Is it perhaps naive of me to think that just cause they laid off dedicated tumblr staff doesnât mean they donât have some wordpress, etc. staff just pulling double duty? Or possibly going to be reassigned? Do we know for sure this is a death knell and not just some kind of restructuring (ill-advised or not) while cutting staff event? They updated the app 2 days ago, why bother to do that if the end is nigh? I might be just in denial or I donât know enough, but I can see a lot of ways things might be fine, at least for a while longer
The thing is that the number of people doesn't make sense as a long term investment. It makes sense as "someone needs to keep the lights on until <something else happens>".
Imagine tumblr as a Zoo. Let's say there's this zoo, with a few million visitors per week, that employs 200 people. From those, about half are those in charge of taking care of the animals, and then there's a handful of maintenance folks taking care of the installations and infrastructure, an "editorial" team writing the texts on the plates next to each exhibition and handling social media, a marketing team, etc. It's a big zoo, so people from other zoo companies always mention how understaffed they are, but they manage to make things run. Sure, they can't organize fancy temporary exhibitions like other zoos do, and sometimes one of the bathrooms breaks and it takes a week to be fixed, but generally speaking, things work fine.
Then, a year ago, the owners of the zoo announce it's losing too much money and they need to do an internal reorg where about half of the employees were sent to a different, profitable, zoo owned by the same company. Small parts of the zoo are closed to address the reduced staff capacity. Now you have about 50 people in care of the animals, a couple of maintenance staff, and reduced editorial and marketing teams. Things keep going, though the there's only a couple of veterinaries for the entire zoo, and the distribution of food schedule needs to be adjusted, so our furry friends may get their plates refilled later than usual.
Then, last week, the parent company of the zoo announces layoffs. The zoo team will be reduced to ten animal handlers, no maintenance staff, no vets, one person handling the social media, only two people to work on the ticket booths, and three to handle the hot dog stand, the icecream shop and the gift shop. There are no longer night watchmen.
The zoo is the same. It still has a few million visitors per year. It still has 1300 animals that need to be feed and taken care of by only ten people. There's literally not enough people to keep the ticket booths or the shops open without breaking the labor laws, and no one know how they are going to handle that. There are no longer veterinarians or people to fix the (always breaking) bathrooms. Everyone knows this can't be a permanent arrangement, because they can't make the zoo work with just this number of people.
Now, change "zoo" for "tumblr", and "animal caretakers" for "software engineers and designers", visitors for "tumblr users" and "animals" for "features" (I really wanted to make us tumblr users to be the animals on this metaphor, but I didn't manage to make it work, damn it).
(btw, if the app was updated two days ago, it was 100% submitted before the lay-offs: it take some time for apps updates to get reviewed before they pop-up in the app stores)
stormborns
vaporwave
