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eBay is laying off 9 percent of its workforce
- jrod2121 3y agoSeems like every day I am now seeing multiple companies laying off X% of its workforce.
- ohthatsnotright 3y agoThe CEOs who haven't done one yet got booted out of their country club until they do.
- Oarch 3y agoPerhaps this is something to be normalised. It's perfectly feasible eBay no longer needs to build, develop and market at the pace it once did?
- kome 3y agoThat's entirely possible. eBay is a very mature product, and it has been like this for years. Among the e-commerce platforms, it's still one that empowers the little people and serves a goal. I hope they won't "disrupt" it. Alternatively, they could be in a crisis.
- 83 3y agoEvery year or two Ebay rewrites their UI and makes it slightly worse. I kind of wish they'd laid off a good chunk of their designers/developers three or four UI's ago.
- whatyesaid 3y agoIt's going to be normalised in the coming years, across small and huge companies. Not sure how all the web devs will adjust. Also we aren't in 2010. You don't need to build as much in house anymore or patch up tech that doesn't scale. Modern frameworks, cloud, and open source tech makes things at least 10x easier than they used to be. We will only improve in this regard.
- schnitzelstoat 3y agoIn the past this just meant it was easier for people to make new services and companies etc. and overall employment in the sector actually increased. Maybe AI will change this, but we've seen plenty of doom-mongering before that never bore out.
- whatyesaid 3y agoOnly if the rate of newer services/companies keep up and outweigh the ease of development we should eventually reach. People are currently still maintaining jQuery PHP and other tech that makes doing anything much more complicated than it needs to be.
- kkarakk 3y agomight be a naive take but i think LLMs will improve the ease with which maintenance can happen. one of the major problems with older tech is finding people who are willing to work in that domain for cheap - LLMs seem to trivialise that.
- jareds 3y agoHow do you think they trivialize it? I've found them to be good for writing short scripts or answering a specific question. I've never seen one that you point at your own code base and have it do things like write a new endpoint that takes into account all the existing database and authentication code. If such a thing exists I'd like to know about it.
- whatyesaid 3y agoYour first sentence is describing the web based LLMs. There are others that operate against the project structure and has read all the files. But a lot of CRUDs also involve a much easier modular domain structure. LLMs amplify you quite a bit in productivity if you're doing CRUD which is what most people are doing. You just clean up the code and clarify potential improvements.
- tutfbhuf 3y agoWhile NASDAQ is at an all-time high, according to some podcasts I follow, these layoffs are mostly due to AI.
- Moldoteck 3y agoHow ai is influencing this?
- IshKebab 3y agoMight be automating some moderation tasks.
- bombcar 3y agoAI is a buzzword that allows the layoffs to happen. I’ve yet to see any serious affect from actual AI beyond broken chat bots. If they didn’t want to do layoffs, they’d be arguing that AI is allowing them to hire more and get more business.
- paxys 3y ago> AI is a buzzword that allows the layoffs to happen Not a single public layoff announcement has mentioned AI as the reason. In fact the current round of layoffs have been going on since before ChatGPT or Github Copilot even launched publicly.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoThese companies must have fallen on hard times. I feel bad for the CEOs.
- BizarreByte 3y ago> I feel bad for the CEOs. I don't. They know exactly what they're getting into when the take the top role and frankly? They get away with a lot of stuff they shouldn't. I feel bad for all the lives negatively impacted by the leadership at companies.
- subtra3t 3y agoI suspect they were being sarcastic, perhaps referring to the sometimes overly extravagant lifestyles that some CEOs flaunt.
- BizarreByte 3y agoIt's so hard to tell on HN. A lot here will do anything to defend leadership.
- subtra3t 3y agoThat's fair.
- kmerroll 3y agoSome much this. If executives were held accountable and terminated for performance failures resulting in layoffs rather than rewarded with earnings bonuses I would feel more sympathy.
- mmh0000 3y agoI love that you're being down voted by the sarcasm impaired. Or maybe you're being sarcasticly down voted. Either way it's amusing.
- firstSpeaker 3y agoI think it was expected after Musk let go of so many people and technically speaking twitter is still functioning as it was with a bunch of extra features (half baked some might be).
- paxys 3y agoThe 5-10% layoffs in tech started well before Musk showed up at Twitter. eBay is simply copying what every tech company has done since mid-2022.
- prewett 3y agoThis is pretty normal for the start of a downturn. There's probably a bunch of forced vacation going on (or will be), too. I remember a lot of that from the healthier companies in the 2002 time frame and a friend of mine at a more hardware-oriented company told me his company is doing that.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoPeople were saying this was the start of the downturn when layoffs happened last year then the spy moved up 100 pts since.
- prewett 3y agoDespite what EMT fundamentalists will tell you, the stock market is only loosely correlated with fundamentals and 100 pts is nothing. Besides, there's no reason a company's profit _must_ decline during a downturn: for example, if they perfectly predict the downturn and reduce expenses (like laying people off) just before it hits.
- saos 3y agoNormal. Media doing a good job. But the numbers are unexpected for me.
- cod1r 3y agoA lot of layoffs seem to be on the news but the unemployment rate is still not that high according to https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
- padjo 3y agoHence the contained ratcheting up of interest rates. Hard to keep both inflation and unemployment low.
- quonn 3y agoWhy? I think this would only be true if negative inflation is the goal. Since the inflation rate is computed relative to last year and as long as salaries do not increase, after a year or two of inflation the average employee has less and less disposable income left, so they can spend less unnecessarily and accordingly the inflation could go down to zero despite full employment. As an example, if I can buy 2 units of a good this year (so demand is high) and then high inflation persists for two years and now I can only afford one unit (so demand is low) - my salary being the same, then an inflation rate of 0 in year 3 would mean everything stays the same. I can still only afford one unit and that should push prices down or at least keep them steady which is what zero inflation would mean. Maybe the assumption is that decreased demand will necessarily cause unemployment, but this seems to be true only for domestic demand (questionable for the software industry) and in any case following this line of thought would mean the more employment the more inflation which seems absurd.
- steveBK123 3y agoIt's a shame eBay got their "marketplace" lunch eaten by Amazon. I remember when shopping at eBay was sort of sketchy to normies and Amazon was the trusted retailer. In the intervening decade Amazon has done everything to dilute their marketplace to be as wild wild west with fake goods / junk / stolen good fencing / disappearing sellers no better than eBay.
- delichon 3y ago> marketplace to be as wild wild west with fake goods / junk / stolen good fencing / disappearing sellers no better than eBay. My home is half full of things from flea markets where all of the above apply a lot. Yet they're still a great place to shop with caveat emptor shields on high. Amazon has just become the biggest best flea market ever and the other half of my things are from there. So while all you say is true it is still a tremendous value to me. Sure you can't trust the sellers. So I don't, and it still works over all.
- readyplayernull 3y agoAt least you can personaly inspect an item before buying it in a flea market. Last time I bought a tablet in Amazon the seller sent the right box with a completely different cheap product inside that had no serial number anywhere. Since the serial is absolutely required there was no way to return this thing. I left a 1 star polite review with pictures that was quickly removed with an automated message about "focusing too much on the seller", edited the review to remove any mention of the seller and it got quickly removed with no reason at all. What a great scam.
- delichon 3y agoUnlike with flea markets, I've always been able to return such items bought from Amazon. They've never given me a hard time about it. That's happened frequently enough that I plan for it. I still don't like it of course. But if an Amazon-with-zero-scams opened up I'd only be willing to pay a little more for that service.
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- someonehere 3y agoLayoffs are on the menu again. You can track layoffs through https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi
- xtracto 3y agoOr https://www.trueup.io/layoffs https://www.trueup.io/layoffs They don't seem as bad as last year around the same months.
- whatyesaid 3y agoAre there any stats on how many people are being hired?
- myth_drannon 3y agoThere are stats on the number of open jobs https://www.trueup.io/job-trend https://www.trueup.io/job-trend
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoIt's not as bad as last year, but if you look at the layoff.fyi graph that goes back further (https://layoffs.fyi/#tabs_desc_471_2 https://layoffs.fyi/#tabs_desc_471_2 ), I remember feeling that around September of last year that the huge amount of layoffs from late 22/early 23 had stabilized: a lot of my dev colleagues on LinkedIn that were previously laid off had found new jobs (but non-IC-eng roles definitely didn't fare as well), and there were even reports of companies that had had big layoffs rehiring. So I'd say I was surprised by the big layoff numbers from the likes of big names like Google, Discord, Twitch, Instagram, etc. this January. To me it had seemed like we had already hit bottom WRT layoffs but apparently not.
- BizarreByte 3y agoI know a site like this can never be accurate, but the non-tech company I work for had a significant reduction in tech workers and isn't on the list. I really think that sound count.
- apwell23 3y agohow many of those were bullshit jobs
- dijit 3y agoHow many of us can reasonably say our job isn't bullshit. I make AAA video games, my industry does not add anything to society. I used to make eCommerce websites, what does that add to society? Easier access to consumerism? Most of the eCommerce sites were selling "bullshit goods" like toys, kitsch gifts or pranks. Very few among us do something substantial that actually improves or saves lives. Fewer still will be reading this comment.
- newsclues 3y agoClearly a lot of the old Twitter employees had bullshit jobs.
- Marazan 3y agoOld Twitter employees managed to make media on my my timeline take less than 60 seconds to load. New Twitter, not so much.
- _ea1k 3y agoMaybe not the ad sales department, though.
- whatyesaid 3y agoAnd eBay would also fall into similar because from an engineering side, there's been no real changes for years (not that any product changes are needed).
- acuozzo 3y agoThis isn't true. There have been many changes on the selling side, but they're mostly market-specific, e.g., cards. And decoupling from PayPal a few years back looked like it forced a ton of re-engineering on the backend. Also, FWIW, I've accessed eBay multiple times per day since 2004 and I can't remember downtime.
- LastNevadan 3y agoI'm sometimes amazed by how many people work at some of these companies. Nine percent is about 1,000 jobs. So, a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that about 11,000 people work there. I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!
- hallway_monitor 3y agoI think about this a lot as well. The massive value multiplication provided by software allows companies to become insanely bloated. At most companies where I've worked you could do it 20% layoff of the tech staff and not notice it. Lots of dead weight.
- OJFord 3y agoAnd it's quite a horror show to use, click around your settings/profile/account type pages in particular and it seems that your thrown through 3+ different apps from different eras.
- bombcar 3y agoThis comes up every time a company’s employees is listed, in the software world. If someone mentions that Walmart employs more people than the US Military, nobody blinks an eye. We can “Richard Scarry” imagine what they are doing, because there are lots of stores and we see what they do. (Reference: https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-cat-or-a-boa-constrictor-in-a-richard-scarry-book-im-not-sure-its-necessary/ https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-... ) But a company like eBay or Google; we only see a website and can’t imagine what they’re doing. And Xitter continuing to not be completely on fire lends to this. What do those balls of employees do? Sales, marketing, localization, etc. You can get some 50-80% of the total with a smallish group, but to get it all you need more and more people. And then you need management on top to keep everything moving. At some point it turns from “what do we need to do X” and becomes “do we get more revenue from this hire than it costs”.
- camdenreslink 3y ago
- kristopolous 3y agoI wonder if it includes the groups that did all these lousy seller redesigns. I swear, the new selling pages were made by people who never sold anything on eBay. It's gone from functional to a clunky buggy mess. Just simple things - like what qualifies for media mail, is profoundly broken. I'll see things like computer parts getting the option and books not. They're in the right categories, that's not it, it's just broken. Then there's these comically bad features, like the generic AI description (a book description will be something like "dive into the tantalizing tale of adventure and excitement" as opposed to the condition of the book). It's such terribly unhelpful garbage. Whoever thought polluting the listing with paragraphs of generated bullshit was a good idea? And the new templated shipping costs interface is thoroughly broken. You have to reload the page sometimes to get it to accept the values. Then there's the api speed. Updating things like the price has gone from under .5 seconds to more like 5. If you want to do a bulk price update it's sluggish and exhausting now. They also broke the image widget. Rotations and crops sometimes don't stick nor does rearranging the images. I'll do the work then come back days later to see it didn't actually save the edits. If you try to void a label, not only is this now multiple extra clicks, if you try to do it from mobile, it now takes you to a broken part of the app. I don't want to exhaust you, but this is only about 1/3 of the issues. I mean really, it's a bunch of bugs, system slowdown, and features that will do nothing but kill your sales. New things are fine. Broken things are not.
- spking 3y agoI agree the seller tools have become shockingly unusable. I’ve resorted to using the mobile app just to keep track of orders.
- kristopolous 3y agoI stopped getting phone notifications for offers recently. I'm basically only catching them by chance. Yet another thing broken. I'm sorry people have lost their jobs but I hope it's the right kind of cut here - my sales this time last year was about 8x what I'm doing now - these updates have killed things pretty bad
- saos 3y agoDamn. That’s much. i am dissatisfied with the copy paste “we overhired”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- artninja1988 3y agoDo we know which jobs are affected? Was it mostly marketing, sales etc or engineers?
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39111911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39111911