HomeAdvisor was a great company until its merge with Angie's List and rebrand into Angi. The leadership was great and you could tell they knew how to run a public company. HomeAdvisor was growing and revenue was up. Things were being done right.
Once the rebrand to Angi occurred the company had most of its C-Suite execs replaced with people from start up backgrounds. Thats when the layoffs began. Shortly after the rebrand, product directors and managers who played a key role in making sure the rebrand was successful were fired in a first round of layoffs. Believe it or not the home services business model is actually fairly complex and a lot of business specific knowledge is gained the longer you work here. That knowledge cannot be easily replaced. However, the new C-Suite believes that the business model can be simplified. Therefore, this knowledge is disposable. This would be true, but when you have built your entire tech stack around the first business model it is very unwise to layoff the people who are most knowledgable about it. But, that is what happened.
The second round of layoffs came when our new CTO asked for a list. From this list, the new CTO chose dozens of engineers to be laid off without consulting their managers. This layoff came right after our quarterly reviews where my colleagues who were fired passed with flying colors. It was a huge shock to us all. On top of this, those of us who got to keep our jobs were notified about who was being laid off before the individuals being laid off were. Therefore, when we reached out to our fired colleagues to tell them how sorry we were they had no idea what we were talking about. Then in our next company wide meeting we were told that the layoffs occurred because of a “new company direction” and that most of my laid off colleagues’ positions would be rehired for. Finally, when our new CTO was asked when the next round of layoffs would be he laughed.
I would expect this kind of behavior from a start up struggling to raise series A funding, but not a public company. I’ll work for HomeAdvisor, not Angi.
