Roku lays off 300 workers and removes streaming content to save money

DannyMac@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 437 points – Roku lays off 300 workers and removes streaming content to save money | Engadget
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Roku looks to be seriously tightening its pursestrings. The company’s laying off a full ten percent of its workforce, over 300 employees, in addition to a conducting a number of other cost-cutting measures, as reported by Variety. These job cuts are just the beginning, as Roku’s also removing streaming content, consolidating office space and reducing outside service expenses. The goal here is a major reduction in the year-over-year operating expense growth rate.

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I know an even better way for them to save money. Anthony Wood, the CEO, gets like $20,990,000 in total yearly compensation. Like most these fucks most of it is non-salary, so they don't pay taxes on it right away if at all.

I fell down the internet rabbit hole. He gets 1.2M in pay. No bonus and no stock award. The rest are options. Last year he has sold 400,000 shares worth $69M. The year before he sold 1,950,000 shares worth $690M... Looks like he had a scheduled sale of 80,000 shares every 2 weeks. Which had been worth about $25M every time. It looks like he stopped it when the same sale started pulling in about $11M. So yeah, assuming a generous $500k fully loaded employee cost, they cut $150M in HC. So canning him would save about 40 jobs. And he'd still be a billionaire.

I think you touch on the real issue, and it's where the wealth of a company is created. The cashflow and operations is one thing, the investor money is entirely another. People in the company don't benefit from the investor capital nearly as much as the senior leadership does. The takeaway is how fundamentally broken the economy is right now as investment is wrecking how we do business. "Publicly traded" my ass. I get that companies need capital, and the VC money is one thing, but when we see shit like this it paints the picture of an established company getting enshittified to satisfy late game investors that act more like a parasite than anything else, and undermines the prosperity of business itself.

It’s not late game investors, but short term investors.

I mean I guess it’s both, but short term investors don’t give a fuck about the fundamentals of a company, they care about growth, or at least the illusion of growth above all else.

So you end up with gigantic conglomerates that do everything. Piano makers that sell dirt bikes, movie companies that run theme parks, kettle makers that run the largest financial institutions in the world. It makes no logical sense, but that doesn’t matter…. Line goes up.

Piano makers that sell dirt bikes, movie companies that run theme parks, kettle makers that run the largest financial institutions in the world

I know that’s Yamaha and Disney, but I’m blanking on the last one. I probably know it but don’t know about the kettle side.

Absolutely. Roku probably would be doing fine if they stuck with the cute little TV boxes and didn't have to keep making growth targets for the parasites. That drive for constant growth has made their core product suck more too...

Having used Roku stuff recently, and helping family out with their new shiny Roku tv's, I couldn't agree more. You took the words right from me. They enshittified bigtime since the days people genuinely loved using their products.

Roku tv interfaces are still better than vizio and even samsungs slower advertising interfaces.

Like those slimy venture capital groups that take over declining businesses and instead of getting them back on their feet take out tons of loans against them, pocket the cash, then sell off the parts that still work and throw the rest (and the employees) away?

In capitalism businesses have only one purpose. "To last long" ain't it. The biggest owners and their chief lieutenants must make as much money as is humanly possible. Sometimes that means a long term strategy, and sometimes it doesn't.

But we can't have that I guess. I fucking hate corporations so much.

Damn. I wish people who had nothing to live for would just camp outside these guys' mansions with an AR instead of attacking innocent crowds of people.

Our lives are worse because theirs are better.

You hear this a lot when personal wealth is discussed, "But his wealth isn't real, it is in the business!" This shows that the wealth is real.

It amuses me when a company will go on about how they need to let people go and cut costs but then they piss away millions on a handful of people. The real issue is that they need to cut costs to keep pissing away money on a few people.

If you slice his compensation in half, that's about 100 employees he can pay at $100k for a full year.

So employees cost more than just their salaries (if they get things like benefits, 401K match, etc.) So you'd have to cut more than half of his total compensation, which I don't think either of us would be mad about

I also doubt most of those employees made 100k either so it's probably still a good estimate.

[$10,000 monthly budget on candles.] Help my family is dying, someone help me please. ~ dril