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.
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.