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PayPal Said to Cut as Many as 400 Jobs
- humdumb 14y ago"excessive meetings" Based on that criteria we could probably cut some 15% of the total workforce. For many employees, that's all they do is attend meetings, all day long. We call these employees managers. :) Startups where almost everyone is actually working (save VC chosen CEO's) and there's no room for corporate welfare I guess bigger companies might perceive them as "nimble". Is that a euphemism for efficient?
- propercoil 14y agothe phrase "90% of everything is horseshit" really fits paypal - and that's alot of shit when you'r a juggernaut of that size
- kamaal 14y agoThe key to that phrase is the word everything. Which means the replacements are not likely to be any better.
- rbn 14y agoStripe is good for C2B payments. But they suck at marketplace payment processing. The only company that can do international marketplace payment processing is PayPal and no one is even close to creating the infrastructure for this.
- zapdrive 14y agoAnd Stripe to hire 400 people over the next few weeks! I hope thats true.
- jusben1369 14y ago"PayPal is eliminating jobs primarily in its product and technology groups" Yikes - that kind of surprises me. Braintree and Stripe will be sending out the recruiters......
- paulgb 14y agoI doubt that Stripe and Braintree will be interested in employees in the bottom 3% of PayPal.
- kamaal 14y agoWhat makes you think only the bottom 3% get shown the door in during lay offs? In fact from my experience, the guys with most political contacts inside the companies generally get the most security.
- rorrr 14y agoExactly. When shit hits the fan, expensive contractors go first. Then the executives that lost to other executives. Low wage workers rarely get cut first.
- johnrob 14y agoIt would nonetheless be an easy way to get some valuable knowledge from the internals of paypal.
- gadser 14y agoKnowledge on how to suck, yes.
- khuey 14y agoIndeed. Given how stagnant Paypal seems to be (at least from the outside), I suspect that many of the good employees interested in the problem space left for greener pastures a while ago.
- jusben1369 14y ago
- hemancuso 14y ago13,000 employees!!!???
- fourstar 14y agoMicrosoft has 90,000
- georgeecollins 14y agoYes but Microsoft has Windows, Office, Xbox, Surface, Bing, Skype, etc. PayPal is a big business with many features, but 13,000 people is a lot for just that one thing. I can't believe even half of them are developers.
- dangrossman 14y agoWhen you have a quarter billion users of a money transfer product with 24/7 support, you probably need a pretty big service staff. I'd imagine customer support, tech support and administrative staff outnumber developers.
- rbn 14y agoLet's not forget their international presence. PayPal is classified as a bank in many countries.
- kamaal 14y agoYou will be surprised how employees work on one thing called iPhone. A large product like PayPal might have dozens of sub systems. Its difficult to imagine from the outside the dynamics of large companies and how they function.
- conradfr 14y agoA big portion of that may be the call centers though.
- Sambdala 14y agoThe vast majority of the 13,000 are going to be CSRs and CSR support staff/management. The actual development team will be small in comparison.
- bryanh 14y agoKind of disappointing how stagnant PayPal has become. I know innovators dilemma and all, but it seems like their peak was the ability to properly deal with fraud & security (a sort of a right of passage for all companies that deal with real money). Since then, it just feels like eBay has been milking the cash cow. Shame. Good luck to Stripe and co, they are doing what PayPal should have been doing all along: iterating the platform.
- kamaal 14y ago>> iterating the platform. Small companies with small user base predominantly dominated by power technology users can do that. Its a little unfair to compare a start up with large corp in these issues. The right time will be when stripe will be as big as PayPal is now.
- dangrossman 14y agoThey've expanded into new countries, into mobile with both apps and Square-style card readers, into POS with at-register integrations in store chains, into identity management, into lending... if you think they're stagnant, maybe you haven't been paying attention to them. https://www.x.com/products https://www.x.com/products They're also doing new vertical-oriented products for governments, banks and education. https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/other-solutions-overview https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/other-solutions-overview
- d0m 14y agoThese numbers are always big mostly because it's a good occasion for big companies to let go bad employees even if they don't have strong public reasons. I.e. it's easier to say: "it's not you.. 399 other employees are leaving".
- zmitri 14y agoIt's crazy seeing this, after just reading this http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-for-entrepreneurialism-did-Peter-Max-David-have-at-PayPal/answer/Keith-Rabois?srid=pB&st=ns http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...
- richforrester 14y agoThought I feel sorry for the 400 people that might lose their jobs, I can't say the same of PayPal itself. It's just another one of those companies that think profit is made with margins, and not with an actual product.
- petercooper 14y agoand not with an actual product. It's more a service, but whatever it is, they do have an "actual" one. PayPal has been a cornerstone of my income since around 2001. Nowadays, there are several other services I could (and might) practically switch to, but for a good 8 years or so, it was them or nothing in the sort of business I ran. I consider that an "actual" product or service since without it, I wouldn't be where I am now. I am far from a PayPal evangelist and find a lot of the stories about their practices saddening, but the facts are clear to me, they've offered me one heck of a useful service over the years that no-one else was able to.
- kamaal 14y agoComments in this thread make me realize how much developers are ignorant about business matters. Large companies like PayPal have many sub systems, division and units that need to function to even keep the company alive. To give you a small example, say if you are running PayPal- For a company of that scale you can't really plan any thing on the business side unless you measure things, so suddenly you see a requirement for a system which will deal only with metrics and analytics. Once your user base grows out to a large size, suddenly you will find yourself running large data centers, service engineering teams and their operations. You will need dedicated sales teams to tackle those problems, product teams to ensure crap doesn't shipped out. You will need architects who can make a dozen systems work together, you will product managers decide the right technical course for the future. You will need program managers to ensure engineers hit the deadlines. You will need QE teams to break stuff what engineers overlook. Yes you can argue that you may not need all that, but when you do that you will inevitably find somebody or the other in the organization doing those jobs, albeit the scenario will now be a lot more chaotic with no center of ownerships and responsibility. It becomes difficult to move quickly in such places.
- edanm 14y agoReminds me of one of my favorite pieces of writing on software, which every developer should read, especially if they haven't worked at a large company before: "How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?" http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298...
- johnx123-up 14y agoJust copy-pasting this comment by cubicleslave from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-cutting-as-many-as-400-jobs.html#comment-680447739 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-c... as it has some interesting perspective: Pointy-haired management at its finest. It's a predictable ritual whenever a new CEO comes in that he will (a) cut jobs, because it plays well with Wall St. and immediately raises the value of his stock grants, and (b) micromanage and force a one-size-fits-all policy on everyone, imposing change for the sake of change, just to mark his territory like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant - in this case by making them work in bullpens. Of course CXO's are in meetings all day long and thrive on nonstop face-to-face interaction, and they can't imagine anyone working differently. They don't realize that when engineers are in meetings, they're not getting their work done. A year from now Marcus will be baffled why engineer productivity has plummeted since he took over.
- mh- 14y agoI'm not being facetious here, at least not intentionally: Is there any indication their engineering productivity in recent years, anyway? I've seen a few design refreshes..
- johnx123-up 14y agoTrue, many APIs aren't not properly architected. For example, here is Agriya's take on their adaptive payments API http://blogs.agriya.com/paypal-adaptive-payments-an-open-letter-to-paypal http://blogs.agriya.com/paypal-adaptive-payments-an-open-let... I don't know why Agriya couldn't yet disrupt the payment gateways through their crowdfunding approach
- yuhong 14y agoTypical, maybe, but is it really true in this case?
- zengr 14y agoI think every one missed the point. They are expanding out side US: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/PayPal-plans-to-hire-1000-in-India/articleshow/13840301.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/PayPal...