There's an argument to be made that the company is doing harm to customers just by existing in such a precarious state. Anything that forces the technical leadership of the company to do the right thing or fail completely is actually better for customers in the long term.
Defensive comments like this reveal something deeper about a company. The leadership continues to believe that they couldn't have done anything differently that would change their current circumstance. This is a dangerous indicator that they'll continue doing the same things.
Not "calling for their ultimate demise", just projecting based on recent knowledge of how they do business. The "questionable design decision" is a symptom, not a cause.
It's not clear they have a long term sustainable business model. They clearly have a problem with the cost of customer acquisition running up against the lifetime value of a customer. If they can't fix that then the model is dead.
Execution issues are just adding fuel to the fire.
Sounds more like non technical leadership sleeping at the wheel. I mean if they could just afford to lose money like this why bother with all that work to fix it?
I had considered that, but that seemed the less likely scenario: that they'd intentionally let their business get damaged, rather than having issues that most large corporations face.
I mean, they clearly don't have a handle on a wide variety of bad actors in their ecosystem, but keep putting out awkward attempts at solutions. This suggests they're trying to fix perceived problems, but are avoiding the core of the problem because they either don't see it or don't have the political will to fix it.
Their business model has the most to lose if this trend continues. So it is understandable why the ceo would take such creative liberties to paint the picture.
The irony is the better ran the tech company, the more they can slash without short term consequences, but the long term impact might be catastrophic and difficult to diagnose.
The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by definition.
As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in this case. They are just looking for even more profits. It's not even close to a "struggling company".
But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules. Of course under these conditions companies will always choose to fire people and keep making profits to its owners.
But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s) profitable.
As a customer, the one thing I really want to know is whether or not the company is dealing with this in a manner that helps me decide if I should continue being a customer.
Do they understand that they may need to fire the CEO given that the CEO probably is the weakest link here? Do they have sufficient liquidity and capital to invest in resetting the culture and hiring people who can turn this around?
The company in the article clearly has very serious problems. Based on the description they're in serious trouble no matter what.
But when there's a boom going on in an industry it can be so easy to make money and gain new clients that it can cover-up a lot of fundamental problems with the way that business is run.
Because money is pouring in the door (either by earning it or from VCs) the company can afford to give out a lot of perks and raises. It's easy to hire extra employees to pick up slack or for employees to get away with wasting large amounts of time or being semi-competent. If customers buy your service once and never come back who cares if there are beating a path to your door? There will always be more so you'll stay in the black. The atmosphere can be really relaxed and fun and casual. Lots of different ideas can be tried in a "throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks" manner. It doesn't really matter if you fail, things are going really well!
The problem is what happens when the market starts to cool down. The perks suddenly disappear in the raises stop happening. Manual processes that wasted a lot of employee time or cost extra people to have to be hired suddenly get cleaned up and people find themselves working overtime or without jobs. When the executive start seeing the money disappear the feeling inside the place changes completely. You better not make any mistakes or trying waste money with a new idea. Best to stick with what used to work; that must've been correct. Wasting money is the last thing you need.
But it doesn't really matter if the employees were doing their best job and weren't slacking off or wasting resources and all. Even if they are model employees the business model may have been unsustainable (like pets.com) and never would've succeeded even if everything had been run perfectly. $300/customer acquisition cost doesn't work well when the average customer ends buys $25/year in products.
If you knew all this was going on, employees could get out near the top or skip the ride altogether and work in a company that's solid building up their reputation there. Instead they might get laid off or have to leave under desperate circumstances and might have to find another job on the quick.
All because a change in the market revealed that there was a company that never should've been successful in the first place and may have only grown through an accident of luck.
reply