SoundCloud is cutting over 40 percent of its staff, the company announced on its blog. The streaming service will let go 173 of its 420 employees in order to "ensure our path to long-term, independent success," SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung wrote. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
As part of the reduction, the company will shutter its offices in San Francisco and London, leaving only its New York and Berlin offices operational. It's been a trying year for SoundCloud to say the least. The company announced it may possibly run out of money before the end of 2017 back in January, before landing a $70 million credit line from investors to stave off certain collapse.
Source: The Verge
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday July 07 2017, @11:33AM
The advantage of only hiring inexperienced smart young things to staff a startup is sometimes the kids are creative, which is useful sometimes in some creative roles early in a companies life, and they're cheaper than old timers, maybe half price. The disadvantage is a lot of NIH and youthful inexperience and judgment errors means there's plenty of non-creative positions that now require ten people to do the work of one competent experienced person, especially when dis-economies of scale set in like coordination and communication.
So if you move the decimal point one spot to left the numbers makes sense. But then you'd have to pay 1/10th the number of employees twice as much individually, which is "too expensive".
Aside from outright empire building games. If you want a title promotion your direct reports direct report needs to implement a manual data entry department updating /etc/hosts files and password files, you can't have DNS or LDAP AND get a promotion for managing a larger team.