SleepyHamster
SleepyHamster

Hearing really bad news from BYJUs, firm has silently laid off upto 15-20 K people in months

People in the firm what is happening? Is this the end of edtech and BYJUs? What went wrong?

28mo ago
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
Round 1 by Grapevine
PrancingPotato
PrancingPotato

They focused more on sales and marketing rather building right product to market

Being an ex byjus at leadership level I have personally seen products team were forced to build things as per marketing needs not what market demands

Bringing innovation nor raising engineering efficiency nor focus to solve tech debts were considered

Adding fuel to fire, the new leadership imported lot of program managers who merely did calculated no of person vs number of days.

Erosion of good tech folks post the above import impacted the quality and speed by which product has been built.

End of pandemic played a major role making online education obsolete.

Adamant founding team paying the price now

BouncyMarshmallow
BouncyMarshmallow

Which product did you work on ? Not all product teams in Byjus were like this. There were some excellent PODs as well

PrancingPotato
PrancingPotato

Every-team under new president had the problem and abused.

may be you are part of marketing team..?

SleepyHamster
SleepyHamster

Summarising some of the comments

  • lack of product focus
  • no strong talent pipeline and retention plan
  • excessive spends on marketing
  • non transparent & confused leadership
  • lack of respect / love for employees
BouncyMarshmallow
BouncyMarshmallow

Also stupid acquisitions where lot of so called Founders ( mostly failed products which no one ever used) warming chairs to get their stocks vested or amounts credited to bank account

WigglyDumpling
WigglyDumpling
BYJU'S28mo

People becoming VP/AVP in sub-30 age is a big issue.

PrancingPotato
PrancingPotato

The problem is people without that capability and leadership quality became VP 😂

CosmicDonut
CosmicDonut

Even before this firing spree, it's been reported on this forum that there is a lot of harassment including of women in Byju's. How true is this??

WigglyDumpling
WigglyDumpling
BYJU'S28mo

Not really.

FluffyDonut
FluffyDonut

Nah.

PrancingWaffle
PrancingWaffle

I am going to talk about an unpopular opinion here. Pressure on profitability is extremely high as of now in all the edtech firms. Investors are not going to give out free lunches anymore. Most of the folks/teams being asked to leave form a part of important but not so critical mass at the moment. Company needs to buckle down and showcase profitably run businesses across divisions. Some of the firing is also due to excessive hiring during covid years and duplicate teams being created as per the whims and fancies of leaders. Course correction was much needed and is happening as per priority.

PeppyDumpling
PeppyDumpling

Course correction is fine but the Engineering team strength is halved since October, 50% cut. Only Twitter might have done more layoffs percentage wise in the world. I will call it a crash landing instead of course correction.

PeppyDumpling
PeppyDumpling

I too feel like most discussions and tasks are around enabling the sales team with more data and creating new subscription products from existing content etc. Rarely anything new is discussed and if you take the initiative, nobody's interested. They are least bothered about solving the tech debt which is huge imo due to the main focus being on rolling out things quickly rather than properly. I blame the top leadership for this mess, they should be fired first.

SleepyHamster
SleepyHamster

Also heard,
To boost organic attrition. BYJUs has implemented a mandatory punch in / out system where is employees have to log in 8 hours in addict 5 days a week. Without exceptions. This has started in Jan end / Feb start

PerkyPancake
PerkyPancake
BYJU'S28mo

A bunch of people got fired from the creative team, too. I think this is purely a result of bad hiring decisions, 3x the number of people in a team than actually required.

Multiple senior folks are leaving cause no one is listening to them. Complete lack of strategy at the moment.

PeppyCupcake
PeppyCupcake
BYJU'S28mo

Absolutely top management should be fired
Absolute shit show happening

DerpyBurrito
DerpyBurrito

Why don't government look into this insane drop of employees count , All of them are forced to resign with no severance pay and just 1 month notice period.. I think it's around 15k 🥲🥲

Discover more
Curated from across
Layoffs
by DerpyJellybeanSoftware Engineer

BYJU'S Recent Layoffs

Byjus has done another round of layoffs today, even VPs and top level managers were affected. Investors are losing faith in the organization. Looks like the fall of the company has started.

Layoffs
by SleepyHamsterGrowth Manager

Layoff at BYJUS as mentioned by articles

As per internal company sources: This is big like 500+, lots of folks cut in platform teams, brand teams, marketing teams, business teams, product and tech. Wish everyone there all the best. This shall too pass!

Top comments
user

Hired lionel messi to promote brand and cuts employees to save costs. What a fucking high IQ C suite the compan...

user

It's Karma, Bychus bitches. You looted the poor lower middle class families by creating fomo and fucked their ch...

user

Whitehat also affected. Heard folks from content team in Mumbai that they are being asked to come to Bangalore and wo...

Layoffs
by SleepyHamsterGrowth Manager

Another layoff at BYJUs

Heard that there has been some senior management connect, where in due to financial constraints & lack of new round of funding. Some folks will be asked to leave. This is a complete 360 from the conversation they had in Mar’23 where in ...

Layoffs
by SleepyJellybeanData Scientist

BYJU'S set to fire another 4,000 employees

This gets the figure to like 10k in that many months 🫣

Post image
Top comments
user

Paying exorbitant salaries was going to bite them sooner or later, feel sad for those who will loose their jobs. But ...

user

What grows fast, comes down faster!!!