As someone who joined pre-pandemic, my opinion is that we were unsustainably lean at the time. I was shocked at how small the infrastructure team was when I joined the company and things were honestly a bit rickety at the user scale we were at then. While engineering was probably the single biggest department, a large chunk of that 200 were in departments like Trust & Safety and Customer Experience (support).
We saw a huge amount of user growth during the pandemic, we massively increased the number of users that could be in a single guild (server), we launched features that asked a lot more from our AV backend (stage channels, camera video in guild voice), had to deal with a massive increase in spam during the crypto boom, expanded voice calls to Xbox and PS5 and had to deal with an increasingly fraught regulatory environment.
We also shipped a lot of user-facing features during that timeframe. Some of those ultimately got removed because of poor results and depending on your use of the platform I imagine some of those that stayed may not be particularly visible, but we really did ship a lot of stuff and I'm not going to attempt to list it all here.
Obviously, in hindsight we should have had a tighter focus and probably hired a bit less, but this sentiment that we are/were hugely bloated feels pretty wild to me from where I'm sitting.
This is great context and I really appreciate it. I honestly thought of Discord as being super stable even in 2020; interesting to hear things felt rickety, internally.
My sense is that Discord was exploring a lot of different ideas for monetization all at once, and that maybe the sprawl of new projects got unwieldy, esp. in 2022-23; how accurate would you say that is?
Still -- my quick google came up with 750 employees mid 2023. So this is 125-ish employees. Particularly with 5 months severance, that seems too small to save much money (assuming $300k fully loaded, that's $40m pa) and also too small to materially impact velocity by reducing headcount and being more careful about commits.
I'd expect more like a 50% cut to really speed up the significantly fewer projects by eliminating coordination overhead and giving PMs the ability to really slash projects.
ps -- I'm not claiming it was bloated, that's (implicitly, and I believe fairly?) the ceo's claim.
It’s the way HN continues to rationalize the hundreds of thousands of layoffs. Every company is bloated and few software engineers are worth keeping it seems.
We saw a huge amount of user growth during the pandemic, we massively increased the number of users that could be in a single guild (server), we launched features that asked a lot more from our AV backend (stage channels, camera video in guild voice), had to deal with a massive increase in spam during the crypto boom, expanded voice calls to Xbox and PS5 and had to deal with an increasingly fraught regulatory environment.
We also shipped a lot of user-facing features during that timeframe. Some of those ultimately got removed because of poor results and depending on your use of the platform I imagine some of those that stayed may not be particularly visible, but we really did ship a lot of stuff and I'm not going to attempt to list it all here.
Obviously, in hindsight we should have had a tighter focus and probably hired a bit less, but this sentiment that we are/were hugely bloated feels pretty wild to me from where I'm sitting.
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