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Snap lays off over 500 workers 'to promote in-person collaboration'
- paulpauper 3y agosnap was so overhyped during pandemic. People thought this would be as big as Instagram, not even close
- catchnear4321 3y agosnap, formerly snapchat, which removed the “chat,” promoting in-person collaboration. through layoffs. for an app that somewhat expects not being in person. if it weren’t for there being individuals impacted, it might be funny.
- bombcar 3y agoI had no idea what snap was, but this reminded me that snapchat was a thing, but I can't actually remember what kind of thing it was.
- theGnuMe 3y agoIt’s huge in high schools.
- catchnear4321 3y agosomewhere, a marketer gained their wings.
- paulddraper 3y agoI'll go out on a limb and say that snapchat isn't meant for professional collaboration.
- catchnear4321 3y agothe app or the company?
- fuzzfactor 3y agoThe employees will certainly be collaborating with 500 fewer of their colleagues going forward. I suppose the remaining employees had better collaborate as much as possible, quick while they still can.
- paulddraper 3y agoThe app
- mvdtnz 3y agoThat's like complaining that the people making fish-finding software aren't doing it from onboard a boat. Just because their users are expected to be remote from one another doesn't mean remotely is the best way for them to work.
- catchnear4321 3y agosame could be said about a company’s commercial real estate holdings / leases - arguably more accurately. context matters, and experience lends understanding. so yes, remote workers may better understand a remote context, which may be a benefit, or not. whereas accounting is mad that money is being torched needlessly. just because you don’t see the relation, correlation, or even causation, doesn’t make it not there.
- mullingitover 3y agoHot on the heels of recent research[1] showing forcing RTO doesn't do anything to improve firms' valuations, but does reduce morale. Remote workers provide a convenient scapegoat for low performing CEOs: > Our empirical analyses find that the probability of RTO mandates is higher for firms with poor prior stock market performance. However, institutional ownership significantly decreases the probability of RTO, and CEO stock ownership does not have a significant effect on RTO mandates. Further, the probability of RTO mandates is significantly higher for firms with male and powerful CEOs, who are more likely to grab power back from employees through RTO (Cragun et al., 2020; Business Insider, 2023a). 5 Overall, our results do not support the argument that managers impose these mandates to increase firm values. Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401
- timr 3y agoThat paper is a joke. Here's how they collected their "treatment set": > We collect RTO information for S&P 500 firms through manual news searches on Google and Factiva. Specifically, for each firm, we search by using the company’s name and the following keywords: ‘Work from Home’, ‘return to office’, and ‘days required working in the office’. We focus on S&P 500 firms because these large firms are closely followed by media, thus mitigating concerns about media coverage bias. Among the S&P 500 firms, 137 publicly announce their RTO policy and are classified as RTO firms in this study. These 137 firms become our treatment firms They then correlate this with other (ahem) high quality datasets...like Glassdoor reviews. Setting aside all personal biases, this is like bad undergrad research. You can't just look at titles and treat papers like pokemon cards.
- passwordoops 3y ago"this is like bad undergrad research." Unfortunately I think you just described the corpus of behavioral science over the past two decades
- monero-xmr 3y agoDoesn’t matter if BigCos say RTO is better. We need 10 years for remote-only companies to mature and start going public en masse. The cost savings, ability to hire anywhere, and attract the best talent regardless of location, IMO will vastly outweigh any “unquantifiable benefits” of forced in-person interaction. But we need the proof to come out where it matters the most, P&L.
- lijok 3y agoAre there significant cost savings? Remote workforce management costs a TON. Are we able to hire anywhere? Crazy costs associated with contract and tax residency management, complexity managing timezone overlap both during hiring stage and in the workplace, etc And frankly, you don’t need to, and you wont be able to hire the best talent unless you’re doing envelope pushing work. I work at a “hip remote-first startup that raised a ton of money” and we still only hire from within the country we’re based in, still have to have an office + office space for remote workers that require it, and have exploded the complexity of workforce management. I’m just not seeing the benefit to the employer. To the employees, absolutely, but not employer.
- frfl 3y agoThere's an app for that. Sorry I meant SaaS. Its 2024 not 2014 after all. remote.com and other similar companies that specialized in employer of record services. For example remote charges $600/month per employee, $30/month for contractor, and provide the tax and legal stuff for hiring in like 200 countries. Thats $7200/yr per employee. I dont know what it costs per employee if you hire a dozen and provide a 5000/sqft or whatever office space for them to work in. I heard rents in NY are crazy, _may_ actually be cheaper to hire remotely than pay for an office and all the rest. I dont know for sure, I haven't run the numbers. ...I checked quickly. Say 5000sqft. Google says $80-$90/sqft rent annual, lets use $80. Thats $80 x 5000 = $400,000/yr in rent alone. Its $80,000/for 1000sqft, but idk if you can squeeze a dozen people in 1000sqft for 8 hours. Plus you need offices for CTO/CEO/C-whatever-O, managers, conference room(s), 2 washrooms, kitchen/break room/area. And the upkeep, furniture, heating, electricity, water, internet, insurance, security system, whatever else.
- 3y ago
- passwordoops 3y agoThis is what jumped out at me: "The company pulls in more than a billion dollars a quarter in revenue but still operates at a loss" I'm at a loss for words
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- binsquare 3y agoThese companies operate at a loss in order to invest in growth for future profits. Not saying it will work out but amazon famously was unprofitable for the longest only because it kept investing back into itself for growth
- al_borland 3y agoThey weren’t operating at a loss though, right? I thought the profits of Amazon were basically negligible, as profits were getting reinvested. I read that as different than operating at a loss, which would imply their costs exceed their revenue.
- passwordoops 3y agoI'm not sure about Amazon, but I know Uber was the more recent poster-child for the "operate at a massive loss to win market share then Jack up prices later when customers are locked in" strategy to keep the funding going. I don't see that strategy working again for a long time
- al_borland 3y agoAmazon for sure did this with ebooks, but I don’t think the overall business was operating at a loss. All those profits were used to build out new areas of the business, like AWS.
- hayd 3y ago
- RockRobotRock 3y agoHonestly don't know how you could use Snapchat once your frontal lobe is fully developed
- blululu 3y agoSure. Though their users are a large demographic with plenty of disposable income at a lifestage where lifetime value of a customer is a high. The app’s design is embarrassingly bad (probably a CEO micromanagement problem), but that is less important than being able to talk to your friends. A usable and well design app is ultimately less important than getting the right features and clearly Snap did this well. Their real problem is Apple’s ATT pulling the rug out from the entire mobile ads business.
- zht 3y agoI don’t quite understand this kind of comment. Is it to feel superior for not using something that you don’t get? Are you trying to make yourself feel better or to put down Snap users as brain damaged and/or undeveloped? They have hundreds of millions of users, using it for all sorts of use cases. There’s many features or products that are not for me, but I still try to see why instead of this kind of dismissal. Why make snarky remarks like this?
- RockRobotRock 3y agoI was in a bad mood at work. Sorry about that. I'm young enough that when Snapchat came out, I was in the core demographic. I think Snapchat in particular makes me angry because it was extremely sticky in my friend group despite being annoying to use.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- streamfunk191 3y agoSupposedly part of the justification for the layoffs was to recoup the large amounts of equity that had been given in recent years (presumably to senior members of staff) which had led to a dilution of the stock. Pretty bizarre if this was used as a rationale and it wasn’t the actual reason.