Agreed. This and the recent controversy around the HyperSocial CEO posting an emotional layoff post on LinkedIn makes me wonder if the new trend in layoffs is to try to make us relate more with the CEO than the laid off employees and take some heat off them.
This is legitimate feeling, maybe because not all your employees might have Instagram. We can't assume it wasn't also done on internal channels, though?
Looks like most of the layoffs are in marketing and sales, and that they're still hiring on engineering and product. Honestly, I'm surprised they had marketing and sales people to begin with. Those sorts of efforts pay off most with big-name, high-end artists who probably don't need monthly patrons to be successful. Focusing in improving the product seems like a smarter move, especially given how janky their product was until quite recently.
These "user generated content companies" spend a lot of time and money marketing to the content creators (Patreon is defending against the built-in platform monetization of things like Youtube and Twitch, et al) and getting big name content creators on their platform (see some of the leaks related to Onlyfans, etc al).
Glad to see they're really thinking long term. After getting rid of their security team, they should maybe rethink those pesky fire extinguishers that have done nothing but expire.
I assume OP expected the blog post to be taken down or changed, so they captured it and linked to the capture instead of the original. I feel like the protocol for this should be to make a capture, post a link to it as a comment in the thread, and link to the original in the post.
Your quoting suggests that you think what people on onlyfans and patreon do aren't "real jobs", but in fact to succeed in those spaces needs very hard work.
I'd say something like people are actually willing to pay the average or even the worst job-doer something resembling a living wage.
If the stats from things like Patreon are to believed (and filtering out the "dead weight" of creators who don't post or have given up without closing their account) there's a serious "top 1% of creators make XX% of the revenue" problem.
Which means that for a small fraction, it's a job, for the vast majority it's a money-losing hobby.
Do you not believe working in retail or restaurants are real jobs? Because the vast majority of them are not paid a living wage in the US and have to rely on having multiple jobs or welfare. Walmart even teaches you how to sign up for welfare as an employee
Those are real jobs and should be paid a living wage or eliminated if that's entirely unfeasible. There can be arguments at the edges but I think people generally agree on that.
And even if you don't, certainly an "industry" where 99% of the people "employed" don't even make the poverty line or make back their expenses (patreon and only fans would fall here) wouldn't. (The people trying to 'make it big' are probably moonlighting as retail/restuarant anyway, just as all those who tried to make it in Hollywood did in years past).
There's certainly major abuses but the 1099 and "self employed" world is even more full of them than the W4 world.
It's not a real job because nobody will pay you for that because nobody gets value from that.
You get paid by people = you provide value in the economic sense (do not always align with the moral or ethical sense, which might be the source of your dislike for the job).
> But that doesn't make it a job. You could do hard work in moving a mountain but that's not a job.
Job (n):
1. a paid position of regular employment.
2. a task or piece of work, especially one that is paid.
---
It seems to fit #2 perfectly (exhibiting to an audience), and #1 can be met based on e.g corporate structure (subscription pay into an LLC that normalizes the salary etc)
I'd argue that it's in fact potentially "skilled labor" in that it's not obvious what it takes to produce content that brings regular subscribers. Tons of adult content creators burn out and pivot because they can't get traction.
>Needless to say, earning money off of your looks (something you didn't work hard to gain in the first place) doesn't qualify as hard-working job.
Even if you're very conventionally attractive, you need to put in a lot of networking and marketing before you can make money off of "your looks". Even then, you don't just sit back and let your looks do everything.
Porn stars generally spend a couple hours DAILY in the gym. Then there's all of the events you have to do to remain relevant in social circles. Then there's actual shooting. But before that there's hair and makeup. Then there's outfits. Selecting garments that match your personal style and also are sexy enough to excite your fans isn't easy and it usually isn't cheap.
Going through all of that to get paid by the fans is absolutely a job. If the fans didn't pay, it wouldn't be a job.
It takes a LOT of work to "earn a living off your looks"
Ignoring the time spent setting up shoots, editing, engagement, etc, and focusing just on "looks", you have to spend a lot of time on working out, make up, shaving, putting together outfits, etc.
If you think that looking good is something that doesn't take any hard work, it's because you've never tried to put in that work yourself.
Anything you do to make yourself look good has only incremental effect; you must already have a "good" foundation (genetics, race, etc.)
An African American woman, for example, has almost zero chance of making it to the top 10 p$rnstars list, no matter how much she put effort and time to prepare herself.
Some things are just the realities of the world. Thinking otherwise makes you delusional.
What are you responding to? (I feel like I'm asking this a lot here.) The comment to which you're apparently responding was only saying that it takes a lot of work to make a living off of your looks; they were silent on whether you need to have good genetics, the correct skin color, or anything else.
> earning money off of your looks
I'm assuming your taking about the sex workers of OnlyFans. I find your attitudes a bit dismissive and offensive. These are real humans with real feelings that you're talking about with such little regard.
Plus, I earn money off of my natural intelligence. I didn't do anything to gain it in the first place, I just happened to have intelligent parents.
> doesn't qualify as hard-working job
Two questions:
1. Why doesn't it qualify as a job if they are earning income?
2. Why should someone have to "work hard" to earn a living? If have a high-value easy-to-sell product, then why work harder than you need to?
"earning money off of your looks (something you didn't work hard to gain in the first place) ....."
If you have a cognitive aptitude for mathematics, you didn't "earn" that either - everything in some way or another is part of your birthright and privilege, both nature and nurture.
If you genuinely believe that the mind is somehow magically distinct from the same genetic system that gave you your physique, I'm afraid you're the delusional one.
Hard work alone doesn't make something a job. If someone was offering a professional level of service (delivering what they said they would, on time, and issuing refunds when they didn't without their clients having to ask for it) then I'd say they were doing a "real job". Most of onlyfans/patreon aren't, IME.
I've heard the same, Meta for sure, and a few folks at Goog have told me as well they are coming. For google this will be the first time they have ever done layoffs in the company history(2009 had 200 folks leave so not really layoffs so to speak) so that tells you the scale of this tech downturn.
You can't have your stock down 60% YoY (META) without consequence. There is a whole lot of fat at both of these companies (and really all large firms that never had any bad quarters) and a reckoning has to happen
You absolutely can. Stock price is really meaningless as far as the day to day life of a company is concerned- if your cash flows haven't changed, and the market has just decided to shit on you for a bit for irrational reasons there are no consequences other than maybe looking into whether a buyback makes sense.
Equity markets are often irrational and wrong. IE Covid- essentially every stock was down significantly in March of 2020, not realizing that some businesses will actually benefit from the pandemic.
That said, your statement about fat at these companies is true, and its probably been long past time that they clean out some dead wood.
The market is going to do what it is going to do, I am not sure if you mean that from an employee based perspective or from a corporate perspective, but either should not matter- I guess with a big disclaimer that I am assuming that your core business is still doing well, but its just the "market" that has decided you are out of favor.
From a corporate perspective, you are buying a fixed dollar amount of shares to compensate your employees- I haven't heard of a fixed number of shares being offered as compensation in years for pubic companies. This does not affect your cashflow, just the number of shares being purchased in the open market.
From an employee perspective, its definitely not fun to see the value of your grants drop by 50%. It should only really affect your decision to leave or not if you feel the drop is permanent, or just a temporary blip. IE if I was hired at Peloton in 2020, the stock has dropped 95% and while it will likely bounce back a decent amount, the equity part of your compensation is essentially worthless and not going to be a golden handcuff that will keep you around. Google/Alphabet, its down about 30% but thats likely just an overreaction and is to some extent welcome as you get more shares in your grant... it wouldn't stress me out at all- maybe if I was looking to cash out and buy a house right now, but this was a risk that was always there.
Mark is completely unaccountable to investors. He can do whatever he wants as long as he has good faith reason to believe it will benefit shareholders.
That's genuinely anxiety-inducing to hear. I have several friends who have signed offers with Google, with start dates set within the next few weeks/months.
Really hoping they don't start pulling offers. I can't put my finger on why, but somehow that seems like it'd be even more cruel than layoffs.
Pulling offers is always considered a _very_ bad look. I would be extremely surprised if Google did such a thing given the optics, but it wouldn't be the first time Google has surprised me with it's stupidity.
I have heard that the 2009 layoffs were limited to recruiting. If these layoffs occur, they may be the company's first engineering layoffs.
I find it surprising that they are considering layoffs. There have been a number of articles about Sundar's concerns over productivity [1,2,3], but layoffs have a tendency to reduce moral and productivity.
2009 layoffs were technically just a bunch of radio DJs that were hired into a product around revolutionizing radio and then had nowhere else to go in the company when their project was canceled. The recruiters let go were contractors, and Google just terminated their contracts.
Well, seeing as how saying that means nothing, adds nothing, and says nothing, then not saying it at all would be more meaningful.
The non-corporate speak translation would be “I tried my best to make this company bigger and more valuable, but it didn’t work. Some of you will now need to be sacrificed, but not me!”
That's because you didn't come up in a time when people who fucked up like this would step down from their position for their clear and obviously failed leadership. You're not used to seeing what "full responsibility" actually is.
Full responsibility is a samurai killing himself painfully while his best friend cuts off his head to end his suffering. That's full responsibility.
This is, "I fucked up guys, here's 3-6 months pay and some benes... my bad. And yeah I know I fucked up last year too, but I took full responsibility then as well, so it's all good..."
Yes, that is a good image. I don't think litteral seppuku is called for (though it is a helpful reminder of what shame has looked like in the past), just that people are getting a bit tired of executives saying "I take full responsibility for this failure," while getting handed a giant bonus, a pat on the back from the board and shareholders and another biz mag feature.
We don't know that he hasn't taken a pay cut. Posting about it might just come across as self-serving, but then not posting about it makes it seem like he's not doing it. Lose-lose, it seems.
And... I suspect whatever he's doing is also affecting him emotionally/mentally, and... to some extent career-wise. Taking these sorts of public steps may make it harder to be entrusted to CEO someplace else in future. Given patreon specifically, I doubt he's planning to leave and go CEO someplace else, but overall, there's no easy outs in scenarios like this. He'll be getting second-guessed and pilloried regardless of what steps he takes.
Putting your money where your mouth is. Resignation and public, in-person apology like they do in Japan.
Better yet, refuse to take a bonus, not that the board should award one. If the board awards one anyway, contribute 100% of it to helping laid off employees.
The rest of the letter reads well to me. He should have avoided that phrase given how pilloried it's been recently, with reason. But that doesn't take away from the generous actions he's fought for for the departed.
It means that the employees are being let go because he did a bad job, not that they were low performing or that other employee performances caused patreon to perform better.
It doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things but it’s just that he is claiming culpability for all of the ills patreon is experiencing.
The main significance here is "please hire the people we're letting go as if they were normal Patreon employees you'd want to poach; they weren't let go for performance or other individual reasons".
Yes, and the parent's point is that companies that end up looking at those people's resumes are going to know that they were not let go because of poor performance. What the parent said.
A company finds itself in a situation where it needs to reduce headcount for reasons. Do you a) just role the dice and randomly pick who goes? or b) Have managers rank their performers and use it to get rid of the lower performers or protect their most valuable people? In a case like this is means some variation of "you're too expensive for what you do for us."
3 months' of pay + longer depending on tenure at the company. Healthcare until the end of the year. Mental care up to 6 months. They contracted a placement company to place the laid off staff to other companies in the sector. A lot of those people will already get hooked up by a company within a week or so, even without the placement company being able to take action.
That's the choice of the person who posted the Instagram post at HN instead of the actual blog post that was posted before the Instagram post, obviously.
No. That's not the social contract for employment. It's dangerous to think it is. There's a mutual need from both parties. When that need changes, both parties are free to respond. Forcing a company to keep someone would be just as bad as forcing someone to stay.
What we also don't know is the companies financial situation. Keeping people on when they can't be afforded can be a way to make a company completely collapse. I was in two startups that would have collapsed completely, without layoffs, around the time of the last recession. This is why the "keep x months of salary" are rules you strictly follow.
What are you responding to, exactly? That comment was claiming that we can't know for sure that "nobody" would lose their livelihood over this. And it's true, we can't know.
I think they are responding to the assertion that the employer is obligated to keep the employee just because the employee might have absolutely nowhere else to go. Especially in the competitive tech space neither you nor your employer are obligated to maintain your employment relationship.
This is besides Patreon giving their former employees a license to goof off on their dime for 3 months. I can’t imagine anyone at Patreon being so hard up that 3 months pay and insurance to look for new work is enough to break the camels back.
Those who are hired to Patreon and similar companies arent people who would end up unemployed if they are laid off. Those people already have to turn down recruiters who try to poach them every week.
Mid-November through December is a hiring no-man's land due to the accumulation of end-of-year vacations and family trips. Most of these employees have about a month and a half before the shutdown begins and they are stuck scrambling to try to find work in the new year.
My comment comes directly from my experience in the past as a recruiter. We saw a 60%+ downturn in the hiring market From Nov 15 - Dec 31 regardless of how the hiring market was performing in general, and then they would spring back to life after Jan 1 when everyone was back in the office. It takes more than a hiring manager to hire employees.
The slowdown comes from all the moving parts who need to be in place in order to facilitate the transition of an employee to an org.
Think of your average tech hire who needs to (a) go through orientation just like everyone else, and (b) is going to take a week or two just to get his work environment and credentialing set up so he can work with the servers. I'll put my experience on that side of the desk working with dozens of clients against any anecdotal one-offs who got hired late in the year.
You speak the truth. Any recruiter with any experience at all will tell you hiring plunges late in the 4th quarter. It's been that way forever. There does tend to be an uptick in interviewing starting late in the 3rd quarter and early on in the 4th (i.e. now) so they can get the people they need in place for the start of the new year and next year's budget. Hopefully these folks will be able to take advantage of that and if they can't start immediately at least be ready to go at the end of the holidays, and if they've been paid through the end of the year then they can at least enjoy the holidays.
A lot of business in general tends to slow down during the last few weeks of the year. It's sector-dependent, somewhat, but just things like getting approvals from or meetings with people who are 'out' for the holidays impacts even well-intentioned orgs from moving at 'regular' speed when it comes to making hires or signing business deals or what not. It's not a 'negative' viewpoint so much as 'realistic'.
This is pure negativity and not true. Hiring might slow down because of seasonality overall, but I was hired the last two times end of year. It's a great time to get new employees ramped up when things are slower.
A polite reminder that some companies are growing really fast and are even struggling with hiring.
I would think the impending collapse of the tech sector might be a bigger concern, but I think there's still plenty of time for people getting laid off right now.
It's not going to be this hard. They will land on their feet in weeks, maybe days. Anyone recruiting is hard plugged into layoffs.fyi and while big company recruiting takes months, we (and my other friends in startups) can turn around the whole thing in 3 days if we have to.
While true the parent comment was talking about Seasonal jobs that retail adds at the end of the year, these are not programming jobs that are added but cashiers, stockers, etc.
I wasn't. My point stands - people, including myself, have no trouble getting software related jobs in any season. Other markets/industries it may vary.
Dogpiling is dogpiling. Luddites are luddites. Who am I, a person with real tech agency recruiting experience who could view the actual live job boards year after year during this period, to possibly to speak out about what actually happens when we've got people who have anecdotal experience? Every year we would reach that point and suddenly pull many jobs from the board until after the new year, but I guess it was just my imagination because someone over there got a new job in November once.
I didn't even say it was impossible. I just think it's unrealistic to expect to find something after Nov 15th and until the New Year. Sorry for knowing what I'm talking about, I guess.
Also, I think it's quaint that people assume that when labor reductions happen at tech companies, that only tech employees are affected. Somewhere there's an admin assistant who has been working at that glorified CMS, and I doubt they have the same job prospects as a software architect.
It's like people didn't read the statement at all. He clearly says they're going to invest more into engineering and some other shit... so it's not about money. They're going to spend more fucking money. This sounds like a bunch of people got their jobs automated away through algorithms or intelligent systems or just whatever innovation you wanna chalk it up to, and they redundant to the company, so they gotta go.
This is why I will never be a CEO. I'd just come right out and say, "17% of you are expendable and I had your jobs replaced by scripts and a few machines. I'm going to use that money to buy more machines, hire more brilliant engineers, and see what percentage of the company I can replace by next year."
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but this is how an extraordinarily large amount of high-level individuals think - they just won't admit it.
If you're able to automate a large portion of your workforce, why wouldn't you? You'll be rewarded for it in every aspect. You'll be praised by the Board of Directors for cutting costs and improving productivity (since algorithms and robots don't have to sleep, never get tired, never call in sick, never get drunk and shit in their husband's bed, etc.). You'll be praised by Wall Street as a "visionary, technologically-minded thinker / leader".
There's zero downside for you.
There's enormous downside for parts of society.
The difference is, I'm willing to admit that when I do this, it's directly to my benefit.
Have you considered that part of the fabric of civilized society is...being civil with the people that you interact with, and require cooperation from?
You can hold any opinion of them that you like, but the difference between a competent manager and an incompetent one is how they can translate their personal disdain for their direct reports, in a way that doesn't treat them like cogs, and improves their performance on the things they're responsible for.
This is just patently untrue and plays out in every office across the entire world every day.
What makes someone a competent manager is whether or not they complete their assigned tasks and projects that come down from above.
You don't like people who are direct and brutal in their feedback. Got it.
Hell, you can turn back the clock to 2004-2008 World of Warcraft and see this for yourself. The best guilds in the world had leadership that was brutally forthright - bordering on downright cruel - to their membership, but they still managed to execute, because when everyone's goals are aligned, you'll be surprised the shit people are willing to entertain. And not only were these people not being paid, they had to pay to play the damn game!
And yes, I know the analogy doesn't map perfectly onto work for several reasons, but the crux of the idea is there: a harsh taskmaster can move mountains with a little bit of fear (I'll replace you with a shell script if your performance doesn't improve) and a lot of honesty.
In the future, you could save us both a lot of time and effort by just saying, "I don't like this management style."
But I've seen it in video games, I've seen it in startups, I've seen it in Fortune 500 companies, and I've seen it in the military. Properly implemented, it works wonders.
That is the one and only purpose of high tech. To automate work and improve efficiency (I.E. make people redundant). Be that automating the work of acquiring and connecting eyeballs to adds or getting rid of Janice the nice secretary from the 80s to going from 50 to 5 production planners at a factory.
It was fine when I was an external developer, but when I switched over to an in-house role it sucked seeing the fear in departments that I turned my gaze to :(
He's taking responsibility for over-hiring relative to the needs of his business, and taking corrective action for the long term health and viability of the business. This is the right thing to do. Yes, it sucks for the people who lose their jobs, but unfortunately some risk is always involved in an employment arrangement. It would be far more unfortunate if Patreon overspent to the point that their business had to close, as that would affect their entire userbase and entire employee base.
> He's taking responsibility...and taking corrective action for the long term health and viability of the business.
Maybe this is just a language thing, but in my world "taking responsibility" involves some action to personally shoulder the pain of the layoffs beyond saying "my bad". I'd expect it'd at least begin with resignation in this case. Just like you can't just announce "I declare bankruptcy" to shrug off debts.
The post includes tons of details about complicated things Patreon is doing to help out the people affected. Do those count for nothing to you? It feels like you are insisting not on "support" or "generosity" but on "sacrifice".
I tend to think that non-profit-maximizing actions of a company are almost entirely due to top-down leadership, so I would give him credit for those actions.
When you're +$400mil into venture capital raises 'the company' doing something like that can be an awful lot of time, effort and potentially political capital for a CEO to get through.
I'm astounded that so many supposed seasoned leaders were out there making crazy projections around maintaining covid levels of growth and I also don't think 'my bad' is enough in that context, but benefits above what's required are rarely handed over without someone committing to fighting for it.
I'd share your surprise; but, I sometimes question if they believed it themselves. I've spent the last 15 years in public companies and if there's one thing "The Street" demands, it's growth upon growth. The context of a pandemic being a once-in-a-lifetime event is meaningless. Your business experienced record growth and we expect you to continue that trajectory of increased growth no matter what--so get to investing for it!
Being responsible means being dependable, keeping promises and honoring our commitments. It is accepting the consequences for what we say and do. It also means developing our potential.
People who are responsible don't make excuses for their actions or blame others when things go wrong. They think things through and use good judgment before they take action. They behave in ways that encourage others to trust them.
People who are responsible take charge of their lives. They make plans and set goals for nurturing their talents and skills. They are resilient in finding ways to overcome adversity. They make decisions, taking into account obligations to family and community.
This guy literally made excuses for his actions: "broader economic slowdown"
"To ensure that we make progress on that roadmap, we are increasing our investment in product, engineering, and design, which means decreasing our spend on other ares[sic] of the company."
So it's not even a money issue. They have the money, they just want to spend it on servers and other people.
And finally, just so we're clear, I don't take umbrage with his decision and his plan for his employees. Hell, it's admirable, frankly. I take umbrage with his words. He's not taking responsibility. Responsibility means he'd cut his pay as much as necessary to keep these people because he misjudged the market and where it's headed post-COVID-19 lockdowns (since there is no such thing as 'post-COVID-19' - it's here forever now).
This is pretty classic example of wanting to have the best of all possible worlds.
"I want to be lauded for my graciousness. I want to be lauded for taking responsibility. I want to be lauded by my investors for a plan that grows the company."
That's why this is a load of horseshit. He's trying to please everyone. I have no doubt he probably agonized over this decision - I really do not; but he made it, and that means there are certain consequences with which he must live, one of those is that it should be clear to his employees that they will always take a backseat when the economic times get tough.
> The post includes tons of details about complicated things Patreon is doing to help out the people affected
I was under the impression we were addressing "Jack"'s claim to responsibility. I wasn't trying to comment on the actions of the company (which I fully admit is more compassionate in its layoffs than other companies would be).
You're textbook correct, I think, but in general I never really understand the CEO who makes a statement about trying to do everything they could to prevent this from happening but there was no possible other situation than laying off X amount of people who were significantly contributing to the company.
Not that this was said in this particular case so directly. This is just a general thought.
How is funding so tight that cutting the 1% of money going to these people is going to make all the difference? It's not even a total 1% gain, there will be some lost productivity making it somewhat difficult to measure.
If you truly tried everything, couldn't the CEO or other executives take a tiny cut? Not that I expect them to, I'm just saying if they truly did everything within their power to prevent it, like is often said.
I mean, sometimes I give a significant amount of my salary, like 10% as donations / tips / handouts and expect nothing back. These aren't even people I did something bad to, like forgot to pick up when I said I would, or felt guilty for spilling food on their carpet.
Surely in situation where I messed up and caused a problem for someone, I would do whatever it takes to make it right. I wouldn't just say "Well, that's what you get in this system of inviting friends over. I'm not technically required to do anything. I guess there's nothing I can do (including picking up the mess I caused or paying to have it cleaned)"
I've seen similar large donations from people who truly struggle to pay for rent and food even be similarly generous. Sometimes people will live on limited food or delay getting an apartment if it means helping out an acquaintance.
If you make millions of dollars, you don't need to worry about these basics. You'd think it'd be easier to take a personal hit which probably will have actually 0 impact on your life (literally no change-- keep on golfing, vacations, etc), rather than supposedly living with the guilt, as is frequently said, of people struggling to survive because you wanted to save 1% of your company's money for a few months (before realizing you need to hire and retrain people from scratch.)
They’re listed as having 885 employees. If the average cost is $100k per head, 88M/year looks like a pretty high burn rate (they’ve had ~400M in funding). Saving 10% in one swoop is huge.
> it'd be easier to take a personal hit
Jack Conte, the CEO, was not previously wealthy (that we know of). At this stage he might be getting paid very well, maybe even in the mid six figures, but definitely not spending $8M/year on golfing to make that a viable alternative to layoffs.
Taking full responsibility used to look like getting fired for poor planning. Now taking full responsibility means "I say in public that this is my fault" versus trying to push the blame off.
Agreed. That part was not well written. It seems like a vacuous, self-important phrase unless it is immediately tied to something else like, "I take full responsibility and as such I will be <taking the following meaningful actions or stepping down, etc>.
You might be overthinking... Jack over-hired. That's it. Doesn't really warrant a CEO stepping down. He's simply empathetic and wants to let people know that the employees are good to hire, and Patreon is still doing well as a business.
Even if they didn't bend over backwards to make sure everyone lands okay, saying "lose their livelihood" is a bit much, no? These are not peasants losing their land, rather they're highly paid professionals that should have no issue finding work. Shameful plug - we're hiring at Vitally :) Feel free to reach out in the DMs.
Patreon's handling of expired cards is terrible.. people I know who used Patreon just lose subscribers because the flow for fixing an expired card basically doesn't exist (or didn't, maybe it's been fixed since). Those people left Patreon and won't be returning.
Their new engineering staff could fix that, for one.
Interesting. I haven't had to enter new data for any subscription service when a cc expires for years now. Somehow the new info gets relayed to the service without my input.
Certain credit card providers have a (paid?) service where companies like Patreon can poll for the updated details of any of the cards they have on file.
My card didn't automatically update and I can confirm that the site gets weirdly broken.
"but as the world began recovering from the pandemic and enduring a broader economic slowdown, that plan is no longer the right path forward for Patreon"
So basically, they overhired to meet demands during Pandemic and now as less people are using the platform (??), there is no need for the 17% of people. Interesting.
>In the US, teammates leaving Patreon will be given three months severance plus an additional two weeks for each half year of tenure beyond the first year.
Pretty decent IMO.
>You’ll also receive COBRA health care coverage through the end of the year.
Odd that that doesn't match the pay period, but oh well.
I suspect its because of the way that COBRA works: COBRA would start for them on October 1st (their active employee insurance would cover them until Sep 30), so they are getting three months. I have never seen a health insurance that supported two week increments, so you couldn't do the 'two weeks for tenure' thing. You could, in theory offer an extra month per year beyond the first, but that's a lot of extra work and expense to go into, offering it, for something that I suspect will have very little pick-up. My guess is most everyone who is laid off today will have a job which will offer insurance by Jan 1st.
In spite of what some developers seem to think job hunting can be a many month process, especially over the holidays and in an environment where many companies are being very cautious about hiring. So no I don’t expect most will have jobs by January.
One thing that is not clear is if they will actually Pay for COBRA or just provide COBRA coverage. Employers can provide the coverage for COBRA but are usually not obligated to pay for it. Also, cost of COBRA out of pocket can go upto 102% of the total premiums (yes the 2% can be admin fee added by the employer if they choose to do so)
> "... I’m more confident than ever that the world needs a better economic system for creative people, and Patreon will keep building that system for creators over the decades ahead. However, the pandemic introduced volatility to the broader trend, starting with a rapid acceleration during COVID lockdowns. In response, we built an operating plan to support this outsized growth, but as the world began recovering from the pandemic and enduring a broader economic slowdown, that plan is no longer the right path forward for Patreon. I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the changes today, which will be very difficult for our team."
It's the same pattern at so many other companies now. Over-hiring during COVID (thinking what exactly? that people would forever stay locked up at home with nothing else to do with their money?), before waking up to the reality that things have gone back to normal and that there was never really a plan whatsoever for those hired. Asses were put in seats though, so there's that.
I wonder how much of it may just be "keeping up with competitors". You can lose a lot of ground in a year or two, and recovering that ground may be more costly than the additional hiring-and-firing cost.
I agree with you in principle, but we now have the benefit of foresight.
Imagine Patreon's position during early covid: they had a firehose of money pointed at them. I'm sure they knew it will end, but not "when". They had to react to it, if for no other reason than to prevent a competitor from getting ahead.
> thinking what exactly? that people would forever stay locked up at home with nothing else to do with their money?
I wonder if this was Bay Area tech elite bias. Between the Bay Area being late to reopen and generous remote working options, decision makers might have planned for growth that matched where SF in the pandemic, but hadn't realized that most of the country had already moved on.
Which hardly anyone seems to use, at least for YouTube. I watch too much YouTube for my own good, and I can't remember the last time someone encouraged viewers to donate money on a recurring basis via any company except Patreon.
I'm all for having some SFW platforms, but let's not pretend that there isn't a dramatic, dramatic demand for NSFW content, and that banning it is nothing short of prudish.
I'm no fan of banning such things, but an outright ban is much clearer and more comprehensible than Patreon's very murky and subjective (to the point where it's almost impossible that they're not selectively applied, if only by accident) rules.
No? Last time I understood from my artist friends who do kinky NSFW art (as do I), they use SubscribeStar's NSFW version, right over here if you missed it - (https://subscribestar.adult/)
As a new user of Patreon (literally this week is the first time I've used it) I finally signed up because a content creator is posting their videos to Patreon a day early. Youtube could solve that problem.
Does anyone have any other examples of what Patreon does for them?
"Hi everyone - I have some sad news to share: today, Patreon is doing a layoff of about 80 employees, about 17% of our team. This was ultimately my decision, so I wanted you all to hear directly from me about the reasoning.
Before I do, I want to say two things: first, today will be painful for many people, and I am deeply sorry to the incredible teammates who will be leaving Patreon - they are good, kind, creator-first, exceptionally talented, and smart people.
And second, I remember how nerve-racking it was when I was a full time creator - before starting Patreon - to watch companies that I depended on go through moments like this. So for those of you who rely on Patreon for your business and communities: I want to assure you that the company is making this move precisely for that reason - so we can continue to be a rock for your business.
As the world has recovered from COVID lockdowns and entered a broader economic slowdown, it has become clear that the original plan we built doe he year, to support outsized growth through the pandemic, is no longer the right plan for the company.
I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team.
It's important to me that we continue to deliver for our creators and patrons with new features and products like native video, new content creation and organization tools, a wold-class mobile experience, and new ways for creators to grow their membership and strengthen their communities. To ensure that we make progress on that roadmap, we are increasing our investment in product, engineering, and design, which means decreasing our spend on other ares of the company.
Ad difficult as this is fo our team, I know this is the right thing to do for Patreon, because it ensures that the company maintains a position of strength, even through an economic downturn, while continuing to deliver for our creators.
If you want to read more about this decision, I just published the internal note I sent to our team this morning, and it's linked in my bio. I'm going to stop posting here for a while to be 100% present internally for our teammates at the company. But I promise to come back in a bit - I will see you all soon.
> To ensure that we make progress on that roadmap, we are increasing our investment in product, engineering, and design, which means decreasing our spend on other ares of the company.
Underrated dynamic in the startup layoffs this year. Many software companies grew headcount rapidly in areas outside of prod / eng in 2021 and are now scaling back those roles while preserving the talent that was extremely difficult to hire.
>I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team.
What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again?
I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without actually taking any responsibility. It seems like the laid off employees are taking responsibility.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the expression, but usually when English speakers say they "take full responsibility" for a tragedy or unfortunate occurrence, they mean from a moral and blame-based standpoint, it's rarely related to the finances of those affected.
The laid off employees are the ones ultimately worse off by the outcome, that goes without saying, what you're missing is that this is different from being morally or strategically responsible for why the situation played out this way. That's the ownership the CEO is trying to take.
That's what they think they are saying. What it actually means is "It is my mistake that I admit is mine, you get fucked, I keep my chair and take zero actual consequences for it"
I mean if it's helpful to you, people can deconstruct the meanings of their colloquialisms so it's more clear, but for most English speakers it's not really necessary. Are you ESL?
If I told someone "we'll be working on this report til the cows come home", I wouldn't expect that it's necessary to explain that the expression doesn't actually have anything to do with cattle, and instead just means I'm expecting this to take a long but indeterminant amount of time. If someone found it clever to point out what I _actually_ meant, I wouldn't find their input very helpful, just socially unintelligent and annoying.
Usually it's more helpful to just research what an expression means, rather than trying to argue about what you personally think it _should_ mean.
That only works if expression isn't purposefully vague or misleading, which most of corpo PR speak is.
"Taking responsibility" (taking care of the kid) of condom breaking is a bit different than "taking responsiblity" (doing absolutely nothing of substance) in corporate world.
Right, so one one might use a more specific expression if they were talking about the parental responsibilities of their own future child. Again, you're trying to argue against the well-understood meaning of a colloquialism that most English speaking adults understand.
Your observation that words being said in the corporate world may be interpreted differently than in the bedroom is not a meaningful one and just comes off as uneducated, if I have to be honest. Communication in the corporate world is often deliberately vague, congratulations on your groundbreaking discovery.
It means ‘there are layoffs because of poor management decisions and it isn’t your fault if you’re being laid off and it isn’t your fault if you feel you pushed the company towards these management decisions that ultimately led to your colleagues being laid off’.
I don't know if it this is the case here but I have seen real power struggles with the boardroom (and the then-CEO departing because the board says so). I was "fun" knowing that the company imploded pretty much after that because they removed the golden eggs from the company.
It is sort of fun to watch someone shoot themselves in the foot over and over while thinking it is someone elses fault. However, they also hurt a lot of people in the process and so it would be even more idealistic to watch them lose everything for a while until they may actually be capable of feeling real guilt and remorse and not just some PR campaign.
What does him resigning achieve? Everyone still gets laid off. The board hires another CEO. Maybe they're better, maybe they're worse. Maybe they save a little bit of money. Nobody who was laid off today gets their job back.
The knee-jerk "oh yeah you should quit if you feel bad!!1" reaction is ill-informed and boring, but unfortunately very predictable.
The next CEO is more responsible with the money. If you earn high, stakes should be high, else there is no stopping from making decisions that are harmful to all the parties: investors, employees and the company itself.
Taking personal responsibility and resigning fixes lots of things.
>>oh yeah you should quit if you feel bad
He should quit for making wrong decisions, for which he had many many weeks to months to deliberate upon. And also had the choice to not continue with the bad decisions for nearly the same time if not more.
how about cutting executive pay first? That is what usually happens in Japanese companies if leadership doesn't live up to expectations.
During covid lawmakers cut their own salary by 20%. A little bit of honor in a culture when ordinary people are taking hits goes a long way, rather than lipservice and PR.
It wouldn't "make a difference" more than it would be signaling taking responsibility.
I'm not necessarily for that but perhaps reducing his bonus this year is better way of sharing responsibility, if people really want or need one.
1. We are laying off underperformers to strengthen the company (Has happened)
2. We are laying off poorly performing divisions (again, indirectly foisting the responsibility on the employees, because their division is underperforming)
3. We are laying off to cut costs and keep the company profitable (This may be the truth, but it treats employees like they are replaceable cogs in the machine they can throw out and bring back in any time).
4. Making the employees quit by themselves by creating toxic work environments (recently, forcibly enforcing back to office rules to shed all employees who cannot make it back or prefer remote).
5. Just layoff without any reason, not worrying about the mental health of the leaving employees or the ones who remain.
Just owning up his responsibilities means, the relieved employee atleast does not have to add the stress of "did-I-do-something-wrong" to his/her list of woes. This can sometimes be debilitating.
It also adds to the confidence of the existing employees that the company will do right by them, if it comes to letting them go in the future.
Ideally, no one should get laid off. But companies cannot be forever profitable and the government or no other body is going to bail them out. Considering that, this seems to be a more mature way of handling a terribly difficult situation.
So employees will know in the future that the CEO will say it was their fault, but that they are the one that has to deal with the consequences of poor management. Got it. I hope everyone there "quiet quits" after this. Patreon is a cesspool of far-right grifters.
Trust me, as someone who got laid off at 1.5 months into the first job, the way that was handled was a jarring experience. I would vastly prefer the above response.
As you spend more time in the industry, you see lots of badly handled layoffs and some better managed ones. You hear the stories of other veterans and learn a little more.
At some point you realize it is something everyone inevitably goes through and just a part and parcel of working in the private sector. You learn to plan ahead financially and mentally to handle such surprises.
Nowhere here do I talk about quitting (other than in the context of the forced one),
Instead of saying things like "there are a lot of coasters" and "some of you don't belong here" it is refreshing to see someone actually say "I made a choice, and it did not work out. It was no-one else's fault but mine."
I've been through a bunch of layoff, and most of them are steeped in legal noise, mainly because in the UK layoffs need to follow a legally proscribed route. so the explanations are normally a lot less honest.
I always interpret it to mean "if you're going to hate anybody, hate me". It's deflecting blame away from his staff. "Full responsibility" is a bad term for sure.
This is somewhat meta, but linking to an instagram post is terrible, I get immediately redirected to a login page and can't even see the content on Instagram. I do not have an instagram account, nor do I want to create one just to see this.
Love it when companies and executives come with subtle titles like "A Note from XXXX", "A sad announcement", "Looking ahead into the future" etc. when they're nothing but just plain layoff notices.
Sometimes I click a twitter link on a devices I don't want to login to (work machine). I ended up creating a second account for this exact reason, so annoying.
With Twitter, I find you can click the log in button, and then there is an X to dismiss the modal with, which then lets you read the page. (And this is absolutely annoying, terrible UX, and I wish to God people would stop putting things on Twitter.)
The existence of these backdoors is a bad excuse these teams use to justify user-hostile UX. I had no idea this was possible, so for me this might as well have not existed. I simply skipped reading twitter threads when I was on a device I wasn't logged in on.
This bit from the employee announcement about how they're handling equity vesting [1] is worth highlighting as a pretty classy move, all things considered:
> We’re waiving the one-year equity vesting cliff for all departing employees so that everyone has an opportunity to be a shareholder, regardless of your tenure. [...] All departing teammates will qualify for an extended option exercise period of 5 years, and we have extended it to 7 years in regions where we are legally able.
It must be jarring to be on the receiving end of a layoff. In the grand scheme of things, a laid-off employee surely has bigger things to worry about... but I still think what they did here with the equity, especially the option exercise period, is a nice touch. Not many companies do this sort of thing, but they should.
They say there's 3 months of pay, healthcare, mental care until the end of the year too. And they contracted a placement company to hook people up with new jobs.
I agree. Tech companies should never really break off with former employees. Any former employee is a future potential employee that you can re-recruit when the time comes. Also, talent is difficult to find. Which makes people the center. Whatever you build, you will build it with people. So you need people. Be them new employees, be them former employees.
> Any former employee is a future potential employee that you can re-recruit when the time comes
Not only that, all former employees are de-facto "background check references" / "evagenlists" / "detractors" of your company. Forever! (well, not exactly forever... but close enough)
I can't recall a single year over the last 10 years where younger engineers, cousins, nephews or friends have asked me about the 2 companies I worked at before.
And boy, have I been candid.
Talked a very good friend of mine from joining Amazon for an offer he got making nearly 3 times much I did. All because of "decency" (or lack thereof) of a company.
Amazon has really developed "not giving a shit" into an art form. They even still have the cliff vesting of RSUs, which is their way of telling new hires "we don't expect you to stay for more than 2 years"
Agreed, its not ideal but there are things a company can do to put their money where there mouth is in this situation. This seems to be the new playback for doing it right. I appreciate that.
I had some unkind feelings about Patreon when it was announced / made public that they laid off their entire security team. I still think that was a poor move and any company responsible for handling payments ought to have an in-house security team.
That said - I've held off on any criticisms around their strategy/execution for the moment (aside from that) since it's unclear what happened. I'm wondering if Patreon is getting hit with lots of people backing off support of artists after a big jump due to the pandemic.
Given inflation and a lot of feelings of uncertainty around the economy, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that their revenue went way down in a hurry this year.
I back four artists on Patreon, down from five a year ago. In all 4 cases I'm either too busy to get full "value" out of sponsoring (e.g., I don't have time to read the updates or listen to all the demos), or there's not really any benefit other than funneling money to support the artist in hopes they'll continue working as an artist.
Each month I look at the bill from Patreon and wonder "do I really need to keep spending this money?" So far I've elected to - but I haven't been hit super hard by inflation or a layoff like many folks...
They didn't lay off their entire security team. What one person among the laid off ones thought to be 'security team' may not overlap with what their company had been doing since a long time. In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).
> In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).
You're right!
That said, by the time a company is large enough that 17% of it is more than 17 people the kind of startup organization you have wisely and correctly nodded to will have ceased to exist.
So while you are right in that such scenarios have, do, and will continue to happen there's perhaps cause to wonder if that's really the best way to characterize replacing a security organization with specialists with a bunch of engineers who are likely quarter-time security at best. It's akin to firing all your engineers because the sales people can do a little bit of coding each.
> That said, by the time a company is large enough that 17% of it is more than 17 people the kind of startup organization you have wisely and correctly nodded to will have ceased to exist.
Not really. A lot of stuff having moved to services, a lot of stuff being handled in 'no code' manner have simplified organizations a lot these days. Today you can just offload a lot of things to SaaS vendors that can automatically handle those stuff. Instead of having to have entire teams dealing with it like how it was in the earlier decades. You just need a host of capable people to deal with those services on your side, by wearing various hats. So the 'startup format' seems to have become extended to larger organizations.
This is exactly how to handle a layoff: do it 3-6 months earlier than required and give the laid off employees that money as severance. Waving the equity cliff too is very generous and good of them.
Everyone should note the companies that do brutal layoffs with little/no severance. It's a major red flag because it shows incompetence and/or a lack of ethics.
Some of this is because of the WARN Act in California [0], which requires 60-day notice before any mass layoff. Employers can also fulfill the requirements of this mandate by letting employees go now but having their actual termination date 60+ days in advance. I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way.
Good for Patreon to go beyond the 60-day mandated period though
There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis. If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!
This, I've been laid off about 6 times, only once because of my own accord (and I freely admit my fault there). I've left a company 2x that count. I started my career in 1999. What a year to start...
Very much so. I've had to explain that some of them were just contracts, some of them cease to exist anymore, and some went through layoffs. The reality is it's more like 13 companies but yeah.
Don't sweat it. Most human resource departments take their methods from Kafka's The Trial. The more you look the better you get at it, the easier the brutal process of some employers' hiring processes become. Fire and forget. The more applications you complete, the better your chances of getting hired, and once hired, the longer you work, the further disappointment retreats in your rearview.
Yup! Exactly. It’s a numbers game. I’ll never work at a FAANG probably because of it but that’s ok. I’ve carved out a pretty cool career AND I do side projects and games so it’s fine.
It's pretty easy to get laid off a lot if you work in startups. You join and know there is a ticking clock in the background. If you don't, you probably should.
Every startup thinks they are the 1 out of 10 (because why wouldn't they, you have to.)
I agree, I have never actually been fired from a collapsing company, but as an intern I have been in the meeting room when a company was folded, and I have also seen a few companies collapse after I left. I'm a realy early guy, I tend to leave when the timesheet comes, so there is probably some runway left when I leave.
> If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!
This depends on where you worked. Most of the developers I know were around for the dotcom bust, but only 2 have experienced a layoff. But none were working for dotcom companies.
I was born in the 60s and haven't been laid off yet, including during the dotcom bust, all while working for 12+ companies in my career. The bust was the worst, though, our company went through 7+ layoffs and we were decimated, and no one did any real work after a while. Fingers crossed that I can keep this trend until retirement!
Being laid off twice was a rewarding experience both financially and for my career. It forced me to step out of my comfort zone. Now, being outside my comfort zone is my comfort zone.
In the first layoff I knew the company was planning a round in the next 18 months and I'd been there 6 years. I waited around for the payout. Layoff law in Australia is more favorable to the employee, the payout was 10 months. I took a week off before starting the next job on a substantial salary increase.
The most important is not to take it personally as a failure. That can mess with self confidence and interview performance and general well being. At my HR interview they had the team there and some "transition coach" they seemed worried about us. I was actually thrilled as I planned to leave anyway.
>"There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis."
The "2022 financial crisis"? That's not even a thing. Slowing economic growth and even a recession, should we enter one later this year does not constitute a "financial crisis."
By most historical measures of recession, we're already in one. This redefining of what constitutes a recession is a recent phenomena, and has political roots, not financial ones.
>"This redefining of what constitutes a recession is a recent phenomena, and has political roots, not financial ones."
There has been no "redefining" nor is it a recent phenomenon nor does it have political roots. You are wrong on all accounts.
It doesn't have political roots. The National Bureau of Economic Research(NBER) is a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization with an aim is to promote a greater understanding of how the economy works.
The nonpartisan panel, which was established in 1978 by former Ronald Reagan adviser and NBER president Martin Feldstein, has gone out of its way to keep politics out of the process.
The committee meets in secret and doesn’t announce its gatherings in advance or even in retrospect, unless there’s a press release declaring a formal decision.
And it typically takes the panel about a year to decide on a recession call, though some decision have been made in a few months while others have taken almost twice as long. That’s almost always well after a recession has been widely recognized by Wall Street.
The committee has never reversed a call.
Rather than two negative GDP readings, the NBER is looking for a substantial decline in activity over a sustained period of time. The committee sets dates of the peaks of economic activity and troughs based on six monthly data series, including nonfarm payrolls, personal consumption spending and industrial production.
Again, a recession is not at all the same thing as a financial crisis. This is the thing I was commenting on. There is no consensus that we are even in one. Recessions are always backward looking.
It's pretty spectacular though that not only have been able to declare that were in one but you are also able to comment with confidence on how bad it's going to be be.
During the dot com downturn the consulting company I was at went through 2 or 3 rounds of layoffs. Then in the 2008 fallout, there was another round. If one is lucky enough to survive them, they could be witness to many but not be a recipient of any.
I worked in an industry that's highly cyclical and had major consolidation over the last decade (HDD/SSD storage). We bought several companies and they would do layoffs roughly every 18 months or so.
I joke with my friends in other industries about how often I have been laid off. For me, it's been uh...5 times? Maybe 6. I am probably forgetting them. None of them were very small but like usual characteristically overextended. One company I survived 4 full rounds of layoffs before getting axed. Another one I survived 3.
It's the nature of playing around in the high stakes startup world. As I've gotten older I've found more stable companies. But it was quite funny coming home once every few years to tell my girlfriend I was laid off again and then picking up another job a week later.
Unless you're in government/health. You're going to lucky not to be laid off multiple times in your career and if you're not laid off at all in your career, consider yourself extremely lucky.
WARN Act is federal law not CA Law. I highlight this because there is a belief that only CA has employment protections laws, and while CA does have more of these; other parts of the US also have employment protection laws often times not really that much different than CA
Both CA and Federal is 60 days, the main difference is CA requires employers with over 75 employee's federal is 100, and CA includes Part Time employees in the count Federal is Full Time workers only
If not, I've had a lot of incredibly decent employers in the past. They all seem to do two or three months. I know of layoffs where people have gotten significantly more, though.
I don't like a lot of their business decisions (I know much of this is driven by credit card/payment processors) but this is the most respectable mass layoff I've ever seen from a company, and should be lauded.
I always thought it was awesome that a company to support creators was creator lead. I came across Jack Conte in 2010 before Patreon existed. He was a music creator on YouTube that made what he was calling Video Songs, songs with each instrument part video'd and mixed together, and selling his music collection through e-junkie at the time. He was one of the first creators I ever financially supported. Some of the videos are still up on YT: https://youtu.be/D2PwVkQBp5o
Despite not knowing Jack personally pretty much everything I've seen from him over the years has reinforced my generally high opinion of him. In this case as well. As lay-offs go Patreon seems to be trying very hard to do right by their employees.
As a former Patreon team member, he has done an incredible job of attracting creator-focused team members -- one of the most mission oriented groups I've ever been a part of.
Don't mistake that for being a good CEO. He gives deep-felt apologies every time he does layoffs... which he does frequently. Often because he just doesn't like what people are doing. He also frequently communicates with the public in a more heart-felt manner than he does his own employees. He's great at putting out a great face.
- 2019, September layoffs (can't find the links for these ones)
- 2019, June layoffs
- 2018, June layoffs
Also, to be clear. I was not one of the ones laid off. But I did see my entire team besides my manager vanish one day and then be told I'm expected to do the team's work for the next 6 months.
Yeah, I'd imagine in many respects he's unqualified to be a good CEO since he, as far as I can tell, essentially stumbled sideways into the role as co-founder. There's the upside of the CEO being a creator themselves but the downside of not having a background in business or necessarily the other qualities a good leader possesses.
Patreon has a great mission though and I can see how it would attract creator-focused team members. There are some impressive Patreon alumni in their own right.
What? These are public companies; short-dated OTM options have > $0 value only in volatile markets. But these companies don't pay employees in options.
This is true for liquid options. Startup options are not liquid, there is a chance they’re illiquid until the company folds or is bought- and in an acquisition of a struggling company they’re likely to prioritize higher share classes before common stock gets to see a piece of the price.
> what they did here with the equity, especially the option exercise period, is a nice touch.
But it's not all that great. Patreon is not publicly traded, so it seems likely that exercising any options will require cash up front, plus it will immediately trigger taxable compensation (income tax plus FICA). And how will the FMV be determined, if there is no public market trading? (ans.: usually just some number voted on by the board). It may well be that the options are never worth anything even after the extended period.
It is clear that these are not ISOs (statutory options), because statutory options by law only allow up to 3 months to exercise after employment ends.
This is incorrect. You cannot exercise ISOs after 90 days post-employment. What you pay to the company at exercise isn't time dependent: the strike price is fixed at time of grant. What you may be referring to is the AMT, which does fluctuate depending on FMV at time of exercise, but that doesn't affect the 90-day limit.
Yea I wasn't completely clear I the description, not remembering exactly at the moment. Thanks for pointing out. I was referring to the option some employers will offer to convert ISOs to NSOs after 90 days. So yes you're technically not exercising ISOs after 90days. My point more being that there are options with some employers to not completely loose all rights to equity after 90days.
To me, this seems a little odd to complain about given that all those factors were true about the equity compensation when people signed on. The company didn't fundamentally do a bait and switch or change the rules.
Layoffs suck but I found the extended exercise windows and other benefits to be rather pleasantly responsible given the situation.
FMV is determined by a 409a valuation, it’s an imprecise thing but it’s done frequently even for private companies and all employees will know the FMV of the shares. Not just a made up number by the board.
They are likely NSOs and with an extended exercise period the former employees do not need to exercise them. They can just hold them and if within 7 years there is a liquidity event, they can exercise & sell. The taxable event would only be upon exercise, so in the case the former employee just holds the options (which is almost certainly what they’ll do), there is no immediate tax impact, nor any sadness about the options expiring. Upon a future E&S they’ll have taxes to pay but also money from the sale to pay the taxes.
Yes the situation could be more complicated if the person were trying to optimize the tax situation but I think that is very unlikely to apply in this situation. Just hold the options and be happy.
And really PopAlongKid, why are you so critical when you really have not even a basic understanding of how this works?
I was neither complaining (previous reply) nor being critical. I was just saying that at best extending the exercise window was pretty neutral, not some nice benefit funded by the company like extra severance pay or extended health insurance. Most of the comments seemed to be vastly over-valuing this particular aspect of the layoffs.
And if Patreon is acquired some day rather than going public, the employee shares are probably going to be last in line after all the VC money (preferred share classes), and maybe not worth anything. I went through this when I worked for a dot-com startup in the early aughts. Even if they do go public, there will probably be lock-up periods to restrict the immediate selling of shares, and then you are at the mercy of the stock market, where the value of the company (which you long ago stopped having any input to) could well put your shares into loss territory.
The shares can’t lose money (in theory) because with the extended exercise period you can simply not exercise them if they are underwater.
It's not a unique benefit, many companies offer the extended exercise window, but it is very good for employees because otherwise they have 90 days to exercise or abandon the options.
In your mind you are imagining somebody with a few options that are barely in the money. What if somebody who got laid off has worked there for 5 years and is sitting on super valuable options. With no extended window they'd be in a huge pickle where they'd either have to abandon all their options or pay a huge exercise/tax bill right now. But with the extended window they don't.
Neither of us can predict the future of patreons valuation so you shouldn't assume things are going to go badly and thus this benefit will not matter. The whole point of stock options is the option part of it. Maybe it will be worth a lot, maybe it won't, but you'd like to wait and find out and shouldn't have to give that up because you were laid off.
>The shares can’t lose money (in theory) because with the extended exercise period you can simply not exercise them if they are underwater.
Incorrect. Yes, one would not exercise options that are already underwater, but once you own the shares and there is a post-IPO lockup period[0] you most definitely can lose money on the shares, money on which you already were taxed at ordinary tax plus FICA rates. Try looking at the volatility of company share prices in the period immediately after their IPO.
>you really have not even a basic understanding of how this works?
You also have not addressed the strong possibility of being acquired rather than going public. (Ex-)employees do not make any money until after all the VC people do, and there may not be much left.
Again, I never said this was a bad thing, more like a "meh" thing.
Exercise and sell is an instant prices. If you choose to exercise and hold obviously you now have the volatility of owning the stock, I'm not talking about that.
Yes preferred share classes exist, this is irrelevant to whether or not the options have option value! I'm not guaranteeing that Patreon stock will be worth a lot of money, only that it might be worth a lot of money.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but since the equity is all options, doesn't that imply that they're making it easier for people to give them money?
Yes, sure, they have to dilute the company a bit by creating more stocks for the people buying it, but if your company is in enough trouble that you're laying off 1 in 6 employees, it seems financially wise to effectively be doing many small rounds of fundraising this way. It extends your runway some small amount.
Ah, that's a good point. It's sort of the opposite: now the option holder can wait longer to decide if this is a worthwhile investment, vs "You have 30 days to exercise this or you get nothing".
The ability to extend that period isn't always up to the option-granting company; while it is possible for non-qualified stock options (NSOs), incentive stock options (ISOs) must be exercised within 90 days of termination of employment, by law.
Yeah. They have had a major layoff every year for the last 3 years. Are they just engineering a kind of forced unregretted attrition? The alternative is that it's just complete chaos in there.
Because taxi business isn't actually that great business. You have to employ lot of relatively expensive drivers and they have to pay for costs of complex machine... And the users want to get it as cheap as possible and complain somewhat if prices ever go up.
Looking at their app they do a lot more than just give rides nowadays. UberEats delivers from restaurants, but also apparently groceries now? They have a short-distance package delivery option. Rental cars. And some kind of tool to book a plane and hotel for travel?
I don't know if it's the right business call, but Uber is like 10 different companies now.
1) you won't attract any follow-on investment capital;
2) your original investor will be angry that you're sitting on a pile of money that is doing nothing;
3) you will likely grow slower than your other competitors. in some markets, this is death, in other markets, this is fine.
Patreon had nearly 500 staff before layoffs. Now has about 400 staff. You may have a hard time understanding what all those people do, but I suspect they're all quite busy.
Shouldn't point 2) be start paying the pile of money back? Or allow investor to sell the whole thing to someone else who just want to live on dividends.
The investors don't want their pile of money back - that would just be a loan, they want your business to go to the moon so their equity becomes much more valuable than their investment. The investors will call for more investment and faster growth, so they can find a window to sell for big money.
That's just not how VCs work. Basically it's you HAVE to always show hockey stick growth.
Steady 5-10% per year isn't good enough. It has to grow exponentially. So that's why you keep hiring and keep spreading out the service into a whole bunch of other areas.
There are plenty of companies that have been highly successful at growing way beyond their first product or service. If Apple had stopped with PCs, we wouldn't have iPods, iPhones, iPads, etc.
The danger is when a startup seeks to grow just for growth sake. Hire way more people than we really need so we attract investors by showing rapid growth is their modus operandi. That approach has actually worked enough that many companies are willing to travel that risky road. But that road is also littered with casualties.
Because a startup isn’t about growing sustainable. It’s about build an expensive rocket ship and trying to grow at record speeds. Most companies will fail but a select few will have 10x+ gains.
You don’t need VC cash to start a successful company but the time horizon is much longer.
Many people do. They have a five-person company that does one thing and that you never hear of, either while it's running happily or when it goes out of business.
Patreon is/was clearly trying to become an all-in-one platform to justify their increasingly large cut (like 15% now). Stopping at 2 doesn't achieve that.
If you take VC money you are on a different track. VC's place thousands of bets with a %99.9 failure rate. But the hits, are so huge, they cover all their bad bets. So they want you to take the money and swing for fences.
It’s weird these companies grow this big. How many software engineers do you need to monthly bill a list of people and transfer it to a different list?
If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.
Most of them? Can you give an example of a 5 person competitor competing with a large company?
And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?
They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why.
Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.
Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.
I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat.
It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes.
In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale.
Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.
Have they outperformed Zoom and Teams? That feels like a stretch, even if I prefer Discord to either of them
Plus, they had a small team, but I met most of them back in the Hammer and Chisel days and they were already a 20 person team at that point at least.
I'm not at all trying to say you can't have a good product with a small company. It's the incessant "I could do this myself in a month. I won't actually do it, but I totally could" responses. Almost every company you've heard of isn't getting by on single-digit employees, let alone one very smart person.
I don't disagree with you, but Zoom is also providing a pretty different service, and Teams provides a lot of enterprise level stuff that Discord doesn't. Discord is better for us perhaps, but it's definitely doing worse as a matter of revenue.
He's not wrong. Patreon's technical platform isn't cutting edge or unique and could be replicated fairly quickly by a small team in a month or two. Most of what makes Patreon what it is comes from the other parts of the company, i.e., the marketers, account managers, etc., that bring in the actual revenue.
Of course, that's also the reason why a tiny company can't just replace Patreon: it's not the tech that matters. It's the marketing and other people stuff that you just can't handle with a small team.
It's not a good sign that Patreon is doubling down on engineering and eliminating the positions that actually bring in revenue. That's a sign of a poorly managed company not understanding its value proposition. Keeping extra engineers on staff to create yet another cryptocurrency isn't going to save Patreon, but the absence of the two dozen plus marketers and account managers they just fired will be acutely felt as they go into the holiday season.
Is that true? I feel like every past discussion about Patreon, as well as from the folks I know who use it as artists, they're not really getting much in terms of marketing or assistance/management. I certainly have a hard time believing that they're making most of their money from their "services" outside of just relaying money.
Their discovery is pretty awful too. My understanding is that they're mostly viable because there's no easier way to solicit money as a podcast/youtube channel right now.
That's a problem with the people, not with the tech. They overhired without training people into the roles they were hired for.
On discovery: Tiktok, for example, is absolutely slaying Insta, Snap, and Twitter. Tiktok uses human curation; the other 3 use an algorithm.
Note that Patreon takes a % of all transactions, so the key driver is increasing transactions. They don't need fancy new tech for that; they need more human interaction.
AIUI OnlyFans actually did successfully compete pretty directly with Patreon for a while as a 3 dev company. (I assume they may have grown a little since then)
It's amazing how consistently HN people underestimate the workload involved in basically any software product, and how often this blog post is relevant: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.”
Products are nearly always more complicated internally than it appears to the user. Indeed, often the very ease of use that you see as an end user is because of higher complexity on the inside.
People who say this have never worked in an enterprise, global software company. Or if they did, they may not be working on key projects.
Just SCALE ALONE is enough to expand a group of engineers a significant amount. A personal project is fine to run 1 AWS or Digital Ocean instance to run the application, database. But global distribution that has to support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million+ users concurrently globally? It's a big orchestration of applications and services that requires much larger teams.
Add in payment services and managing those integrations. Then, given that you're a global company and have to operate in multiple countries you have all sorts of regulatory compliance requirements. Who oversees that? Who manages all of these requirements? Not a single dev or a small team.
1 is bit low with number of customers that is both creators and users. But I would see the right number reasonably be under 100. With some geographical distribution.
> to monthly bill a list of people and transfer it to a different list
Sounds like a fantastic service to use for fraud or money laundering. It would be a shame if you had to dedicate a ton of employees towards preventing that. ;)
Structural inflation is primarily driven by blue collar wages. Going to be a lot of white collar casualties on the way back to 2%, given that rising discount rates hits them first
What's the growth from graphtreon vs these layoffs. Most top patreons have quadrupled or more monthly earnings from 2020. This could just be a netflix style "thanks for the hardwork, goodbye".
As layoff announcements go, this one is pretty solid. Cuts immediately to the chase. No sugarcoating. Takes full responsibility. Offers pretty solid severance packages.
I can only hope that if my organization has to lay people off, they'd be half as kind as some of the recent ones have been (and not at all like others, such as Klarna).
I wonder if it's somehow related to some allegations floating around today (e.g. https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1569439160561442817 ) of Patreon dealing with part of the revenue coming from effectively selling risque pictures of minors.
Bit confused by reducing staff spend while increasing spending on engineering & product. Surely for a software company those are roughly the same thing?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadSounds like someone is in serious need of an ego check.
I should imagine the people that blog post is relevant to know who he is, yes.
So professional! /s
https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack
I assume OP expected the blog post to be taken down or changed, so they captured it and linked to the capture instead of the original. I feel like the protocol for this should be to make a capture, post a link to it as a comment in the thread, and link to the original in the post.
If the stats from things like Patreon are to believed (and filtering out the "dead weight" of creators who don't post or have given up without closing their account) there's a serious "top 1% of creators make XX% of the revenue" problem.
Which means that for a small fraction, it's a job, for the vast majority it's a money-losing hobby.
And even if you don't, certainly an "industry" where 99% of the people "employed" don't even make the poverty line or make back their expenses (patreon and only fans would fall here) wouldn't. (The people trying to 'make it big' are probably moonlighting as retail/restuarant anyway, just as all those who tried to make it in Hollywood did in years past).
There's certainly major abuses but the 1099 and "self employed" world is even more full of them than the W4 world.
/s
But that doesn't make it a job. You could do hard work in moving a mountain but that's not a job.
Needless to say, earning money off of your looks (something you didn't work hard to gain in the first place) doesn't qualify as hard-working job.
Job (n):
1. a paid position of regular employment.
2. a task or piece of work, especially one that is paid.
---
It seems to fit #2 perfectly (exhibiting to an audience), and #1 can be met based on e.g corporate structure (subscription pay into an LLC that normalizes the salary etc)
I'd argue that it's in fact potentially "skilled labor" in that it's not obvious what it takes to produce content that brings regular subscribers. Tons of adult content creators burn out and pivot because they can't get traction.
Even if you're very conventionally attractive, you need to put in a lot of networking and marketing before you can make money off of "your looks". Even then, you don't just sit back and let your looks do everything.
Porn stars generally spend a couple hours DAILY in the gym. Then there's all of the events you have to do to remain relevant in social circles. Then there's actual shooting. But before that there's hair and makeup. Then there's outfits. Selecting garments that match your personal style and also are sexy enough to excite your fans isn't easy and it usually isn't cheap.
Going through all of that to get paid by the fans is absolutely a job. If the fans didn't pay, it wouldn't be a job.
Ignoring the time spent setting up shoots, editing, engagement, etc, and focusing just on "looks", you have to spend a lot of time on working out, make up, shaving, putting together outfits, etc.
If you think that looking good is something that doesn't take any hard work, it's because you've never tried to put in that work yourself.
An African American woman, for example, has almost zero chance of making it to the top 10 p$rnstars list, no matter how much she put effort and time to prepare herself.
Some things are just the realities of the world. Thinking otherwise makes you delusional.
If people are willingly paying you to do something, that's a good job as any other job.
Plus, I earn money off of my natural intelligence. I didn't do anything to gain it in the first place, I just happened to have intelligent parents.
> doesn't qualify as hard-working job
Two questions:
1. Why doesn't it qualify as a job if they are earning income?
2. Why should someone have to "work hard" to earn a living? If have a high-value easy-to-sell product, then why work harder than you need to?
If you have a cognitive aptitude for mathematics, you didn't "earn" that either - everything in some way or another is part of your birthright and privilege, both nature and nurture.
If you genuinely believe that the mind is somehow magically distinct from the same genetic system that gave you your physique, I'm afraid you're the delusional one.
Equity markets are often irrational and wrong. IE Covid- essentially every stock was down significantly in March of 2020, not realizing that some businesses will actually benefit from the pandemic.
That said, your statement about fat at these companies is true, and its probably been long past time that they clean out some dead wood.
Not when significant part of your employee compensation is equity-based.
From a corporate perspective, you are buying a fixed dollar amount of shares to compensate your employees- I haven't heard of a fixed number of shares being offered as compensation in years for pubic companies. This does not affect your cashflow, just the number of shares being purchased in the open market.
From an employee perspective, its definitely not fun to see the value of your grants drop by 50%. It should only really affect your decision to leave or not if you feel the drop is permanent, or just a temporary blip. IE if I was hired at Peloton in 2020, the stock has dropped 95% and while it will likely bounce back a decent amount, the equity part of your compensation is essentially worthless and not going to be a golden handcuff that will keep you around. Google/Alphabet, its down about 30% but thats likely just an overreaction and is to some extent welcome as you get more shares in your grant... it wouldn't stress me out at all- maybe if I was looking to cash out and buy a house right now, but this was a risk that was always there.
Really hoping they don't start pulling offers. I can't put my finger on why, but somehow that seems like it'd be even more cruel than layoffs.
I find it surprising that they are considering layoffs. There have been a number of articles about Sundar's concerns over productivity [1,2,3], but layoffs have a tendency to reduce moral and productivity.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515458 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322131 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32816105
Taking full responsibility mean taking a pay cut or stepping down or basically taking consequences for yourself first before others have to.
The non-corporate speak translation would be “I tried my best to make this company bigger and more valuable, but it didn’t work. Some of you will now need to be sacrificed, but not me!”
Full responsibility is a samurai killing himself painfully while his best friend cuts off his head to end his suffering. That's full responsibility.
This is, "I fucked up guys, here's 3-6 months pay and some benes... my bad. And yeah I know I fucked up last year too, but I took full responsibility then as well, so it's all good..."
And... I suspect whatever he's doing is also affecting him emotionally/mentally, and... to some extent career-wise. Taking these sorts of public steps may make it harder to be entrusted to CEO someplace else in future. Given patreon specifically, I doubt he's planning to leave and go CEO someplace else, but overall, there's no easy outs in scenarios like this. He'll be getting second-guessed and pilloried regardless of what steps he takes.
Better yet, refuse to take a bonus, not that the board should award one. If the board awards one anyway, contribute 100% of it to helping laid off employees.
It doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things but it’s just that he is claiming culpability for all of the ills patreon is experiencing.
Is it possible to be "laid off" for performance reasons?
For example "The bottom 10% of salesmen by sales volume"
A company finds itself in a situation where it needs to reduce headcount for reasons. Do you a) just role the dice and randomly pick who goes? or b) Have managers rank their performers and use it to get rid of the lower performers or protect their most valuable people? In a case like this is means some variation of "you're too expensive for what you do for us."
https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack
3 months' of pay + longer depending on tenure at the company. Healthcare until the end of the year. Mental care up to 6 months. They contracted a placement company to place the laid off staff to other companies in the sector. A lot of those people will already get hooked up by a company within a week or so, even without the placement company being able to take action.
This looks as decent as layoffs go.
We don’t know everyone’s unique situation, even if they did go beyond what most companies do.
What we also don't know is the companies financial situation. Keeping people on when they can't be afforded can be a way to make a company completely collapse. I was in two startups that would have collapsed completely, without layoffs, around the time of the last recession. This is why the "keep x months of salary" are rules you strictly follow.
This is besides Patreon giving their former employees a license to goof off on their dime for 3 months. I can’t imagine anyone at Patreon being so hard up that 3 months pay and insurance to look for new work is enough to break the camels back.
Recognizing the impact of an action does not mean you're entirely responsible for it.
Those who are hired to Patreon and similar companies arent people who would end up unemployed if they are laid off. Those people already have to turn down recruiters who try to poach them every week.
The slowdown comes from all the moving parts who need to be in place in order to facilitate the transition of an employee to an org.
Think of your average tech hire who needs to (a) go through orientation just like everyone else, and (b) is going to take a week or two just to get his work environment and credentialing set up so he can work with the servers. I'll put my experience on that side of the desk working with dozens of clients against any anecdotal one-offs who got hired late in the year.
A polite reminder that some companies are growing really fast and are even struggling with hiring.
Most people in tech also don't live paycheck to paycheck. As an adult, your responsibility is to have an emergency fund. No career is safe.
They're making more than $15/hr: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/walmart-global-tech/salarie...
I didn't even say it was impossible. I just think it's unrealistic to expect to find something after Nov 15th and until the New Year. Sorry for knowing what I'm talking about, I guess.
Also, I think it's quaint that people assume that when labor reductions happen at tech companies, that only tech employees are affected. Somewhere there's an admin assistant who has been working at that glorified CMS, and I doubt they have the same job prospects as a software architect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV-3GgU6rlo
It seems to be what most CEO are saying lately.
This is why I will never be a CEO. I'd just come right out and say, "17% of you are expendable and I had your jobs replaced by scripts and a few machines. I'm going to use that money to buy more machines, hire more brilliant engineers, and see what percentage of the company I can replace by next year."
If you're able to automate a large portion of your workforce, why wouldn't you? You'll be rewarded for it in every aspect. You'll be praised by the Board of Directors for cutting costs and improving productivity (since algorithms and robots don't have to sleep, never get tired, never call in sick, never get drunk and shit in their husband's bed, etc.). You'll be praised by Wall Street as a "visionary, technologically-minded thinker / leader".
There's zero downside for you.
There's enormous downside for parts of society.
The difference is, I'm willing to admit that when I do this, it's directly to my benefit.
Have you considered that part of the fabric of civilized society is...being civil with the people that you interact with, and require cooperation from?
You can hold any opinion of them that you like, but the difference between a competent manager and an incompetent one is how they can translate their personal disdain for their direct reports, in a way that doesn't treat them like cogs, and improves their performance on the things they're responsible for.
What makes someone a competent manager is whether or not they complete their assigned tasks and projects that come down from above.
You don't like people who are direct and brutal in their feedback. Got it.
Hell, you can turn back the clock to 2004-2008 World of Warcraft and see this for yourself. The best guilds in the world had leadership that was brutally forthright - bordering on downright cruel - to their membership, but they still managed to execute, because when everyone's goals are aligned, you'll be surprised the shit people are willing to entertain. And not only were these people not being paid, they had to pay to play the damn game!
And yes, I know the analogy doesn't map perfectly onto work for several reasons, but the crux of the idea is there: a harsh taskmaster can move mountains with a little bit of fear (I'll replace you with a shell script if your performance doesn't improve) and a lot of honesty.
In the future, you could save us both a lot of time and effort by just saying, "I don't like this management style."
But I've seen it in video games, I've seen it in startups, I've seen it in Fortune 500 companies, and I've seen it in the military. Properly implemented, it works wonders.
It was fine when I was an external developer, but when I switched over to an in-house role it sucked seeing the fear in departments that I turned my gaze to :(
It means "I'm not blaming anyone else for this". Which might not mean much but it's probably better than the alternatives.
Maybe this is just a language thing, but in my world "taking responsibility" involves some action to personally shoulder the pain of the layoffs beyond saying "my bad". I'd expect it'd at least begin with resignation in this case. Just like you can't just announce "I declare bankruptcy" to shrug off debts.
I'm astounded that so many supposed seasoned leaders were out there making crazy projections around maintaining covid levels of growth and I also don't think 'my bad' is enough in that context, but benefits above what's required are rarely handed over without someone committing to fighting for it.
Responsibility
Being responsible means being dependable, keeping promises and honoring our commitments. It is accepting the consequences for what we say and do. It also means developing our potential.
People who are responsible don't make excuses for their actions or blame others when things go wrong. They think things through and use good judgment before they take action. They behave in ways that encourage others to trust them.
People who are responsible take charge of their lives. They make plans and set goals for nurturing their talents and skills. They are resilient in finding ways to overcome adversity. They make decisions, taking into account obligations to family and community.
This guy literally made excuses for his actions: "broader economic slowdown"
"To ensure that we make progress on that roadmap, we are increasing our investment in product, engineering, and design, which means decreasing our spend on other ares[sic] of the company."
So it's not even a money issue. They have the money, they just want to spend it on servers and other people.
And finally, just so we're clear, I don't take umbrage with his decision and his plan for his employees. Hell, it's admirable, frankly. I take umbrage with his words. He's not taking responsibility. Responsibility means he'd cut his pay as much as necessary to keep these people because he misjudged the market and where it's headed post-COVID-19 lockdowns (since there is no such thing as 'post-COVID-19' - it's here forever now).
This is pretty classic example of wanting to have the best of all possible worlds.
"I want to be lauded for my graciousness. I want to be lauded for taking responsibility. I want to be lauded by my investors for a plan that grows the company."
That's why this is a load of horseshit. He's trying to please everyone. I have no doubt he probably agonized over this decision - I really do not; but he made it, and that means there are certain consequences with which he must live, one of those is that it should be clear to his employees that they will always take a backseat when the economic times get tough.
I was under the impression we were addressing "Jack"'s claim to responsibility. I wasn't trying to comment on the actions of the company (which I fully admit is more compassionate in its layoffs than other companies would be).
Not that this was said in this particular case so directly. This is just a general thought.
How is funding so tight that cutting the 1% of money going to these people is going to make all the difference? It's not even a total 1% gain, there will be some lost productivity making it somewhat difficult to measure.
If you truly tried everything, couldn't the CEO or other executives take a tiny cut? Not that I expect them to, I'm just saying if they truly did everything within their power to prevent it, like is often said.
I mean, sometimes I give a significant amount of my salary, like 10% as donations / tips / handouts and expect nothing back. These aren't even people I did something bad to, like forgot to pick up when I said I would, or felt guilty for spilling food on their carpet.
Surely in situation where I messed up and caused a problem for someone, I would do whatever it takes to make it right. I wouldn't just say "Well, that's what you get in this system of inviting friends over. I'm not technically required to do anything. I guess there's nothing I can do (including picking up the mess I caused or paying to have it cleaned)"
I've seen similar large donations from people who truly struggle to pay for rent and food even be similarly generous. Sometimes people will live on limited food or delay getting an apartment if it means helping out an acquaintance.
If you make millions of dollars, you don't need to worry about these basics. You'd think it'd be easier to take a personal hit which probably will have actually 0 impact on your life (literally no change-- keep on golfing, vacations, etc), rather than supposedly living with the guilt, as is frequently said, of people struggling to survive because you wanted to save 1% of your company's money for a few months (before realizing you need to hire and retrain people from scratch.)
> it'd be easier to take a personal hit
Jack Conte, the CEO, was not previously wealthy (that we know of). At this stage he might be getting paid very well, maybe even in the mid six figures, but definitely not spending $8M/year on golfing to make that a viable alternative to layoffs.
Their new engineering staff could fix that, for one.
My card didn't automatically update and I can confirm that the site gets weirdly broken.
https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack
"but as the world began recovering from the pandemic and enduring a broader economic slowdown, that plan is no longer the right path forward for Patreon"
So basically, they overhired to meet demands during Pandemic and now as less people are using the platform (??), there is no need for the 17% of people. Interesting.
Pretty decent IMO.
>You’ll also receive COBRA health care coverage through the end of the year.
Odd that that doesn't match the pay period, but oh well.
Everybody did, even anticipating that the move to online economy would slow down after the pandemic.
But nobody predicted the Ukraine war, sanctions, and the economic effect those sanctions made back in the West.
It's the same pattern at so many other companies now. Over-hiring during COVID (thinking what exactly? that people would forever stay locked up at home with nothing else to do with their money?), before waking up to the reality that things have gone back to normal and that there was never really a plan whatsoever for those hired. Asses were put in seats though, so there's that.
Imagine Patreon's position during early covid: they had a firehose of money pointed at them. I'm sure they knew it will end, but not "when". They had to react to it, if for no other reason than to prevent a competitor from getting ahead.
I wonder if this was Bay Area tech elite bias. Between the Bay Area being late to reopen and generous remote working options, decision makers might have planned for growth that matched where SF in the pandemic, but hadn't realized that most of the country had already moved on.
https://www.subscribestar.com/prohibited_content
I'm all for having some SFW platforms, but let's not pretend that there isn't a dramatic, dramatic demand for NSFW content, and that banning it is nothing short of prudish.
Does anyone have any other examples of what Patreon does for them?
"Hi everyone - I have some sad news to share: today, Patreon is doing a layoff of about 80 employees, about 17% of our team. This was ultimately my decision, so I wanted you all to hear directly from me about the reasoning.
Before I do, I want to say two things: first, today will be painful for many people, and I am deeply sorry to the incredible teammates who will be leaving Patreon - they are good, kind, creator-first, exceptionally talented, and smart people.
And second, I remember how nerve-racking it was when I was a full time creator - before starting Patreon - to watch companies that I depended on go through moments like this. So for those of you who rely on Patreon for your business and communities: I want to assure you that the company is making this move precisely for that reason - so we can continue to be a rock for your business.
As the world has recovered from COVID lockdowns and entered a broader economic slowdown, it has become clear that the original plan we built doe he year, to support outsized growth through the pandemic, is no longer the right plan for the company.
I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team.
It's important to me that we continue to deliver for our creators and patrons with new features and products like native video, new content creation and organization tools, a wold-class mobile experience, and new ways for creators to grow their membership and strengthen their communities. To ensure that we make progress on that roadmap, we are increasing our investment in product, engineering, and design, which means decreasing our spend on other ares of the company.
Ad difficult as this is fo our team, I know this is the right thing to do for Patreon, because it ensures that the company maintains a position of strength, even through an economic downturn, while continuing to deliver for our creators.
If you want to read more about this decision, I just published the internal note I sent to our team this morning, and it's linked in my bio. I'm going to stop posting here for a while to be 100% present internally for our teammates at the company. But I promise to come back in a bit - I will see you all soon.
- Jack"
Underrated dynamic in the startup layoffs this year. Many software companies grew headcount rapidly in areas outside of prod / eng in 2021 and are now scaling back those roles while preserving the talent that was extremely difficult to hire.
What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again?
I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without actually taking any responsibility. It seems like the laid off employees are taking responsibility.
The laid off employees are the ones ultimately worse off by the outcome, that goes without saying, what you're missing is that this is different from being morally or strategically responsible for why the situation played out this way. That's the ownership the CEO is trying to take.
If I told someone "we'll be working on this report til the cows come home", I wouldn't expect that it's necessary to explain that the expression doesn't actually have anything to do with cattle, and instead just means I'm expecting this to take a long but indeterminant amount of time. If someone found it clever to point out what I _actually_ meant, I wouldn't find their input very helpful, just socially unintelligent and annoying.
Usually it's more helpful to just research what an expression means, rather than trying to argue about what you personally think it _should_ mean.
"Taking responsibility" (taking care of the kid) of condom breaking is a bit different than "taking responsiblity" (doing absolutely nothing of substance) in corporate world.
Your observation that words being said in the corporate world may be interpreted differently than in the bedroom is not a meaningful one and just comes off as uneducated, if I have to be honest. Communication in the corporate world is often deliberately vague, congratulations on your groundbreaking discovery.
Some of You May Die, but that is a Sacrifice I'm Willing to Make
The knee-jerk "oh yeah you should quit if you feel bad!!1" reaction is ill-informed and boring, but unfortunately very predictable.
The next CEO is more responsible with the money. If you earn high, stakes should be high, else there is no stopping from making decisions that are harmful to all the parties: investors, employees and the company itself.
Taking personal responsibility and resigning fixes lots of things.
>>oh yeah you should quit if you feel bad
He should quit for making wrong decisions, for which he had many many weeks to months to deliberate upon. And also had the choice to not continue with the bad decisions for nearly the same time if not more.
During covid lawmakers cut their own salary by 20%. A little bit of honor in a culture when ordinary people are taking hits goes a long way, rather than lipservice and PR.
1. We are laying off underperformers to strengthen the company (Has happened)
2. We are laying off poorly performing divisions (again, indirectly foisting the responsibility on the employees, because their division is underperforming)
3. We are laying off to cut costs and keep the company profitable (This may be the truth, but it treats employees like they are replaceable cogs in the machine they can throw out and bring back in any time).
4. Making the employees quit by themselves by creating toxic work environments (recently, forcibly enforcing back to office rules to shed all employees who cannot make it back or prefer remote).
5. Just layoff without any reason, not worrying about the mental health of the leaving employees or the ones who remain.
Just owning up his responsibilities means, the relieved employee atleast does not have to add the stress of "did-I-do-something-wrong" to his/her list of woes. This can sometimes be debilitating.
It also adds to the confidence of the existing employees that the company will do right by them, if it comes to letting them go in the future.
Ideally, no one should get laid off. But companies cannot be forever profitable and the government or no other body is going to bail them out. Considering that, this seems to be a more mature way of handling a terribly difficult situation.
In this ideal world of yours, are people allowed to quit?
As you spend more time in the industry, you see lots of badly handled layoffs and some better managed ones. You hear the stories of other veterans and learn a little more.
At some point you realize it is something everyone inevitably goes through and just a part and parcel of working in the private sector. You learn to plan ahead financially and mentally to handle such surprises.
Nowhere here do I talk about quitting (other than in the context of the forced one),
I've been through a bunch of layoff, and most of them are steeped in legal noise, mainly because in the UK layoffs need to follow a legally proscribed route. so the explanations are normally a lot less honest.
I think something got lost along the way there.
Was there no better place to link to?
> We’re waiving the one-year equity vesting cliff for all departing employees so that everyone has an opportunity to be a shareholder, regardless of your tenure. [...] All departing teammates will qualify for an extended option exercise period of 5 years, and we have extended it to 7 years in regions where we are legally able.
It must be jarring to be on the receiving end of a layoff. In the grand scheme of things, a laid-off employee surely has bigger things to worry about... but I still think what they did here with the equity, especially the option exercise period, is a nice touch. Not many companies do this sort of thing, but they should.
[1]: https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack
Not only that, all former employees are de-facto "background check references" / "evagenlists" / "detractors" of your company. Forever! (well, not exactly forever... but close enough)
I can't recall a single year over the last 10 years where younger engineers, cousins, nephews or friends have asked me about the 2 companies I worked at before.
And boy, have I been candid.
Talked a very good friend of mine from joining Amazon for an offer he got making nearly 3 times much I did. All because of "decency" (or lack thereof) of a company.
Is this supposed to be haven't?
https://retailwire.com/discussion/there-might-soon-be-no-one...
I actually went out of my way to make it easy for my employees to quit. If they didn't want to stay, then I sincerely wished them well.
The company limited what I could do, but I did my best, and it seemed to work out.
That said - I've held off on any criticisms around their strategy/execution for the moment (aside from that) since it's unclear what happened. I'm wondering if Patreon is getting hit with lots of people backing off support of artists after a big jump due to the pandemic.
Given inflation and a lot of feelings of uncertainty around the economy, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that their revenue went way down in a hurry this year.
I back four artists on Patreon, down from five a year ago. In all 4 cases I'm either too busy to get full "value" out of sponsoring (e.g., I don't have time to read the updates or listen to all the demos), or there's not really any benefit other than funneling money to support the artist in hopes they'll continue working as an artist.
Each month I look at the bill from Patreon and wonder "do I really need to keep spending this money?" So far I've elected to - but I haven't been hit super hard by inflation or a layoff like many folks...
You're right!
That said, by the time a company is large enough that 17% of it is more than 17 people the kind of startup organization you have wisely and correctly nodded to will have ceased to exist.
So while you are right in that such scenarios have, do, and will continue to happen there's perhaps cause to wonder if that's really the best way to characterize replacing a security organization with specialists with a bunch of engineers who are likely quarter-time security at best. It's akin to firing all your engineers because the sales people can do a little bit of coding each.
Not really. A lot of stuff having moved to services, a lot of stuff being handled in 'no code' manner have simplified organizations a lot these days. Today you can just offload a lot of things to SaaS vendors that can automatically handle those stuff. Instead of having to have entire teams dealing with it like how it was in the earlier decades. You just need a host of capable people to deal with those services on your side, by wearing various hats. So the 'startup format' seems to have become extended to larger organizations.
Everyone should note the companies that do brutal layoffs with little/no severance. It's a major red flag because it shows incompetence and/or a lack of ethics.
Good for Patreon to go beyond the 60-day mandated period though
[0] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN
How many times have you been laid off?!
It's pretty easy to get laid off a lot if you work in startups. You join and know there is a ticking clock in the background. If you don't, you probably should.
Every startup thinks they are the 1 out of 10 (because why wouldn't they, you have to.)
This depends on where you worked. Most of the developers I know were around for the dotcom bust, but only 2 have experienced a layoff. But none were working for dotcom companies.
In the first layoff I knew the company was planning a round in the next 18 months and I'd been there 6 years. I waited around for the payout. Layoff law in Australia is more favorable to the employee, the payout was 10 months. I took a week off before starting the next job on a substantial salary increase.
The most important is not to take it personally as a failure. That can mess with self confidence and interview performance and general well being. At my HR interview they had the team there and some "transition coach" they seemed worried about us. I was actually thrilled as I planned to leave anyway.
The "2022 financial crisis"? That's not even a thing. Slowing economic growth and even a recession, should we enter one later this year does not constitute a "financial crisis."
There has been no "redefining" nor is it a recent phenomenon nor does it have political roots. You are wrong on all accounts.
It doesn't have political roots. The National Bureau of Economic Research(NBER) is a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization with an aim is to promote a greater understanding of how the economy works.
The nonpartisan panel, which was established in 1978 by former Ronald Reagan adviser and NBER president Martin Feldstein, has gone out of its way to keep politics out of the process.
The committee meets in secret and doesn’t announce its gatherings in advance or even in retrospect, unless there’s a press release declaring a formal decision.
And it typically takes the panel about a year to decide on a recession call, though some decision have been made in a few months while others have taken almost twice as long. That’s almost always well after a recession has been widely recognized by Wall Street.
The committee has never reversed a call.
Rather than two negative GDP readings, the NBER is looking for a substantial decline in activity over a sustained period of time. The committee sets dates of the peaks of economic activity and troughs based on six monthly data series, including nonfarm payrolls, personal consumption spending and industrial production.
It's pretty spectacular though that not only have been able to declare that were in one but you are also able to comment with confidence on how bad it's going to be be.
Saw the writing on the wall for each of those and left before I was the one laid off.
I worked in an industry that's highly cyclical and had major consolidation over the last decade (HDD/SSD storage). We bought several companies and they would do layoffs roughly every 18 months or so.
It's the nature of playing around in the high stakes startup world. As I've gotten older I've found more stable companies. But it was quite funny coming home once every few years to tell my girlfriend I was laid off again and then picking up another job a week later.
Despite not knowing Jack personally pretty much everything I've seen from him over the years has reinforced my generally high opinion of him. In this case as well. As lay-offs go Patreon seems to be trying very hard to do right by their employees.
Don't mistake that for being a good CEO. He gives deep-felt apologies every time he does layoffs... which he does frequently. Often because he just doesn't like what people are doing. He also frequently communicates with the public in a more heart-felt manner than he does his own employees. He's great at putting out a great face.
- 5 days ago - Security Team - https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/09/patreon-security-layoffs/
- 2021 - https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/patreon-lays-off-36-emplo...
- 2020 - https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/patreon-lays-off-13-of-wor...
- 2019, September layoffs (can't find the links for these ones)
- 2019, June layoffs
- 2018, June layoffs
Also, to be clear. I was not one of the ones laid off. But I did see my entire team besides my manager vanish one day and then be told I'm expected to do the team's work for the next 6 months.
Patreon has a great mission though and I can see how it would attract creator-focused team members. There are some impressive Patreon alumni in their own right.
This is "mid", as my friends have started to say
Edit: I read the link and it appears to apply to RSUs as well. What I said about options is true but RSUs, different story. I’d sell those for sure.
Why do you think that?
It doesn’t require ‘very, very good luck’ for most companies shares to not collapse.
If you work for a big company like Oracle or IBM your options have cash value no luck needed.
What? These are public companies; short-dated OTM options have > $0 value only in volatile markets. But these companies don't pay employees in options.
But it's not all that great. Patreon is not publicly traded, so it seems likely that exercising any options will require cash up front, plus it will immediately trigger taxable compensation (income tax plus FICA). And how will the FMV be determined, if there is no public market trading? (ans.: usually just some number voted on by the board). It may well be that the options are never worth anything even after the extended period.
It is clear that these are not ISOs (statutory options), because statutory options by law only allow up to 3 months to exercise after employment ends.
Layoffs suck but I found the extended exercise windows and other benefits to be rather pleasantly responsible given the situation.
They are likely NSOs and with an extended exercise period the former employees do not need to exercise them. They can just hold them and if within 7 years there is a liquidity event, they can exercise & sell. The taxable event would only be upon exercise, so in the case the former employee just holds the options (which is almost certainly what they’ll do), there is no immediate tax impact, nor any sadness about the options expiring. Upon a future E&S they’ll have taxes to pay but also money from the sale to pay the taxes.
Yes the situation could be more complicated if the person were trying to optimize the tax situation but I think that is very unlikely to apply in this situation. Just hold the options and be happy.
And really PopAlongKid, why are you so critical when you really have not even a basic understanding of how this works?
And if Patreon is acquired some day rather than going public, the employee shares are probably going to be last in line after all the VC money (preferred share classes), and maybe not worth anything. I went through this when I worked for a dot-com startup in the early aughts. Even if they do go public, there will probably be lock-up periods to restrict the immediate selling of shares, and then you are at the mercy of the stock market, where the value of the company (which you long ago stopped having any input to) could well put your shares into loss territory.
It's not a unique benefit, many companies offer the extended exercise window, but it is very good for employees because otherwise they have 90 days to exercise or abandon the options.
In your mind you are imagining somebody with a few options that are barely in the money. What if somebody who got laid off has worked there for 5 years and is sitting on super valuable options. With no extended window they'd be in a huge pickle where they'd either have to abandon all their options or pay a huge exercise/tax bill right now. But with the extended window they don't.
Neither of us can predict the future of patreons valuation so you shouldn't assume things are going to go badly and thus this benefit will not matter. The whole point of stock options is the option part of it. Maybe it will be worth a lot, maybe it won't, but you'd like to wait and find out and shouldn't have to give that up because you were laid off.
Incorrect. Yes, one would not exercise options that are already underwater, but once you own the shares and there is a post-IPO lockup period[0] you most definitely can lose money on the shares, money on which you already were taxed at ordinary tax plus FICA rates. Try looking at the volatility of company share prices in the period immediately after their IPO.
>you really have not even a basic understanding of how this works?
You also have not addressed the strong possibility of being acquired rather than going public. (Ex-)employees do not make any money until after all the VC people do, and there may not be much left.
Again, I never said this was a bad thing, more like a "meh" thing.
[0]https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answer/12/ipo-lockup-period...
Yes preferred share classes exist, this is irrelevant to whether or not the options have option value! I'm not guaranteeing that Patreon stock will be worth a lot of money, only that it might be worth a lot of money.
Yes, sure, they have to dilute the company a bit by creating more stocks for the people buying it, but if your company is in enough trouble that you're laying off 1 in 6 employees, it seems financially wise to effectively be doing many small rounds of fundraising this way. It extends your runway some small amount.
1. Start a company that does a thing well
2. Hire enough people to do the thing well
3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things
4. Hire more managers who hire even more people
5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done
6. Run out of money
7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary.
Why not just stop at 2?
Because your investors will never allow that. And without their money, you cant even reach #2.
I don't know if it's the right business call, but Uber is like 10 different companies now.
1) you won't attract any follow-on investment capital;
2) your original investor will be angry that you're sitting on a pile of money that is doing nothing;
3) you will likely grow slower than your other competitors. in some markets, this is death, in other markets, this is fine.
Patreon had nearly 500 staff before layoffs. Now has about 400 staff. You may have a hard time understanding what all those people do, but I suspect they're all quite busy.
That's just not how VCs work. Basically it's you HAVE to always show hockey stick growth.
Steady 5-10% per year isn't good enough. It has to grow exponentially. So that's why you keep hiring and keep spreading out the service into a whole bunch of other areas.
I'm guessing 100 managers at least. Busy hiring more people to staff their perpetually understaffed teams, each doing some disjoint initiative.
The danger is when a startup seeks to grow just for growth sake. Hire way more people than we really need so we attract investors by showing rapid growth is their modus operandi. That approach has actually worked enough that many companies are willing to travel that risky road. But that road is also littered with casualties.
You don’t need VC cash to start a successful company but the time horizon is much longer.
That’s like a single person saas.
And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?
Being over-staffed is different from "one person can run this as a saas business"
Teams, Google's VoIPs, Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Zoom
Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.
It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes.
In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale.
Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.
Plus, they had a small team, but I met most of them back in the Hammer and Chisel days and they were already a 20 person team at that point at least.
I'm not at all trying to say you can't have a good product with a small company. It's the incessant "I could do this myself in a month. I won't actually do it, but I totally could" responses. Almost every company you've heard of isn't getting by on single-digit employees, let alone one very smart person.
Better product
Of course, that's also the reason why a tiny company can't just replace Patreon: it's not the tech that matters. It's the marketing and other people stuff that you just can't handle with a small team.
It's not a good sign that Patreon is doubling down on engineering and eliminating the positions that actually bring in revenue. That's a sign of a poorly managed company not understanding its value proposition. Keeping extra engineers on staff to create yet another cryptocurrency isn't going to save Patreon, but the absence of the two dozen plus marketers and account managers they just fired will be acutely felt as they go into the holiday season.
Their discovery is pretty awful too. My understanding is that they're mostly viable because there's no easier way to solicit money as a podcast/youtube channel right now.
On discovery: Tiktok, for example, is absolutely slaying Insta, Snap, and Twitter. Tiktok uses human curation; the other 3 use an algorithm.
Note that Patreon takes a % of all transactions, so the key driver is increasing transactions. They don't need fancy new tech for that; they need more human interaction.
> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.”
Products are nearly always more complicated internally than it appears to the user. Indeed, often the very ease of use that you see as an end user is because of higher complexity on the inside.
Just SCALE ALONE is enough to expand a group of engineers a significant amount. A personal project is fine to run 1 AWS or Digital Ocean instance to run the application, database. But global distribution that has to support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million+ users concurrently globally? It's a big orchestration of applications and services that requires much larger teams.
Add in payment services and managing those integrations. Then, given that you're a global company and have to operate in multiple countries you have all sorts of regulatory compliance requirements. Who oversees that? Who manages all of these requirements? Not a single dev or a small team.
On the other hand
How much friction there's between decision makers and people writing code in those companies?
How much time is wasted on meetings, teaching new people every month, etc, etc?
Sorry, but I really can see scenerios where 5 skilled engineers with domain knowledge can outperform 25-50 that need meetings to agree on everything
Sounds like a fantastic service to use for fraud or money laundering. It would be a shame if you had to dedicate a ton of employees towards preventing that. ;)
I can only hope that if my organization has to lay people off, they'd be half as kind as some of the recent ones have been (and not at all like others, such as Klarna).
Bit confused by reducing staff spend while increasing spending on engineering & product. Surely for a software company those are roughly the same thing?