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Zoom To Lay Off 1,300 Employees, Or About 15% of Its Workforce (cnbc.com) 44

Posted by BeauHD from the latest-round-of-layoffs dept.
Zoom on Tuesday announced plans to cut about 1,300 workers, or 15% of its workforce, according to a blog post on the company's website. CNBC reports: CEO Eric Yuan wrote in the blog post that as the world continues to adjust to life after the Covid pandemic, the company needs to adapt to the "uncertainty of the global economy" as well as "its effect on our customers." "We worked tirelessly and made Zoom better for our customers and users. But we also made mistakes," Yuan said. "We didn't take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities."

Yuan said the cuts will impact every organization across Zoom, and employees who are laid off will be offered up to 16 weeks of salary and health-care coverage. The CEO also said he plans to reduce his own salary for the coming fiscal year by 98%, and he is also forgoing his 2023 corporate bonus. "As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today -- and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions," Yuan wrote in the post.
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Zoom To Lay Off 1,300 Employees, Or About 15% of Its Workforce More

Zoom To Lay Off 1,300 Employees, Or About 15% of Its Workforce

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  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @05:50PM (#63273729) Homepage

    In other news: It takes about 9000 people to program that thing.

    sheesh.

    • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:41PM (#63273879)

      It takes about 9000 people to program that thing

      This is why when you go to a restaurant nobody but cooks exist in the place, you just randomly sit yourself, and shout your order towards the kitchen.

      That 1,300 more than likely has large quantities of sales, customer service, and management thereof involved. Zoom has offices in the UK, Brazil, France, China, India, and Singapore for offices outside the US. As for technical, lot of it is data center and the telephony endpoints. Zoom also has a pretty large staff for it's network operations and there's a management unit for all their leases and negotiations done for the various fiber optic leases they have. There's even a legal department that has a lot of people in it because, surprise, they operate in a lot of different countries and have to comply with all the various laws in those countries.

      Believe it or not, there is a lot more to a company than the people who write the software for it. Shocker.

      • If the "cooks" were entirely automated "containerized workloads" with a self-service UI then yes, I would eat there.

      • This is why when you go to a restaurant nobody but cooks exist in the place, you just randomly sit yourself, and shout your order towards the kitchen.

        I've been to restaurants where you pay a fixed fee and food comes out of a kitchen on conveyor belts.

        You sit and watch the plates go past and pick up the ones that look tasty.

    • From a detailed analysis of the functionality of Zoom I've determined that it was actually written by Bob, an intern who works there two days a week and taught himself to code by writing Zoom. The other 8,999 people are sales, marketing, media relations, strategy, ...

  • Let him reduce his wealth by 50%, instead of his salary.

    • Re:Bah (Score:4, Informative)

      by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:07PM (#63273779) Homepage Journal

      >Let him reduce his wealth by 50%, instead of his salary.

      I don't have any issue with him keeping his wealth. That is money that has already left the company, he's playing with whatever is in the company now. Reducing his salary is more than a lot of other tech leaders are doing, at least he's trying.

      • Re:Bah (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:42PM (#63273881)
        That's just not true. Most of his net worth is shares he currently holds in the company. It hasn't left the company at all, it's invested in the company.

        . It amazes me how these sleigh of hand tricks work on people -- you've been reading Slashdot for decades and still get bamboozled by the statement about him reducing his salary. In reality, his salary was low ($300k) and bonus was nonexistent in the past year, so he wasn't giving anything up.

    • Let him reduce his wealth by 50%, instead of his salary.

      Already done [yahoo.com].

  • What the heck were they all doing?

  • In Silicon Valley, We call this Optics (Score:5, Informative)

    by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:09PM (#63273783)

    Initially, it appears commendable that the CEO Eric Yuan reduced his own salary and bonus. At many companies, like Apple, the CEO pay is so significant that it can pay for hundreds of employees' salaries.

    That wasn't the case at Zoom. The New York Times reports that in 2022, the CEO received a $300k salary and no bonus. He's worth $3.9 billion in Zoom stock, however.

    So, he's already set for life. He can take loans based on the value of his zoom stock, or enter into a plan to outright sell some to support himself, his family, and everyone his family is friends with on Facebook for life.

    Clearly, he did this just for optics. The $300k salary is irrelevant to him, not even a rounding error to his wealth, and he won't notice the difference. If he wanted to do something real, he'd have sold a small portion of his stock to pay all those employees' salaries for a year or two. If those 1,900 employees were making an average of $150k a year, that would be $300MM, or 8% of his stock. For those people it would be a lifeline, for him it would mean that perhaps his second-cousin-once-removed won't get an estate in Hawaii, etc.

    • So over the last 40 years in America (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @07:24PM (#63273999)
      The top 1% have pocketed 50 trillion dollars while the national debt has ballooned to 31 trillion.

      If somebody stole your credit card and spent the last 40 years using it without your permission would you pay the bill? That's the American economy in a nutshell.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Blame Trump, the four years of his presidency are responsible for roughly one-quarter of the total USA government debt.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      That wasn't the case at Zoom. The New York Times reports that in 2022, the CEO received a $300k salary and no bonus. He's worth $3.9 billion in Zoom stock, however.

      So, he's already set for life.

      No, if he held $3.9B Zoom stocks, he is not set for life. If Zoom imploded and the stock price goes to zero, his Zoom stocks will worth nothing. If he had SOLD his Zoom stocks and got $3.9B cash, THEN he is set for life.

      As long as most of his wealth is in Zoom stocks, he basically floats or sinks along with the company, more so than any employee.

      • No, if he held $3.9B Zoom stocks, he is not set for life. If Zoom imploded and the stock price goes to zero, his Zoom stocks will worth nothing. If he had SOLD his Zoom stocks and got $3.9B cash, THEN he is set for life.

        As long as most of his wealth is in Zoom stocks, he basically floats or sinks along with the company, more so than any employee.

        That would be true if most of his wealth was still in Zoom stocks. But, it's not -- he's sold a ton of it [benzinga.com] amounting to hundreds of millions. In 2021, also transferred $6B of it to unspecified beneficiares [marketwatch.com], who are definitely also set for life more so than any of his employees.

  • Zoom is one of the companies that profited ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:14PM (#63273793)
    ... massively from the pandemic era. Peloton® was another. Now that the pandemic is subsiding and people are returning to offices, well, the need for the at-home stuff is subsiding. Tell me, who didn't see this coming?

    • Tell me, who didn't see this coming?

      Eric Yuan, clearly.

    • Even with employees returning to the office, remote meeting infrastructure is here to stay. How many employees does Zoom need or is their stock price appropriate? No idea.

      But they do big enterprise video communications and they do it really well. We have meetings with hundreds across global major offices and the work from homers (like me). It just works. My employer uses the Google suite so I'm sure it would be cheaper to use their platform, but Zoom is integrated across the org from huge meetings to 1-1 m

  • Janet Yellen said there is no recession [msn.com] and unemployment is low.

  • We hardly hear of any open-source video-conferencing software, any more. : (

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ksw_92 ( 5249207 )

      That's because the software part is pretty easy nowadays but the infrastructure to run large meetings is still hard. Sure, you can do things like Big Blue Button or other OSS telepresence apps but it takes hardware and bandwidth and that's not free, ever.

      • That's because the software part is pretty easy nowadays but the infrastructure to run large meetings is still hard.

        Even for those willing to run BigBlueButton or Jitsi or similar...the people on the other end need to be able to join. Browser-based conferencing can work if the camera/mic permissions aren't denied, but having to have a user download a new EXE can easily be a nonstarter for corporate laptops. Internal-only is easy enough, but if you need to meet with someone else, even in browser mode, it is uncharted waters in comparison to well-known solutions that are more likely to be present on a corporate laptop.

        Even

        • Zoom is cheap enough for most people to just pay it,

          Yes, but it's garbage. Only the Windows version is kind of reliable, and it isn't really either. The Linux version will do audio right in a test and then fail it on the call, making the user look like an asshole. It's pathetic just how bad Zoom is.

    • Jitsi

      If you're a small company and you just want to work internally, a jitsi server isn't too hard to construct and run. There are even cloud providers who do Jitsi images, or managed jitsi. It'll work fine for one-to-one calls, dev standups and probably a whole company meeting or two as well. External people can join via a browser, and it works decently well.

      If you're a bit bigger than that, Jitsi starts to cost you - you'll need to figure out which of the components you need to scale, how to scale them an

  • Five? Are you sure it wasn't six? (looks worriedly at monitor) I'm pretty sure you meant six.

  • https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]

    "On an unadjusted basis, payrolls actually fell by 2.5 million last month."

  • by the THOUSANDS. And it's not just in the computer/internet spaces. Boeing is doing it too (just one example of many).

    All the traditional indicators said we entered a recession last year... but we had mid-term elections, so the administration insisted on re-defining the criteria for a recession, and all their pals in the media went along eagerly (Hey, Orwell, hold my beer!).

    Now, we're WAY past the traditional definitions of a recession and the layoffs are piling up...

    Move along. Nothing to see here...

    Belie

  • SInce Microsoft is driving down the costs of Office 365 and now including Teams, there's no reason for corporations to pay for two things. Granted, Teams isn't great when compared to Slack but still if I can get Secure E-Mail, OneDrive, and Teams for one price/user/month why wouldn't I do it as a CFO?

  • Doom (Score:3)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:13PM (#63275699)

    Zoom boom doom looms.

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