Vimeo just got hit by another round of layoffs, and it sounds like it was a big one.
Business Insider reported earlier [last] week that the video hosting site had cut jobs across its global workforce.
“Yesterday, following Vimeo’s recent acquisition by a private equity firm, I learned that I, along with a large portion of the company, was impacted by layoffs,” wrote the company’s former vice president of Global Brand & Creative, Dave Brown, in a post on LinkedIn.
A software engineer said in their own LinkedIn post that they were laid off along with a “gigantic amount of the company.” And a former Vimeo staffer also posted on X that “almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off,” including the entire video team.
The news comes just months after the Italian tech holding company Bending Spoons bought Vimeo for $1.38 billion last year. Vimeo had previously cut its workforce by 10% in September.
If we in the West ever manage to extricate ourselves from intentionally convoluted laws that allowed these entities to come into being, I hope businesses with any vague hint of appearance resembling these perfidious demons from the ninth circle of hell are bound like wicked watchers and cast into crevices under rocks above lava.
I get your sentiment and I don’t really like Bending Spoons either. But the reality is that they buy somewhat failing business that have absurd costs that they cannot offset with their revenue. Most tech companies are way too large for the things they do. That’s how Bending Spoons succeed; because they can get the same or more revenue with a fraction of the man power.
That is exploitation not success.
That’s typical for most construction projects.
If I’m going to build a building or a bridge, the number of people required to build is far more than the number of people required to maintain.
It looks like we’re starting to hit the same issue with websites. You need a maintenance staff for websites, but no where near the level of staff required to build the thing.
Eh not really. Those are not some minimal wage employees that have no choice but to work for them. They are highly skilled and sought-after employees. Should companies be forced to employ people even when they do not need them? Sounds pretty silly to me. Instead just give everyone basic universal income and let them do something they choose.
All the more reason to outlaw and ruthlessly discourage any attempts to do it again, regardless of how innocuous an actor tries to sell it. The billionaires didn’t implement their policies in one fell blow, they are centuries patient and cunning. Like the serpent didn’t actually lie, it just failed to tell the entire truth, and/or didn’t grasp all the unforseen (latent) possibilities and their implications, leading the first self-aware astray. That’s not entirely bad, a long, winding path of learning painfully can yield invaluable lessons, the “badness” is in allowing whitewashing and revisionist history, which should have the head crushed under the heel, figuratively speaking.