Even the legal and PR departments were not spared in eBay’s current round of layoffs announced on Tuesday. Company-wide, it is laying off 1,000 employees (9% of full-timers). In California alone, where eBay is headquartered, it is laying off 391 employees – 261 in San Jose, 20 in San Francisco, and 110 remote workers in the state – and about 132 of those losing their job in the Golden State are Software Engineers.
Of interest to sellers, among the California employees being let go are people in the “categories” department (3 directors, 1 manager and 8 staff). Three Merchandising Generalists and a “Channel Marketing Specialist” are on the list. And 3 members of eBay’s Ad Sales team in California are also being let go.
eBay is also letting go of 22 Lead or Senior Product Managers and 9 Managers or Directors of Product Management in the state.
Reviewing the list of positions impacted in California, many of those eBay is laying off include manager and director positions. The Strategy Development team is not immune – positions on the chopping block include 1 director, 1 manager and 2 staff.
A Director-Associate General Counsel, a Manager of Safety/Security, and a Director of Communications are also on the list.
Not surprisingly given the reduction in headcount, on the list of Californians being let go were 5 recruiters and a Director of Recruiting. Also on the list: 3 People Business Partners (apparently they are HR coaches).
eBay published the letter CEO Jamie Iannone sent to employees on Tuesday afternoon, which included a request for employees to stay home on Wednesday and wait to hear through Zoom calls if they still had a job.
We have yet to examine positions of those being let go in other states – eBay locations include Oregon, Utah, and New York, as well as outside the country.
In his letter on Tuesday, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said the company also planned to scale back the number of contracts within its alternate workforce over the coming months, though he didn’t specify if that included customer service representatives and software programmers.
“A Director-Associate General Counsel, a Manager of Safety/Security, and a Director of Communications are also on the list.”
I wonder if these people would have been on the witness list in the Steiner’s lawsuit.
Software engineers? Who needs those? The eBay website is so “magical” it practically runs itself!
*** But you don’t know the whole story ***
Companies that are laying off employees also say that they are planning on using the new frontier of including AI machine learning to run its business, therefore will need less employees.
The junior engineer with simple engineering tasks can now be replaced by AI tools…And who needs to hire marketing individuals to tell you how to evolve you company?
Chat GPT will change everything.
Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Ebay didn’t fire the right people as sales are going down , impressions are down despite heavy advertising and sales.