Reddit is Laying Off About 5% of Its Total Workforce

According to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, the company would not only lay off over 90 employees, but will also limit its hiring for the next year

Social platform Reddit has just announced that it will be laying off over 5% of its total workforce of over 700 employees, making the company join the list of technology companies that laid off its workforce after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

The list includes some of the world’s most renowned names including Meta, Amazon, Twitter or even Google, all of which have collectively laid off thousands of employees post pandemic as tech dependency went down and the whole industry collectively took a fall.

E-commerce giant Amazon topped the list with over 37100 layoffs and Meta followed soon after with more than 27000 layoffs, both of which stated that the layoffs were a part of an organizational restructure that will help the companies better face the challenges ahead of an economic downturn.

Reddit, which despite its popularity is run by a smaller team, is firing about 90 employees during this round of layoffs. These numbers, however small, are an indication of the ‘copy cat’ behavior prevalent in the tech industry.

Identified by Stanford Business Professor ‘Jeffrey Pfeffer’, the tech industry layoffs are a ‘social contagion’, where companies are laying off their workers because everyone else is doing it, indicating a ‘copy cat’ behavior.

To understand why layoffs are happening at Big Tech, it's not enough to understand if a company is profitable.

Microsoft's profits (net income) for 2022 was at $72B: this is above the *revenue* it had every year before 2012.

Layoffs have to do with shareholder's expectations:

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) January 19, 2023

“These companies are all making money, they are doing it because other companies are doing it,” said the Stanford Professor.

According to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, the company would not only lay off over 90 employees, but will also limit its hiring for the next year, bringing it down to 100 from an initial plan of hiring about 300 employees.

Reddit has also been facing some heat from its API pricing increase that has caused many communities on the platform to plan a ‘going dark’ protest, where they will leave the platform until the company decides to revoke its API pricing.

 

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