U.S. corporate culture says to do it around Halloween before Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year. Paid too much for Inmarsat. Inmarsat acquisition created administrative redundancies. Space Junk #1 won’t bring in the revenue. Space Junk #2 a total loss. Reorg updates are promised for November. Bigwigs and HR people holed up in conference rooms all day today.
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10% of workforce, not really. Immersat employees are immune to a reduction in force via the contract signed, EU government reports say a period of 3 years.
What is confusing, beside the modern method of don't tell anyone and cut login resources of those affected, is the talent and contributor level that was affected. In most opinions, the majority of those affected were high contributors.
Poorly executed RIF, regardless of the HR spin of empathy and thoughtfulness.
Lots of room for improvement.
The engineering cuts were haphazard. Critical "don't get hit by a bus, please!" type of roles tended to have slightly unique titles, and though their departure is a horrible mistake, they chose that over just re-aligning the titles.
Not to say that a layoff wasn't needed after that massive merger, but the way it happened was a really awful way to do it.
Makes you think about your own company and position. Mergers and Acquisitions ALWAYS have layoffs that follow. As someone else said, most times the ones left behind are worse off than those laid off.
Viasat had 6800 employees as of 03/23
Inmersat acquisition added 1800
Laid off 800 on 11/1/2023
Seems like a big part of this layoff is refocusing engineering on new priorities and putting a lot of older projects that are earning us money on life support to phase them out. That part isn't merger as much as part of pivoting to Guru's stated goals for the company.
Feels real bad, but it is not super surprising they are making some deep cuts at more established engineering projects that were more hardware focused.
This also aligns with how they probably doled out some of those retention bonuses. Like "Hey we really need you to make this work with half the people, so take this retention bonus"...
Absolutely brutal.
Viasat does not recover from the failed satellite. VS-2 had problems. VS-3 is a bust. That's supposed to be our core competency. Company is finished as you know it.
They are firing engineers left and right today. They are screwed
Will be interesting to see if it is just redundancies between the two former companies or if it cuts deeper
I don't see much overlap between meetings of my orgs higher ups through the exec level. But I assume the impending RIF has already been laid out and it is more likely HR/P&C in meetings figuring out logistics. Best of luck all, terrible timing any way you look at it...
HR holed up in conference rooms is not a good sign.