Indeed cuts 15% of workforce, 2200 jobs
indeed.com> I take sole accountability for where we are today. I am deeply and profoundly sorry. I will be taking a 25% cut in base pay. Additionally, more than 75% of my total compensation is directly tied to Indeed revenue growth, and is at risk given current trends.
That’s how you tell people you’re accountable.
Maybe I'm imagining it but this letter seems a lot more direct than the other ones.
"People loosing jobs" instead of "Puffys getting the opportunity to move on.".
Also their yes/no mail has a clear title and they lay down policy that fired people get to use slack for a few days to "say goodbye to friends" etc.
Not great obviously (it's still kicking them out) but at least they are not adding insult to injury.
Yes, this is among the best letters of this kind that I have read.
To be fair, stock prices typically go up after layoffs are announced. So it’s not like he is losing money.
stock proce isnt revenue growth.
IF comp is tied to revenue, it doesn't matter if the stock goes to the moon.
The stock goes up because investors think that revenue will go up if they pay fewer salaries.
Profits, not revenue. But the point remains.
FairPoint, the article said Revenue so even layoffs won't help unless they shift there expenses from Devs to marketing or something like that
Higher stock value helps companies achieve things. See GME
For most companies stock value is meaningless in terms of achieving things. It doesn't put more money in their pocket to pursue development unless they do additional stock offering, which is very unusual for a mature company.
That's not true: from my understanding equity compensation plans fit in here, and that's the vast majority of companies (or really nearly all of them, at least for executive staff).
Lol. A 25% cut and “my revenue is at risk” is meaningless when you make more in a year than most of your employees will even retire with.
It’s crazy we don’t hold CEO’s to the same rigorous standards as employees, despite their importance (as measured by salary) being x 100 that of the average employee. Low risk, high reward.
It's not completely meaningless.
When compared to the stress it causes for those impacted, I’m going to disagree and claim that it’s entirely meaningless. Given that most of his compensation comes from stock, losing a few 100k at most in salary is nothing.
What is something the CEO could say or pay cut he could take that would make these comments not appear in a HN thread?
Nothing most likely because the fact remains that the CEOs of these companies do never face the same existential crisis as many of their employees do when loosing their job.
They can (and many probably do) put a small amount of their income into conservative boring low yield investments and still be set for Life if everything else collapses. Maybe not with the yacht, prestige or power they hoped for but still more comfortable than most of the population.
The best a CEO can do is take responsibility by making a significant financial sacrifice and not bullshit their former employees on the way out. I think this letter does it as best as possible given the circumstances but it can't bridge the gap between them and most people.
CEOs chose to be in that position and I'm sure they can handle a little criticism from the internet
Yep. Quite rare to see this kind of accountability.
It’s so predictable even ChatGPT can write this drivel now
Prompt: Write a press release for a company who is laying off 15% of its workforce. It’s in the voice of the ceo. Mention that they are accountable for this decision.
—-
Dear valued members of our community,
It is with a heavy heart that I announce today that our company will be undergoing a significant workforce reduction. As a result of ongoing challenges in our industry and the global economy, we have made the difficult decision to lay off 15% of our workforce.
This decision was not taken lightly, and we understand the impact it will have on the individuals and families affected. We are committed to supporting our colleagues during this transition and will be providing them with resources to help them find new opportunities.
As the CEO of this company, I take full responsibility for this decision. It was a tough call, but it was necessary to ensure the long-term success and sustainability of our business. We remain committed to delivering exceptional products and services to our customers and believe that these changes will allow us to do so more effectively.
We want to assure our customers, partners, and stakeholders that we remain committed to our values and to providing exceptional service. We will work hard to ensure that this transition is as smooth as possible and that we emerge from this period even stronger.
We understand that there may be questions and concerns, and we are committed to providing answers and support to everyone affected by this decision. We will continue to communicate openly and transparently as we move forward.
Thank you for your understanding and support during this challenging time.
Sincerely,
[Your Name] CEO of [Company Name]
Oh yes baby, communicate it to me openly and transparently.
I hate the word transparently. It can mean one of two things:
1. Crystal clear: like you can see through a crystal and can identify any defect or impurity present
2. Invisible: like air is transparent. You can't see air. Can't see the nitrogen, oxygen, PPM, bacteria, germs, CO2, methane etc. It is there, it is transparent, even though you don't want it to be.
Instead I prefer terms crystal clear for first and opaque for second
Thank you for your input, Bob.
Indeedian here, thankful to not have been in the 2200.
Was a bit chaotic this morning, it doesn't seem like there was any clear pattern to who got layed off. Managers were given no advance notice for this either, know our manager was trying this morning to figure out over Slack who was affected by asking everyone.
If managers didn’t know, how was the decision taken? I am a manager (not indeed but other company just doing layoffs) here and I received a first estimate of my boss and I adjust when I will let go whom (based on business needs).
In big companies, the decision of who to lay off is often handled farther up the management chain. It’s very common for upper management to decide on criteria to use then have HR execute the layoff by identifying individuals using that criteria.
Criteria commonly is some combination of performance review history, cost, location, role, seniority, tenure.
The goal is to do it without managers interfering to save their favorites and to ensure it’s done in a non discriminatory way.
Indicates this layoff is probably actually cost-cutting necessity, given it had to be done immediately with no regard to performance.
there were definite patterns. Certain orgs, roles, and offices seem to have been more heavily affected than others
Can you say which ones?
Betting DEI, HR, Product & Project Mgmt, and internal tooling -- which would be in line w/ most of the other layoff.fyi research
ah then I guess I was wrong
There is an accountant, and maybe some consultants. They're in a room somewhere far removed from the day to day.
There is a spreadsheet, with performance scores, salaries, bonuses, benefits, etc.
Sort the spreadsheet by cost and start chopping from the top, or maybe work up from the bottom. Maybe skip every every other employee. C-level and VPs will give additional guidance, maybe 80% of DEI and HR Staff, 40% of Product, etc.
Once there is a list, it may travel to HR or other managers to check or confirm -- make sure you're not accidently laying off some superstars or key initiative personnel -- and then the list is finalized and notices go out. There may not even be any veto; here's the list, adios amigos.
Source: did IT hiring and firing, was involved w/ this at a a couple F500s -- tho not any recently.
Thanks and any advice on not landing on such a list. I was part of giving my advice for the list last December, but now new cuts will come and I could be on it. How to be that favorite person? Is beeing more or less expensive really a criteria?
How come Indeed has so many employees? 15K doing what? SpaceX is sending people to orbit on reusable rockets that can land on a moving platform on the ocean, with 4K less people. How is this even possible? Are most of Indeed employees sales reps?
SpaceX is a company with all of it's employees and testing in one geographical location.
Indeed is a global company spanning multiple languages and governments. This requires creating, designing and specializing for multiple languages and sensibilities. JP Indeed has additional integration with LINE. It's hyper specific to Japan but that integration is required for success. Multiply that by a few factors for operating in each region, having dev groups for each region, understanding and operating within the law within each region...
I always see these kind of comments to be remarkably ignorant because operating on a global scale requires a global workforce.
Excuse my ignorance. Still feels excessive for a global company. I worked for a handful of multinationals for many years and had the opportunity to live in many parts of the world including. .. yes, Japan. I know by experience a global workforce doesn't mean duplication of business units and language/culture is not an excuse to have them. Developer groups for each region? What? Compliance and legal is not necessarily as big as you would think, unless you are perhaps a pharmaceutical. In my latest company, a large manufacturing company with deals worth billions we handled compliance for the entire US and Canada out of a small office in Philadelphia with the support of a small legal firm from NY,if there were more than 20 guys in that office I would be surprised.
Even with the 60 or so countries listed here (https://www.indeed.com/m/countries), that’s ~230 employees per country.
Still seems way to high, especially given the uneven size of some of the job markets in those listed countries.
If you were to solely take into account job market size then China alone would dwarf the entire list and require a massive team to maintain on its own for what I hope should be obvious reasons.
And this ignores that the job market size isn't related to the complexity of integration. If you're doing business in China your data retention and storage is going to be massively different than Europe which is different than the US which is different than Japan which is different than Indonesia. These will require some form of backend customization and integration with the common UI framework they use for their site design. You need QA teams, you need lawyers, you need managers and live ops engineers and specialists and researchers to drive user retention and businessmen to reach out to companies.
Have you ever worked in a global team environment? Or perhaps talked to your coworkers working on similar products in other countries?
Yes I understand the rationale behind “lots of bodies”.
As OP was rightly pointing out, there is a discrepancy here between output and size.
LinkedIn for example has many of the same issues and a lot more complex functionality. They manage to do this, compete with Indeed (and have a higher market share), with a relatively small number more people.
LinkedIn has 21000 employees. Which is significantly more than Indeed.
Yes, about 25%-30%. And they do way more, in a lot of geos.
Or are you saying LinkedIn has 14,000 employees just for their job board functionality, and only 6k for the other larger, more complex parts of their system?
No? So what explains the relatively small percentage difference in employees but a large difference in functionality and market share?
LinkedIn doesn't have no where near the market share of job search / hiring in the US compared to Indeed. It's like, 2-3x less.
We are not talking about purely US market share, because the argument being made is that the headcount is required to compete globally.
Job board popularity varies greatly by country, but from the look of it LinkedIn has more of the global market share of Indeed.
My point is that unlike indeed they do this without jobs being the core, 100% thing they are dedicated to. Even if they are slightly behind in market share the point still stands that LinkedIn is clearly doing more with less.
Would anyone know how many employees they had pre-pandemic? (i.e. how much they grew recently)
About 12,000 before I left in Nov 2021. There was a hiring freeze in place pretty quickly with the pandemic.
That is pretty ironic, I guess. Like firetruck catching fire or ambulance getting in an accident.
2,200 people go. This is roughly 15% of our team.
Why does such a company need 15k employees to begin with? That seems like too many for a site that does not produce anything tangible. Coding, support, marketing, sales, etc. does it really add up to 15K?
You probably underestimate the marketing, sales, and support aspects. Also, there are no doubt a ton of spam/scam jobs being posted constantly. I'm not saying it adds up to 15K, just more than you or I would think...
Not saying it wasn't bloated, but international websites -- Indeed definitely is international -- will have to replicate much of their functionality for their new location.
Different rules and roles for data retention, security, privacy, etc. Different languages and interfaces, completely different cultures with regards to sales, marketing, hiring, etc. Regulations -- both official and "official" -- could be very complex. Laws, taxes and accounting may be wildly different. Hiring in France or Germany, for example, is totally different beast than in the US. Very different roles for Unions, employee retention, trial periods, etc. These need to be baked into the website, otherwise you're just Craigslist in a different language -- and CL is already there.
Then there may be deep regional differences in those countries, just as how different states in the US can have all sorts of different, often subtly nuanced, laws. It's not just US law, it's California Law vs. New York Law vs. Delaware -- which means you need an accountant who can do each of those.
And then there is the offshore work, stuff that's contributing to the main efforts. QA teams in Croatia, Support in Mexico or India, etc.
The base code may be the same for those websites, and plenty of shred repos, but it isn't just hiring 2-3 locals, getting something translated, and then slapping some VMs & containers on AWS Europe and calling it a day.
Thanks for this. The devil is always in the details. "Building a job board" is the easy part...
This is such a very written comment. I always wondered why they needed more people
Nope, it’s too much, doesn’t make sense
sorry I'm with the parent poster on this one - Indeed was bloated
I'm not saying it's not bloated, just "less bloated" than folks wholly ignorant of the details would think.
Well, obviously the CEO thought so too.
> Why does such a company need 15k employees to begin with?
Because not everything is tech?
For starters, Indeed is in a field with legal compliance issues. If somehow "No minorities." ever made it through their screening system all holy hell would come down on their heads.
That means that probably everything an employer could post needs to be vetted by a human eventually. That's a lot of people given the number of job postings.
Start a competitor to Indeed and attract their customers with your superior cost structure.
Indeed is no good. They try to suck everything out of you when you apply to a posting on their site, including details about your current company. I avoid using them if I can.
They make money purely out of laziness of their customer base.
"Where should we post this listing? I don't know...Indeed?"
I can think of 2,200 people he can hire immediately.
Depends what they were doing. Anecdotal evidence suggests it wasn't anything important.
2200 HR and DEI drones, legal and financial specialists in parts of LATAM that don't make money, etc.
This is the best comeback to the mentally...struggling...people that make the half-baked argument that "tech companies are sooooooo bloated"
Yes because Indeed has literally zero moat /s
This is a really tired trope. Clearly they didn’t need as many people. Clearly they need more than most people think they do.
It would be really nice to see the tree diagram that breaks the company structure down to ~100 person 'divisions'
A lot of empire building during the good times. Ridiculously heavy layers of prod and eng middle management.
I'm starting to feel like there is no way I can read any of these messages and feel like the CEO actually feels like they're responsible?
This is objectively a very good severance package, the CEO is taking a pay cut, and the tone is about as generic and non-confrontation as it can be, but I'm still dissatisfied. It still reads to me like a different variation of IDGAF.
There's just something about firing 2200 people, no matter the size of your company, that screams that you don't care. Like you didn't care in the first place. How do you accidentally hire 2200 people only to figure you need to get rid of them later? Don't hire them in the first place! It's just antithetical to how I imagine I would run any potential company.
It is probably not very comfortable for the folks whose job searches now begin on the website they used to be paid to develop. Oof. <3 to the 2200.
There is always Dice, Linkedin, Cleared Jobs, or just downloading a list of F-500 companies, hitting their career sites, and applying manually.
I've had good luck w/ indeed but it's not like they can't be easily replicated.
The irony is that Indeed is not the best place to find work for those 2200 who lost their jobs.
Indeed used LinkedIn to hire me :3
Still got a job?
interviewed there once
was confounded by the high headcount, also confounded by the amount of commercial RE they held in Austin
even after these layoffs, their headcount seems curiously high for a listings site