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Reddit Laying Off About 90 Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://archive.is/3wR5j https://archive.is/3wR5j
- coverband 3y agoI thought they were already working with a very slim headcount? How the heck did they get to 2,000 employees?
- chippiewill 3y agoApparently they got a bit carried away after a fundraising round https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-round-250-million-double-employees-investment https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro... Astonishing really considering Reddit hasn't changed that much since back when they had like 100 employees.
- yunohn 3y ago> Astonishing really considering Reddit hasn't changed that much If I had a dollar for every “X is trivial” comment on HN…
- CogitoCogito 3y agoYou’re right. Reddit has changed quite a bit for the worse.
- missedthecue 3y agoYes you are right. It is brought up a lot. But the crazy thing is that despite it coming up in every other thread, I have yet to see a solid explanation. Some theories (it looks good for VCs!!!!!), some half-assed justification (akshually, running web apps does need thousands of engineers), and a lot of people agreeing that it's crazy. I think it's probably true that most companies are overstaffed. He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named managed to cut headcount 80% at a fairly prominent tech employer and drama aside, the business has not severely suffered. Could Ford Motor Company or US steel or Delta Airlines lay off 80% of their workforce and manage to maintain and grow operations as well as the bird app has managed to? I doubt it.
- SllX 3y agoElon Musk. Everything Dumbledore said about Voldemort applies here too. If you don’t want to give him the power, don’t give him the power. But that aside, your point is very good.
- Dylan16807 3y agoBeing silly is different from being scared of him.
- Snowflame 3y agoI mean... according to him, that company's business HAS suffered. Granted, he blames it on a conspiracy out to "cancel" him with advertisers rather than technical problems, but still.
- missedthecue 3y agoThe advertiser exodus has been caused by Elon's contentious personality and his strategic decisions on how to structure Twitter as an experience, with regard to re-platforming controversial users, broadening the definition of acceptable content, and so on and so forth. It has not been caused by laying off 6,000 project managers and react developers, and will not be fixed by bringing back on 6,000 people at six figure salaries. The app itself is functioning well even as the number of users has increased and number of staff decreased, and not only is it being maintained, but they seem to be regularly releasing new features without protracted delays or major technical bungles.
- rhaway84773 3y agoMany advertisers have backed off because laying off a lot of people has led to a worse product. Many more advertisers who might have otherwise been persuaded to stay by sales reps they had contact with have backed off because those sales reps themselves were let go. One could genuinely make an argument that most SV tech companies have way more employees than they need. And one could almost trivially prove that to be true (many Tech companies were hiring developers not because they needed them, but to keep them out of the hands of competitors). That does not make Elon’s slash and burn destruction of Twitter sensible by any measure. Meta is also offloading vast number of employees and it’s managing to do it without making it sound like their company is a dumpster fire. Elon’s approach to Twitter is highly reminiscent of the Stephen Elop burning platform memo to Nokia, but orders of magnitudes worse.
- nullc 3y ago> reddit hasn't changed that much It's changed dramatically, but many of the visible changes are for the worse! To error is human but to really screw things up requires significant manpower.
- pangolinja 3y agothis! it's a radically different website, and has been through some really intense changes over the years, from the people, the methods of influencing the platform, and the platform's own position on the content and it's moderation.
- Pigalowda 3y agoI guess Musk should have tried to buy Reddit first..
- freediverx 3y agoAlso when you consider the company generates none of the content and performs none of the content moderation.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI mean this is all textbook IPO nonsense: Pump the revenue however possible (crazy API fees, push for native only) assuming that people have no choice cause it’s been so long Slash anything that isn’t directly revenue producing All to make the P/L look really groovy but more importantly as a loyalty test to your underwriters.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoThey've also enshittified the website experience, with auto-expanded, auto-play ads at full volume.
- vosper 3y agoI think that falls under >> Pump the revenue however possible
- TX81Z 3y agoDepends on time scale. You can only piss off a certain percentage of users for a short time. If that percentage goes up, and people stay angry, that takes longer, but then you die. People forget exponential growth in a social network always ends with exponential collapse. It takes a while to get there, but sites can clear out in a matter of months.
- flangola7 3y agoWhy are they so eager to IPO in the first place?
- valval 3y agoBeats me, but there has never been a stock I've been more eager to short.
- NoboruWataya 3y agoMoney. They, and probably more importantly their existing investors, want a pay day.
- nerdchum 3y agoDoes anyone know if the new design team is part of that?
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoI sometimes wonder is layoff just for show for the investors. A company the size of reddit couldn't possibly care about saving salary of 90 people to take bad PR. Instead they could have simply moved people around and fire 90 over period of a year or so easily as part of performance review. Similarly I know a company whose yearly attrition rate is 30%, and they fired 10% of the people with 4 months reverence.
- Dma54rhs 3y agoIs it really bad PR? People here do discuss it but it doesn't change anything regarding their users, they are just there to mindlessly consume. And for investors as we have seen it can come off as a good signal. Only people working in tech mind care but do what in the big picture?
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoI am talking about employee PR. It makes hiring significantly more difficult for 2-3 years at least.
- fwungy 3y agoI've heard anecdotally from people I trust that social media is dying. Content is struggling for views and shares. Reddit isn't completely social media, but if people aren't responding to SM like they were it will hurt Reddit. If you're an insider it's probably the best opportunity you're going to get to juke the stats and max your IPO. Only going to go down from here.
- libraryatnight 3y agoI don't generally have a good sense of where gen pop is heading, but recently the few social media type sites I still use are losing what little appeal they had. It's all just so boring and recycled.
- wodenokoto 3y agoI don’t think social media broadly is going away, but they are changing. Facebook kinda killed its own activity by pushing growth of their social graph. Over time it stopped being a place to connect with friends and just became… I don’t know. But it discourages user activity because family, friends, old classmates, guys you bumped into on a night out, ex’es all can see your activity. It’s not fun checking-in somewhere, posting funny pictures from last nights party or whatever because it is practically public. And my impression is young kids don’t like it either. You do your highlights reel on Instagram, but other than that, everything happens in private chat groups. Every meetup group I go to, every Facebook group I visit wants us to connect in a private chat group and have notifications every time someone says something. For this old fart, it’s exhausting to keep up with.
- arlcode 3y agoI feel like there is only so much "interesting" stuff going on in the lives of the people I care about. The need for SM companies to get more of my time requires them to shower me with increasingly irrelevant content to keep my engagement going up. At some point there is literally no additional time people can spend in SM (you can't get a time credit card). So more ads it is until the plattform is barely usable for someone not interested in the passively consumed avalanche of polished medicare. That's why chat groups are increasingly popular I think. You get to have a two way conservation with people who respond and care about you (at least a little bit). Meeting them in real live (or one on one online) also enforces the "authenticity" of the interaction. Therefore I expect Facebook to introduce lots of ads to WA very very soon.
- pyrelight 3y agoHonest question from someone who has never worked at a Bay Area startup: What do all these developers at these tech companies do all day? As a freelance developer who has to meet ridiculous timelines all the time, I don't really get how a company can have hundreds of developers and yet the product seems to languish and/or get worse or slower or both. I suppose there's a lot more overhead with internal QA, code review, meetings, etc, but with the amount of developers these companies have as full-time staff, what are they doing all day? Is it mostly internal systems, tooling, etc? I just find it hard to believe that there can be hundreds of developers at a company like Twitch and yet the product is largely the same as it was 5 years ago. I would think features could be cranked out so much faster than they appear to be.
- smabie 3y agoReality is surprisingly complicated.
- efficax 3y agoThis sort of question comes up a lot when people are talking about big social media sites and there are two answers, both related to scale. First is that things really do just go more slowly when you are larger. There are more stakeholders and greater consequences to change. You don't change anything without measuring it first through flagging and limited a/b releases, and often those a/b tests actually fail to show a reason to release the change since the stats show that even though you think it's an improvement, it actually has a negative impact on key metrics. But the second one is that while the site might seem simple and straightforward, the way it has to be engineered to handle the massive scale of a Reddit (with over a billion active monthly users) makes it very, very complicated internally. I'm not familiar with Reddit specifically but having seen the architecture at other places of similar size, I can tell you there's a ton going on behind the scenes to make it possible to reliably serve that many users and that makes major changes very complicated, involving multiple teams, and lots of planning.
- stcroixx 3y agoThese companies don’t operate like bay area startups, nearly the opposite. Where a startup is low on process and very nimble, these orgs are slow and bloated. They have too much money. They’re more like a bad corporate gig with even less focus on quality because they heard Zuck say breaking things is ok.