The bit that is viewable in the paywalled article indicates 1000 people will be let go and their revenues are forecasted to shrink as people go back to pre-pandemic shopping habits. I believe they were on a hiring binge last year to get 2000+ engineers. Any indication if the layoffs are just engineering or across the board?
"The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its divisions, though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting, support and sales units, said Mr. Lütke. “We’re also eliminating over-specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that were convenient to have but too far removed from building products,” he wrote. Staff who are being let go will be notified on Tuesday."
As the large majority (if not all) of this year layoffs in tech companies, engineering is barely affected.
> ”The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its divisions, though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting, support and sales units, said Mr. Lütke.”
edit: Re-read the thread somehow missed that it was specific to engineering. Comment makes sense - engineering typically last to go for obvious reasons.
I'll counter though that I don't think its about pricey severances but more related to keep core products operating and being built for the future. Lutke comes from software engineering.
It made sense to me. I was and their reply was talking about engineering jobs.
I said that all these layoffs are not firing many, if any, software engineers. They replied that, while that’s true, tech companies are not firing software engineers, they are on a hiring freeze and canceled offers that were out. So not firing, but not hiring any either.
A hiring freeze for any one company generally means slowly bleeding in that area: people are still leaving, you're just not getting anyone new to replace them.
But if basically every company is doing a hiring freeze, and employees are unable or unwilling to quit because of bad economic conditions, maybe less so.
