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?
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
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
Which product did you work on ? Not all product teams in Byjus were like this. There were some excellent PODs as well
Every-team under new president had the problem and abused.
may be you are part of marketing team..?
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
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
People becoming VP/AVP in sub-30 age is a big issue.
The problem is people without that capability and leadership quality became VP 😂
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Absolutely top management should be fired
Absolute shit show happening
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 🥲🥲