Opendoor Board Chair Says Company is 'Bloated,' Needs To Cut 85% of Workforce (cnbc.com) 47
Keith Rabois, co-founder and newly minted board chair of Opendoor, said remote work and a "bloated" workforce have been a drag on the online real estate platform's culture, as he vowed to slash headcount. CNBC: "There's 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don't know what most of them do. We don't need more than 200 of them," Rabois told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Friday.
How do companies wind up with so many employees? (Score:2, Insightful)
Empire building by managers. Inefficient processes. Armies of salespeople.
Re:How do companies wind up with so many employees (Score:5, Insightful)
How do companies wind up with such clueless executives?
Yes, there is inefficiency in most corporations. But some level of inefficiency can't be avoided. The more likely truth in this case, is that the CEO simply doesn't realize what he'll be doing to his company, until it's too late.
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The more likely truth in this case, is that the CEO simply doesn't realize what he'll be doing to his company, until it's too late.
That's decidedly possible, but when it involves one of these multi-billion dollar "startups" I'm very inclined to believe most of their employees aren't actually doing anything useful. Uber having >30k employees would be an example of this.
Re:How do companies wind up with so many employees (Score:5, Insightful)
So my question would be, who is most likely to know whether these people are "needed" or not? The chairman of the board? Probably not. Such a person has no direct knowledge of what's happening on the ground, they are fed everything through multiple layers of communication. Each layer distorts reality further, just like the whisper game. This guy's tone sounds more like one of those full-of-himself executives who doesn't get why software costs so much to produce.
My own company's CEO once asked, when told a software project would take 9 months to complete, "Why does it take so long? NASA sent astronauts to the moon for less money and in less time!" A statement that is completely untrue and ridiculous on its face. But it does illustrate the cluelessness that exists at the top of many corporations.
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As I said, that's decidedly possible, and I agree that knowing who is actually doing useful work is definitely more important that knowing that you have bloat in the first place. Taking a chainsaw to the org is probably not going to have a positive outcome.
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Right now, everyone at Opendoor is thinking of their colleagues and wondering if they are in the 15% that won't get the cut. For a team of 20, that means you've got to either truly believe that you're in the top three of that group, are blissfully naive, or will be polishing your CV and getting it out to agencies this weekend, and since company morale just went to shit, there's a pretty go
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Companies were perfectly OK with stupidly large numbers of employees during the era of infinite growth. When interest rates were zero, and future growth prospects appeared infinite, there was no such thing as overhiring.
But now its the total opposite. Growth mode is over. Innovation mode is over. Now its all about enshittification. Raise prices while cutting quality, and not caring if customers leave. Especially in captured industries where customers have nowhere else to go.
Now companies can't cut workers f
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The more likely truth in this case, is that the CEO simply doesn't realize what he'll be doing to his company, until it's too late.
That's decidedly possible, but when it involves one of these multi-billion dollar "startups" I'm very inclined to believe most of their employees aren't actually doing anything useful. Uber having >30k employees would be an example of this.
So, is the solution to get rid of the unnecessary workers or to get rid of the incompetent CEO who allowed those workers to be hired? And if the decision is to get rid of the workers, how would executives and managers who were previously incompetent in identifying needed workers suddenly acquire the ability to discern who was needed and who was not?
The moral of the story is that those without authority and power are always the scapegoats.
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There is some truth to this.
Generally too many people end up in "make busy" work. Basically doing things that nobody asked them to do, and has no goal to improve anything. It's just stuff that the employee does to look busy for their KPI's but doesn't actually move the needle outside their team.
You solve this by getting rid of KPI type of metrics and instead use results
"Thing asked - (thing) | Thing resolved (YES|NO)"
"If thing asked was not resolved, is employee still working on it, or does employee need he
Re: How do companies wind up with so many employee (Score:3)
Re:How do companies wind up with so many employees (Score:4, Insightful)
Got me to look at the story (Score:2)
Just to find out what the company is. It's some kind of real estate scam. The joke is in the title search?
The land is just there and the land don't care who's sitting on it. Now or ever. "But the money!"
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It seems to be a gamestop type short hunter shell company now ... why have employees for that when they could just raise their own salaries for as long as this last?
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100% this. It's original incarnation was as a 'disruptive' house flipper. Went public in 2020 (?) around the heyday of pandemic driven real estate craziness. The overall idea was to have algorithms price houses just based on data, without a realtor, human appraiser, or home inspector being used.
Unlike the now ubiquitous "I buy homes for cash" guys that prey in elderly or people in financial distress with below market offers, OpenDoor was pretty generous with their purchase offers. They told the market
But who will administer the apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for 200 people to do actual work, around 1000 employees are needed to administer Jira, Confluence, a bunch of HR and time tracking apps that don't integrate but were adopted by someone in between making their "day in the life of" videos, and a number "product management" apps chosen by various former employees because they saw a pop-up ad for the apps and thought they looked a "cute and fun" way to coordinate daily stand-ups.
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Don't forget the sales rep with the short skirt.
Re: But who will administer the apps? (Score:3)
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Yea no shit JIRA were software goes to die.
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oh your company didn't just shove Jira administration at the engineering team resulting in executives pinging them to do drop everything and add a new field or troubleshoot why their client couldn't see a ticket?
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The real estate market is collapsing (Score:5, Insightful)
Those houses have been on the market for over a year and people are giving up yanking them from the market. That's going to shrink the market for companies like Open door and the CEO knows it.
So his entire industry is hurting and it's probably going to hit his company especially hard and his company is probably massively overvalued. This is him getting out ahead on that.
It is however a really really bad sign of the job market that he thinks he can get away with this. He still needs employees to have a company and he has just signaled to every single competent skilled employee in his company that they need to jump ship asap.
If he's doing that it's because the economy is so bad and the job market is so bad that he thinks he can get away with that...
But hey, how about those cheap eggs?
And it the end basically everything (Score:1)
Is collapsing. Collapsing before our eyes. It's like how we blame cell phones on everything wrong with kids and not the ludicrous amounts of pressure we're putting on them because we know the entire economy and job market is collapsing and there aren't going to be enough jobs available for the number of people capable of working them so we're all hoping our kid is going to get the edge and be allowed to have a home and a car and food and medicine.
As far as I can tell the entire economy is collapsing around
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Calm down. Recessions come and go. It's normal. We have seen it before and the world didn't end. We can see it again and find a way to pull through, just like we did before.
The unemployment level is not the only metric of economic health. The stock market is doing quite well, for example. And, it's all connected. A growing stock market winds up presenting capital and incentives for businesses to expand, which in turn creates new jobs. It doesn't happen overnight, of course. All of these things take
Re: The real estate market is collapsing (Score:1)
I blame realtors. They are always encouraging owners to list properties at inflated prices because they get a bigger commission. I am trying to get a reasonable offer in on a crappy project mobile currently listed at 27,700 and the dickhead I was referred to demanded a $4500 flat broker's fee saying it's his minimum, that's over 15% of the current asking price which is itself too high. Fucker could maybe talk me into 7% tops. That's his flat fee for a mobile? Well this is a currently unliveable project, wha
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The majority of realtors do not encourage people to post homes at too high prices. They do not want the bigger commission. Instead they want smaller commissions for less work.
If you take double the time for 10% more money, you have made a major mistake. Greedy realtors would far rather you underprice the sale, they may get paid 10% less, but if they sell it in halve the time, they are getting paid far more per hour of work.
The only time a sane realtor will overprice a home is if a) the client is important
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You are correct. Though I think the belief that realtors drive the prices up is a common misconception from the basic intuition that realtors want to push the prices up since they get paid by percentage. It's an easy mistake to make.
I think the real cause for the housing crisis in the USA is simple: contractors stopped building houses after the last housing market crash (which was clearly caused by overdevelopment). They allowed the supply to naturally shift, so now demand outstrips supply and that is dr
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I think the issue is that luxury housing has far higher profit margins. So developers build luxury housing, a small amount of middle class housing and no cheap housing.
This means we end up with too much luxury housing and not enough middle class and no cheap housing.
Part of the problem is single family housing. Most places tend to push that. If we instead push for multi-family housing you can turn things around.
The profit margin to build an owner occupied duplex or quad could be as high for a similar s
No sale no profit (Score:2)
'the only houses any contractors are interested in building are high-end luxury homes since those have a higher profit margin. They will sit unbought as well, since they will still be out of most buyer's price ranges.'
If the developers keep on doing this, they will go bankrupt. It only makes sense if they ARE selling - which is the case in the UK where lots of large houses are getting built and bought.
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There is no shortage of shitty greedy realtors out there.
A good realtor will look at comparative properties in the area, with similar features / amenities and give you a range where you want to position the property in order to get multiple bids and get the bidders competing - you get more cash for the sale, the realtor gets a better commission, and the ultimate winner of the bidding war gets the home they want to buy. Everyone is happy.
Shitty realtors do what you are describing and make nothing because yo
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Oh its the minimum, its standard, yeah like uhm everyone knows and stuff
Don't know what most of them do? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, in other words, he is completely ignorant of how the company functions or what it is doing.
Shareholders love that. /s
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So, in other words, he is completely ignorant of how the company functions or what it is doing.
Well, he's the CEO.
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I would not expect the Chairman of the Board to know what each and every person does at a company with more than 1,000 employees. If he does have that level of knowledge, he's a useless CEO who is too busy micromanaging and doing his subordinates' jobs and not doing the strategic shit a board chairman should be doing.
This guy sounds like an idiot. Best of luck to him after this quote makes the rounds on their internal Slack / Teams / Whatever and any of his employees with actual talent immediately start b
My Bet Is... (Score:2)
He'll find out he does need a lot of those people, he just doesn't want to admit it.
Stupidity (Score:2)
...said remote work and a "bloated" workforce...
Half of this sentence is remarkably stupid. Remote work isn't the drag on profitability. The relentless lemming hiring (everyone else is hiring, so I need to keep up even though we can't afford it) undoubtedly played a big role, which is part of management incompetence. His management is responsible for his company's insolvency. Remote workers are probably responsible for keeping the ship afloat longer than it would have survived otherwise.
Sounds familiar. Fire first, ask questions later. (Score:2)
"There's 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don't know what most of them do.
Maybe don't pull a DOGE and find out what they do *before* you fire them, so you don't have to just rehire them when you discover they actually did necessary work?
We don't need more than 200 of them.
"640k should be enough for anybody."
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I looked at some houses, and the Opendoor ones were just sad travesties.
What was likely nice wood grain cabinetry just blasted with paint. Just sprayed on and painted all the doors shut. Same for handrails, which felt horrible to touch. Nice grain patterns replaced with light beige wall paint. Looking deeper, they never fixed anything that I would have considered important, just made things worse with new paint without regard for the thing being painted. I think they were more valuable before they had it
Who? (Score:2)
I never heard of "Opendoor".
As far as I'm concerned, they don't need ANY employees and can just go out of business.
Logical next steps: (Score:2)
1. Opendoor employees update their resumes and start hunting for jobs
2. The best and brightest find new jobs
3. ???
4. Profit!
I'm sure this will work out just great for shareholders.
Some companies deserve an attrition problem. This one deserves it the most.
Don’t know what most of them do (Score:1)
Don’t know why they’re here but I guess they’re useless right?
You might assume he’s dumb but he thinks his audience is dumb