LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53484764

by DarkContinent • 6 years ago

359 288 6 years ago

bbc.com

vandleyindust• 6 years ago

Looks like all cuts are across HR/Sales.

saos• 6 years ago

Kinda makes senses. They’ll scale back up again

bdcravens• 6 years ago

"Our Talent Solutions business continues to be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously."

pixelbreaker• 6 years ago

I'm sure they can find a job on LinkedIn.

0xFFC• 6 years ago

Yeap. One of those fake job ads will respond to them applying.

raxxorrax2• 6 years ago

If their marketing had a bit of creativity, they would get the people laid off into new jobs. Potential customers might notice.

LaundroMat• 6 years ago

960 is 6% of the global LinkedIn workforce. I am baffled by how many people work for LinkedIn.

actuator• 6 years ago

That seems like a lot but a lot of interesting stuff in engineering has come out of LinkedIn, I think a lot of other roles like sales might be there.

ponker3• 6 years ago

Almost all enterprise software companies have more people in sales than engineering. Microsoft is one big exception but LinkedIn must have more sales than eng.

ponker3• 6 years ago

Most of it is sales.

durnygbur2• 6 years ago

selling... what? or LinkedIn has become corporate IG and people receive money for all this "this is how I succeeded" and "I overcame my weaknesses" unsolicited content.

Nextgrid6• 6 years ago

I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is.

It has a lot of potential, but is completely ruined by the social media aspect and their attempt at making it yet another cesspool like Twitter or Instagram, all the way down to the algorithmic feed, likes and reactions.

They should step away from the nonsense and make the tool (because yes it should be seen as a tool and not a lifestyle) easier to use, not harder. Stop getting in my way trying to make me use the algorithmic feed (it forgets your choice after a few hours) or nagging me to add a profile picture (I've said no for 2 years, why are you still trying?) or certain profile details I might not want to share, or "following sources" (whatever that means, I guess it's about following bullshit hashtags so you can have even more crap in your feed). The UI is absolutely terrible and slow for no good reason and makes it painful to use.

The worst is that you might think "okay well the free version for the plebs is nasty because it tries to drum up engagement, but the premium version should be better, right?" WRONG! The premium version is just as bad but instead of wasting just your time it wastes your time and your money.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

I can see that being the cause.

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

Which product?

LinkedIn has managed to release a new app for basically every function while also bundling all that functionality into their primary app...

It’s truly a disaster over there...

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

The feed is really quite awful. All social media is somewhat performative by nature, but LinkedIn's feed takes it to another level. It's not just performing for peers, but also performing for current and potential future employers.

Never have so many words been written that mean so little.

opportune• 6 years ago

LinkedIn the product is an expensive tool for recruiters, and the pool of people on LinkedIn they can pull from. The feed is just fluff. In that regard, before the pandemic, LinkedIn was a big success.

drchopchop• 6 years ago

I think at this point, for most people, LinkedIn just serves as a repository for formatted resumes. Connections add a bit of value, as you can see where co-workers end up in the future.

The real problem is that for anyone with decent-sounding title, the amount of inbound spam is incredibly high. Endless outsourced development companies, recruiters, and random people wanting to connect for no discernible reason. Add to that a bunch of low-quality blogging, and I can't see how anyone can really enjoy spending time on the service.

SkyPuncher• 6 years ago

I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is.

That's because the "product" isn't the social network. The "product" is insight and access to much of the professional workforce. Sales and HR use it extensively.

The social network aspect is likely to keep people semi-engaged with the platform and voluntarily disclosing things that Sales and HR can use as signals.

GreenWatermelon• 6 years ago

Is it alright not to have a profile picture on LinledIn? I've searched around and only found advice telling me to put one.

projektfu4• 6 years ago

Please add your photo so creepy people can check you out and potential employers can determine if you are ugly, wrong color, wrong sex, uncool, or other discrimination.

fishywang• 6 years ago

I was an early user of LinkedIn, got my account on 2005. I delete my account on 2010, when I started working for Google. The logic then was simple, with Google on my resume I would hardly need LinkedIn to find another job, and the noise is just too much. Now 10 years passed (I worked for Google for 6 years) and I never missed it.

I really don't find any value of LinkedIn on the employee side (for the 5 years I had a LinkedIn account, there's zero job I got through LinkedIn). I know some of my colleagues (engineering managers) use LinkedIn as a recruiting/sourcing tool, but if talents don't find value on it, it's value as a sourcing tool will decline quickly. There are already a lot of interesting new ideas/companies in the sourcing market to eat its cake.

My guess would be that it's still riding the inertial wind. After a few years, if they still can't figure something new out, it will fail badly.

sshagent2• 6 years ago

They need that many to keep up with the sheer volume of emails they are sending out each day /s

justsid• 6 years ago

LinkedIn keeps suggesting me my mother who passed away 4 years ago. Every week, without fail, I get an email telling me that I should totally connect with her. It’s highly annoying and no matter what I do to my email preferences, I keep getting the same damn email.

downvoteme1• 6 years ago

A lot of them are sales people. LinkedIn as a people business needs a lot of sales reps and account managers to be in contact with Recruiters and other people involved with selling .

16K people spanning the whole globe is not bad .

dustinmoris• 6 years ago

It is not just big, it is mega big. WhatsApp had world dominance and their product had to deliver instant messages, including photos, videos and other features over crappy internet connections and they managed to build, manage and sustain an amazing consumer product with a handful of people, so 16k for an online job board is laughable and embarrassing. It's just a website after all.

rainyMammoth• 6 years ago

I'm baffled as well, especially given how mediocre their website is (and yes I know they have more than just their website).

Usually with those type of comments someone replies explaining that we don't get it and that you MUST have 20000 people to support a website like LinkedIn

blocked_again3• 6 years ago

Doesn't LinkedIn(Microsoft) has a shit ton of money in reserves? Is cutting down these jobs in the midst of a pandemic really essential for the company's survival? Especially when the economies has started recovering in many parts of the world.

duxup2• 6 years ago

I don't think you stay in business long paying folks that ... you don't want / need working for you anymore.

blocked_again3• 6 years ago

Yeah. But the economies are going to recover right? I don't think a few more months of pay slips for 1000 people is going to make any dent in MS bank account. But it sure makes a dent in the life of people who were let go in the middle of a pandemic.

If they were not needed in the first place, then the management who hired them in the first place should be also fired for incompetence and letting them all go in middle of a pandemic.

blackflame7000• 6 years ago

It’s a business not a charity

replyifuagree• 6 years ago

One thing I've noticed is that labor law has evolved to where layoffs are the risk free way to cut staff who aren't performing. At my company we would almost never PIP people because we were strongly encouraged to wait for a layoff round. I think the calculus revolved around lawsuits that pips could generate due to their personal nature, vs layoffs being non-personal.

compiler-guy5• 6 years ago

If these laid-off employees have an average fully-loaded cost of $400,000 (which probably isn't too far off), then linkedin will save about $460,000,000 annually by not keeping them on the payroll.

That is not small change, even for a company the size of Microsoft.

They may have been contributing more than that to the bottom line prior to the recession--hard to know--but the recession changes quite a bit of the calculus around long-term bets.

blocked_again3• 6 years ago

If these laid-off employees have an average fully-loaded cost of $400,000 (which probably isn't too far off),

I highly doubt that. Most of the folks who were let go are from HR/Sales. Plus a portion of the folks are located in India and all.

ojbyrne• 6 years ago

Curious about your math. $400k x 960 employees = $384 M.

curiousllama2• 6 years ago

Companies commonly use layoffs as an easy way to get rid of under-performing staff, realize cost savings from previous investments (e.g., automation) ahead of schedule, or efficiently reorganize divisions whose execs fall out of favor. Not going to say this is good, but a <10% layoff is not unreasonable for a healthy company, especially when some business units may be stagnating.

However callous it is, roles on the margin get cut when prospects for growth dim.

wolco3• 6 years ago

The issue not being talked about is the removal of the recruiter from remote roles. Those recruiters paid linkedin thousands a year for premium access.

Plus the lower jobs posting overall.

kevstev• 6 years ago

What do you mean? The only remote job I have had used a typical recruiter from the company side. I am sure he had a premium subscription. I didn't use a recruiter from my side as I knew someone that worked there.

vcanales• 6 years ago

removal of the recruiter from remote roles

What does this mean? What issue is this?

dehrmann• 6 years ago

a <10% layoff is not unreasonable for a healthy company

From what I've read, this was standard practice at Microsoft for over a decade.

I think this makes sense during a downturn, but probably wears on morale if it happens every year.

dvirsky2• 6 years ago

I've heard from people who worked there at the time that as part of the stack ranking system, it contributed to a culture of mediocrity and stagnation. The high performers did not want to excel in fear of retaliation from teammates that this was putting at risk, and no one wanted to be at the bottom. So the result was that everyone tried to be mediocre, do exactly as told, not more and not less. I would never want to work in such a culture.

retzkek• 6 years ago

a <10% layoff is not unreasonable for a healthy company

So, almost literally decimate in the classical sense? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)

varjag3• 6 years ago

My knowledge of corporate culture might be outdated, but I believe the former LinkedIn employees get to live.

maxk42• 6 years ago

Decimate in the classical sense would be to reduce by 90%, not 10%.

war1025• 6 years ago

Apparently "decimate" is having a moment on HackerNews lately. It came up over the weekend as well [1], with the same disagreement between people on what it actually means.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878605

symlinkk4• 6 years ago

Yeah doesn’t Amazon lay off 10% of devs every year as part of their stack ranking?

three_seagrass3• 6 years ago

That was Microsoft for the longest time and it destroyed their work culture.

simonebrunozzi3• 6 years ago

No, never heard of this systematic approach while I was there (AWS, 2008-2014), although the turnaround effect might have been somewhat close to that number just coincidentally.

reducesuffering• 6 years ago

Almost. 10% are put into a "Dev List" which starts with some coaching on how they should improve. It then likely leads to a "Pivot" where the employee is given the option to take a 3 month pay severance, or go on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) (likely biased against the employee, as manager and manager's manager have already put a lot of work into getting here and have made up their mind). Failing the PIP, they are likely going to be terminated soon and only get 1 month severance. So, they start with 10% but they target about 6-8% actually getting terminated.

aka1234• 6 years ago

Never heard of this in my organization. Have heard whispers of it in some corners, but not from anyone currently employed by Amazon.

mathattack3• 6 years ago

In this case, they make a disproportionate amount of their revenue on jobs postings and selling recruiters the right to spam us. With less jobs their revenue goes away. They don’t need as many salespeople and internal recruiters.

Microsoft has historically been pretty ruthless about annual culls. It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. More recently it’s more quiet.

I don’t begrudge companies this. They need to move resources where they’re most needed.

monadic22• 6 years ago

I imagine at some point a reputation like this affects hiring ability.

Zafira2• 6 years ago

It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year.

Hasn't it been demonstrated that GE under Jack Welch was basically a massive fraud?

eldavido2• 6 years ago

I feel like there are basically three ways to lose your job in tech.

In one, the company cuts an entire business unit, or a company shuts down, or something else cataclysmic happens. This is where you have dozens/hundreds of people let go. Outside of small startups, this seems pretty rare. I think selling/divesting a failing business unit is more common than outright shutdown in tech.

In the second, the employee does something really egregious and gets straight-up terminated for cause (fired). Absenteeism, theft of company property, sexual harassment, something so bad it's borderline illegal and potentially a legal risk for the employer if they don't do something about it.

The third, which is what we're seeing here, is a general reduction in bloat done under the guise of "the economy". In my experience, great people don't tend to get let go in situations like this--it's political cover to remove the bottom 10%. Companies, at least in tech, don't make a routine practice of doing this without "a reason".

Being in the bottom 10% can happen for a lot of reasons. Maybe you just lost interest in the work. Perhaps you don't get along with your manager, or something's going on in your personal life, or the role was never a good fit in the first place. I used to think some people were just "bad", and some indeed are, but it also seems like peoples' performance really does change over their careers. Provided there's good unemployment insurance, probably best for both parties to part ways. Not only does it give the employee a kick in the pants, but it also improves the morale of the rest of the team, because it doesn't feel like someone isn't "pulling their weight".

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

Having dealt with LinkedIn, I honestly think there's another 10-15% of people who wouldn't probably have their jobs if LI had better systems in place.

swivelmaster• 6 years ago

Forcing managers to wait until layoffs to get rid of underperforming (and possibly toxic/counterproductive) staff is terrible for the morale of the rest of the team and I wish it wasn't the norm. Better to fire people and just give them the severance package than to drag it out while nobody's happy and then do it anyway.

elihu• 6 years ago

I agree that this is pretty normal for any company, though I do wish that there was a bit better balance of risk and reward between the employee and the employer. For instance, if an employer that laid off an employee for anything other than an ethical violation were required to pay out one month of income for every year the employee worked for the company, it would force them to weigh the costs and benefits a bit more.

This is the kind of situation where it would be good to have a union. In the tech industry, it might have to be a different kind of union than exists elsewhere (for instance, I think most of us wouldn't want to do technical work in an environment where people who aren't good at their job can only be fired in reverse order of seniority).

The way I see it, people aren't entitled to good jobs for life from private companies, but neither are companies entitled to a cheap and disposable workforce. There's probably some place we could meet in the middle that has stronger protections for workers than are currently in place in the U.S. (I don't know enough about what protections exist in other countries to comment.)

dahfizz• 6 years ago

a <10% layoff

My first reaction to the headline was mild shock that 960 people even worked for LinkedIn. What do 10,000 do at Linked? Netflix has 8,600 and Twitter has less than 5,000 for comparison

mark-r• 6 years ago

So maybe this means I'll be getting less spam from LinkedIn? Unfortunately it will probably mean the opposite.

harshulpandav• 6 years ago

LinkedIn would be investing in other parts of the business which would result in some job creation and the firm would "work with employees impacted by today's announcement to explore these opportunities"

Good to know that they will first consider rehiring/interviewing the laid off employees and they are public about it.

Curious question: does the employee get to keep the severance package if rehired after being laid off?

compiler-guy5• 6 years ago

I don't know how linked in is handling it, but in a typical layoff situation (I'm unfortunately familiar with several personally, and many more corporately) if you are rehired after your official termination date, you get to keep whatever the termination package was. The company considers you a new employee.

It needs to be this way for certain legal reasons.

AlphaSite• 6 years ago

Usually the way it works for our company, they give you a 2/3 month grace period where you stay on the books and get a chance to interview externally or internally and you only get the severance (in addition to the 2/3 months no work period) if you move out of the company.

vvladymyrov• 6 years ago

Usually there is a wording in a papers that need to be signed in order to get severance - if rehired, severance won't be paid (plus reject the right to litigate). This is easy to implement as severance might be paid in be-weekly cadence (like salary).

6c696e75783• 6 years ago

On top of everything else, I think this goes to show how expensive Azure infrastructure really is.

dyingkneepad• 6 years ago

How is this related to this news? Yes, I know both are owned by MSFT, but I'll need more info.

6c696e75783• 6 years ago

Linkedin wasn't on Azure until MS bought them. Now the TCO has gone up. GitHub has also shown signs of the Azure infrastructure.

12xo7• 6 years ago

What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why does this site/company require 10k people?

CrackpotGonzo• 6 years ago

Sales.

12xo7• 6 years ago

Its mostly self-service and partner driven (programmatic). As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I just dont see the need... My guess is that they have several thousand offshore devs and a lot of fat from acquisitions.

blizkreeg• 6 years ago

you don't think $7B of revenue in 2019 merits 10k people? Do you think you can run that size of a business with 500?

12xo7• 6 years ago

Yes you can. Look at Craigslist or POF.com for examples. But I also forgot that LI owns Lynda.com, so there are a lot of redundancies over there.

cpach• 6 years ago

500 might be a bit low. But maybe 5000?

Dragory• 6 years ago

They didn't say anything about whether it merits 10k people, they were curious what all those 10k people are doing. I'm curious about that as well - clearly LinkedIn is doing much more than I was aware of.

sct202• 6 years ago

I know that one of my friends got a swag box (card, candle, and a metal water bottle) from LinkedIn when he got hired at a company that used LinkedIn's recruiting services. I'd imagine there's a lot of other random things they do at low scale to excite their customers.

TulliusCicero3• 6 years ago

This article is so damn useful: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers?
...
Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There's also a wide body of research that's found that decreasing latency has a signifiacnt effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize.
And that's just performance. Features also matter: when I talk to engineers working on basically any product at any company, they'll often find that there are seemingly trivial individual features that can add integer percentage points to revenue. Just as with performance, people underestimate how many engineers you can add to a product before engineers stop paying for themselves.
Additionally, features are often much more complex than outsiders realize. If we look at search, how do we make sure that different forms of dates and phone numbers give the same results? How about internationalization? Each language has unique quirks that have to be accounted for. In french, “l'foo” should often match “un foo” and vice versa, but American search engines from the 90s didn't actually handle that correctly. How about tokenizing Chinese queries, where words don't have spaces between them, and sentences don't have unique tokenizations? How about Japanese, where queries can easily contain four different alphabets? How about handling Arabic, which is mostly read right-to-left, except for the bits that are read left-to-right? And that's not even the most complicated part of handling Arabic! It's fine to ignore this stuff for a weekend-project MVP, but ignoring it in a real business means ignoring the majority of the market! Some of these are handled ok by open source projects, but many of the problems involve open research problems.
There's also security! If you don't “bloat” your company by hiring security people, you'll end up like hotmail or yahoo, where your product is better known for how often it's hacked than for any of its other features.
Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years1. When people imagine how long it should take to build something, they're often imagining a team that works perfectly and spends 100% of its time coding. But that's impossible to scale up. The question isn't whether or not there will inefficiencies, but how much inefficiency. A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. But when doing the math on how many employees a company “should” have, people usually assume that the company is an efficient organization.

bryanrasmussen2• 6 years ago

what languages does LinkedIn support - I get mine in English but I suppose it must be heavily internationalized as well.

whymauri• 6 years ago

Thank you. I'm so tired of reading the same "I could build this unicorn over the weekend with a few AWS credits and a healthy stream of whiskey."

On every damn layoff thread.

12xo7• 6 years ago

To me LI is a tower of Jenga. Years of growth, mutliple acquisitions, M&A and almost no downward market pressure put them into this position of bloat. But your points are good, very very good. It take a lot of people to run a large org. But that's not always the best way...

mason55• 6 years ago

This question comes up on every post about a big tech company. LinkedIn in a global company operating commercially in probably almost every country. The "social network for work" part is easy but when you start talking about things like job listings across the world and then the sales and account management and local office management and compliance and the internal tools and billing and everything else, it's quite easy to get to 10k.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have 1000 people in the US just dedicated to sales & account management for the job listings.

12xo7• 6 years ago

I am not surprise, just amazed that a site which is mostly self service and runs on UGC needs anywhere near this many people to operate. But then again, most of the people are probably hold-overs from acquisitions. As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I dont see how they'd need this many people in sales. Its almost all automated self-serve and partner driven. Even with a large US based team to manage the big spends, you're still not needing a large staff... But then again, these types of orgs tend to be filled with a lot of mediocre talent and suffer from BigDumbCompany syndrome...

three_seagrass3• 6 years ago

It's the perennial HN question that ignores how much global companies need in-market sales, marketing, and support teams to grow.

bitbuilder2• 6 years ago

This question comes up on every post about a big tech company.

And in turn, there are always replies that justify these head counts in ways that I still have a hard time buying into.

All I have to go off is on my own experience, but I worked at a large retailer/wholesaler that had:

  - 1500 retail store locations.
  - Probably a half dozen warehouses. 
  - A couple high volume ecommerce sites (not at LinkedIn scale, but scale was a concern).

To support those operations, they employed people for:

  - Staffing the retail stores and warehouses.
  - Call centers for customer support.
  - Sales for the wholesale division.
  - Advertising/marketing for the retail division, all run internally.
  - Logistics/shipping.
  - Real estate.
  - Merchandising.
  - Inventory management.
  - Product design.
  - Sourcing product manufacture.
  - All of the boilerplate corporate crap (HR, recruiting, accounting, etc.)

Almost all of the above had software to support it that was written and maintained in-house, including a custom built ecommerce stack.

All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.

So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.

decafninja4• 6 years ago

I've interviewed for roles at several top tech companies and what surprised me was that there were entire teams dedicated to working on what seemed like a tiny feature or functionality. In some cases, two entire teams - one for frontend, one for backend.

Granted, I understand there is a HUGE mind boggling level of scale involved.

But still, after going on such interviews, and talking with friends who work at FAANG, etc. it sounds like my boring mediocre job as a bank SWE is more involved and exciting than some of these FAANG jobs.

But I'd still jump through flaming hoops to jump ship to a FAANG or similar tech company.

ptmcc• 6 years ago

A lot of FAANG and FAANG-adjacent dev jobs are not any more glamorous than other dev jobs. A lot of the day to day looks the same, just keeping the lights on. Sometimes a really interesting technical problem does come up, but a lot of the complexity of the job is working within a huge complicated environment, both technically and organizationally.

I will say, completely anecdotally, that the average bar for competency and work ethic is higher. Day to day stuff just gets done faster and more thoroughly with more accountability. But that's just personal experience, YMMV.

I worked on cooler and more diverse stuff at various start ups and contract gigs, but I get paid literally double (or more) in big tech sooooo yeah riding it out for a bit. I don't see doing this for 20 more years, though.

symlinkk4• 6 years ago

A lot of small features are needlessly complicated at a FAANG because they reinvent the wheel.

twblalock2• 6 years ago

FAANG companies can't move fast and break things like startups. If their services go down, it might be mentioned on the evening news, and it would certainly cost a lot of money. FAANGs have huge existing revenues to protect, large customer bases to keep happy, and laws to obey in all of the countries where they operate.

A "simple" feature change is not so simple for companies with those concerns.

pavas• 6 years ago

The features may have limited scope but if they have an entire team dedicated to them they usually deal with large enough scale that it's worth it.

When you're dealing with distributed systems at large scale you can no longer have services be down for longer periods of time because it's a lot of money you're losing.

The business decision for employing an engineer or engineering team should be made at the margin -- that is, if the marginal revenue increase is higher than the cost of employing that team you should definitely employ them.

At large scale, a sub 1% increase in revenue or decrease in revenue lost can be multiple $M, so it would be worth having a team that only increases productivity across the company by an average of <1%.

hindsightbias• 6 years ago

The question to ask is how many VPs and Directors they have.

Once you have that answer, you’ll know why there are so many employees.

mandeepj• 6 years ago

They actually have 16,000 people. Unfortunately, it'd send you even more intense shock waves.

jldugger4• 6 years ago

To expand on https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/, 10k people aren't required per se, they're there to make more money than they cost. Specifically:

  - sales & billing for linkedin premium, lynda, and other paid products
  - billing fraud detection, to cut the cost of chargebacks
  - security, to prevent that one leak from happening again, to keep PCI compliance, etc.
  - spam filtering, tuned to balance keeping paying customers (recruiters) happy with keeping suppliers (candidates with a resume) happy
  - Writing new features, to keep engagement and signups up
  - fixing things that keep breaking, like the email contact scraper
  - testing code for new features to make sure they, IDK, don't break the signup page
  - a/b testing the hell out of any and every thing
  - collecting and storing the massive analytics datasets they generate daily
  - analyzing daily datasets to determine which a/bs to promote
  - coming up with new features
  - testing anything at all
  - deploying corporate networking in all the offices buildings and such
  - optimizing infra costs
  - deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS
  - moving back to cloud (azure) because after you were acquired, the markup dropped and the calculus on on-prem vs cloud flipped
  - managing all the projects associated with above
  - recruiting staff to handle all the above
  - managing all the staff associated with above
  - acquistions (lynda, fliptop, glint, drawbridge)

notyourwork3• 6 years ago

they're there to make more money than they cost.

This is the key most people ignore. If each employee generates revenue greater than their cost of employment, why not keep them around?

The goal isn't keeping the lights on, its making money.

codegladiator• 6 years ago

Now multiple that by X (=20 ?) regions.

jaywalk• 6 years ago

deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS

I feel like their parent company has a pretty good handle on that, and going to AWS wouldn't really be an option.

ogre_codes• 6 years ago

Delivering the part of LinkedIn which provides value to end users is relatively trivial. A small number of engineers (20-30) could do that. The problem is ironically how much profit they make.

Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue.

Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify).

Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense.

And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.

symlinkk4• 6 years ago

Nothing, it’s bloat. People will twist themselves into a pretzel performing mental gymnastics to tell you otherwise, but it’s bloat, plain and simple.

vasco• 6 years ago

Look at an up to date org chart of a tech company of 1.3k people and what they do: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/

If you now think that all business divisions have more work to perform due to scale, and that for development, you want to have more parallel streams of work, this should give you an approximate idea of what an order of magnitude larger company uses 10k people for.

sireat• 6 years ago

Looking at that chart I was puzzled at some of the roles.

Why would there be a person who is only doing pricing? - ie Pricing Manager.

Yet if you read the job description: https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/product/pricing-manage...

you can start to understand how crucial pricing could be to a large organization that they could dedicate a person(and a whole team underneath!) solely to pricing goods and services.

EDIT: At the same time you wonder if pretty much all jobs follow Parkinson's role: job filling up to fill up the time.

You have a whole team of talented front end guys at Youtube (or Gmail or Dropbox or ..) and front-end will change and features will be added or dropped because well something needs to be done.

So wouldn't this same principle apply to other jobs? Pricing Manager would keep fiddling with prices if there is nothing else to do. Obviously there would be justifications to higher ups.

jsnell2• 6 years ago

Thanks, that's great! Having a concrete example really drives home the point.

spicymaki• 6 years ago

This might sound naive, but I would like to advocate for more employment than less. Optimizing jobs from 10k to 500 as some people in the thread are advocating seems horrific to me.

The ideal is that you would have 500 people that are efficient enough to perform 20x the work, and optimize the work efficiency, and automate some things.

What I have seen personally is that employers just overload staff. They reach a crisis point and have to hire more people. That just hurts employees and there families.

I do not want to make baseless assumptions on who was laid off. People could be laid off for something as trivial as a site consolidation and the person could not relocate, or an acquisition where multiple people had the similar roles. Using laid off status as a scarlet letter is a worrisome trend and only serves to harm all of us in the long term.

I personally do not want to live in a zero sum economy.

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

Besides the usual, LinkedIn is running an e-learning operation for business these days (LinkedIn Learning), and generally trying to be another vehicle through which Microsoft expands its offerings — moving away from simply being the "recruiting" social network and instead moving to be the social network for every phase of your life as an employee.

jedberg2• 6 years ago

Last year LinkedIn made $6.8B in revenue. If they hire someone who can make a process .01% more efficient, they would save $680,000. If they pay that person even $400,000/yr plus benefits, they are coming out ahead.

If you find someone who can make things .002% more efficient and pay them $100,000 a year, you've still come out ahead.

At that revenue, it doesn't take much to get an ROI on a new employee.

jsnell2• 6 years ago

Making "a" process .01% more efficient is not sufficient in your example. You need (the weighted average of) everything to become that much more effective.

Somebody improving e.g. the build speed by that amount will not be paying back their salary in improved productivity of other developers. While a person who increases the click through rate on ads by 0.02% probably does.

barrenko• 6 years ago

Every big company just wants to die, don't believe anything else.

peter303• 6 years ago

I a medium size vertical software company I worked at no more than 20% were software engineers when it reached the mature stage. Some were software support people like program managers, testers, technical writers, Training. Some were company support like executive, HR, sales, IT. And then were services side of People who used the software embedded within customer companies because the customers wanted to outsource that role.

toephu2• 6 years ago

10k? LinkedIn has 16k employees..

kgraves• 6 years ago

Hmm, title looks wrong lets fix it:

'Microsoft to extinguish 960 jobs worldwide'.

There, fixed it for you.

jlokier• 6 years ago

I'm surprised. LinkedIn has to be one of the major sites whose traffic has gone up in recent months, with so many people looking for work and stuck in front of a computer.

patrickaljord• 6 years ago

LinkedIn makes most of its money out of companies posting job ads, not on people applying for them. And companies paying for ads are going down.

postalrat• 6 years ago

I always figured LinkedIn makes their money selling candidate data to recruiters.

ilamont2• 6 years ago

I'm sorry to hear about people losing their jobs. It sucks, especially now when there is so much uncertainty.

LinkedIn makes a lot of money through recruitment ads - five years ago it was at least $300/month for professional positions in hot markets. If companies stop posting ads or switch to cheaper alternatives (some companies still use Craigslist) the impact will be significant for LinkedIn and its employees.

jiofih2• 6 years ago

Wow, this means linkedIn has ~16k employees? What on earth are all those people working on?

MagnumPIG• 6 years ago

Ads.

bryanrasmussen2• 6 years ago

Microsoft is doing its usual fiscal year-end layoffs, but fewer than usual - https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-doing-its-usual-f...

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

A lot of the very big companies are quite reluctant to start layoffs if they think the situation can be survived for a few months. They don't want to be seen as evil firing-their-contractors, people-as-expendable, etc. They are an easy target as "big corp".

But if they can see this is going to go on more than the end of 2020, they will start having to confront the need to layoff people seriously. Interestingly, the more certainty they have about how bad it is, the sooner the layoffs.

thebean11• 6 years ago

Or, they've really been wanting to do this for a while, and the economic situation provides political cover.

bbarn• 6 years ago

The downward spiral for all industries that are primarily US based because of the overreaction to COVID has not even begun to be felt.

But you know, keep posting about how this side won't wear masks and people are jerks all day instead of facing the fact that haircuts aren't the goal - a stable economy is essential, not secondary, to a country's survival.

pm90• 6 years ago

A stable economy requires its healthcare systems to not overflow. It needs to be able to provide its citizens with healthcare. The US response has been the opposite of overreaction and the economy will pay the price.

briansteffens• 6 years ago

As is tradition, we managed to get all the downsides of both shutting down and not shutting down, with none of the benefits of either.

habosa• 6 years ago

I find it a little disappointing how when any large company reduces staffing it always makes the news.

I'm not at all saying these people at LinkedIn deserve this, I bet they're smart people and I hope they find new employment very soon.

But speaking generally ... many of us have worked at or worked with big bloated companies. We all know that many of them could be improved by slimming down. But we report on it like its a sign of the downfall.

prawn7• 6 years ago

I always think "Those 960 people had jobs there for a while - that's a positive". I've worked for myself the last 20 years so I'm occasionally jealous of anyone who's had even a year of stable, predictable income.

quacked• 6 years ago

How does your self-employed career compare to a parallel salaried career in your industry across 20 years? (In terms of year-averaged income, hours worked, etc.)

0xy2• 6 years ago

A stable job invariably means you're underpaid -- usually substantially. I might get a 10% raise at a job if I'm amazing at my job, but if I left that job for a new company I might get 30%+ more.

majormajor• 6 years ago

I'd ask "why did they decide to try to get more efficient now"?

And here the answer is: because there's a big overall downturn.

When things are going well, we generally try to find ways to grow. Find new things for people to do if they aren't needed in their current roles. When we have to focus on trimming costs instead, it's usually due to negative factors.

mlthoughts2018• 6 years ago

I disagree pretty strongly. Rather than layoffs, most of these people could be retrained. Cutting costs of < 1k people is not a serious cost cutting effort, it’s juicing short term numbers.

Probably most of the cuts are very political, with certain darlings being given freedom to restructure and layoff according to their whim.

I think the story that companies do this for efficiency is mostly bullshit. That’s just the excuse.

projektfu4• 6 years ago

If a company like LinkedIn is doing a lay-off, that’s different from business as usual. They’re supposed to be growing. When they grow they fire people along the way. But a lay-off means they have run out of work or can’t employ people profitably. This can mean:

1. LinkedIn has its own special problems. (Maybe I’ll sell and follow another company or sector).

2. The economy is in recession. (Should have gotten into bonds 3 months ago, oh well).

Companies often try to paint structural problems as competitive adjustments, but we know they rarely do real layoffs during flush times.

diogenescynic• 6 years ago

Other companies just do layoffs less obviously. For instance, PayPal has been laying people off in the Bay Area even though they are doing really well to shift those jobs to Austin or Omaha or Chandler. They just don't do it all at once and often give people anywhere from several weeks or months to start looking for a job before their actual termination date, depending on how long they've been with the company and pay grade. Companies are super sneaky.

smabie3• 6 years ago

If you have to fire so many people at once, it means you've fucked up. They should have never been hired, or individually fired a while back, or whatever.

It means the company is making a dramatic shift in how they do things. While this could be good (mass layoffs often mean that the company has finally realized they have a problem), what is definitely means is that they've made a lot of mistakes. It's essentially admitting that they've made suboptimal decisions.

That is why it is reported on, not because it's a morally bad thing or whatever.

irjustin2• 6 years ago

To say you've fucked up in the face of a global pandemic seems a bit obtuse.

The current state of normal is not the same way to operate when there is no COVID. Sort of like saying we should have always operated like the bubonic plague never went away even after it did.

Treating the situations the same is too dogmatic.

amonteiro• 6 years ago

Business is all about calculated risks. You can't tell the future, so you make decisions based on your best guess on how the future will play out.

The covid downturn happened over 3 months (feb - april). To start laying off people you have be sure there's no recovery happening around the corner. For example, you may bet that business will improve in may, june, july that will save their jobs and your business outlook. I'm obviously over simplifying since projects, release dates, projected ad revenue and a 100 other factors play into it.

It's easy to sit on the side lines and judge it with the history behind us, but reality is more complicated.

rishav_sharan• 6 years ago

I agree with you in general, but the timing is what concerns a lot of people. With the whole Covid situation and considering that many economies are in free fall, its hard not to get a bit worried - Can my company also do this? could I be next?

beachy2• 6 years ago

"Our Talent Solutions business continues to be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously."

We're in a recruitment-related field (online background checking) and we can clearly see that recruitment activity has dropped way off, even in sectors that are largely unaffected by the pandemic.

My theory is that people are clinging on to their jobs tightly as unemployment rises, so discretionary turnover is way down.

octygen• 6 years ago

I'd err towards this direction too based on the megacorp I work at. Curious if you have ballpark #s to how much less companies are hiring.

beachy2• 6 years ago

My guess would be about 50% for retail. We are in NZ, so unique circumstances apply - there is no Covid on the loose, so things are all normal as far as retail goes, but entire industries such as overseas tourism have vanished for now, so there are many candidates for every job.

gundmc• 6 years ago

It's awful to see such a large reduction in force when MSFT overall is up 30% year to date. I haven't heard of other FAAMG companies making similar moves.

aahhahahaaa• 6 years ago

It's got to sting a little to use the platform you were laid off from to look for a new job. I wish everyone the best.

mattoxic• 6 years ago

Does that mean i don't get 960 emails a week now?

LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide

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