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eBay to slash about 1,000 roles, or approximately 9% of full-time employees
- ijhuygft776 3y agoWhy are the only hiring news we see are firings? pretty sure thats only half of the story..
- dghlsakjg 3y agoNobody hires 1000 people in a single day. If they did we would hear about it. We also don't hear about most firings, since no one really cares when a few people are let go, or a position is left open. We hear about things like this because it is the company sending a strong signal. We can safely say that eBay made a massive management error in hiring, or they are in financial trouble, or both.
- anjel 3y agoIn fact, the latest "Jobs Created" stat and the "New Unemployment Applications" figures are regularly covered as financial news and often in the general news cycle as soon as the gov't "prints" them. https://www.bls.gov/ https://www.bls.gov/
- paxys 3y agoWhy do we hear about bombs being dropped over a country but not all the babies born there over the year?
- delichon 3y ago[flagged]
- rodlette 3y agoA fair conclusion. SREs predicated Twitter would crumble when Twitter's SRE team was laid off. It had some hiccups, but seems stable now. I suppose the next line of defence is that it takes a while for architecture to crumble. Time will tell whether that's accurate, or a No True Scotsman.
- ShaveTheTurtles 3y agoIt sounds like the SREs did a good job of making resilient services
- kelipso 3y agoTakeaway is building resilient services is bad for job security lol.
- rodlette 3y agoDisclaimer: I've worked in SRE. My position is that early SRE solved the hard parts, before I was involved. Services and platforms became reliable. The field is mature. SREs still point to risks, but execs have called their bluff. The takeaway is to make sure you are actually creating value. Maybe Twitter's SREs were not actually improving reliability much.
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoMy anecdotal impression is the pace at rolling out changes and features seems to have also increased.
- bfeynman 3y agoThey also vastly scaled back the number of services operating though. This whole thing of saying its stable with x << 100 % of staff is kind of nonsense when it its users, revenue, and features are also << what it used to be.
- paywallasinbeer 3y agoI don't use xitter so forgive my ignorance. What services did they scale back?
- TMWNN 3y ago>SREs predicated Twitter would crumble when Twitter's SRE team was laid off. It had some hiccups, but seems stable now. I think SREs knew better than to claim such. I saw tons of non-SREs claim that Twitter would surely immediately collapse. Then the 2022 FIFA World Cup occurred immediately after the mass layoffs ... and Twitter kept on working.
- msie 3y agoAn Ebay outage would be more costly than a Twitter outage.
- blagie 3y agoMy general impression is that a lot of companies are more than 4x overstaffed. Early Google had small, elite teams, whom it treated very well. That works really well. Late Google kept elite team salaries with bloated, mediocre devs. That works less well.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoHis infrastructure hasn't fallen over. But by his own admission the site has lost a huge majority of its value, and the main revenue source has dried up.
- ryandrake 3y ago> His infrastructure hasn't fallen over. ...yet. An airplane can still glide a great distance if you turn off the engine that actually powers it. I feel like Twitter/X is still at the "Wile-E-Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff and is still running in midair" part. The technical bits are probably running on pure momentum.
- nradov 3y agoI doubt that the decline in advertising revenue has much to do with the staff cuts. Advertisers were driven away by bad PR, changes in content moderation policies, and the extension of the Community Notes feature to ads. Mainstream advertisers are rightly paranoid about anything that would harm their brand images.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoOne of the big units that he cut was to the trust and safety team, including content moderation and hate speech. A big part of why he lost so much advertising revenue is advertisers knowing that there isn't the staff necessary to ensure that their accounts are being handled properly, and the content they appear next to is moderated.
- bdcravens 3y agoDepends on the makeup of those roles. Often it's not core engineering or infrastructure that's cut, but things like Innovation Evangelists, dev rel, swag diversity procurement specialists, TPS Report Format Change Control specialists, etc.
- paxys 3y agoThe floodgates were already wide open by the time Elon showed up at Twitter (in Nov 2022). Mass layoffs in tech started sometime in the fall. Microsoft laid off thousands in Oct 2022. Stripe did a similar number in early November. Facebook had the largest layoff in company history (11,000 people) the week after Twitter. Salesforce was the same week. Amazon laid off 10,000 a week after that. So it wasn't really Twitter setting the trend. The company was simply reacting to the same market conditions as everyone else.
- dangerboysteve 3y agoDoes that include their terror and customer intimidation department?
- lionkor 3y agoWhere can I read more about this?
- dangerboysteve 3y agoJust google "ebay execs terrorizes couple"
- ametrau 3y ago“EBay Execs stalking and harassing couple”
- bdcravens 3y agoThe employees involved in that incident were all fired in 2019.
- nothercastle 3y agoeBay has done almost no innovation in the last 5 years it needs a skeleton crew to maintain on the dev side
- gjsman-1000 3y agoWhat's the deal with every company deciding that decimating their workforce is a good idea?
- mjevans 3y ago"Iannone said the job cuts are necessary because eBay’s “overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business.”" Growth, when they're already effectively the dominant marketplace, maybe excluding Craigslist or whatever is within Facebook (no account and refuse to sign up). Where is there left to grow? They're a completed service. I also have trouble imagining they have 1000 of anyone, aside from Customer Facing roles / fraud defense.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoCraigslist and Marketplace largely serve non-commercial, local sales. Ebay serves that, but also non-local, commercial, used and new. They go toe-to-toe with Amazon and Ali-express for drop-shipping type stuff, especially international. Small scale international eComm is a huge, and growing market. Ebay has certainly cornered some niches, but it can really pick up a lot of ground in some truly massive markets. If I want to buy a specific electronic prototyping board, my choices are eBay or AE. If I want to buy a part for my older cars: EBay. I just had a hard to find steering bushing shipped direct from Japan, in fact. EBay especially dominates markets for unique things. Vintage cameras, watches, collectibles, etc.
- nradov 3y agoEtsy is a competitor in some spaces. Bring a Trailer is offering increasing competition to eBay Motors.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoExactly, the market is expanding, and those are both pieces of the market that eBay would like to (re)capture.
- tharkun__ 3y agoEbay was great. You could sell non local and paid a bit in fees sure but you could still actually get some money back from stuff you had "outgrown". Now? As a casual seller of stuff that clutters the house? Or your old laptop when you get a new one? Fat chance I'll send that around the country for all the fees I'll be paying to Ebay. Fake Facebook profile and various other online and completely free flea market type sites are the only thing we use. Ebay is dead to us. I bet we're not the only ones.
- bluedino 3y agoI've been an eBayer for almost 25 years, and over the last two years I've started buying more and more items. It's easier to find a "deal" compared to Amazon or other online dealers. I miss the really old days when it felt like a community and people basically knew the sellers and buyers. It's more of a flea market now, the sellers are willing to wheel and deal, and you get more individual items along with all of the random alibaba crap everyone sells.
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- alphabettsy 3y agoeBay has raised fees and not invested in the platform. I used to sell tons of stuff on eBay but with the fees and poor support I’ve had better luck with Facebook marketplace lately. eBay buyers don’t pay and they used to at least give unpaid time strikes, they don’t care now.
- latchkey 3y ago> I’ve had better luck with Facebook marketplace lately. Is the item still available?
- tmm84 3y agoMy relative recently sold something on eBay and actually after the deal was done the fees made it to where listing was negative for him. He would have done better to have donated/wrote it off rather than sell on eBay. He also complained about having to prove his bank account info and identity just to get the money from the sell of said item.