AM I NEXT? NO LOVE AT PARLEMENT TECHNOLOGIES / PARLER

Nashville, Tennessee-based Parlement Technologies, and parent of free-speech social media platform Parler appears to be in financial difficulty.

Starting in November 2023, the company has laid off approximately 75% of its staff, executives included, and is operating today with an estimated 20 employees at the parent and subsidiaries.

Parler, on the way to a successful launch in a politically-charged nation, was laid low by a conspiracy of politicized progressive actors who advocated for de-platforming Parler from its service provider, Amazon Web Services, and the removal of the Parler app from Apple and Google stores.

Recovering from this company-crippling sequence of events, Parler limped back to life and now faces an uncertain future.

The attempted acquisition of the company by Kanye West was canceled after his anti-Semitic rants saw him de-platformed as a promoter of hate speech. “Parlement Technologies has confirmed that the company has mutually agreed with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler. This decision was made in the interest of both parties mid-November.”

Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?

AM I NEXT? NO LOVE AT SNAP (02/04/24)

FEBRUARY 6, 2024 — 10% REDUCTION IN FORCE

The company has announced plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, impacting 528 employees.

According to a company spokesperson, "In order to best position our business to execute on our highest priorities, and to ensure we have the capacity to invest incrementally to support our growth over time, we have made the difficult decision to restructure our team."

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023 — 170 EMPLOYEES TARGETED

The company has announced plans to shut down its AR (augmented reality) business unit, noting the development of generative artificial intelligence “made it harder for us to differentiate our offering” as the company focuses on its “core advertising business.” 170 employees are targeted in the second cut of 2023.

JANUARY 6, 2023 — SNAP SHUTS DOWN SNAP APP FOR MACs AND PCs

The company has announced that it is shutting down its Snap Camera, the program that let you apply silly filters to your face while you were on Zoom or other video conference calls, on the MACs and PCs on January 25, 2023.

Employees associated witb the development, maintenance, and promotion of the product are likely targeted for reassignment or layoff.

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 — Original post…

Santa Monica, California-based Snap, a software development company offering a digital camera application and the operator of the multimedia instant messaging app Snapchat, has announced its plans to execute a reduction in force.

The reduction in force will impact approximately 20% of the workforce or about 1,300 employees in both hardware and software development teams, including employees at the social mapping app Zenly which Snap bought in 2017, and those working in Snap’s hardware division which just killed off the Pixy selfie drone.

From the company's Quarter 2 statement, “While the continued growth of our community increases the long-term opportunity for our business, our financial results for Q2 do not reflect our ambition," said Evan Spiegel, CEO. "We are evolving our business and strategy to reaccelerate revenue growth, including innovating on our products, investing heavily in our direct response advertising business, and cultivating new sources of revenue to help diversify our topline growth."

"While we are excited about the progress we have made in terms of community growth and engagement, demand growth on our advertising platform has slowed significantly. The combination of macroeconomic headwinds, platform policy changes, and increased competition have limited the growth of campaign budgets. In some cases, advertisers have lowered their bids per action to reflect their current willingness to pay."

Snap continues to reiterate that it primarily a camera company and that's where its future lies. "Snap Inc. is a camera company. We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. We contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together."

Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?

AM I NEXT? IS THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL AT YELP?

JUNE 25, 2022 — AS YELP TRANSITIONS TO A VIRTUAL OFFICE BUSINESS MODEL, THE FUTURE OF ITS EMPLOYEES BECOMES LESS CERTAIN

San Francisco, California-based Yelp Inc., a software platform that develops and publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses, has announced that it is adopting a "virtual office" business model that will result in the closure of offices in Chicago, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and New York, New York.

It is unknown how the transition to a virtual office will affect current employees, but traditionally some workers do not appreciate the benefits of working at home, especially if young children are present.

According to Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman...

"The pandemic has brought about unprecedented change over the past two plus years. While we expected some things would go back to the way they were before, early on it became abundantly clear to us that the way we work has gone through a major transformation. Over time we came to realize that the future of work at Yelp is remote. It’s best for our employees, and for our business. Today, I shared with our team why Yelp is leading the way in creating the workplace of the future.

We learned that we could not only effectively operate our business as a distributed remote workplace, but that our people could thrive and be just as, if not more, productive while remote. Employees are more satisfied working remotely as they can spend precious time they would have otherwise spent commuting doing the things they love with the people who mean the most to them. In surveying our own employees, 86% of respondents said they’d prefer to work remotely most or all of the time, 87% report that working remotely has made them more effective at work, and 93% of employees and their managers report they can meet their goals remotely. Our record revenue in 2021, which carried through to our first quarter results this year, demonstrate just how productive we are in a remote work environment.

The most telling signal for us that people strongly prefer remote work has been the under-utilization of our offices. When we started reopening offices over the past nine months we chose not to set a “return to work” date. Instead, we piloted a remote-first approach to give people an option to use an office if they wanted to do so. We’ve since learned that the vast majority didn’t need the space. Globally, about 1% of our workforce is choosing to come into the office every day. After observing how employees have been using our offices, we’ve decided to close our most consistently underutilized offices on July 29, in New York, Chicago and Washington D.C., as well as reduce our footprint in Phoenix. Combined, the three offices we’re closing saw a weekly average utilization of less than 2% of the available workspaces.

As we continue to embrace a fully remote workplace and design the future of remote work at Yelp, we plan to re-allocate resources towards our employee experience, new talent, and the growth of our business. Additionally, our in-person gatherings will continue to evolve as we reimagine the long-held paradigms around work.

I’ve shared my thoughts on why forcing people back to the office, even in a hybrid model, is the wrong approach. It requires employees to live near an office, potentially driving up their housing costs, and to endure unpaid time spent commuting. It also means hiring is artificially constrained by geography, translating to a smaller and less diverse pool of talent. Our workforce was previously concentrated in the areas where we have offices, and now we have employees spread across every state in the U.S. and four countries. We also hired two remote C-level executives in geographies with no Yelp offices, and have been seeing a strong surge in candidate applications, with many noting that remote work is part of the reason they’re drawn to the company and role.

When you’re a company founded on the idea of connecting people with great local businesses, having employees in communities all over the world ties directly to our mission. Yelp continues to experience the benefits of a remote workplace and it’s the clear path forward for us. We’re excited to continue to design the future of remote work at Yelp together with our employees."

Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?