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> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues. https

> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-communications/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-comm... Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2022 was 6,787, a 53.48% increase from 2021. Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2021 was 4,422, a 74.64% increase from 2020. Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2020 was 2,532, a 48.77% increase from 2019. Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2019 was 1,702, a INF% increase from 2018. Probably not the most up to date/accurate info. If 1300 is 15% of their workforce, they are up to 8.6k employees, headed back down to 7366, still all time high. Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%? 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing? > Zoom has 300 million users in meetings daily. 89% of zoom users use it for work meetings. 73.41 million downloads of the Zoom app were recorded worldwide in the first quarter of 2022. https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+daily+active+users https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+daily+active+users What new features have they rolled out past 12 months that justify needing 4,000 engineers/project managers/product managers/QA team/dev ops/whatever fulltime? I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: "The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off" Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing?

ActionHank 4y ago
This is tragic for those involved, but I really don't understand how there were 6700+ people working on Zoom. I feel like the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen and there should be further investigations into how they even arrived at this point because this is just bananas.
- lxgr 4y ago
  > the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen Unfortunately, "all the other CEOs were doing it too" will probably hold up extremely well as a justification – in the unlikely case it ever comes to that.
  - ActionHank 4y ago
    If there is fat to cut that means they were paying staff to do work that was unnecessary or wasteful which is money out of investor's pockets.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      "Unnecessary or wasteful" is as subjective and context/environment-dependent a judgement as it gets. Other than that, the sometimes toxic dynamics of sudden windfalls in funding have also been discussed here at length: Paradoxically, not spending investors' money can sometimes be considered worse than wasting it on moonshot projects (or even outright on fancy office furniture and eye-catching employee perks).
      - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        I work for a startup that raised a bunch of money and hasn't spent most of it. It might have seemed bad last year, but I'm sure their investors have come round to the idea now ;)
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    It’s likely also exactly what the board would have wanted or even demanded when the hiring was happening.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffwask 4y ago
  This is one of the layoffs where I go... yeah you really did over hire WTF were you thinking. How do you even effectively onboard that many people as a percentage of existing staff?
richardwhiuk 4y ago
I'd be hugely surprised if they had more than 40% engineering.
- pnw 4y ago
  From LinkedIn Insights: Sales 21% Engineering 18% Other 12% IT 10% Support 5% PM 3% The rest is split between finance, BD, education and admin roles. This seems pretty typical for a public company with lots of compliance and red tape. Highest growth areas in the last year are admin, operations, PM and engineering.
ketralnis 4y ago
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? It's easy to feel superior with hindsight, but possibly, yeah. Maybe it's not the right bet but it's not totally crazy to think that companies shifting to working from home might continue to work from home after trying it out. I can certainly think of some "they should have known" examples but this isn't one of them. Nobody knew one way or the other. Heck my company is now majority remote so I'd say we still don't know.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift. As it turned out, things reset to be more like pre-pandemic than many thought--especially outside the tech bubble--and Google and Microsoft were probably better able to capitalize on an overall increase in videoconferencing as part of their office suites.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    > Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift. I agree from the perspective of, how much travel related to business is non-essential (could be solved over Zoom/equivalent but instead isn't)? Face to face with clients, seminars Maybe I'm missing data on the intangibles of in-person meeting vs digital meeting
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I don't know about data but there are definitely intangibles relating to building relationships over food/drink/activities that aren't really replaced by a more transactional video call intended to communicate information. That's not really a surprise to most people but there was still a pretty broad assumption that the practicalities of reducing travel in favor of video would win out to a significant degree. And that mostly hasn't happened. It's probably also the case that a lot of people in companies, including execs, complain about business travel but actually really like the change of scenery so they find excuses to do it.
anon7725 4y ago
There is no way that 60% are engineers. This kind of scale up is usually in sales and customer support roles, and moderation if applicable.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  What's a better guess for all in number related to engineering staff? Engineers, QA (if any), resource managers, product managers to work with engineers to develop new features/ideas, project managers to manage "sprints" or "agile" or "waterfall" or "kanban" or whatever
  - ketzo 4y ago
    For a company that focuses on enterprise sales as hard as Zoom does, I think a super rough ballpark is that all-in engineering staff are not more than 50% of headcount.
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      agree, so let’s move the goal post in an engineering org what’s the ratio of engineers (hands on keyboard) to non engineers? 50-50? 8 hours a day 5 days a week 20 days a month what are 2000 engineers working on related to zoom?
      - ketzo 4y ago
        It's a good question, honestly. My go-to answer is just "scale" -- the number of people required to go from "1,000 video calls that are pretty good" to "1,000,000 video calls that are close to perfect" is probably insane, for a lot of reasons that I won't even speculate on. But 2,000 still seems like a LOT.
      - rbetts 4y ago
        The ratio is likely closer to 20-30%. I searched the internet until I found data that confirmed my guess ;-). https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/the-makeup-of-saas-headcount-3ae9180f2375 https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/the-makeup-of-saas-.... Zoom includes network, compute, video, voice, recording, recording-storage, transcription, mobile clients, telecom/phone-in, meeting controls, webinar controls, in app messaging, presumably global data centers, calendars, whiteboards, 3rd party app integrations for calendars and schedule, zoom-rooms/hardware, "zoom apps" - 3rd party application integration, bot integration, and a whole enterprise VOIP business on top of it all.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? I presume competition by the likes of Microsoft teams is a bigger factor.
chazeon 4y ago
Speaking from inside Academia, Zoom remains an important part of communication. We never used Zoom or any form of video chat before COVID, but even after COVID, Zoom is here to stay now. We meet in Zoom because it has unmatched quality and stability for video-conferencing / screen sharing compared to Skype etc. Office hour have Zoom sessions, etc.
- rconti 4y ago
  Speaking from inside tech, we were using Zoom before the pandemic, its usage exploded during the pandemic, and our usage of it has never come back down.
  - cpncrunch 4y ago
    But it's not going to go up either.
    - ChickenNugger 4y ago
      Perhaps with population growth?
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  I think google meet is way cleaner feeling and I would pick it over zoom or teams. We do continue to use Zoom for very large 200+ meetings with the idea being that Zoom handles those better than Meet. Not sure if that information is outdated at this point.
  - philjohn 4y ago
    Which is why it's good when there's a big outage and you need a ton of engineers in a call to debug it - Zoom is the only one I've seen that doesn't fall over.
  - smueller1234 4y ago
    No idea about Zoom scaling but I can say with confidence that Meet works perfectly fine with >200 these days. (I work at Google, use Meet 8+h per day in meetings small and large.)
frankc 4y ago
"The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off" I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. They are going to have to lay many or most of them off after. Couldn't they see that Christmas wouldn't last forever? Think of it this way - if there is a huge market/demand expansion, and you don't meet that need/demand, someone else will. Even if you think that much of that expansion is temporary, you will have fallen behind competitors in technology and market share. When the boom ends, they lay people off and you don't have to, but you are still behind now.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. You aren't wrong, I'd say the only subtle difference there is, when you are hired for a Christmas seasonal job, you're informed that it's seasonal and are expected to be laid off, right?
  - scruple 4y ago
    Yes, from what I recall, from working in retail in highschool and beyond, it's specifically temp work and typically staffed through a temp agency.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  I think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs, but these weren't billed as temporary jobs, so I think some shame is warranted. People probably relocated for these jobs, expecting them to be stable. I don't really want to become complacent to working in an industry where major players just lay off thousands of people periodically.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
> 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing? Low latency video in general is an extremely hard problem to get right. Video conferencing is that, and more. Is the number of employees likely overinflated? Clearly as they just had layoffs. But let's not pretend the problem space is some super easy thing that can be handled by one engineer in their basement.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  i don’t disagree but at its core haven’t they already solved this problem? i don’t hear any release notes about it getting any faster or better quality i’m sure they have scaling semi solved now at 300m+ daily users (if that’s true)
- cpncrunch 4y ago
  Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room. We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same room. Having said that, I think they have already solved all those problems now, so I don't really see the need for a huge number of engineers at Zoom, other than what is required to keep the whole shebang running.
  - moduspol 4y ago
    > Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room. And don't forget they're often doing it with end-to-end encryption involved, and they've somehow done it without impacting the user experience much. In a vacuum, I'd expect that to introduce non-trivial latency / performance issues that would lead to "just turn off end-to-end encryption for this call so it'll work," but it really hasn't. They really deserve some praise for this.
none_to_remain 4y ago
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? Thinking of Covid as forever seems surprisingly common- all the people who full-on moved houses. The people still indefinitely isolating and masking. People expecting the pandemic emergency working arrangements to continue forever
lkbm 4y ago
> What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%? > > 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing? If you think 4200 is an absurd number of engineers, why did you use that number as your estimate? Maybe it's 90% sales and customer support.
nradov 4y ago
If it was so obvious then I assume you purchased puts on $ZM during the pandemic?
adrianmonk 4y ago
The best case I can make is that their reasoning might have been like this: (1) Permanent or not, right now the pandemic is clearly generating huge interest in videoconferencing. (2) Our big competitors (Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc.) can afford to speculatively invest heavily into their products just in case it does take off, remote work really is the future, etc. (3) For us, things are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before the pandemic. If we do nothing, we risk getting left behind. If we invest heavily too, although it may turn out badly, at least we're giving ourselves a fighting chance. We are betting the company on something; it's just a matter of choosing what to bet it on. It's hard to evaluate the risk of getting left behind. Network effects (don't want to ask all your friends who have Zoom set up already to switch technologies) might be a big enough moat that they never even needed to worry. Or maybe not.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Very insightful, thank you. For "fun", a counter argument I would make is, if you took the Zoom product right when the pandemic hit and lockdowns started, and just did the bare minimum necessary to make it stable, performant, and scalable to handle HUGE influx in demand would that have been good enough? with focus on, other than improving latency/audio quality/video quality and supporting small meetings all the way up to 500 person meetings, did you need to double engineering staff to achieve this, or could you have gotten away with less and the rest of the engineers got stuck working on random useless features just because it was cheap to borrow money and finance their salary at the time? > Basic (free or free with credit card): 100 participants. Pro: 100 participants. Business: 300 participants. Enterprise: 500 participants.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    What is good enough? I think the relevant question is if the company would be in a better position today if they did the minimum vs loading up on staff and then laying them off. How much did it actually cost them to pay the extra employees? How much market share is worth paying ~1500 employees for two years? If Zoom fails, will it be because of this cost, or because they couldn't do more.
bilater 4y ago
I've thought about this a lot as well and don't have a good answer. My best guess is that this comes about via group dynamics (so and so is hiring and we should too!) and external investor pressure (you should grow faster says investor!) that forces the hand of executives who know deep down it's gonna go south eventually. Also we have to understand that sometimes the callous decision to do this deliberately (better to hire fast and grow faster now and then lay off the bottoms X%) is made. In my experience in tech its hard for me to see how that makes sense considering the resources + time it takes for a new engineer to become productive but perhaps in FAANG level companies the onboarding process is good enough for that to work at scale i.e. getting 0.5x of a new engineer for 6 months is still better than the costs to train and pay em for that time.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
>I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: I can steel man that. The pandemic was a once in a lifetime moment for the the adoption of video meetings. Market share captured during those couple years will largely define the players for decades to come. It would be financially responsible not make every effort to seize the opportunity. If this means massive temporary staffing, so be it.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Right. And, if I had stood up in June 2020 and made the prediction that 50% of business travel would be replaced by video conferencing because companies would realize that their T&E spend was bloated and unnecessary to a significant degree--you might have disagreed but you probably wouldn't have laughed me out of the room. Instead, air travel is pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels in spite of economic headwinds.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Yet Video conferencing is still an 10 billion dollar market and growing, and Zoom is a, if not the leading player. It is projected to hit 19 billion by 2027. https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/01/12/2587929/0/en/Global-Video-Conferencing-Market-Size-Projected-to-Reach-19-1-billion-by-2027-Growing-at-a-CAGR-Of-12-6-Report-by-MarketsandMarkets.html https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/01/12/258...
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Fair enough. What we've seen since pre-pandemic but accelerated by it is that companies have mostly decided that video conferencing vs. voice-only is basically free in the grand scheme of things and it's useful for a great many circumstances. It hasn't mostly replaced in-person though and, for events, it feels like there's a great deal of virtual fatigue at this point. In fact, the main event observation I'd make is that people going to events in-person seem more inclined to socialize/network rather than parachuting in to give a talk relative to pre-pandemic.
ryanSrich 4y ago
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? Very likely not, but what else could they have done to deal with demand other than hiring more people for a few years?
ChickenNugger 4y ago
>Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing? Does he? Perhaps this is what you're missing: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5927165/chart-the-weak-relationship-between-ceo-pay-and-performance https://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5927165/chart-the-weak-relatio... I have no idea, but it's the most salient thing I know about CEO pay having never been one.

ActionHank 4y ago

This is tragic for those involved, but I really don't understand how there were 6700+ people working on Zoom. I feel like the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen and there should be further investigations into how they even arrived at this point because this is just bananas.

lxgr 4y ago
> the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen Unfortunately, "all the other CEOs were doing it too" will probably hold up extremely well as a justification – in the unlikely case it ever comes to that.
- ActionHank 4y ago
  If there is fat to cut that means they were paying staff to do work that was unnecessary or wasteful which is money out of investor's pockets.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    "Unnecessary or wasteful" is as subjective and context/environment-dependent a judgement as it gets. Other than that, the sometimes toxic dynamics of sudden windfalls in funding have also been discussed here at length: Paradoxically, not spending investors' money can sometimes be considered worse than wasting it on moonshot projects (or even outright on fancy office furniture and eye-catching employee perks).
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      I work for a startup that raised a bunch of money and hasn't spent most of it. It might have seemed bad last year, but I'm sure their investors have come round to the idea now ;)
- tshaddox 4y ago
  It’s likely also exactly what the board would have wanted or even demanded when the hiring was happening.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jeffwask 4y ago
This is one of the layoffs where I go... yeah you really did over hire WTF were you thinking. How do you even effectively onboard that many people as a percentage of existing staff?

richardwhiuk 4y ago

I'd be hugely surprised if they had more than 40% engineering.

pnw 4y ago
From LinkedIn Insights: Sales 21% Engineering 18% Other 12% IT 10% Support 5% PM 3% The rest is split between finance, BD, education and admin roles. This seems pretty typical for a public company with lots of compliance and red tape. Highest growth areas in the last year are admin, operations, PM and engineering.

ketralnis 4y ago

> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? It's easy to feel superior with hindsight, but possibly, yeah. Maybe it's not the right bet but it's not totally crazy to think that companies shifting to working from home might continue to work from home after trying it out. I can certainly think of some "they should have known" examples but this isn't one of them. Nobody knew one way or the other. Heck my company is now majority remote so I'd say we still don't know.

ghaff 4y ago
Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift. As it turned out, things reset to be more like pre-pandemic than many thought--especially outside the tech bubble--and Google and Microsoft were probably better able to capitalize on an overall increase in videoconferencing as part of their office suites.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift. I agree from the perspective of, how much travel related to business is non-essential (could be solved over Zoom/equivalent but instead isn't)? Face to face with clients, seminars Maybe I'm missing data on the intangibles of in-person meeting vs digital meeting
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I don't know about data but there are definitely intangibles relating to building relationships over food/drink/activities that aren't really replaced by a more transactional video call intended to communicate information. That's not really a surprise to most people but there was still a pretty broad assumption that the practicalities of reducing travel in favor of video would win out to a significant degree. And that mostly hasn't happened. It's probably also the case that a lot of people in companies, including execs, complain about business travel but actually really like the change of scenery so they find excuses to do it.

anon7725 4y ago

There is no way that 60% are engineers. This kind of scale up is usually in sales and customer support roles, and moderation if applicable.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
What's a better guess for all in number related to engineering staff? Engineers, QA (if any), resource managers, product managers to work with engineers to develop new features/ideas, project managers to manage "sprints" or "agile" or "waterfall" or "kanban" or whatever
- ketzo 4y ago
  For a company that focuses on enterprise sales as hard as Zoom does, I think a super rough ballpark is that all-in engineering staff are not more than 50% of headcount.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    agree, so let’s move the goal post in an engineering org what’s the ratio of engineers (hands on keyboard) to non engineers? 50-50? 8 hours a day 5 days a week 20 days a month what are 2000 engineers working on related to zoom?
    - ketzo 4y ago
      It's a good question, honestly. My go-to answer is just "scale" -- the number of people required to go from "1,000 video calls that are pretty good" to "1,000,000 video calls that are close to perfect" is probably insane, for a lot of reasons that I won't even speculate on. But 2,000 still seems like a LOT.
    - rbetts 4y ago
      The ratio is likely closer to 20-30%. I searched the internet until I found data that confirmed my guess ;-). https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/the-makeup-of-saas-headcount-3ae9180f2375 https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/the-makeup-of-saas-.... Zoom includes network, compute, video, voice, recording, recording-storage, transcription, mobile clients, telecom/phone-in, meeting controls, webinar controls, in app messaging, presumably global data centers, calendars, whiteboards, 3rd party app integrations for calendars and schedule, zoom-rooms/hardware, "zoom apps" - 3rd party application integration, bot integration, and a whole enterprise VOIP business on top of it all.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago

> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? I presume competition by the likes of Microsoft teams is a bigger factor.

chazeon 4y ago

Speaking from inside Academia, Zoom remains an important part of communication. We never used Zoom or any form of video chat before COVID, but even after COVID, Zoom is here to stay now. We meet in Zoom because it has unmatched quality and stability for video-conferencing / screen sharing compared to Skype etc. Office hour have Zoom sessions, etc.

rconti 4y ago
Speaking from inside tech, we were using Zoom before the pandemic, its usage exploded during the pandemic, and our usage of it has never come back down.
- cpncrunch 4y ago
  But it's not going to go up either.
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    Perhaps with population growth?
kerpotgh 4y ago
I think google meet is way cleaner feeling and I would pick it over zoom or teams. We do continue to use Zoom for very large 200+ meetings with the idea being that Zoom handles those better than Meet. Not sure if that information is outdated at this point.
- philjohn 4y ago
  Which is why it's good when there's a big outage and you need a ton of engineers in a call to debug it - Zoom is the only one I've seen that doesn't fall over.
- smueller1234 4y ago
  No idea about Zoom scaling but I can say with confidence that Meet works perfectly fine with >200 these days. (I work at Google, use Meet 8+h per day in meetings small and large.)

frankc 4y ago

"The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off" I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. They are going to have to lay many or most of them off after. Couldn't they see that Christmas wouldn't last forever? Think of it this way - if there is a huge market/demand expansion, and you don't meet that need/demand, someone else will. Even if you think that much of that expansion is temporary, you will have fallen behind competitors in technology and market share. When the boom ends, they lay people off and you don't have to, but you are still behind now.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. You aren't wrong, I'd say the only subtle difference there is, when you are hired for a Christmas seasonal job, you're informed that it's seasonal and are expected to be laid off, right?
- scruple 4y ago
  Yes, from what I recall, from working in retail in highschool and beyond, it's specifically temp work and typically staffed through a temp agency.
heleninboodler 4y ago
I think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs, but these weren't billed as temporary jobs, so I think some shame is warranted. People probably relocated for these jobs, expecting them to be stable. I don't really want to become complacent to working in an industry where major players just lay off thousands of people periodically.

mynameisvlad 4y ago

> 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing? Low latency video in general is an extremely hard problem to get right. Video conferencing is that, and more. Is the number of employees likely overinflated? Clearly as they just had layoffs. But let's not pretend the problem space is some super easy thing that can be handled by one engineer in their basement.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
i don’t disagree but at its core haven’t they already solved this problem? i don’t hear any release notes about it getting any faster or better quality i’m sure they have scaling semi solved now at 300m+ daily users (if that’s true)
cpncrunch 4y ago
Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room. We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same room. Having said that, I think they have already solved all those problems now, so I don't really see the need for a huge number of engineers at Zoom, other than what is required to keep the whole shebang running.
- moduspol 4y ago
  > Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room. And don't forget they're often doing it with end-to-end encryption involved, and they've somehow done it without impacting the user experience much. In a vacuum, I'd expect that to introduce non-trivial latency / performance issues that would lead to "just turn off end-to-end encryption for this call so it'll work," but it really hasn't. They really deserve some praise for this.

none_to_remain 4y ago

> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? Thinking of Covid as forever seems surprisingly common- all the people who full-on moved houses. The people still indefinitely isolating and masking. People expecting the pandemic emergency working arrangements to continue forever

lkbm 4y ago

> What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%? > > 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing? If you think 4200 is an absurd number of engineers, why did you use that number as your estimate? Maybe it's 90% sales and customer support.

nradov 4y ago

If it was so obvious then I assume you purchased puts on $ZM during the pandemic?

adrianmonk 4y ago

The best case I can make is that their reasoning might have been like this: (1) Permanent or not, right now the pandemic is clearly generating huge interest in videoconferencing. (2) Our big competitors (Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc.) can afford to speculatively invest heavily into their products just in case it does take off, remote work really is the future, etc. (3) For us, things are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before the pandemic. If we do nothing, we risk getting left behind. If we invest heavily too, although it may turn out badly, at least we're giving ourselves a fighting chance. We are betting the company on something; it's just a matter of choosing what to bet it on. It's hard to evaluate the risk of getting left behind. Network effects (don't want to ask all your friends who have Zoom set up already to switch technologies) might be a big enough moat that they never even needed to worry. Or maybe not.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Very insightful, thank you. For "fun", a counter argument I would make is, if you took the Zoom product right when the pandemic hit and lockdowns started, and just did the bare minimum necessary to make it stable, performant, and scalable to handle HUGE influx in demand would that have been good enough? with focus on, other than improving latency/audio quality/video quality and supporting small meetings all the way up to 500 person meetings, did you need to double engineering staff to achieve this, or could you have gotten away with less and the rest of the engineers got stuck working on random useless features just because it was cheap to borrow money and finance their salary at the time? > Basic (free or free with credit card): 100 participants. Pro: 100 participants. Business: 300 participants. Enterprise: 500 participants.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  What is good enough? I think the relevant question is if the company would be in a better position today if they did the minimum vs loading up on staff and then laying them off. How much did it actually cost them to pay the extra employees? How much market share is worth paying ~1500 employees for two years? If Zoom fails, will it be because of this cost, or because they couldn't do more.

bilater 4y ago

I've thought about this a lot as well and don't have a good answer. My best guess is that this comes about via group dynamics (so and so is hiring and we should too!) and external investor pressure (you should grow faster says investor!) that forces the hand of executives who know deep down it's gonna go south eventually. Also we have to understand that sometimes the callous decision to do this deliberately (better to hire fast and grow faster now and then lay off the bottoms X%) is made. In my experience in tech its hard for me to see how that makes sense considering the resources + time it takes for a new engineer to become productive but perhaps in FAANG level companies the onboarding process is good enough for that to work at scale i.e. getting 0.5x of a new engineer for 6 months is still better than the costs to train and pay em for that time.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

>I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: I can steel man that. The pandemic was a once in a lifetime moment for the the adoption of video meetings. Market share captured during those couple years will largely define the players for decades to come. It would be financially responsible not make every effort to seize the opportunity. If this means massive temporary staffing, so be it.

ghaff 4y ago
Right. And, if I had stood up in June 2020 and made the prediction that 50% of business travel would be replaced by video conferencing because companies would realize that their T&E spend was bloated and unnecessary to a significant degree--you might have disagreed but you probably wouldn't have laughed me out of the room. Instead, air travel is pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels in spite of economic headwinds.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Yet Video conferencing is still an 10 billion dollar market and growing, and Zoom is a, if not the leading player. It is projected to hit 19 billion by 2027. https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/01/12/2587929/0/en/Global-Video-Conferencing-Market-Size-Projected-to-Reach-19-1-billion-by-2027-Growing-at-a-CAGR-Of-12-6-Report-by-MarketsandMarkets.html https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/01/12/258...
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Fair enough. What we've seen since pre-pandemic but accelerated by it is that companies have mostly decided that video conferencing vs. voice-only is basically free in the grand scheme of things and it's useful for a great many circumstances. It hasn't mostly replaced in-person though and, for events, it feels like there's a great deal of virtual fatigue at this point. In fact, the main event observation I'd make is that people going to events in-person seem more inclined to socialize/network rather than parachuting in to give a talk relative to pre-pandemic.

ryanSrich 4y ago

> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever? Very likely not, but what else could they have done to deal with demand other than hiring more people for a few years?

ChickenNugger 4y ago

>Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing? Does he? Perhaps this is what you're missing: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5927165/chart-the-weak-relationship-between-ceo-pay-and-performance https://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5927165/chart-the-weak-relatio... I have no idea, but it's the most salient thing I know about CEO pay having never been one.