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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

wsj.com

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#391

Post by gruez »

a-dub wrote: post #283
gruez wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what a vesting period is supposed to enforce?

yeah it needs to be stretched more. people talk about ESG... imagine what the world would look like if energy company executives were compensated based on the health of the company (and by proxy the health of the economy) ten years in the future... also maybe more tax rules along the lines of long/short cap gains that reduce the short term time value of money.

>people talk about ESG

What you described is supposed to be part of the "G" in "ESG".

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#392

Post by ceeplusplus »

bsuvc wrote: post #368
chii wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their compensation being high is not really relevant imho. It's the hidden assumption that if only the CxO compensation was lower, those workers could've been saved (aka, instead of redundancy, the CxO takes a pay cut to pay for the wages of those workers). Is this a valid argument? I dont know, but i feel that it isn't.

I'm trying to understand your point of view. Are you saying executive compensation should be orthogonal to company performance? Overpaid executives failed, so workers lost their jobs, but the executives get to keep theirs all the while saying things like "I take responsibility for this" when it is objectively false that they are taking responsibility. Does that seem right to you? Is that a good way to run a business,…

Executives also have to hold lots of stock that tanks when the company does poorly. Should workers also be forced to hold 100% of their RSUs as long as they work there and be paid 80% in RSUs? Even senior SWEs make 50% tops in RSUs and can sell their stock as soon as it vests with no restrictions. They get top ups to make up for poor stock performance. Their personal exposure to the company (risk!) is way lower than any executive. The CEO has effectively made negative salary due to their stock tanking.

Should companies be forced to keep unproductive or no longer useful workers? Clearly there is not enough customer demand for Robinhood to continue employing their ops/content/etc. workers. What are those workers going to do then, if they keep working?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#393

Post by BeetleB »

deaddodo wrote: post #371
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more difficult to justify to shareholders paying less, tbh. The risks of a bad CEO are enormous.

And yet, CEOs for decades (the 50s-80s) did just fine at a fraction of wealth disparity compared to today [1]. In fact, in just the last three years; the overall disparity has increased 31% despite corporations failing to properly manage the pandemic or their workforces. 1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker...

> And yet, CEOs for decades (the 50s-80s) did just fine at a fraction of wealth disparity compared to today [1].

And yet, SW professionals did just fine for decades when making anywhere from a quarter to a third of today's FAANG salaries (inflation adjusted).

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#394

Post by stackbutterflow »

xpe wrote: post #217
manquer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rich don’t see it that way. At its core wealth accumulation is a scoring contest so every penny counts for those care. Also if you have all the material needs that is satisfied, then you go after the rare hard to get high value exclusive money drain this is human nature. For your specific example what that 50m might make difference it maybe a bigger jet that flies further or a second jet for the family or a yatch…

Imagine if I was visiting Laos and told someone I met in the countryside that I spent, say $2,000 on a racing bicycle -- which would be considered "normal" in bike racing culture in many parts of the US. Imagine what that person would think! My central point is this: People are quick to "normalize" their behavior relative to their perceived peer group. So, yes, multinational CEO compensation is hard to comprehend. (I…

I don't entirely disagree with your point. However you and that person in Laos both have to work to put a roof over your head and food in your plate.

There's an absolute threshold at a few million dollars that guarantees financial independence wherever you are in the world. These rich people are well above that threshold. That's why it is more ridiculous to chase ever more money at their level than it is for you to purchase an expensive bike.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#395

Post by just_boost_it »

hosh wrote: post #359
BeetleB wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - all these articles about CEO compensation are misleading. Case in point: Intel's CEO's 2021 salary was reported as almost $180M. In reality, he got only about $10M. He hit literally none of the targets that would allow him to get the rest of the compensation (although in theory he has a few years to hit those targets).

That speaks to another point though -- the incentive to return shareholder value, often times to the detriment to the company, the employees, the customers, and sometimes to public safety.

Well, the shareholders provided the money that allows any of it to exist at all. If there's was nothing flowing back, there'd be nothing for institutional investors. IPOs would be worthless which means there'd be no exit for VCs. Everyone would love to just get money with no obligation to give anything back, but that's not the way the world works.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#397

Post by humanrebar »

adam_arthur wrote: post #358

The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…

You say that, but companies that cut tech too deep will probably get crushed under a mountain of technical debt or gradually lose goodwill due to buggy or stale products.

Point is, it's possible to ship crap with a small crew. But the cuts won't come uniformly from scoping back or removing low productivity engineers. You'll also see corners cut, upgrades delayed, security flaws ignored, and so on.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#398

Post by peter_mcrae »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #61
soneca wrote: post #49

> ”In his message Tuesday, Mr. Tenev said the new round of changes at the company are particularly concentrated in its operations, marketing and program management departments.” People here on HN often say how bad is to be an engineer in a non-tech company. It seems that it’s much worse to be a non-engineer in a tech company.

As a nontechnical person, I can say I don't blame co's for cutting these roles first. Marketing, HR, program management, etc. are great at creating additional layers and busywork that makes it seem like they're absolutely critical to a company functioning. I was mostly in sales/bd and what I did love about the job was that there were pretty objective criteria to look at to see performance- how many partnerships or de…

I don't disagree on cutting these roles first, but I don't think it's a function of these roles being non-important; rather when a company stops growing these roles have less utility. Less about the role and more about the company priorities which shift when growth stalls. No one is sales is going to advocate for less marketing spend.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#399

Post by chillfox »

chii wrote: post #379
bsuvc wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand your point of view. Are you saying executive compensation should be orthogonal to company performance? Overpaid executives failed, so workers lost their jobs, but the executives get to keep theirs all the while saying things like "I take responsibility for this" when it is objectively false that they are taking responsibility. Does that seem right to you? Is that a good way to run a business,…

> Overpaid executives failed Their failure has already dropped a huge amount of their stock-based compensation. Their base salary shouldn't be determined by the company's failure (only their _future_ salary). What if you applied this to a worker instead of a CxO? Would you yourself take a pay-cut, after the fact, if the company fails to perform?

Employees are already paying for the failure by getting laid off. That's a 100% pay cut, the Executives who caused the fuck up still get paid.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#400

Post by LeafItAlone »

chii wrote: post #379
bsuvc wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand your point of view. Are you saying executive compensation should be orthogonal to company performance? Overpaid executives failed, so workers lost their jobs, but the executives get to keep theirs all the while saying things like "I take responsibility for this" when it is objectively false that they are taking responsibility. Does that seem right to you? Is that a good way to run a business,…

> Overpaid executives failed Their failure has already dropped a huge amount of their stock-based compensation. Their base salary shouldn't be determined by the company's failure (only their _future_ salary). What if you applied this to a worker instead of a CxO? Would you yourself take a pay-cut, after the fact, if the company fails to perform?

Plenty of ordinary sales people are 100% commission based.

Plenty of CEOs already do (or did during their tenure) take no material base salary and their compensation is tied entirely to the performance of the company.

Is that not reasonable for large, profitable businesses. It has its own issues, but what compensation plan doesn’t?

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