Comment on Discord lays off 170 people, blames growing too quickly | TechCrunch
monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Since they were overstaffed that means the executive team messed up. I am sure they will be held accountable….
Comment on Discord lays off 170 people, blames growing too quickly | TechCrunch
monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Since they were overstaffed that means the executive team messed up. I am sure they will be held accountable….
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They didn’t mess up. The government interest rates were 0% when they borrowed money to increase their workforce from a couple hundred to a thousand people. The interest rate has risen to 5.5% - an interest rate hike that hasn’t been seen since the “stagflation” crisis fifty years ago.
It’s unfortunately for the 170 people being fired, but what’s the alternative? Keep going until they’re bankrupt and then all 1000 people are out of a job?
pup_atlas@pawb.social 9 months ago
No, they messed up. Regardless of user count, and economic context, there is a limit to how fast you can grow a company. Going beyond that limit means that you’re diluting internal company knowledge so much that everyone just ends up doing their own thing— it’s chaos. Quality control, standards, procedures, etc go out the window. You also loose your ability to create accurate, data-backed plans with a high degree of confidence the farther you get from where you are now. You can predict the impact of a few new hires pretty easily, but hundreds, when your current team is only a couple hundred? You simply can’t forecast what holes you are creating, and challenges you will encounter with that many new people (specifically, that high of a growth percentage) in that short a time period. Growing that fast is incredibly risky, and in almost all cases, a terrible business decision. I’ve worked for SEVERAL companies that have worked this way, and it always destroys the company from the inside out.
monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Cool blame the government for the decisions of the executive team…
They weren’t FORCED to hire like crazy, they did it because they got greedy, thought the money train would never stop and got caught with their pants down. Many companies stayed within normal growth estimates and many didn’t.
Executive teams should be expected to predict these things accurately or be held accountable. But they won’t. They will cut staff and will happily pretend they did everything they could cash the checks and do the Bronze Medal meme Celebration as they MBA the fuck out of a company until it is dead and do the same to the next one.