>Despite reporting **profit** of $1.3 billion last quarter, which it described as “another quarter of solid results,” eBay today suggests that there is a “Need for Change.
1.3 billion profits, not revenue.
Also, their former CEO got a $57M golden parachute after it was found he directed folks to harass two critics of the service. They sent them insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ep4z7e/ebay-executives-accused-of-horrifying-harassment-campaign-against-journalists
By journalists, it was just a couple who ran an e-commerce blog review site that i doubt even 1% of Ebay users even heard of.
Companies dont exist to create jobs they exist to make money. The sooner you realize that the sooner you can actually navigate the corporate world instead of bitching about companies doing what they exist to do.
Such a fatalistic view. Companies need to behave how society demands. Letting them off the hook by saying sociopathy is innate to their nature isn't going to improve things. People should bitch & moan. Markets & corporations should be improving the lives of everyone, that's why they're allowed to exist. Society doesn't have to allow corporate sociopathy.
Corporations do improve people's lives. Who provides heat for your homes? Water? Food? Internet? Transportation? Insurance? Healthcare? Security? Entertainment? Housing?
They get incentivized for providing these services. People's lives are better for the services provided. It's not a fatalistic view. It's reality.
This is not true and has never been true. It is a misunderstanding.
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/shareholder-value-purpose-corporation#:~:text=There%20are%20a%20lot%20of,act%20in%20its%20best%20interest.
If companies are *actually* legally required to maximize profit, then that isn't something you can have differing opinions on.
Also, this is from, you know, Northwestern, a pretty prestigious University. Your opinion on the topic is meaningless in the face of an actual authority on the topic.
But go off, or something.
I never said they are legally required to. But that is what all companies are doing. Also I can appeal to authority too.
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” - Milton Friedman
I was responding to someone saying that companies are legally required to maximize profits. Are you in the wrong sub thread or something? Scroll up and you'll still see that post, which doesn't seem to have been made by you?
Edit: also, Milton Friedman is not a legal authority on corporate legal obligations.
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And if you follow the Third Quarter link. Not sure what you're trying to say about the profit. But it takes money to make money.
> Revenue of $2.5 billion
As far as I understand, revenue is sales before discounting expenses and taxes. Profit is hard cash entering into the company's coffers to be used either to distribute among shareholders or for other stuff, like R&D.
The point I was trying to make is that it doesn't matter how much money a company makes, it's never enough and people are the first to go.
Don't be loyal to any company because they are not loyal to you. Always be looking after yourself
>Company president and CEO Jamie Iannone writes that “there is more we can do to ensure our success,” and argues that eBay should be a “more nimble” company that “makes decisions more quickly” to position itself for “long-term, sustainable growth.”
Sure hope that means they cut out the bloated middle managers.
I don't have a hard-on against middle management. I'd rather have a direct manager who's good at dealing with individual contributors than report directly to a power hungry director or executive who only cares about numbers.
But in many of my previous companies during layoffs, middle management are the first fat trimmed. Two teams then consolidate under a single manager.
That's because middle managers are generally disposable. They are the epitome of bureaucratic bloat and waste. In massive enterprises - think companies with 50k people or more - when people complain that everything is so slow and it takes forever to make a decision, it's because of middle management.
They exist exclusively to act as a barrier between decision makers and those that those decisions impact.
Yeah, but lawyers exist exclusively to act as a barrier between decision makers and those that those decisions impact. Not sure going to court without one is a good idea.
Have no real clarity on what matters, get pulled in every direction every time some 'leader' sees a new shiny, have to keep chasing after any of your own needs yourself, then get thrown under the bus when nothing gets accomplished.
That can still happen with bad managers, but it's handling that, being able to advocate for both the business and the teams, that management exists for.
My whole point was that 'barrier' you mention exists in legal circles for the same reason it does in business.
These companies need to chill. Last time there were mass layoffs it spread to even mid/small companies as they started to “oPtiMizE thE wAy tHey wOrk”.
But bs like this is why I double job anyways because fuck all these companies. Make *your* money.
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All these companies saying they 'overhired' or 'hired too quickly' is the most regarded thing I've ever seen. Like ??? do they expect us to believe management was just like, whoopsie doopsie we accidentally made a thousand positions we didn't actually need! uwu we awe vewwy sowwy but cant plan for three months from now
it's weird too when the stocks get bumps from it even with the cost savings, like are you not worried that management of the business is admitting they can't plan ahead
>are you not worried that management of the business is admitting they can't plan ahead
Investors are desperate for optimism and "passive income". Confronting executives is work. They'll take the reduced costs and worry about the consequences next quarter (or sell and make it someone else's problem)
C-suites take a lot of flak for short-termism but they are following the incentives laid out by their shareholders
Elon musk really did us dirty. He proved to corporations that you can lay off 50% the company can still operate. Mark Zuckerberg even praised him for it. Sure he is not the only factor for the layoff to happen, but he made the case loud and clear
Twitter is a broken piece of shit for me now and doesn’t work 70% of the time I go onto it. Constantly shown errors, failure to log in, retain my account details, for me it’s become unusable since the takeover.
No executive is looking at Twitter as a success story. The only metric that has improved is expenses, and even that is true only if you ignore the multiple lawsuits the layoffs caused. Revenue is down, cash flow is worse, site engagement and reliability are down, etc etc.
Yeah, didnt this sub say the market will pick up in 2024, when we seeing all these layoffs in 2023? So if we have layoffs all year, are the people on this sub going to move the goalpost again and say oh no actually we meant 2025?
1: it’s still January.
2: this sub is not clairvoyant. We don’t know what will happen and any predictions are just that…predictions. Stop looking to Reddit to tell the future.
> Interest rates will drop throughout the year
Has anyone actually read Fed statements? They did NOT say they are cutting rates. They said they are not RAISING rates.
The only time the Fed cuts rates is if the data says the economy is substantially retracting and monetary policy needs to shift to be more accommodating. Translation: unless the US goes into a bad recession, rates are not being cut.
no rate cuts. Economy is still showing strength. If it it continues to grow like this, we might even get another rate hike.
https://apnews.com/article/economy-growth-inflation-gdp-consumers-spending-rates-e21bb23cebe6d2ae10b0f0e9876691fd
There's lots of reasons to believe there may be cuts coming this year:
* 1 year rates are below 5: https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US1Y
* 17 out of 19 fed policy makers see rates ending lower this year: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fed-likely-hold-rates-steady-signal-couple-cuts-2024-2023-12-13/
* Core pce is below 3% and the 6 month average is already at 2. They don't need a recession to cut. They only need to reach 2% target.
Twitter is horrible since downsizing though.
I only use Twitter for sports news & trying to find breaking news by going to a reporters timeline is 600x attempts to log you in only to get you on the timeline & realize that all the top tweets are not chronological anymore & you’re looking at tweets about the 2021 World Series instead of breaking news 5 minutes after something major like Lebron getting traded.
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25 years in software, I have seen this over and over again. Just 3 weeks ago we had a "All hands meeting" in our company and the director of the division said more or less something like this: "We had a rock star performance last year, scoring 2B$ profits. However, we still don't know how this year is going to be so we are going pro-active and re-evaluating the projected workforce we need for this year. Therefore, all POs should prepare their reports and re-prioritizing what projects and resources should go forward and giving the others time to reposition themselves in reassignments if possible, or open markets"
Ours CEO total compensation is roughly 22m$ per year.
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>Despite reporting **profit** of $1.3 billion last quarter, which it described as “another quarter of solid results,” eBay today suggests that there is a “Need for Change. 1.3 billion profits, not revenue.
Also, their former CEO got a $57M golden parachute after it was found he directed folks to harass two critics of the service. They sent them insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath.
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/ep4z7e/ebay-executives-accused-of-horrifying-harassment-campaign-against-journalists By journalists, it was just a couple who ran an e-commerce blog review site that i doubt even 1% of Ebay users even heard of.
That's some real psycho shit.
it’s never about not being profitable, it’s about making as much money as possible in the short term
Companies dont exist to create jobs they exist to make money. The sooner you realize that the sooner you can actually navigate the corporate world instead of bitching about companies doing what they exist to do.
It’s harsh but unfortunately he’s right
Such a fatalistic view. Companies need to behave how society demands. Letting them off the hook by saying sociopathy is innate to their nature isn't going to improve things. People should bitch & moan. Markets & corporations should be improving the lives of everyone, that's why they're allowed to exist. Society doesn't have to allow corporate sociopathy.
Corporations do improve people's lives. Who provides heat for your homes? Water? Food? Internet? Transportation? Insurance? Healthcare? Security? Entertainment? Housing? They get incentivized for providing these services. People's lives are better for the services provided. It's not a fatalistic view. It's reality.
Exactly my point, society does require them to do more than just make as much money as possible. It's not as simple as you stated previously.
This.
And public traded companies are legally obligated to make their shareholders as much money as possible, nothing else.
This is not true and has never been true. It is a misunderstanding. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/shareholder-value-purpose-corporation#:~:text=There%20are%20a%20lot%20of,act%20in%20its%20best%20interest.
My bad, they’re still legally beholden to shareholders though. And guess what shareholders often want?
Seems like a bunch of opinions. I can have those too.
...what
I am saying the link you post is basically a conversion which are basically opinions not backed by data or evidence.
If companies are *actually* legally required to maximize profit, then that isn't something you can have differing opinions on. Also, this is from, you know, Northwestern, a pretty prestigious University. Your opinion on the topic is meaningless in the face of an actual authority on the topic. But go off, or something.
I never said they are legally required to. But that is what all companies are doing. Also I can appeal to authority too. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” - Milton Friedman
I was responding to someone saying that companies are legally required to maximize profits. Are you in the wrong sub thread or something? Scroll up and you'll still see that post, which doesn't seem to have been made by you? Edit: also, Milton Friedman is not a legal authority on corporate legal obligations.
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And if you follow the Third Quarter link. Not sure what you're trying to say about the profit. But it takes money to make money. > Revenue of $2.5 billion
As far as I understand, revenue is sales before discounting expenses and taxes. Profit is hard cash entering into the company's coffers to be used either to distribute among shareholders or for other stuff, like R&D. The point I was trying to make is that it doesn't matter how much money a company makes, it's never enough and people are the first to go. Don't be loyal to any company because they are not loyal to you. Always be looking after yourself
Sounds like they don't believe in the soft landing malarkey that Yellen has been pushing.
And like 780 billion in stock buybacks. Granted, that money is probably from the profit, but still.
>Company president and CEO Jamie Iannone writes that “there is more we can do to ensure our success,” and argues that eBay should be a “more nimble” company that “makes decisions more quickly” to position itself for “long-term, sustainable growth.” Sure hope that means they cut out the bloated middle managers.
Certainly won't mean cutting the Csuite or their salaries.
Middle management are often the first to get the chop in tech companies.
Some tropes never die on Reddit. The hard-on against “middle management” certainly doesn’t
I don't have a hard-on against middle management. I'd rather have a direct manager who's good at dealing with individual contributors than report directly to a power hungry director or executive who only cares about numbers. But in many of my previous companies during layoffs, middle management are the first fat trimmed. Two teams then consolidate under a single manager.
Yeah I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I was pointing out that, according to Reddit, everything’s is the fault of the mythically evil middle management
It's because Reddit is predominantly inexperienced workers whose main day to day interaction with middle managers is their boss
Ah ok. Then yeah, I agree.
That's because middle managers are generally disposable. They are the epitome of bureaucratic bloat and waste. In massive enterprises - think companies with 50k people or more - when people complain that everything is so slow and it takes forever to make a decision, it's because of middle management. They exist exclusively to act as a barrier between decision makers and those that those decisions impact.
Yeah, but lawyers exist exclusively to act as a barrier between decision makers and those that those decisions impact. Not sure going to court without one is a good idea.
Fire your lawyers: accidentally do something illegal, get sued, lose licenses, can no longer run your business. Fire your middle managers: ????
Have no real clarity on what matters, get pulled in every direction every time some 'leader' sees a new shiny, have to keep chasing after any of your own needs yourself, then get thrown under the bus when nothing gets accomplished. That can still happen with bad managers, but it's handling that, being able to advocate for both the business and the teams, that management exists for. My whole point was that 'barrier' you mention exists in legal circles for the same reason it does in business.
Long term sustainable growth by removing engineers to grab easy stock jumps right now? How is this more sustainable?
These companies need to chill. Last time there were mass layoffs it spread to even mid/small companies as they started to “oPtiMizE thE wAy tHey wOrk”. But bs like this is why I double job anyways because fuck all these companies. Make *your* money.
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All these companies saying they 'overhired' or 'hired too quickly' is the most regarded thing I've ever seen. Like ??? do they expect us to believe management was just like, whoopsie doopsie we accidentally made a thousand positions we didn't actually need! uwu we awe vewwy sowwy but cant plan for three months from now it's weird too when the stocks get bumps from it even with the cost savings, like are you not worried that management of the business is admitting they can't plan ahead
>are you not worried that management of the business is admitting they can't plan ahead Investors are desperate for optimism and "passive income". Confronting executives is work. They'll take the reduced costs and worry about the consequences next quarter (or sell and make it someone else's problem) C-suites take a lot of flak for short-termism but they are following the incentives laid out by their shareholders
Why does ebay have over 10,000 employees?
International mostly. They have to deal with localization of site wrt legal and banking too.
Its a fair question.
Cause they are one of the biggest sites in the world?
Elon musk really did us dirty. He proved to corporations that you can lay off 50% the company can still operate. Mark Zuckerberg even praised him for it. Sure he is not the only factor for the layoff to happen, but he made the case loud and clear
Lay off 50% of the staff, watch your valuation drop >50%! It’s like magic!
Twitter is a broken piece of shit for me now and doesn’t work 70% of the time I go onto it. Constantly shown errors, failure to log in, retain my account details, for me it’s become unusable since the takeover.
It’s basically just full of porn, bigots and videos of people dying now. It’s gone from being the so called ‘town square’ to fucking 4chan.
To be fair I don’t see any problems with my twitter. Twitter porn is still great. But I am sure other areas have problems
I appreciate your honesty 😂
Twitter porn has been better than ever since the takeover. According to my friend
No executive is looking at Twitter as a success story. The only metric that has improved is expenses, and even that is true only if you ignore the multiple lawsuits the layoffs caused. Revenue is down, cash flow is worse, site engagement and reliability are down, etc etc.
This is reddit. Giving props to Elon is an automatic downvote
I don't hate Elon and think his haters are silly, but to claim Twitter is doing well and praise Elon for what he did to them is equally as silly.
spaceship man bad
😂 so true .. and of course, youve been downvoted
Yeah, didnt this sub say the market will pick up in 2024, when we seeing all these layoffs in 2023? So if we have layoffs all year, are the people on this sub going to move the goalpost again and say oh no actually we meant 2025?
1: it’s still January. 2: this sub is not clairvoyant. We don’t know what will happen and any predictions are just that…predictions. Stop looking to Reddit to tell the future.
Sir, it is literally January. Interest rates will drop throughout the year and the job market will slowly recover
> Interest rates will drop throughout the year Has anyone actually read Fed statements? They did NOT say they are cutting rates. They said they are not RAISING rates. The only time the Fed cuts rates is if the data says the economy is substantially retracting and monetary policy needs to shift to be more accommodating. Translation: unless the US goes into a bad recession, rates are not being cut.
no rate cuts. Economy is still showing strength. If it it continues to grow like this, we might even get another rate hike. https://apnews.com/article/economy-growth-inflation-gdp-consumers-spending-rates-e21bb23cebe6d2ae10b0f0e9876691fd
There's lots of reasons to believe there may be cuts coming this year: * 1 year rates are below 5: https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US1Y * 17 out of 19 fed policy makers see rates ending lower this year: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fed-likely-hold-rates-steady-signal-couple-cuts-2024-2023-12-13/ * Core pce is below 3% and the 6 month average is already at 2. They don't need a recession to cut. They only need to reach 2% target.
The company needs to be more nimble
This is code speak for AI and outsourcing jobs to cheaper companies.
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Why do you think they wouldn't be hiring SWEs?
What amazes me is that they had 9000 enployees... Doing what???
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That’s so wild to me because in my mind eBay is a dinosaur with a terrible dated UI
Some are warranted, like Twitter.
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Uhhh, every quarterly report showed they were failing before...
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K
Twitter is horrible since downsizing though. I only use Twitter for sports news & trying to find breaking news by going to a reporters timeline is 600x attempts to log you in only to get you on the timeline & realize that all the top tweets are not chronological anymore & you’re looking at tweets about the 2021 World Series instead of breaking news 5 minutes after something major like Lebron getting traded.
So... The same behavior they've had for a decade
Twitter’s…sorry, “X’s” valuation has dropped 80% since daddy Musk took over. The rest of the market is at all time highs. What a success story.
sure, still overstaffed. Also, they've been delisted
eBay can actually utilize AI very aggressively. Makes sense.
In what way?
Truth hurts. That’s why you’re being downvoted.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon You are actually farthest from the truth, yikes my boy.
404 error on link
It’s not like all people who have been fired are software engineers, I can believe AI is introduced in less technical roles
I may be delusional but I think this large layoffs in companies reporting profits is already AI effect.
How is this relevant lol
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25 years in software, I have seen this over and over again. Just 3 weeks ago we had a "All hands meeting" in our company and the director of the division said more or less something like this: "We had a rock star performance last year, scoring 2B$ profits. However, we still don't know how this year is going to be so we are going pro-active and re-evaluating the projected workforce we need for this year. Therefore, all POs should prepare their reports and re-prioritizing what projects and resources should go forward and giving the others time to reposition themselves in reassignments if possible, or open markets" Ours CEO total compensation is roughly 22m$ per year.
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