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Despite reporting profit of $1.3 billion last quarter, which it described as “another quarter of solid results,” eBay today suggests that there is a “Need for Change.”
It sounds like they aren’t even hurting, they just are ritualistically cutting off a pound of flesh for Wall Street.
Line must go up!
Yeah, I think it’s pretty weird to say “no working from home except for lay-off day.”
I am more surprised that eBay has more than 11,000 employees.
Parts of that site still feel like they’re from 2000. What do these people do?
Sites at that scale that cannot afford errors, downtime, or system breaches operate massive IT teams just to keep the systems running. That’s before even touching Logistics,Advertising, customer service, seller outreach, brand management, human resources, etc, etc. Ebay in 2023 had 132 Million customers. That’s 12,000 customers per employee per year, or 32 customers per employee per day assuming they worked the full 365 solid. A rather lean storefront actually, probably propped up significantly by the labor of their third-party sellers.
I’ve designed, built, and maintained some pretty complex marketplace sites that get that much traffic and have a bunch of independent people dependent on its uptime for income. I can empathize with the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fit it” philosophy.
That said, eBay smells like it has grown into one of those large companies that require 85 meetings to get anything done. I look at that site and wonder what the hell is going on in that org. Their ratio of people to tech debt just feels off to me.
That company has felt like it was poorly run for a long time now. They’ve been coasting on inertia.
I don’t personally disagree, but I don’t know what sort of business challenges they face. Also I should add that 132 Million number isn’t traffic or transactions, that’s verified customers that have made at least 1 purchase. That all being said there is definitely a redesign/restructure/rebase needed, but the ship takes crew to keep it sailing even if it needs remodeled/repaired/etc.
Yeah, I was following. Active users ≠ order or conversion rate.
Just saying that as someone who builds some pretty busy e-comm marketplace platforms, I have some questions when I see how many people they have and what they’re maintaining.
Maybe their subsidiaries are inflating those employee numbers.
I wonder how much of that is overhead from maintaining legacy systems. It’s one thing to use modern tools to build out big distributed applications. It’s another to take something built in the 90s by someone who left the company a decade ago and scale that up to a hundred million users.
I bet they’ve got rooms full of old machines that used to run critical systems, and that they keep around because they’re the only documentation on how it works.
(At least it was that way when I worked at MapQuest back in the day.)
Map Quest, a real OG.
That’s probably what eBay thought as well. And let them go.
Anyone want to take bets on a big dumb consultancy like McKinsey, Deloitte, or EY making the recommendation to clean house?
We need laws around layoffs, stat. It shouldn’t be legal for execs to layoff a thousand people and still keep their own jobs. It’s their failure that caused the issue in the first place - they’ve been safe for too long.
Lmao they’re closer to criminalizing lunch breaks than that.
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The only issue they’re having is number not go up.
And what would that law be?
Honestly I am curious what the logistics of a ratio cap between lowest and highest paid employee would result in, say 1:10.
Now there’s a lot more to consider but I think restricting the impact onto the managements possible pay by layoffs (while also capping their pay) would encourage upper management who cares about their workers and company alike, and also kill the layoff cycle thats used to boost end of year reports
I mean, I’m not a lawmaker, but ideally if execs do layoffs they should either have to also layoff a certain percentage of upper level execs dependent on the # of people laid off, and/or the company or execs should have to pay fees dependent on the # of people laid off.
No C suite bonuses if layoff happened within the year and no share buybacks for companies who initiated layoffs in that year either.
You’re suggesting the government should be be involved in a private business hiring / firing decisions? And pay fee’s also? So if a business is having a down time, they don’t have funds for payroll, you want to fine them? A large project concludes, they lay off those people, they need a fine? So they’ll need to calculate fines into the price they charge for projects?
Maybe look at this another way:
The government should represent the interests of the people. If the people have shown interest in curbing these layoff behaviors, where thousands of people lose their jobs while management remains in place with no apparent cuts to the top billing, then why would lawmakers not want to translate these interests into legislation?
I get a reasonable wariness of keeping the government out of private business, but if you have a town of 10 people, all employed by local business owner, and that business owner lays off two people, you have a large percentage of the population affected. If the townspeople enact a local ordinance to prevent this kind of behavior in the future, would they be in the wrong?
To prevent … what kind of behavior exactly? Firing people? I’m for the government protecting peoples interest, but also a business needs the freedom to hire and fire as they see fit, without beuaracy involved. Maybe you’re more referring to a union?
how do you know management is not also being fired? Should the ‘people’ be given a list of potential fires and they vote on who the business can fire?
This breaks down as a business grows. When your business employs a significant portion of the local economy, it accumulates soft power that can rival that of local governments, all while having little to none of the accountability or representation that one would otherwise expect.
Management is likely being fired to an extent, but one used to expect those with the authority and responsibility to be in such a position of power to be held accountable. We’re long gone from the days where a leader would personally take accountability and step down while making unpopular or harmful decisions.
I don’t have a perfect solution to this but I clearly think something needs to change.
It’s easy to screech “nuh uh” at ideas people toss around, where are YOUR solutions that aren’t “Shouldn’t have been part of the 10% laid off, fucking losers! ALL HAIL CORPORATE PROFITS!”
Yep, that sounds great to me! At least for large corporations. Obviously shouldn’t apply to contractors, but that sounds great.
you are forgetting that businesses already pay unemployment. That is their ‘fee’ basically. Your unemployment funds come from the payments a business makes during their monthly or quarterly taxes they pay to the state. When they fire anyone , their unemployment payments they have to make increase the following years. Each year the state looks at how many people a company hired / fired and adjusts their payments for the year. And that calculation takes account the last 3 or so years where I am.
Unemployment isn’t enough, I’m not forgetting that at all.
First let’s let them do the layoffs there will be time to figure out what happened later.
The C in C-suite stands for Cunt
Yikes. That is a brutal number of layoffs.
I’m sure those 1,000 people will have no problem finding work… Once all the other places are done with their layoffs and AI has filled in the gaps, and… Welp, maybe i have to reconsider that first statement 😬
best advice for anyone looking for work these days is to learn a trade. I’m sure the drive for unimpeded profits will eventually crater even those types of jobs through AI and automation, just not as soon.
You know, I ignored my interest in programming for many years, instead opting for a trade, specifically aviation maintenance. I went to school for 2 years for it, passed tests, got licensed, got otj, got taxi quals, engine run certified, and a whole host of stuff.
I also broke my body doing it for $18, after years and years and years, I finally made $25 an hour, whoopie.
I worked around hazardous chemicals, dangerous equipment, high voltage electricity. I stood on concrete floors all day busting my knuckles.
I fell off a ladder and smashed my face on a keel beam, requiring I get stitches. I saw other people get much more hurt than that.
I did all of this with the constant pressure that if I fuck my job up, people are going die, and I will go to jail.
I went back to school, got a job as a software engineer at a midsize company that never is in the news and you have never heard of, and get to sit at home and make 3 times the salary. There are 10 other companies in the same block as mine that have 3-400 hundred person engineering teams, there are lots of jobs for developers outside of the silicon valley bubble, we mostly just hang out and do our thing.
Until trades start paying more, it’s just not worth it. I’m sure someone will come in and say that they are a plumber and make $1000 an hour or something, but I can say, there were 500 people in the facility I worked at with the same qualifications as me making the same $18.
Hot damn, well that’s certainly not what i was trying to advise but i wasn’t very specific either. On top of that, I’m in a unique position having been born in a family that would go on to start their own repair biz. I’ve injured myself on the job no doubt. Made big dumb expensive mistakes, to boot. Never had to expose myself to some of the risks you mentioned though, and my pay is definitely higher than that–but only after having been at it for over 20 years between apprenticing and leveling-up to professional, whenever that happened. Being self-employed is absolutely amazing though, if anyone should be fortunate enough to get a chance like i did. Can’t get laid off from your own job! But you’re also on the hook for your own insurances, you have to establish a good rep and uphold it, keep a current inventory, juggle appointments daily, drive a lot, paperwork aplenty, etc etc etc, the headaches are plentiful… And I’m still not getting rich doing all this work, either so it’s hard to really advocate that strongly for my occupation i guess.
I think my response was more directed at how so many companies are executing layoffs lately. Aren’t a lot of these people programmers as well?
I’m betting AI will “fill the gaps” for a while until profits start to drop due to AI not being ready for primetime in most capacities. Then they’ll start hiring back real people to fix the damage for a few years before trying it all over again.
If AI could do all the work of engineers, the engineers would be using it right now to do their job, while relaxing on the sofa and getting paid.
I’m sure some enterprise jobs could be automated though. Stuff like filling in excel sheets with the same things every day.
I’ve already seen this. If you know some programming and not a software person, you can probably automate a good chunk of your work
preferably a unionized trade, more staying power…
This should cover their asses on that big lawsuit they just lost for harassing that poor old couple. Projected profits would be down ~$300m over the period of time they intended to pay this out, I assume, not much of a mathematician. Gross.
It’s a good thing we haven’t raised their taxes or wages. I heard that as long as we don’t do that they’ll NEVER lay people off or raise prices!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
eBay is following in the footsteps of Google, Discord, Twitch, Unity, and more — by laying off loads of workers this January instead of right before the holidays.
Despite reporting profit of $1.3 billion last quarter, which it described as “another quarter of solid results,” eBay today suggests that there is a “Need for Change.” Company president and CEO Jamie Iannone writes that “there is more we can do to ensure our success,” and argues that eBay should be a “more nimble” company that “makes decisions more quickly” to position itself for “long-term, sustainable growth.”
Never mind that last quarter, eBay CFO Steve Priest already said he was “extremely proud of our teams for delivering on their quarterly financial commitments, maintaining prudent cost discipline, and executing key deliverables in support of our strategy.”
eBay also argues that it hired too quickly, an excuse tech companies have been trotting out for over a year: “While we are making progress against our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business,” writes Iannone today.
It asks that all US employees work from home tomorrow while the company processes this news.
Incidentally, Iannone’s predecessor — former eBay CEO Devin Wenig — got a $57 million severance package after the company cyberstalked and harassed a pair of its critics, sending them live insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath.
The original article contains 294 words, the summary contains 231 words. Saved 21%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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And the huge lawsuit they lost because they are run by assholes.
And the techBro war on skilled wages continues…
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It’s probably because of AI.
