The layoffs impacted a broad spectrum of the company’s operations, spanning marketing, product and engineering, platform and infrastructure, and software quality.

Fix the app whilst laying off staff who presumably could help fix it?  It certainly doesn’t help the morale of the remaining staff either.

Sad.  This was so easily avoidable.

You are making a big assumption the staff being laid off could help fix it.

Between the various parts of the cloud service, device firmware, Sonos radio, voice software, data analytics, internal backend systems tools and more that Sonos have teams working on as well as the app, those team areas cover a wide variety of things.
More staff moved to fixing doesn’t mean faster fixing.

Staff with the right knowledge and skills moved to fixing means faster fixing.

Like many companies they had a hiring frenzy during Covid and last year they started a restructuring (ie sacking staff) and closing offices project. This could just be the tail end of that as their financial year end approaches.

Between the restructuring, internal discussions in the lead up to and everything following the roll out I’d expect staff morale was likely already in a bad place. Staff with the right skills and knowledge will likely have already been looking at their options the past couple of years and may already have gone, which could be part of the current problems.

You got to love someone reporting 100 people losing their jobs with such thinly veiled glee.

If you mean me, there’s no glee involved. It’s never good when staff are let go.

I have friends at US owned companies who have seen this happen to their colleagues the past 2-3 years. To an extent it has happened at the company I’m currently at. One part of the business is letting staff go, while another part is hiring and expanding. Where possible staff are moved around, but not everyone has a matching role or appropriate skills for the roles required.

I would like to think Sonos actually did what they could to reassign and keep staff internally where possible.

No. I know you aren’t that way.  I was talking about the OP.

Some C-level types believe that there is always x% of under preforming employees at each level who should be pruned and replaced with better performers. Lower level managers will receive a simple order to prune ‘y’ staff members. A manager can attempt to justify not pruning, but this risks being put on a prune list.

The Bell curve:-). By manager, you mean all the way up to the CEO, although that final consequence takes some time.

C-level staff usually operate against a different set of rules to the rest of us.

Some are just out of touch with everything and seem to enjoy the perks, money and power.

Some do the rounds going from one company to the next being the bad person, shedding staff, stripping assets, taking all the flak on behalf of the investors before moving to the next.

Some helped build it from the ground up, keep shallow reporting lines, stay in touch with what is going on and care about what is happening.

Some recognise their passion is engineering and they really don’t enjoy being ceo or c-level.

https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/mitchell-s-new-role-at-hashicorp

https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/mitchell-reflects-as-he-departs-hashicorp

This is what I’ve seen.  Luckly, the last round of layoffs that occurred at a company I was employed in had an aging work staff (within a year of planned retirement) and nice severance package.  There were plenty of volunteers.

On to the topic though, I also agree that other tech companies are going through lots of layoffs these.  I actually am a little surprised that Sonos didn’t have layoffs earlier this year before the new app was released, just due to market conditions.  I’m not saying the app issue isn’t related at all, just  that it likely isn’t the only catalyst.

I wonder how many are from the same office.

Sonos have be doing building shuffles. Closing or downsizing to a different office often revolves around building leases either having a “break point” where it can be renegotiated or reaching its expiry and not being renewed to avoid penalty clauses.

Keeping staff around until after the release could have been a just in case we need extra hands, we’ll keep them until after which fitted with building leases and still occurs before the end of financial year.

While the American employment laws often seem to favour the employer and have very short notice tough luck attitudes, in Europe employees usually have better protection for notice periods. Depending on numbers and country it involves some very surprising employee protections.

In the Netherlands for instance, which was a mentioned location

for economic reasons, such as bankruptcy or restructuring. You must request a dismissal permit for economic reasons

Do you want to dismiss more than 20 employees for economic reasons within a 3-month period and within 1 geographical work area? This is called collective redundancy. You have to report a collective redundancy with the UWV.
 

https://business.gov.nl/regulation/dismissal-procedures/
One company I worked, with a Dutch parent, had to keep paying the salary of the staff they dismissed for 3 months (I think) after they were made redundant. The Dutch company found them roles at another company as part of the dismissal.

I doubt this is the case here, as there were not any notice of buildings shutting down.  Besides, you can shot down a build and still keep employees working from home these days.

I looked at Sonos job listing, and there are just 12 spots available.  This doesn’t look like they are just shuffling the skill set around.

I have no idea if severance pay was offered here, but 3-6 months is fairly common. There is also unemployment benefits and cobra, which allows you to keep medical insurance at a reasonable rate.  None of that is as good as keeping your job, but it also means you likely aren’t homeless.

You’ve never been on COBRA, I’d take it. Affordable is not something I’d assign to it. ;)

My impression was market rates can be cheaper only if you qualify for ACA subsidies or choose a less comprehensive plan.  Am I mistaken?  Never been on COBRA, curious to know.

No one ever discussed ACA with me, I’m afraid. I was given a single choice on coverage. YMMV, I’ve never been in HR.