already made up their minds. If they get a 'get rid of X% of people' you will be in that list.
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.
I assume they meant “turnover”. Amazon is notorious for burning through employees quickly.
And if employees quit voluntarily, the company doesn’t need to pay severance, may reclaim hiring bonus or RSU’s, and it helps them politically/reputationally in aggregate (by being able to claim low lay-off numbers). Of course then you might wind up with those other than your worst performers leaving, so it’s not great in the long term.
The issue not being talked about is the removal of the recruiter from remote roles. Those recruiters paid linkedin thousands a year for premium access.
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 personally feel like the recruitment firm was beneficial to the process in getting my foot in the door and accelerating everything. I've seen many people have much worse experiences, but mostly from companies that aren't serious about hiring.
I’ve worked with good recruiters. They do a ton of work at the beginning of the hiring funnel.
If you got an onsite interview, you probably didn’t even notice the first few filters that the recruiter applied to you. Those early filters eliminate at least 90% of applicants.
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.
What do you mean? The only remote job I have had used a typical recruiter from the company side. I am sure he had a premium subscription. I didn't use a recruiter from my side as I knew someone that worked there.
A lot of the very big companies are quite reluctant to start layoffs if they think the situation can be survived for a few months. They don't want to be seen as evil firing-their-contractors, people-as-expendable, etc. They are an easy target as "big corp".
But if they can see this is going to go on more than the end of 2020, they will start having to confront the need to layoff people seriously. Interestingly, the more certainty they have about how bad it is, the sooner the layoffs.
LinkedIn would be investing in other parts of the business which would result in some job creation and the firm would "work with employees impacted by today's announcement to explore these opportunities"
Good to know that they will first consider rehiring/interviewing the laid off employees and they are public about it.
Curious question: does the employee get to keep the severance package if rehired after being laid off?
I don't know how linked in is handling it, but in a typical layoff situation (I'm unfortunately familiar with several personally, and many more corporately) if you are rehired after your official termination date, you get to keep whatever the termination package was. The company considers you a new employee.
It needs to be this way for certain legal reasons.
Usually the way it works for our company, they give you a 2/3 month grace period where you stay on the books and get a chance to interview externally or internally and you only get the severance (in addition to the 2/3 months no work period) if you move out of the company.
Usually there is a wording in a papers that need to be signed in order to get severance - if rehired, severance won't be paid (plus reject the right to litigate). This is easy to implement as severance might be paid in be-weekly cadence (like salary).
I'm sorry to hear about people losing their jobs. It sucks, especially now when there is so much uncertainty.
LinkedIn makes a lot of money through recruitment ads - five years ago it was at least $300/month for professional positions in hot markets. If companies stop posting ads or switch to cheaper alternatives (some companies still use Craigslist) the impact will be significant for LinkedIn and its employees.
I'm surprised. LinkedIn has to be one of the major sites whose traffic has gone up in recent months, with so many people looking for work and stuck in front of a computer.
It's awful to see such a large reduction in force when MSFT overall is up 30% year to date. I haven't heard of other FAAMG companies making similar moves.
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 customers (recruiters) happy with keeping suppliers (candidates with a resume) happy
- Writing new features, to keep engagement and signups up
- fixing things that keep breaking, like the email contact scraper
- testing code for new features to make sure they, IDK, don't break the signup page
- a/b testing the hell out of any and every thing
- collecting and storing the massive analytics datasets they generate daily
- analyzing daily datasets to determine which a/bs to promote
- coming up with new features
- testing anything at all
- deploying corporate networking in all the offices buildings and such
- optimizing infra costs
- deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS
- moving back to cloud (azure) because after you were acquired, the markup dropped and the calculus on on-prem vs cloud flipped
- managing all the projects associated with above
- recruiting staff to handle all the above
- managing all the staff associated with above
- acquistions (lynda, fliptop, glint, drawbridge)
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.
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 only well into my career.
Totally anecdotal, but the second I embraced business objectives and commercial thinking is when my career exploded. 3 jobs in 2 years, and my income grew over 110% in that timeframe.
A lot of my colleagues seem to get stuck in a position of being very tech focused where JIRA tickets go in, and code comes out (and not much else goes on).
I highly recommend other developers try to sharpen their business and commercial skills, even if you don't want to be a leader. You'll be able to sell your skills and influence technical decisions way easier.
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.
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.
But it's not like the IRS is having sales people cold call Americans and convince them to send more money. Even if you take the most charitable interpretation of what taxes are (ie. you think they are legitimate and necessary at their current level), it still makes most sense to automate as much of the IRS process as possible. Otherwise those IRS employees are eating up tax resources that could be applied to other things.
You may not know there is a huge job the IRS needs people to do: audits and reviews, which are not automated. And take cases to court.
Every IRS employee who is available to review tax filings can probably bring in multiple (probably dozens of) millions of $ of incorrectly or improperly filed taxes. Tell me that's not worth paying a person's annual salary for?
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.
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.
The metric that tends to matter in this is ROIC, but since software/internet companies tend to be pretty "capital light", they generally already have a very high ROIC. Unless the company can deploy that money in new growth projects that they aren't already going after, or in accretive acquisitions (hard to do when tech valuations are so high), it probably makes sense to do what they are doing.
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 easy to get to 10k.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have 1000 people in the US just dedicated to sales & account management for the job listings.
>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.
>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.
This can be summarized as, "I can tell you what it is, but I cannot understand it for you".
In such cases I've invariably found that the failure is on part of the person who is telling the thing - they are simply failing to communicate effectively.
They are not emphasizing the important points, they are not working backwards from the result that they want to achieve and merely listing steps to get to the result, they don't empathize with the audience so they cannot customize their narrative in a way that resonates with the audience.
This is exactly why in your 16 or more years of education with dozens of teachers, you can only name a handful that actually were good teachers.
> 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?
My apologies, you are correct. I took some things for granted in terms of why I made the comparison, and on further reflection it probably isn't a fair comparison.
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.
I am not surprise, just amazed that a site which is mostly self service and runs on UGC needs anywhere near this many people to operate. But then again, most of the people are probably hold-overs from acquisitions. As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I dont see how they'd need this many people in sales. Its almost all automated self-serve and partner driven. Even with a large US based team to manage the big spends, you're still not needing a large staff... But then again, these types of orgs tend to be filled with a lot of mediocre talent and suffer from BigDumbCompany syndrome...
I think we’ve seen that UGC is and always has been a bit of a myth. Social media companies have always quietly employed armies of people to moderate user posts, persuade famous people and Companies to post, to actually do the posting and “media strategy” for those VIPs and companies, and then of course to sell the ads and pro services that come with it all.
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, etc. it sounds like my boring mediocre job as a bank SWE is more involved and exciting than some of these FAANG jobs.
But I'd still jump through flaming hoops to jump ship to a FAANG or similar tech company.
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 competency and work ethic is higher. Day to day stuff just gets done faster and more thoroughly with more accountability. But that's just personal experience, YMMV.
I worked on cooler and more diverse stuff at various start ups and contract gigs, but I get paid literally double (or more) in big tech sooooo yeah riding it out for a bit. I don't see doing this for 20 more years, though.
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.
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%.
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.
Can't you say the same about banks and finance? Hospitals and medical tech? Software in say, cars, aircraft, ships? If anything, even more so?
I could be naive, but what is the most societal impact that could happen if say, Instagram goes down or gets a major bug? Or if something went wrong at Netflix?
Vs. software going wrong at a major bank or on an airliner?
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"
I think it's also that the economics are just different. If you're evaluating a CICD tool at a small company, you're going to find something affordable and bend your process to how it works. A mid-size company might invest a bit into customizing Jenkins hoping that it will pay off in the long run. A giant company might spend millions building a fully custom system from the ground up because gaining 1% more efficiency in developer effort or even build times makes it worth it. And more than that, they may be willing to invest in experiments knowing that some will fail because the chance of success is still worth it.
From what I have seen, the internal tooling is usually worse than what is publicly available. Often times it is only used because it was built before there was anything publically available, and now all of their tooling and workflow depend on it and they can’t easily change. Plus no one wants to rock the boat and suggest throwing out a tool that likely employs a bunch of people.
And the return of investment for the change is low plus it's an extremely hard sell for management ("we'll work 2 years to get roughly where we are now and maybe get 3 minor features plus the promise of lower maintenance in the future").
I don't think that's limited to FAANG. My company needlessly reinvents the wheel, but I get the impression the reinvented wheel is more competently reinvented at FAANG than at my bank.
This might sound naive, but I would like to advocate for more employment than less. Optimizing jobs from 10k to 500 as some people in the thread are advocating seems horrific to me.
The ideal is that you would have 500 people that are efficient enough to perform 20x the work, and optimize the work efficiency, and automate some things.
What I have seen personally is that employers just overload staff. They reach a crisis point and have to hire more people. That just hurts employees and there families.
I do not want to make baseless assumptions on who was laid off. People could be laid off for something as trivial as a site consolidation and the person could not relocate, or an acquisition where multiple people had the similar roles. Using laid off status as a scarlet letter is a worrisome trend and only serves to harm all of us in the long term.
I personally do not want to live in a zero sum economy.
If you now think that all business divisions have more work to perform due to scale, and that for development, you want to have more parallel streams of work, this should give you an approximate idea of what an order of magnitude larger company uses 10k people for.
you can start to understand how crucial pricing could be to a large organization that they could dedicate a person(and a whole team underneath!) solely to pricing goods and services.
EDIT: At the same time you wonder if pretty much all jobs follow Parkinson's role: job filling up to fill up the time.
You have a whole team of talented front end guys at Youtube (or Gmail or Dropbox or ..) and front-end will change and features will be added or dropped because well something needs to be done.
So wouldn't this same principle apply to other jobs? Pricing Manager would keep fiddling with prices if there is nothing else to do. Obviously there would be justifications to higher ups.
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.
> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers?
> ...
> Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There's also a wide body of research that's found that decreasing latency has a signifiacnt effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize.
> And that's just performance. Features also matter: when I talk to engineers working on basically any product at any company, they'll often find that there are seemingly trivial individual features that can add integer percentage points to revenue. Just as with performance, people underestimate how many engineers you can add to a product before engineers stop paying for themselves.
> Additionally, features are often much more complex than outsiders realize. If we look at search, how do we make sure that different forms of dates and phone numbers give the same results? How about internationalization? Each language has unique quirks that have to be accounted for. In french, “l'foo” should often match “un foo” and vice versa, but American search engines from the 90s didn't actually handle that correctly. How about tokenizing Chinese queries, where words don't have spaces between them, and sentences don't have unique tokenizations? How about Japanese, where queries can easily contain four different alphabets? How about handling Arabic, which is mostly read right-to-left, except for the bits that are read left-to-right? And that's not even the most complicated part of handling Arabic! It's fine to ignore this stuff for a weekend-project MVP, but ignoring it in a real business means ignoring the majority of the market! Some of these are handled ok by open source projects, but many of the problems involve open research problems.
> There's also security! If you don't “bloat” your company by hiring security people, you'll end up like hotmail or yahoo, where your product is better known for how often it's hacked than for any of its other features.
> Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years1. When people imagine how long it should take to build something, they're often imagining a team that works perfectly and spends 100% of its time coding. But that's impossible to scale up. The question isn't whether or not there will inefficiencies, but how much inefficiency. A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. But when doing the math on how many employees a company “should” have, people usually assume that the company is an efficient organization.
This is the same fallacious statement in reverse. You couldn't build LinkedIn in a weekend because they do a lot of things you don't see. Also, when they fire a bunch of people, it will affect a lot of things you also don't see.
Could someone compare today's and yesterday's Wayback Machine results for your company's website and demonstrate the value everyone at your company generated today?
The GP post was a wall of text basically explaining how you can't run a large website without tens thousands of staff. Surely it would fall apart if you suddenly cull 10% one fine Friday?
I've worked at lots of companies where the product isn't optimized, it didn't handle Chinese or Arabic queries, or there were organizational issues. These things don't make a company fall apart suddenly, although they could be impediments for growth.
Don't know what consequences you specifically mean here, but some projects won't get done, some sales won't be made, some research won't pan out. Some institutional knowledge will be lost so the next rev won't go as quickly.
There will be many consequences, just perhaps not obvious for those on the outside looking in.
Except the original comment wasn't that. At all. It was a genuine question because a lot of us aren't familiar with these tech giants and how they're structured.
To me LI is a tower of Jenga. Years of growth, mutliple acquisitions, M&A and almost no downward market pressure put them into this position of bloat. But your points are good, very very good. It take a lot of people to run a large org. But that's not always the best way...
Delivering the part of LinkedIn which provides value to end users is relatively trivial. A small number of engineers (20-30) could do that. The problem is ironically how much profit they make.
Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue.
Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify).
Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense.
And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.
I know that one of my friends got a swag box (card, candle, and a metal water bottle) from LinkedIn when he got hired at a company that used LinkedIn's recruiting services. I'd imagine there's a lot of other random things they do at low scale to excite their customers.
They didn't say anything about whether it merits 10k people, they were curious what all those 10k people are doing. I'm curious about that as well - clearly LinkedIn is doing much more than I was aware of.
Neither craigslist nor POF generates 7 billion in revenue. Latest number I can find for craigslist is around 700m in 2016, let’s assume it’s 1b now. And let’s assume they have 1 employee. You don’t think hiring an additional 10k employees to get an extra 6b in revenue is worth it?
CL has approx 50 employees, operate around the globe and are on track to do in excess of 1b in revenue this year... So I disagree with your assessment.
There are many businesses that operate in the 10figure range that dont require 10's of thousands of employees.
To me LI is more indicative of bloat. Especially since they are owned by MSFT.
Yes but can they scale to 7B with 50 employees? And specifically can they run a business like LinkedIn with 50 (or 500 or whatever small number) employees.
I would argue the answer is no. If CL has a way to scale to that kind of revenue you'd think they would be doing it. One possible answer is the business they run just doesn't scale like that regardless of how many employees they have so it's better to keep things lean.
I'm all for running a lean business, and there are certainly plenty of examples. CL, Stack overflow, POF etc, and they have impressive revenue to employee ratios. But they don't necessarily scale linearly, and they don't have to. CL has 20m revenue per employee, that's impressive. But they likely won't be able to carry that ratio up to 10b in revenue. They also don't need to. The additional employee just need to bring more revenue than they cost.
If someone knows how to run a multi billion dollar global business with 50 people (and more specifically if they know how to do it with linkedin), there will be plenty of people lining up to talk with them and giving them money to do it.
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.
Besides the usual, LinkedIn is running an e-learning operation for business these days (LinkedIn Learning), and generally trying to be another vehicle through which Microsoft expands its offerings — moving away from simply being the "recruiting" social network and instead moving to be the social network for every phase of your life as an employee.
Its mostly self-service and partner driven (programmatic). As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I just dont see the need... My guess is that they have several thousand offshore devs and a lot of fat from acquisitions.
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.
Doesn't LinkedIn(Microsoft) has a shit ton of money in reserves? Is cutting down these jobs in the midst of a pandemic really essential for the company's survival? Especially when the economies has started recovering in many parts of the world.
One thing I've noticed is that labor law has evolved to where layoffs are the risk free way to cut staff who aren't performing. At my company we would almost never PIP people because we were strongly encouraged to wait for a layoff round. I think the calculus revolved around lawsuits that pips could generate due to their personal nature, vs layoffs being non-personal.
Yeah. But the economies are going to recover right? I don't think a few more months of pay slips for 1000 people is going to make any dent in MS bank account. But it sure makes a dent in the life of people who were let go in the middle of a pandemic.
If they were not needed in the first place, then the management who hired them in the first place should be also fired for incompetence and letting them all go in middle of a pandemic.
A lot of people are hoping it will. A lot of people are even expecting it will. But you’d still be stupid to bet on it. The conservative move is to wait and see.
> If they were not needed in the first place, then the management who hired them in the first place should be also fired for incompetence and letting them all go in middle of a pandemic.
It is unreasonable to expect management to have a crystal ball into the future.
The role of serving as a safety net can only be accomplished by society as a whole, not individual business. Businesses should be able to purchase labor and not purchase labor as they see fit, just like they purchase other supplies for the operation of the business. The role of providing basic income should fall to the government.
Yes, and the employees that remain should thank them for their hard work and help them find new jobs. If LinkedIn could easily employ an extra 1,000 people without risking the 10,000 that remain, they would've hired an extra 1,000 a year ago. Doesn't work that way.
If these laid-off employees have an average fully-loaded cost of $400,000 (which probably isn't too far off), then linkedin will save about $460,000,000 annually by not keeping them on the payroll.
That is not small change, even for a company the size of Microsoft.
They may have been contributing more than that to the bottom line prior to the recession--hard to know--but the recession changes quite a bit of the calculus around long-term bets.
Speaking of assuming too much: You have no idea who I am, or my employment history.
The top-line going even lower still doesn't materially change the calculus. Those people cost money to pay, and multiply it by almost 1,000 people and it makes a real difference.
> The top-line going even lower still doesn't materially change the calculus.
There’s a big difference between $50-100M and $460M, almost an order of magnitude difference, so yes it does change the dynamics.
> Speaking of assuming too much
I made no assumptions about who you are or your employment history, I stuck to the figures presented. Software engineers are barely as high as the figure you first provided for fully loaded salary on average, hence the comment about the software bubble. The rest of the LinkedIn org makes no where near those numbers on average.
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 its a sign of the downfall.