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> We’re reducing our global workforce by approximately 1,100 people, or 30 percent, in order to adapt to current market conditions. Why does a crypto exchange
by CommitSyn 4y ago
> We’re reducing our global workforce by approximately 1,100 people, or 30 percent, in order to adapt to current market conditions.
Why does a crypto exchange need 4,000 employees?
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoTo show growth to investors.
- TrickyRick 4y agoBingo
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Why does a crypto exchange need 4,000 employees Because they’re not an exchange. They’re a broker, lender and apparently a bank [1]. [1] https://www.kraken.com/bank https://www.kraken.com/bank
- recvonline 4y agoI would assume most of the 1.1k people is support. You have timezones, hundreds of thousands of customers (if not millions). Kraken has one of the best support I encountered. But with less people buying/selling (as with Amazon: Less buying stuff, less using etc), companies are laying off Marketing, Customer Support, maybe Recruiters and HR. Maybe stopped side projects. I would not expect they shrink their engineering by much.
- KrakenEng 4y ago30% of Eng was cut. Multiple engineers on my team were cut. The QA team was basically wiped out. As far as I can tell, all the lawyers are still here.
- sokoloff 4y agoA followup question, if I may: why does a crypto exchange need 2,900 employees?
- diehunde 4y agoI don't know if you are genuinely curious but this question is getting kind of old. Every time a company does layoffs, somebody asks, "why does an X company need X number of people?". Every opening has a purpose. No company hires people for fun, and unless you are a company employee you don't know all the different areas, projects, and support staff a company needs to run when they are actually a business trying to make money.
- CommitSyn 4y agoIt is a genuinely curious question. I haven't seen the abundance of "Why do they have so many employees" question as I'm new here, and that just seemed like a lot of employees to have if they can just lay off 1/3rd of their workforce overnight.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoI feel like HN should just auto add a comment that says "Why does <company X> need <n> employees?" with a follow up comment that explains how large corporations work. It literally comes up in every single layoff announcement or other discussion of company size in some way, and the follow on comments are essentially the same every single time. I'm not saying that a lot of these companies aren't overstaffed (indeed, that's why they are having layoffs!) but these questions always come across as pretty naive in the same way I hear "It's just a website! I could build that in a weekend"-type comments.
- stickfigure 4y agoI've come to look at it the other way. "Because that's how large companies work" is a lazy non-answer. An honest answer to this question would break it down: # of engineers, # of ops, # of sales, # of hr, etc. And ideally break it down by business division. Of course that requires some real domain knowledge. I've personally watched morons come in, hire lots of useless employees, and destroy millions of dollars of cash while producing negative effect on the product in a company I cofounded. It happens. Despite the common refrain, the question is genuinely interesting and it deserves an interesting answer. What's old is the retort "that's just how big companies work". It might entirely be true that 4000 employees is reasonable (or even low!) for an exchange, but I'd really like to hear the arguments.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoMaybe they were needed to computerize their operations instead of using manual spreadsheets as some recent clownfests were reported to do?
- wpietri 4y agoThe answer might be interesting, but I don't think the question it is. I almost never see it in a form that indicates a sincere grappling with what it might take to do a given company's job. To me it mainly reads as arrogant dismissal that a company could possibly need that many people. It's along the lines of the general-issue jackassery of "I could build X in 2 weeks", which personally I find tiresome.
- rabuse 4y agoIf it were up to HN, I swear, every company would just have 30 employees or it's a "waste".
- dopeboy 4y agoSeriously. Everyone here seems to think every business should be a permanent bootstrapped, profitable company. If you play the venture game, which Kraken is, you need to grow fast. Typically, though not always, that means hiring people to support that growth. WhatsApp is the exception, not the rule.
- capableweb 4y agoThis is hacker news after all, lots of us are hackers that prefer non-VC boosted (nor "cryptocurrency boosted") businesses that are run a bit more lean. Although, it used to be called "Startup News" but lets just ignore that fact for a bit so we can scream at bloated companies for a bit longer.
- nabaraz 4y agoHN thinks a junior developer bootstrapping a webapp over the weekend is production ready.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agonpm install crypto-exchange
- commandlinefan 4y agoAnd those other 29 people are just there to ask me dumb questions.
- bombcar 4y agoI mean HN runs with like three dudes. People have no trouble understanding why Walmart has 2.3 million employees - because they roughly understand “each store has X”.
- 4y ago
- nsonha 4y agoIn comparison, a certain "microblogging" platform has over 7500 while making no money or net positive value to society.
- bombcar 4y ago“Had”
- cjg 4y agoYou could have 300 like FTX and have completely inadequate financial controls.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoMostly support people in my experience.
- renewiltord 4y agoBecause the crypto exchanges with less failed.