Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 717 posts

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#441

Post by s1artibartfast »

mumblemumble wrote: post #27
civilized wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should have been obvious to anyone that people would do less day trading once they had anything better to do.

To any one person, sure. But, as the saying goes, "None of us is as dumb as all of us." Once you start move into the realm of group decisionmaking based on hypothetical future demand for $OUR_WORLD_CHANGING_PRODUCT, positivity culture starts to take over. Plenty of people in the room where the decision is made may be thinking, "But what if this is a passing fad and people don't really love our product in any sort of…

It is also because executives operate on the long tail of a pareto distribution. You get there by capitalizing on a large number of successful gambles. With few exceptions, you don't get their without beating the odds several times in a row.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#442

Post by JohnBooty »

WaxProlix wrote: post #438
JohnBooty wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my industry the wave of stimulus definitely caused behavior changes, it was pretty distinct. Obviously, a lot of people did need that money to make ends meet. But it's also obvious that some % of the population was able to treat it as money they were able to play around and have some fun with.

neat, but not a meaningful response to someone asking for hard data.

Something tells me infosec's not going to give me the okay on that one.

In lieu of that, I think "sending a wave of money through the system by handing a check to every taxpayer will not temporarily change some peoples' behavior" is the hypothesis that would need some data to back it up, in my view.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#443

Post by s1artibartfast »

roughly wrote: post #74
mgfist wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this has already happened. Just look at the stocks of all the pandemic companies. Peleton, Teledoc, Zoom, Docusign and on and on. Pretty much all down 80%+ from their highs.

If anyone had any notion that the markets were efficient or rational in any way regarding the actual underlying value of the companies they purport to represent, I certainly hope that notion didn’t survive the pandemic - I’m not sure what world stocks were pricing in over the last two years, but it didn’t pass even a cursory smell test.

If anything, the current situation is a demonstration of the opposite. The claim that markets are efficient and rational is based on long term price finding. This includes a lot of noise. If Peleton never makes a profit, the market will eventually find the correct price.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#444

Post by ceeplusplus »

peter_mcrae wrote: post #398
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Program managers have very little utility. Ops should really be automated (i.e. it should be half run by SWEs that automate everything they can), so real ops headcount should stay constant as the company grows as automation is increased. I would hope marketing is data driven on things like CAC, but who knows at a lot of companies. Lots of marketing people are not quantitatively fluent.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#445

Post by bagels »

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…

Covid and the wide scale embracing of remote work is really going to combine with layoffs to massacre our wages.

Some FAANG companies will likely prioritize hiring in Europe and Asia and use that to pressure bay area salaries down.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#446

Post by interpol_p »

edouard-harris wrote: post #327
somehnacct3757 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Shopify layoff also contained this phrasing. Shows how tone-deaf these CEOs are. Shopify's version: > Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today.

Note that the complete, non-truncated quote [1] says: "Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today and I’m deeply sorry for that ." Emphasis added, but perhaps some part of this apparent tone-deafness might be attributed to the omission? [1] https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team

I question "we have to say goodbye"

I worked for a small business. The CEO and other executives were generally ethical people. When revenue went down, the C-level executives took a pay cut to ensure others could stay. They knew they could weather it better than their employees. Their salaries were always some of the lowest even before that, because they had a stake in the business that the employees did not have.

Given how much money this person makes, how much of a safety net they likely have compared to their employees, it doesn't make much sense that they do not redistribute their personal wealth to help the people they are "deeply sorry" to "say goodbye to"

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#447

Post by lumost »

alecbz wrote: post #177
thaumasiotes wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you'd ask the question "why weren't they doing it before?". If the answer is "they didn't know about it", you might expect them to keep doing it. But not otherwise. Day trading has had a lot of popular awareness for a long time.

Even if you know something exists, you might just have never tried it for some reason until something causes you to, at which point you might realize you enjoy it. E.g., I got a bike over COVID, found I liked biking a lot, and have been doing it a lot more now.

From a user perspective, day trading is very similar to online poker or other gambling activities. The exception being that everyone wins sometimes, and everyone loses other times.

Anecdotally various betting games had a similar growth curve. People rush in when it’s easy, and then rush out once it’s hard.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#448

Post by nfiedel »

adam_arthur wrote: post #429
strix_varius wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Totally agree. The problem is, nobody knows how to tell which ones. On the ground it's obvious. I'm sure everyone here knows who on their team is crucial to their current production stack, and also knows others who would have no impact (or even positive impact!) if they left. One level up - the direct EM - has most of that context to…

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

Lines or amount of code written is a terrible, and easily gamed metric.

Some of the very best engineers write the fewest lines of code, often making fewer yet better abstractions that fulfill more business use cases more simply. They might also help others write less code.

Some of the most prolific coders are great. And some are terrible. The challenge is discerning the two. Coaching a prolific yet bad coder to slow down can be as challenging as coaching up a slower / not yet confident coder. And the slower coder will do vastly less damage in the interim.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#449

Post by bboygravity »

Who would've thought that scamming people isn't a good business-model in the long term?

RH pretends to be a "broker" and:

1. lets people trade "stocks" that aren't stocks the way people think they are. All (convenient) trades (for its HF clients) get internalized and never ever hit any lit market/exchange. The fact that this is possible is a general issue with the US stock market and lack of meaningful regulation and policing. This is not unique to RH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg8onYvJW3Q

2. its entire business model revolves around selling a "front running service" to RH's hedge fund clients, so they can front run RH's users/retailers (who are NOT clients) on every single trade. The front running service is called PFOF and is illegal in a lot of countries, but not in the US.

3. Literally turns off the buy button temporarily when it's convenient for its hedge fund clients to manipulate a stock price to go in their desired direction. This is so mind-blowing that I probably need to provide a source. Here it is one: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/robinhood-president-sold...

too bad this is apparently not common knowledge. Let de down-voting by RHs few remaining social media managers begin.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#450

Post by kortilla »

qaq wrote: post #241
gruez wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades) Can you provide a source for this? Citadel (one of the companies robinhood sells order flow to) claims in regulatory filings[1] that the overwhelming majority of orders are executed at market price or better, and that they on average save traders money. [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/citadel-wordpress-prd101/wp-con…

Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"? Are you suggesting Citadel is a charity?

Because they are paying for a supply of (on average) uneducated morons with no edge. Can you imagine how much a professional poker player would pay to be in a tournament with amateurs?
Post reply on HN