Snap To Fire 100 Engineers In Its Latest Layoff Round

Snap, the parent company and creator of disappearing messaging app Snapchat, is laying off around 100 employees in order to focus on advertising.

According to news from Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, the additional layoffs represent the last step of the company’s restructuring process, which kicked off in the fourth quarter of 2017.

“Late last year, we asked senior leaders across Snap to look closely at their teams to ensure they had the right resources and organizations to support their missions,’” Imran Khan, Snap’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Tighter integration and closer collaboration between our teams is a critical component of sustainably growing our business.”

Earlier in March, Bloomberg reported that Snap laid off roughly 120 engineers, saying in an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg that it wanted to keep a high technical standard among its employees. Meanwhile, in January, it laid off around two dozen workers who were involved in the content side of Snap’s business.

Bloomberg noted the layoffs are part of an over-hiring spree Snap engaged in to build an advertising business and roll out new products. As the company introduced a new system for employee performance evaluations, CEO Evan Spiegel told managers there would be some tough decisions ahead. At the same time, Spiegel received a $637 million stock award for taking the company public.

Earlier this month, business news website Cheddar reported the layoffs were imminent, saying the cuts would be announced internally sometime in the next few weeks and would impact less than 10 percent of the engineering department. Cheddar noted that Snap had slowed its hiring rate by 60 percent last quarter and withheld cash bonuses for employees at the end of 2017, when internal company-wide goals were not met. Ever since Snap went public, it has struggled to compete with Facebook and Google in the advertising market.