Anecdata, but in my group people are using Snap less and less. Meanwhile I see more and more Instagram stories each week.<p>It's sad for the employees affected, but this could be a wake up call to Snap. I like the premise of Snapchat, that messages are ephemeral, but it seems like Snap the company doesn't realize that people don't use their app for sponsored stories. It's primarily a messaging tool for friends.
Growth rarely lasts forever, and Snap had more employees than generally considered reasonable with such a single-purpose app. I'm surprised they aren't laying off more engineers though, personally.
I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars the mistake of signing that $2 billion Google Cloud deal [1] has cost them unnecessarily and how many jobs are going to get cut as an ultimate consequence.<p>Their SG&A expense line was ~$450 million the last three quarters of 2017, up from $182 million in Q4 of 2016.<p>Daily active users only increased from 158m to 187m in that time, which should have prompted a very modest cost increase in their operating results. They added upwards of $800 million in new annual expenses that should have never been stapled on to the business. Reducing that back to where it was, would still leave them burning $150m or so per quarter in net income (maybe $100m in cash per quarter) in 2018 assuming sales hold up, but it'd be a lot closer to manageable. As it is, they're massively bleeding red ink.<p>Free cash flow was around negative $800m the last four quarters. Their cash went from ~$3.2 billion to $2 billion in 2017. It looks like that will be down to ~$1.2 billion by the end of 2018.<p>[1] <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/02/02/snap-will-spend-on-google-cloud/" rel="nofollow">http://fortune.com/2017/02/02/snap-will-spend-on-google-clou...</a>
My sister is in college and works at Starbucks.<p>She and a group of her coworkers delivered coffee to one of their offices in Santa Monica.<p>Their last major update really upset a lot of people, so when my younger sister ran into a Product Manager, she chatted with him and mentioned the update.<p>His response was, change is good, deal with it.<p>It really rubbed me the wrong way on multiple levels. 1) You're being a asshole, 2) you're being an asshole to your key demographic, and 3) I agree with her, the new update sucks.<p>There is an odd feeling I get about Snapchat, it's almost as if they are successful despite themselves.
One look at the content on the "Discovery" page and you instantly understand the platform's weakness. No one is making genuine, useful, compelling content. It's almost exclusively hyper-vapid garbage.
Seems like the quality of content & comments posted on HN goes down dramatically whenever the discussion is on Facebook or Snap. I understand these are hot-button companies but I think HN could do better than to have these aimless discussions on obscure things. For the vast majority of companies this news would hardly even get posted.
It’s rarely one layoff once the momentum stops. Companies usually do the first one or two thoughtfully with good packages, but eventually it turns into just another tool for management. The irony is that management research suggests that cutting work is where the benefits come from - just cutting the people doesn’t help.
This seems particularly alarming for Snap - they badly need a coherent go to market strategy and client relationships.<p>IMO They need to work hard on a clear business model and ramp up sales against that, not fire the sales people for terrible strategy...
Out of curiosity, how does a company lay off ~220 employees yet still have many open positions on its website? I looked at the jobs section for snap and it seems like they have a plethora of engineering jobs despite laying off 120 engineers. Why?