
LinkedIn to cut 960 jobs worldwide - DarkContinent
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53484764
======
habosa
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.

~~~
prawn
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
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.)

~~~
sillysaurusx
Seconding this question. It'd be fascinating to hear a detailed perspective
from someone who has spent 20 years working for themselves, without also
reaching traditional "success" (i.e. getting rich).

It's starting to feel like getting rich is overrated when it requires so much
of your life to make it happen. Hearing from someone who ended up with similar
freedoms (working for yourself is no small one!) would be cool.

~~~
oneoff1777711
5 years experience web development/full stack/mobile here. 29 years old. I’ve
never had a salaried job in my life. I’m able to pull down $150/hr for a
couple months a year (8 hour days), $125/hr for another 6 months full time,
then take a couple months off and I’m making a decent salary when it all
shakes out. That’s fully remote and working for friends or friends of friends,
occasionally taking a contract with a mega FAANG corp for a while, but usually
working the contract with a buddy.

If you’re savvy, good at networking and self motivated, you can make money
which is comparable to most full time jobs. Just gotta be careful about the
taxes and make sure you save for the lean times.

~~~
sillysaurusx
Any tax tips? That's an interesting observation.

(Thank you!)

~~~
prawn
Personally I have an offset account against my mortgage and stockpile funds
there. Then live well within my means so I can handle tax when it arrives.
Someone who doesn't naturally live within their means could estimate in
advance and push money to a separate account to isolate it.

~~~
dmoy
Don't you have to pay estimated taxes anyways? Or do you just mean within the
quarter between estimated tax payments? (I am salaried and already just budget
by quarter for everything)

~~~
prawn
Where I live, a salaried person will have tax automatically withheld and paid
to authorities by their employer each week/fortnight. Someone self-employed
usually has an estimate they pay quarterly or monthly, and then adjustments at
the end of the financial year if the situation has varied from the estimate.
I'm just saying I stockpile between tax bills (holding the cash against my
mortgage to minimise interest) and my general style of living/spending means I
can just redraw from the mortgage to make tax payments.

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

~~~
Nextgrid
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.

~~~
SkyPuncher
> 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.

~~~
joegahona
Indeed, "talent solutions" and "marketing solutions" are Linkedin's biggest
revenue drivers. Subscriptions come after that.

~~~
realusername
That's kind of a chicken and egg problem though, Linkedin never developed much
features outside of recruiting activities so that's the revenue they have.

Linkedin has a much bigger potential than that though, just the social aspect
and networking impact could be pretty significant.

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abraae
> "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
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.

~~~
abraae
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.

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curiousllama
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.

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

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

~~~
atlgator
But it funded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Silver lining.

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supernova87a
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
Or, they've really been wanting to do this for a while, and the economic
situation provides political cover.

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

~~~
MagnumPIG
Ads.

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aahhahahaaa
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.

------
vandleyindust
Looks like all cuts are across HR/Sales.

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

------
harshulpandav
_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-guy
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.

------
ilamont
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.

------
12xo
What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why
does this site/company require 10k people?

~~~
mason55
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.

~~~
bitbuilder
>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.

~~~
renewiltord
This is one of those things you can't tell anyone¹. You just learn it by
trying differently and failing.

¹ [http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-
an...](http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/)

~~~
nameoda
This can be summarized as, "I can tell you what it is, but I cannot understand
it for you".

In such cases I've invariably found that the failure is on part of the person
who is telling the thing - they are simply failing to communicate effectively.

They are not emphasizing the important points, they are not working backwards
from the result that they want to achieve and merely listing steps to get to
the result, they don't empathize with the audience so they cannot customize
their narrative in a way that resonates with the audience.

This is exactly why in your 16 or more years of education with dozens of
teachers, you can only name a handful that actually were good teachers.

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

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

------
gundmc
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.

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

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

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

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6c696e7578
On top of everything else, I think this goes to show how expensive Azure
infrastructure really is.

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

~~~
6c696e7578
Linkedin wasn't on Azure until MS bought them. Now the TCO has gone up. GitHub
has also shown signs of the Azure infrastructure.

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
Considering they last posted about moving to Azure in 2019, I doubt they've
moved everything to azure in <12 months.

~~~
6c696e7578
You're right. I think downtime is holding them back.

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

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kgraves
Hmm, title looks wrong lets fix it:

 _' Microsoft to extinguish 960 jobs worldwide'._

There, fixed it for you.

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bbarn
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.

~~~
briansteffens
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.

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blocked_again
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.

~~~
blackflame7000
It’s a business not a charity

