
Snap is laying off about 100 engineers - artsandsci
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/07/snap-layoffs-engineering-team-said-to-see-up-to-10-percent-cut.html
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aphextron
I'm honestly curious if the massive headcount of some of these companies is
even necessary. I was taking a look at Bumble[0] the other day. They are the
#2 dating app in the US, turning down acquisition offers, and are profitable
with >$100mm in revenue, yet I have been unable to find a single engineering
job listing or find anyone on LinkedIn that is on their technical staff.
Plenty of Fish[1] was built and scaled to hundreds of millions of users by a
single person. When all you're doing _technically_ is recreating functionality
that has existed for decades now (messaging), and using 100% cloud
infrastructure, why build out a huge engineering org?

[0]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/08/23/women-f...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/08/23/women-
first-app-bumble-turned-down-450-million-buyout-offer-from-dating-giant-match-
group/)

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-
bootstrapped...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped-
plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7)

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gizmo385
What exactly do all of these engineers do at single-focus companies like Snap?
I guess I don't understand where you could find enough work for hundreds of
engineers on a product like that?

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tedmiston
There are so many features in the Snapchat app. If you really dig in, there
are teams dedicated to each portion of the app. I'm not sure if that means a
bunch of separate PMs as well, but it is a big complex app once you account
for all the features... DMs, group messages, Discover, Memories, Stories, the
map, filters/lenses, integrations like Bitmoji, ...

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spyspy
Still doesn't justify anywhere close to 1000 engineers.

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ghostbrainalpha
I think a lot of the engineers are working on new filters.

Then a bunch are working on 'location based promoted filters", these are
basically just graphic designers, or maybe web designers, but they are getting
lumped in.

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maybeiambatman
I got an email from them no longer than a month ago that they were expanding
like crazy and opening a new office in Seattle. I don't completely understand
their situation.

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cyrux004
same here. got a linkedin message from a recruiter in Seattle

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nivals
Former Snap engineers in Venice feel free to get in touch. We're hiring at our
Santa Monica office for all types of engineering roles.

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greatamerican
what's your email?

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__s
Their history is a lot of job posting for sureapp.com. Though not sure where
their careers page is

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nivals
BTW, from the February 'Who is hiring' thread I'm happy to report that we
hired a new front end team member in our NYC office!

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guelo
Could be hardware engineers after the Spectacles failure.

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cassieramen
Have they confirmed whether they are giving up on their hardware play or not?

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brentm
They are reportedly working on two new versions:
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/12/snap-is-developing-a-
secon...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/12/snap-is-developing-a-second-
version-of-spectacles-which-may-include-augmented-reality/)

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tyingq
Ten percent of all engineers is pretty significant. Curious what the motive
is.

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Moto7451
I can posit a few things. My work is "down the street" from them and they
hired extremely quickly. From murmurs I've heard that seemed to actually work
out ok. Having experienced really fast growth at my work, but not their rate
of fast growth, I can trow some spaghetti on the wall that will probably hit
somewhere near the mark for some set of the 100 firings.

1\. Managing out.

If you hire quickly and perhaps not carefully, you'll hire people who don't
necessarily perform as well as you thought (generally), don't perform well in
_your_ environment in spite of their talents (i.e. Chris Lattner's short stint
at Tesla), or don't get along with the team and hurt culture.

2\. Under the same fast growth, you may also hire a specialist for some
technology you decide to get rid of.

While the ideal situation is finding a new role or moving them to a different
team with a similar technology (i.e. one NoSQL DB to another), you may not be
able to do that if you hired lots of folks all at once.

3\. They simply over hired.

This can mean they don't have enough managers and people are being poorly
utilized, they hired opportunistically, or they were just poorly coordinated.

4\. They need to make their accounting look better.

People cost money, until you stop paying them. Not much to say here.

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tyingq
Insightful...thanks for sharing. It's a shame companies don't consider the
personal turmoil they create when moving that fast.

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eitally
Meh. Remember, they're paying you for a service, and they can terminate the
relationship largely at-will when that service is no longer required.

I'm not saying I agree with how the US employment system currently functions,
but them's the facts. If you value stability or loyalty, definitely don't join
a hyper-growth startup.

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Lynz14
Headspace is Santa Monica is hiring for engineering talent. Feel free to email
me at lyndsey.lustig@headspace.com for more details

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luckydata
Headspace is such a cool product. I love what you're doing, hope you have luck
with hiring.

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kylnew
Snap Engineers interested in working in Santa Monica - Join us down the road
at YogaGlo! [https://www.yogaglo.com/careers](https://www.yogaglo.com/careers)

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mayneack
adding to the set of hiring comments. Factual in Century City is hiring across
engineering.

benmayne@factual.com

[https://www.factual.com/company/careers/?gh_src=1pt2v8](https://www.factual.com/company/careers/?gh_src=1pt2v8)

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hans
clearly a bad sign from management as the co is looking for growth: $22b can’t
afford it and if you’re left, you’re next ..

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theklr
Poor Snap. Long live Snap.

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tabtab
Layoffs? Oh snap!

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debt
Probably gearing up to spend more on compelling original content as that's
harder to produce than the software at this point.

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spyspy
And they'll probably end up losing 20-30% within a year. Engineers aren't
stupid, and know they have tons of other options. This smells like VCs
pressuring them to grow, grow, grow and management thinking they can just
throw devs at the problem until the accountants stood up and said enough.

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nemothekid
> _This smells like VCs pressuring them to grow, grow, grow_

They are already public

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spyspy
That's a very recent development. And who do you think owns most of the
company and controls the board seats?

