9 ms·

Eyeball test with zero context, but honestly? I doubt a 17% layoff will cut deep enough. That still leaves them with more than 4x the employees they had in 202

• shmatt 3y ago
  Knowing the average SV interview loop too well, I can't imagine how many bad (for corporate type work) hires growing that fast brings in. A bunch of leetcode-hard optimized engineers being thrown into an organization that just grew from 200 to 1000 people. If you are part of that 200 original group, you probably have a paycheck for another 5 years just answering tech debt questions
  • autoexecbat 3y ago
    When hiring fast, there's also an element of "we'll find something for you to do", meaning that you're expected to find something yourself. This can lead to people becoming very narrow on something that the business doesn't really value
    • nine_zeros 3y ago
      Or better yet, "We hired you to do some work" but at performance review time "tell us how you have made an impact" Dear company, I did what you asked me to do. If my work doesn't have adequate impact, that is on you for planning poorly.
      • slt2021 3y ago
        thats the meaning of working for engineering-driven company. Engineers are trusted to collaborate among themselves and drive feature roadmap, and to make an impact. Leadership doesnt trust non-engineers to handhold engineers and spoon feed feature requests, all non-engineer types should be focused on selling/marketing product or customer support
        • kovezd 3y ago
          Brilliant! As if a solid feature roadmap doesn't require inputs from sales, marketing or customer support.
          • slt2021 3y ago
            what makes you think that engineering-driven cultures ignore or don't ask for input from sales/marketing/customer support? that's the collaboration part. But the final decision over prioritization of feature X over feature Y and planning is done by engineers, not salesmen
            • nine_zeros 3y ago
              > what makes you think that engineering-driven cultures ignore or don't ask for input from sales/marketing/customer support? The part where managers who don't partake in these efforts refuse to believe engineering estimates, engineering challenges and unknown unknowns and yet feel empowered to blame engineers in performance reviews.
        • Xeamek 3y ago
          That's all fine and dandy when you are small, and have a bunch of generalists that will throw themselves at any problem there is. But when you grow to the point of having a sizeable middle management layer that isolates engineers from one another, by enforcing strict area of interest for each team, you really shouldn't call yourself "engineering driven" anymore. And also, the more you scale, the more specialists you need. Specialists that aren't able, or just aren't willing to move from place to place rapidly
  • bluetomcat 3y ago
    It sounds like a recipe for ruining a product and turning a company into a dysfunctional organisation. Onboarding 800 idle people prepared to reverse linked-lists :-)
    • Ekaros 3y ago
      Seems like it ends up with lot features that few people asked. And then another bunch that no one asked. And then outright user hostile things like reworking entire UI time and again and somehow it being worse each time...
    • Regnore 3y ago
      Well maybe they just have like a lot of linked lists that they need reversed? With that many people working in parallel you could really increase the throughput of the reversing process. Of course this is assuming that you previously hired people to identify and remove any cyclical nodes in those link lists.
      • seanhunter 3y ago
        Tell me, what's the big O of having the people working in parallel on the reversing? And as a follow-up, can you explain whether it is better if you have a team of n people doing the cycle detection to do it using a system which is eventually consistent or strongly consistent and why?
  • TylerE 3y ago
    Now imagine if they opened those jobs to all of us in low cost of living areas instead of demanding in person presence. They'd get better people, and people like me would be getting a decent bump even if we were only getting 50 or 60% of SF salary.
    • MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • TylerE 3y ago
        I mean, I certainly think me and my 23 years of experience is better than random body shop grads. I just have zero interest in relocating or playing the startup game.
        • MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • TylerE 3y ago
            You're awful judgey of someone you've never met. If the problem is "we hired every warm body in a 50 mile radius, turns out a lot of 'em aren't really qualified", I don't see how bringing in even garden variety decent people from elsewhere doesn't bring the average up.
      • DevAbdul 3y ago
        damn
    • michpoch 3y ago
      Why would they give you 50 or 60% of SF salary when they could hire someone in a real low cost area then?
      • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  • excord 3y ago
    Discord interview questions are not your typical leetcode problems. Your premise is wrong.
    • jonathankoren 3y ago
      The graded lunch is dumb as fuck. “Do you play any video games?” “I’ve been playing a lot of KSP, but I’m not sold on KSP2 yet.” “Yeah, I don’t play that game.” STRONG REJECT
      • excord 3y ago
        Never heard of that happening, and neither would you, since you do not see interview feedback. Please don't make up a story.
        • jonathankoren 3y ago
          Bwhahahahahahahahaha Anonymous shill calls named lived experience a liar. What a time to be alive!
          • bananagoat 3y ago
            So you did somehow get access to your interview feedback? And you’re sure that your lunch buddy gave you a strong reject and swayed every other interviewer who otherwise gave you a positive review?
• lispisok 3y ago
  Off the top of my head I cannot recall any big features added to discord over the last few years. I'd like to know what those 4x more employees were working on.
  • skrebbel 3y ago
    Maybe not engineers? Discord quickly morphed from a place where gamers yell at each other into a place where lots of communities and movements exist. Maybe that skyrocketed the need for moderation, lawsuits of people demanding that their former block party co-organizer gets un-admin'ed, abuse reports, etc?
  • ketzo 3y ago
    They have been trying a lot of different routes for monetization, and over a pretty short time period. Adding lots of little things to Nitro, more community server monetization features; at one point, Discord was even trying to sell games a la Steam. I'm sure that last one in particular had quite a lot of headcount associated, and it seems obvious that after they totally shuttered the project, they just reallocated the employees to new stuff.
  • Xeamek 3y ago
    They changed the icons for mute mic, and mute sound buttons. So that probably took at least a dedicated team and few months of work...
  • strbean 3y ago
    Activities and soundboards are the ones that come to mind. Activities are a pretty heavy feature.
• spiderice 3y ago
  > what do they even do all day? Discord has added a bunch of new features over the past couple years. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be very useful features (at least not to me). I still just use it for voice chat during video games.
• hamandcheese 3y ago
  Their eng team wasn't particularly large. ~300 was what I last heard. I don't know how eng grew over that time, but it doesn't strike me as bloated given their scale and user base.
• brokencode 3y ago
  One of the most surprising things to me during the pandemic was the dramatic hiring spree that almost every major tech company engaged in at the same time. I was getting pings from different recruiters multiple times a month during this time, and I’m sure others were getting many more. Today’s layoffs are a direct result of the irrational exuberance of that era.
  • Solvency 3y ago
    Can someone explain this systemic hiring phenomena? A pandemic hits and every corporation thinks that's the time to hire and scale by gross multipliers? Why? Whose idea was this? How did it catch on everywhere?
    • supportengineer 3y ago
      The lockdowns which came about as a pandemic response resulted in a huge shift in spending - many companies were suddenly flush with cash, and many of them decided to use that cash to invest in their business, by hiring engineers.
    • klooney 3y ago
      With more engineers you could make more babies per month or something.
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      A lot of companies saw unexpected spikes in revenue and wanted to strike while the iron was hot. The impulse was rational but the scale of the response was completely out of proportion with reality. But it's not like we saw hiring sprees in airlines and hotel resorts. We saw sprees in industries which benefitted from people staying at home and communicating digitally (like Discord).
      • jhaile 3y ago
        A lot of companies also saw spikes in revenue, raised money from investors at sweet terms based on that revenue growth (despite it being unsustainable), and then needed to spend that money to show they were going to use it to keep the good times rolling.
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  > Clearly they are making non-trivial revenue "Non-trivial" is a very low bar to clear. It's obvious that Discord simply does not need to be the scale it is. It doesn't need a billion dollars and it doesn't need a thousand employees. It's very clear that they only have the employees because the investors were stupid enough to give them that much money, and they need to find something to do with it. Some products just do not need to be that big.
  • valval 3y ago
    What on earth is your reasoning for saying this? I really dislike the habit of stating something absolutely ludicrous and running away with it.
• loceng 3y ago
  It seems most, if not all, big-successful companies use the formula to over higher and then you prune off the lowest-poorest performers - however that metric is determined.
• mikepavone 3y ago
  As someone who joined pre-pandemic, my opinion is that we were unsustainably lean at the time. I was shocked at how small the infrastructure team was when I joined the company and things were honestly a bit rickety at the user scale we were at then. While engineering was probably the single biggest department, a large chunk of that 200 were in departments like Trust & Safety and Customer Experience (support). We saw a huge amount of user growth during the pandemic, we massively increased the number of users that could be in a single guild (server), we launched features that asked a lot more from our AV backend (stage channels, camera video in guild voice), had to deal with a massive increase in spam during the crypto boom, expanded voice calls to Xbox and PS5 and had to deal with an increasingly fraught regulatory environment. We also shipped a lot of user-facing features during that timeframe. Some of those ultimately got removed because of poor results and depending on your use of the platform I imagine some of those that stayed may not be particularly visible, but we really did ship a lot of stuff and I'm not going to attempt to list it all here. Obviously, in hindsight we should have had a tighter focus and probably hired a bit less, but this sentiment that we are/were hugely bloated feels pretty wild to me from where I'm sitting.
  • ketzo 3y ago
    This is great context and I really appreciate it. I honestly thought of Discord as being super stable even in 2020; interesting to hear things felt rickety, internally. My sense is that Discord was exploring a lot of different ideas for monetization all at once, and that maybe the sprawl of new projects got unwieldy, esp. in 2022-23; how accurate would you say that is?
  • x0x0 3y ago
    Still -- my quick google came up with 750 employees mid 2023. So this is 125-ish employees. Particularly with 5 months severance, that seems too small to save much money (assuming $300k fully loaded, that's $40m pa) and also too small to materially impact velocity by reducing headcount and being more careful about commits. I'd expect more like a 50% cut to really speed up the significantly fewer projects by eliminating coordination overhead and giving PMs the ability to really slash projects. ps -- I'm not claiming it was bloated, that's (implicitly, and I believe fairly?) the ceo's claim.
• Gintasui 3y ago
  Discord is like nuclear fusion - always one year from being profitable.