Discord lays off 170 people, blames growing too quickly | TechCrunch::Discord has become a mainstay for many online communities in recent years, but its relative success hasn’t shielded the platform from the financial woes Discord is laying off 17% of staff, or 170 people.
So basically… they’re doing so well that they have to fire people. Cool story Discord. Out of curiosity how much are your Executives getting paid?
If you read at least the summary from the bot, you’d see that discord isn’t and never was profitable.
I wouldn’t call that “doing too well to fire people”, just means they fucked up and hired more people than they could financially/operationally afford
Since they were overstaffed that means the executive team messed up. I am sure they will be held accountable….
They didn’t mess up. The government interest rates were 0% when they borrowed money to grow their workforce by about 800 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 and one that couldn’t really be forseen unless you could have predicted the wars in Russia and Israel.
It’s unfortunate 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?
The government absolutely knew this would happen when they decided to raise interest rates. They are acting on advice that things would be even worse if they didn’t rise interest rates. Other countries around the world are doing the same thing, with the same unfortunate results.
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 (verb) the fuck out of a company until it is dead and do the same to the next one.
I dint think Discord will ever be profitable. But there is extreme value in communication. The need for profit destroying good things once again.
How the fuck does a chat program justify a workforce of one thousand employees in the first place?! How do they expect to ever get in the green when they’re spending that much money on staff?
Is their entire business model to just endlessly pull in V.C. money and “grow” until they can’t get investors on board anymore? Actually, don’t answer that one, I assume that’s how almost every tech company works these days, and at some point it’s all going to crash.
