PayPal Said to Cut as Many as 400 Jobs

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-cutting-as-many-as-400-jobs.html

by pg • 14 years ago

85 51 14 years ago

bloomberg.com

jusben13692• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I doubt that Stripe and Braintree will be interested in employees in the bottom 3% of PayPal.

johnrob• 14 years ago

It would nonetheless be an easy way to get some valuable knowledge from the internals of paypal.

khuey• 14 years ago

Indeed. 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.

jusben13692• 14 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if these are good employees in a bad BU. Specifically PayPal seems to have abandoned online payments for POS/B&M (which is exponentially larger - think Stripe's size vs Square) Thus why I imagined (guessed) who might be excited to get the talent.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

What 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.

hemancuso• 14 years ago

13,000 employees!!!???

fourstar• 14 years ago

Microsoft has 90,000

georgeecollins• 14 years ago

Yes 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.

conradfr• 14 years ago

A big portion of that may be the call centers though.

Sambdala• 14 years ago

The 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.

bryanh2• 14 years ago

Kind 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.

dangrossman2• 14 years ago

They'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

They're also doing new vertical-oriented products for governments, banks and education.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/other-solutions-overview

bryanh2• 14 years ago

For the average user & developer, PayPal is the same mess today as it was 5 years ago. That is the stagnation.

untog• 14 years ago

But to take one of your examples, they started offering Square style card readers after Square did. So at that point they're just catching up with the market.

Not stagnant, but definitely not innovative.

dschuler• 14 years ago

Whenever I hear terms like "vertical-oriented", I'm reminded of the managers at the big stagnant corporation I used to work at. Those terms sound just like "value proposition", "leveraging assets", and so on. They're not talking to developers or users, which are the people they need to focus on.

Case in point: I wanted to use PayPal to let users buy my apps, went through the x.com site, and quickly dropped it. Way too complex. Now Stripe on the other hand, that's something I'd really like to integrate with my apps.

I'm not saying PayPal can't possibly improve the situation, but they need to start talking to their customers in plain, simple language. What they're doing now is a red flag to me that I've seen in several other places, right before they were obsoleted and fizzled.

kamaal6• 14 years 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.

phaus2• 14 years ago

Paypal never learned how to deal with fraud or security. They simply avoid taking on the responsibility. Paypal decided long ago that it is far more profitable to refund the customer's money 100% of the time than it is to fight credit card fraud. There are pluses and minuses to this system. On one hand, honest buyers can be virtually guaranteed that they won't get ripped off. On the other hand, honest sellers can look forward to having some of their merchandise stolen at some point in the future.

sovande• 14 years ago

In four years as a PayPal seller we have _not_ had one chargeback. So for us at least it seems that PayPal's fraud detecting system is working just fine.

wtracy• 14 years ago

s/Paypal/The credit card issuers/g

I'm a Paypal employee, so I'm biased, but when the credit card company decides to reverse a payment, Paypal really doesn't have a lot of options.

d0m• 14 years ago

These 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• 14 years ago

It's crazy seeing this, after just reading this

http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...

richforrester• 14 years ago

Thought 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• 14 years ago

and 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.

humdumb• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

the phrase "90% of everything is horseshit" really fits paypal - and that's alot of shit when you'r a juggernaut of that size

kamaal6• 14 years ago

The key to that phrase is the word everything. Which means the replacements are not likely to be any better.

rbn3• 14 years ago

Stripe 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.

Axsuul• 14 years ago

SolidTrustPay is another one although they are also a pain to deal with.

rbn3• 14 years ago

It doesn't even load.

BalancedPayments is very good but they only do U.S.

zapdrive• 14 years ago

And Stripe to hire 400 people over the next few weeks! I hope thats true.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

Comments 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• 14 years ago

Reminds 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...

johnx123-up2• 14 years ago

Just copy-pasting this comment by cubicleslave from 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-• 14 years ago

I'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-up2• 14 years ago

True, 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-let... I don't know why Agriya couldn't yet disrupt the payment gateways through their crowdfunding approach

yuhong• 14 years ago

Typical, maybe, but is it really true in this case?

zengr• 14 years ago

I think every one missed the point. They are expanding out side US: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/PayPal...

PayPal Said to Cut as Many as 400 Jobs

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