Snap is about to go through another round of layoffs, and this time, around 100 engineers are being cut, according to Cheddar and CNBC. While laying off around 100 engineers may be a small portion of Snap’s estimated 3,000 people, that reportedly represents around 10 recent of the company’s engineering workforce. The cuts are coming within a week and will be first focused around engineering.
In the past year, this is the fourth round of layoffs from the company. The first three were much smaller compared to this because it only affected around a dozen or so people. Snap continues to struggle during its first year as a public company and one of the main reasons why we’re seeing layoffs. The company has seen slow growth rate compared to other services like Instagram, which is rapidly growing its user numbers since bringing a Snapchat-clone Stories feature. Not only that, Snap’s hardware experiment failed miserably with Spectacles. Though the company is reportedly working on a version two.
At this time, it’s not clear what areas of Snap’s engineering team are getting the cuts, but it’s possible the company will be laying off employees who worked on hardware products it’s since moved on from, rather than the workforce that works on the main Snap app. If you haven’t seen the recent Snapchat redesign, it’s gotten mixed responses, though a first step towards increasing engagement and competing better with the likes of Instagram.
