Reddit to Lay Off 5% of Workforce, Citing Company Restructuring
Reddit confirmed it was laying off approximately 5% of its workforce, or 90 employees, on Tuesday — in line with most other noteworthy tech companies — to make 2023 a year of layoffs and cost-cutting measures.
The Wall Street Journal broke the news, revealing that Reddit’s laying off employees and looking to cut down on costs in an effort to break even next year. Furthermore, the company’s previous projections of hiring 300 people by the end of 2023 have been slashed down to 100.
A Reddit spokesperson declined to share the original memo but confirmed WSJ’s reporting in response to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Other tech companies reduced their staff earlier in 2023, including Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet. Meta was arguably the most egregious of the companies shrinking staff numbers, aiming to lose approximately 21,000 employees as part of its “year of efficiency” initiative.
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Despite the large quantities of tech employees losing their jobs, the industry’s done well relative to the tough overall economic climate.
Apple, which did its best to avoid layoff season but still ended up sacrificing a few teammates, has not only been enjoying a good year from a quarterly perspective but also from a word-of-mouth point of view. It recently revealed its Vision Pro augmented reality headset, and while some industry experts aren’t sure it’s all that special compared to other companies’ previous AR efforts (such as Microsoft’s HoloLens), the tech is still getting major publicity around the web thanks to the Apple machine being behind it.
Compared to the aforementioned giants, Reddit is not a huge slice of Big Tech’s corporate makeup, but it’s certainly a site that springs to mind when people think of the internet at large. What kind of impact 5% of its workforce disappearing will have on the website remains to be seen. Still, this is nowhere near the kind of culling another social media site, Twitter, has gone through in recent times. Despite that site’s greatly reduced headcount, it’s reportedly still struggling to maximize profit potential, in part due to advertiser issues stemming from the site’s very nature and CEO Elon Musk’s personal behavior.
