Tough times at Snapchat seem to continue as the company Snap has confirmed issuing the pink slip to 120 of its engineers. The message has been conveyed to Snap’s employees through an email that the company’s engineering chief wrote to his ‘team’ that has come to light.
Some of the expressions used in the mail by Jerry Hunter, Snap’s Chief of Engineering in his mail seem to have caught the fancy of the observers. One relates to the use of “‘just over’ 120 employees” in the communication and the other is the reference to the “technical debt” that the team has accrued. The immediate inference could be that Snap internally acknowledges some shortcomings in its offerings to the customers.
“Having high-performing excellent and appropriately aligned teams will be critical to building both a compelling product and a compelling culture for engineers. We want to unleash speed and productivity in our organization, while keeping a high technical bar. That required us to think carefully about the shape of the organization, and where each member of our team fits As part of this, we have made the exceptionally difficult decision to exit just over 120 members of our team from the company,” Jerry said in the email.
Perhaps such a message came loud and clear when they started losing customers to Instagram over the past few weeks and months. If the issue with its services has to do with the engineering and the efficiency of its codes, which immediately reflects on the technical expertise of the engineering team.
The other perspective on this ‘downsizing’ of the workforce at Snap is that the company has a solid 3000-strong manpower strength and the figure of 120 represents just around 10% of the engineering team.
The other factor is that Snap had moved away from its core areas and started projects for hardware making, including for designing and making drones. It is quite possible a large part of the technical personnel from such projects form these 120 engineers now shown the door.
Snap will have to, however, continue working on reinventing itself, since it has seen its fortunes tumble in the marketplace at a time when a rival like Instagram is clocking phenomenal growth.