Employees say this could mean more managers may leave through managed exits.
Reddit is not the only tech company flattening its leadership structure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company would reduce its number of product managers and directors to make it more efficient. Meta had given managers the option to be demoted, with the expectation that many would choose to leave. Shopify has also tried to flatten its organization.
Lost trust in leadership
Reddit employees said they lost trust in leadership after a series of missteps. For example, they said they were repeatedly told before the company conducted layoffs in June that layoffs wouldn't happen.
Product road maps changed in May as the company focused on the API changes and on boosting content creation by users.
The recent change to charge for access to Reddit's API also led to protests from moderators. While many employees supported the API changes, they said Reddit's moderators deserved credit for helping grow the site. A former employee who left in April argued that company leadership should have invested more in supporting moderators and that building tools for Reddit's moderator community "has never been a priority" for leadership.
"Reddit has long had staff who have worked hard to provide a better mod experience, but the will to improve this has never come from the top, and Reddit has yet to fund them to the extent they need to," one employee said.
Illustration of a Reddit logo on a mobile phone with a laptop behind it
Reddit.
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On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."
Leadership shake-ups
Reddit had some leadership changes earlier this year. Jack Hanlon, who was the vice president of feeds, AI, search, and data, parted ways with the company in March, he and the company confirmed. Hanlon led product and engineering for several areas of the company, including machine learning and data science.
In May, Reddit's head of data science, Jose Lobez, was replaced by Tyler Otto, who'd joined Reddit from Hipmunk, a travel website Huffman founded.
Three employees described Lobez's departure as a surprise, as he was well liked within the data-science organization. "He basically grew the data-science organization himself — a big cultural figure internally," one said. They described Lopez as "pretty open both with reports and about the org as a whole," adding that he "helped deal with interorganization disputes pretty well."
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