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Digg Cuts 10% of Staff
- marknutter 16y agoI'm surprised they cut so little. I could never understand, for the life of me, why they had such a big staff. It seems to me Kevin Rose could have made himself a very nice living off the site with a staff of around 5 people maintaining the site, but instead they had to get all "future of news" and overstretch themselves.
- rwmj 16y agoThey have 72 staff? Doing what??
- Zakuzaa 16y agonext you'll say it takes no labour to goto reddit everyday and filter out things and then post on Digg for sake humanity.
- pavs 16y agoIt really boggles my mind till today what the hell do they do with so many employees? Is it a standard practice for startups for keep many employees to justify raising more funds? They have no significant changes in how the site works, at-least in the last 2 years or so. The site speed, though better, still sucks. No new features. Site gaming is rampant (just look at the comments). What are they doing?
- FlorinAndrei 16y ago"What are they doing?" Right now? Layoffs.
- pavs 16y agoBut they are also hiring for quite some time now, its not like they are laying of people because of money crunch.
- patio11 16y agoWhat are they doing? Ad sales. It isn't a very headcount-efficient endeavor once you get past self-served options. A lot of the big corporate branding accounts who have huge amounts of money to burn and don't track conversions (I believe in poker these are referred to as "fish") require someone to chat up the media buyer for a while. Branding campaigns are only a backup strategy, mind you, in case that Digg doesn't sell out their inventory of inflated page views by rabidly anti-commercial poor adolescents. For some unfathomable reason.
- latch 16y agoOnce you get past a certain # of core staff (programmers and a few designers), you start to have overhead. Its almost unavoidable. HR, legal, finance, PR, business dev, management, senior management, QA, tech support
- furyg3 16y agoFor comparison, reddit has four people (I think).
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- ojbyrne 16y agoReddit is owned by a larger company, which presumably handles all the business stuff.
- eli 16y agoI really hope Digg doesn't have 68 people working in HR, Legal, and Marketing
- FreeRadical 16y agoNo, they're all in the database team.
- mahmud 16y agoI knew they went NoSQL, but I wasn't expecting human brains as JBODs.
- ojbyrne 16y agoIt is larger than Reddit. I'd guess around 25-30 engineers.
- qeorge 16y agoTrue, but reddit has less traffic, less users, and less features. For example, Digg shows you which of your friends dugg a story, which is far from trivial. I like reddit better, but the digg guys are also doing some cool stuff.
- crocowhile 16y ago>They have 72 staff? Doing what?? Browsing reddit.
- mitchellhislop 16y agoLooking at edges between users takes AMAZING database skills, and tons of people working on it to speed it up. Any new feature has to fit that, which is pretty crazy to do with the users, traffic, and data that they have. They also give a ton back to OSS, which is key for me.
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- ericb 16y agoIt's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
- rosshudgens 16y agoThis would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a standard because of this.
- jfager 16y agoJack Welch strongly advocates for this approach, and it's how GE operated when he was CEO (I don't know if they still do or not). NetFlix also does something similar. Why do you think it would be a morale nightmare? If you're doing well at your job, wouldn't you take comfort in knowing the person down the line who isn't pulling his weight will be cut out of the company at some point? High expectations are motivating.
- matwood 16y agoWell you could be pushing people to only be about themselves and their team and not the company as a whole. Why would I want to work with and help another team if it means I may move them above the 10% line and me below? So while you're right that it would push people to do their job well it could also push them to submarine others.
- jfager 16y agoThe point is that companies shouldn't waste a lot of time trying to salvage or put up with people who aren't helping them succeed. If a person is hovering around the bottom 10% and they think the solution is to screw someone else over, they probably should go. I know I wouldn't want to work with them.
- PonyGumbo 16y agoDoes anyone know what kind of revenue they have?
- ojbyrne 16y agoLast report was around $15m. Presumably the new shady ads have bumped that up some.
- mogston 16y agoI haven't used Digg much in about a year...it lost its charm when they started to make the site too complex with unnecessary features and ever-so-slightly related vertical topics. K.I.S.S. like HN !!
- lurkinggrue 16y agoThe site was slow and if you read via RSS you couldn't get to the article without going to digg first. That alone drove me to Reddit.