Snapchat parent company, Snap Inc, sent a memo to employees on Thursday stating they were going to lay off 120 engineers from their team and reorganize it, according to Reuters.
The maker of the smartphone app popular for disappearing images has had a rough start to the year 2018 and are now under pressure from investors to reduce spendings after analyst expectations during Snap’s first year as a publicly traded company came short of the predicted figures.
The company based in southern California will, however, offer a package of benefits to all those getting the sack, according to the memo from Jerry Hunter, senior vice president for engineering. It is still unclear who are those who will be laid off and Snap scheduled a staff meeting for March 14 to explain the reorganization and answer the employees’ questions.
The reorganization is said to “unify the entire engineering organization” as a single unit, Hunter wrote.
“Having high-performing, technically excellent, and appropriately aligned teams will be critical to building both a compelling product and a compelling culture for engineers,” Jerry Hunter, Snap’s senior vice president of engineering, said in the letter sent to employees. “We want to unleash speed and productivity in our organization while keeping a high technical bar.”
CEO and founder Evan Spiegel announced that the company had hired more than 24,000 people over the last two years.
“We plan to moderate the growth of our team over the next year and focus on making sure that we have the right team, leadership, and organizational practices in place to support our culture and our mission,” he said.
A month ago, Snapchat introduced a major redesign of its app meant to attract new user and make the interface less confusing. However, the company has since seen a wide range of their user base complain about the difficulty of navigation under this new design. Among others, Kylie Jenner sent a tweet criticizing the redesign of the app which reportedly made Snap Inc lose more than $1.3 billion in market revenue.