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Snap Is Laying Off Around 100 Engineers

Posted by BeauHD on from the slice-and-dice dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Snap is laying off about 100 engineers -- nearly 10 percent of the team -- CNBC has learned. The company has seen smaller rounds of layoffs in recent months in its marketing, recruiting and content divisions. These layoffs would be Snap's largest yet and the first to hit the company's engineers. The company last month rolled out the redesign of its pioneering photo messaging app. The redesign separated publisher content from content posted by friends and connections. Snap reported roughly 3,000 employees as of the December quarter and said in its first annual filing that it expected "headcount growth to continue for the foreseeable future."

27 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How the fuck did they ever have 100 engineers in the first place? Not to belittle their efforts, but you'd think that even the awesomest, most futuristic, most complicated messaging app in the history of civilization would have about .. three engineers, maybe?

    How complicated can it be?

    1. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      How the fuck did they ever have 100 engineers in the first place?

      According to TFS, that was only 10%, so they had a thousand engineers.

      How complicated can it be?

      Indeed. I am always amazed when I learn the headcount of these businesses built around an app that looks like it was slapped together in a few hours.

      Maybe that bloated headcount has something to do with their financial troubles.

    2. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by hawguy · · Score: 2

      How the fuck did they ever have 100 engineers in the first place? Not to belittle their efforts, but you'd think that even the awesomest, most futuristic, most complicated messaging app in the history of civilization would have about .. three engineers, maybe?

      How complicated can it be?

      It turns out that even simple things are complicated when you drill down to all of the details.

      When someone asks a question like this, I like to point to the Slack decision flow to decide whether or not to show a notification. Seems simple on the surface, right? If the user is in the channel and they get a message then notify. But in reality it's considerably more complicated:

      https://twitter.com/mathowie/s...

      Now multiply this across every feature and it turns out that even a simple chat app is complicated. Throw in build engineers, QA, SRE's,24x7 monitoring, etc and it's easy to get to 100 engineers.

    3. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You think that's bad, look at google. Their product is just a form with a single field.

    4. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by hawguy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Who names a productivity software, "Slack"

      If you've seen the inane conversations that go on in a typical company's slack channels, you'd know that it's an appropriate name

    5. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by dj245 · · Score: 1

      It turns out that even simple things are complicated when you drill down to all of the details.

      When someone asks a question like this, I like to point to the Slack decision flow to decide whether or not to show a notification. Seems simple on the surface, right? If the user is in the channel and they get a message then notify. But in reality it's considerably more complicated:

      https://twitter.com/mathowie/s...

      Now multiply this across every feature and it turns out that even a simple chat app is complicated. Throw in build engineers, QA, SRE's,24x7 monitoring, etc and it's easy to get to 100 engineers.

      That is an absolutely ridiculous chart. The user can customize their experience so finely that it seems impossible to get the desired result. Per-device preferences, per-channel preferences, both with different levels of settings and actions. DND and DND overrides, user presence online or not, subscribed to thread messages, etc.

      I'm not a user of Slack but if that's how the app handles notifications, I shudder to think about how one could possibly understand how to use the software effectively.

      --
      Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
    6. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      no, that's just the carrot they use to attract their product

    7. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 1

      You think that's bad, look at google. Their product is just a form with a single field.

      Ba dum ching!

    8. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by hawguy · · Score: 1

      I'm not a user of Slack but if that's how the app handles notifications, I shudder to think about how one could possibly understand how to use the software effectively.

      You don't have to use all of the options - just use the ones you need.

    9. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Exactly my question....

      "Snap reported roughly 3,000 employees as of the December quarter"

      What in the world could they be doing to need 3,000 people?? WTF?

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    10. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by iampiti · · Score: 1

      Invent ways to fuck up the UI :)

    11. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      I currently work for a major healthcare billing company. My team builds some very complex, enterprise-grade apps with a lot of bells and whistles. Our team has about 10 people on it, and there's roughly another dozen in a related group that does some of the software deployment and tooling.

      I have no idea what we'd do with 100 engineers or employees, much less 3,000. That's almost 100 times the size of our entire combined team (although that's not counting all the people in other departments like sales, HR, research, etc).

      How the hell could a craptastic piece of shit like Snapchat suck up 3,000 people? It's mind-boggling.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    12. Re:Isn't that the company with the messaging app? by drsquare · · Score: 1

      If Snapchat is so complicated how come Facebook can copy everything they do in like five minutes?

  2. What do they do?! by h4ck7h3p14n37 · · Score: 1

    I know it's a silly question, but what are those 3,000 employees doing?

    Why would you need more than like six people to build the Snapchat app?

    1. Re:What do they do?! by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      6 people to implement. 2994 people to figure out how to monetize your fake business model.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  3. No they're not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    They are laying off programmers. Snap doesn't have any engineers.

    1. Re:No they're not. by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Funny

      They are laying off programmers. Snap doesn't have any engineers.

      You must be from Oregon.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    2. Re:No they're not. by drsquare · · Score: 1

      Or Germany.

  4. I'm a boring parent, which one is Snap, again? by shess · · Score: 1

    I'm guessing it's something about roasting people, as in "Aw, Snap"? Or is it iot fasteners for your pants?

  5. Whatever by nashv · · Score: 1

    Why is a useless company making a useless app laying off people Slashdot news ? Yesterday, toddlers at our local kindergarten decided to no longer scribble on drawing paper. This news makes exactly the same amount of difference to the world.

    --
    Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
    1. Re:Whatever by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      The subtle news in this article is social media is struggling because it's marketing model, just delivers diluted marketing that sells nothing. When their claims of results are checked for actual sales, that means Google and Facebook, their real customers the advertisers are finding they are shit. Soon the demand will go to Google for full time banners, else they can go fuck themselves with the diluted advertising model that sells nothing except fucking paying for ads, adwords. Proof in the last US election, Google in the most democratically corrupt fashion imaginable was in the tank for Clinton and lost big time, seeing as all the other major companies, main stream media companies, the deep state and shadow government as well as in an extremely corrupt fashion the White House and it's crew of blackgaurds http://www.dictionary.com/brow... (heh, heh), that loss was proof positive of their lack of ability to actually sell anything, except of course themselves and the scam of targeted adwords.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  6. Redesign by blackfeltfedora · · Score: 1

    I hope that anyone involved in that GUI redesign was let go, it was absolutely terrible.

    1. Re:Redesign by aicrules · · Score: 1

      It was a change. Many people whined like babies when it happened. I am on the beta and while it was initially a shock, I'm not a moron who can't adapt. The change to separate friend content from publisher content was an excellent idea. This was similar to the backlack against Facebook when they launched Timeline. People don't like having to relearn something they already know. Whine whine whine

  7. Layoffs? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Oh snap!

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  8. Please add this definition to Merriam-Webster: by LordHighExecutioner · · Score: 1

    to snap (verb):snapped, snapping. Intransitive verb. To instantly layoff a large number of technician without any reason.

  9. About time by The123king · · Score: 1

    Mayb3e they realised that people don't want to buy their stupid glasses. If people didn't want Google Glass (which was relatively stylish), who wants a pair of snapchat spectacles that make you look like a right berk

    --
    If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
  10. How would you orchestrate 1000 developers on this? by LostMyBeaver · · Score: 1

    To be honest, I haven't really used snap, but from what I understand it's a chat program that allows you to send photographs of your genitals to people with a hope they will be deleted before they can share them everywhere.

    Let's assume you're going to build a messaging back end for that. Companies able to handle real-time data processing for 100,000+ MMORPG players which is somewhat more complex in nature do this all the time. If you also consider that using something like an XMPP back-end would save a lot of work since there are some great hardened ones out there already. The fact is, it's really about the front end and code for data collection.

    So that means, they have 1000 developers mostly working on making code for a front end. Opera Software never had half that many people and accomplished substantially more.. having written more or less everything but the operating system itself. Of course, I suppose that's the different between using educated engineers and using whatever you could hire to make your corporate growth look impressive.