
PayPal Said to Cut as Many as 400 Jobs - pg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-cutting-as-many-as-400-jobs.html
======
kamaal
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
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...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298.aspx)

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bryanh
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.

~~~
dangrossman
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>

~~~
dschuler
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.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Just because they're not iterating in the dev-oriented U.S.-centric C2B space,
the least profitable and easiest to solve payment spaces, doesn't mean they
aren't innovating. To put things in perspective JANA, arguably the largest
payment platform in the world by users, is virtually unknown in Silicon
Valley.

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johnx123-up
Just copy-pasting this comment by _cubicleslave_ from
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-
be-c...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-cutting-
as-many-as-400-jobs.html#comment-680447739) 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-
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-up
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...](http://blogs.agriya.com/paypal-adaptive-payments-an-
open-letter-to-paypal) I don't know why Agriya couldn't yet disrupt the
payment gateways through their crowdfunding approach

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

~~~
rbn
It doesn't even load.

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

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jusben1369
"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
I doubt that Stripe and Braintree will be interested in employees in the
bottom 3% of PayPal.

~~~
kamaal
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.

~~~
rorrr
Exactly. When shit hits the fan, expensive contractors go first. Then the
executives that lost to other executives.

Low wage workers rarely get cut first.

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humdumb
"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?

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d0m
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".

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hemancuso
13,000 employees!!!???

~~~
fourstar
Microsoft has 90,000

~~~
georgeecollins
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.

~~~
dangrossman
When you have a quarter billion users of a money transfer product with 24/7
support, you probably need a pretty big service staff. I'd imagine customer
support, tech support and administrative staff outnumber developers.

~~~
rbn
Let's not forget their international presence. PayPal is classified as a bank
in many countries.

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zmitri
It's crazy seeing this, after just reading this

[http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-
culture-f...](http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-for-
entrepreneurialism-did-Peter-Max-David-have-at-PayPal/answer/Keith-
Rabois?srid=pB&st=ns)

------
zengr
I think every one missed the point. They are expanding out side US:
[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/PayPal...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/PayPal-
plans-to-hire-1000-in-India/articleshow/13840301.cms)

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richforrester
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
_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.

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

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

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

