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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

wsj.com

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#461

Post by kortilla »

curious_cat_163 wrote: post #403
martin82 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it just shows that the CEO earned enough to give every laid off employee a whole annual salary, so you could argue that the layoff could have been prevented for at least a year.

Exactly. Hate to go there on HN but there _is_ a moral side to this. What is the cost of making the kind of mistakes this guy did? And who should pay for them?

> Hate to go there on HN but there _is_ a moral side to this.

No there isn’t. Wasting money to keep employing people isn’t good for anyone. The labor market is still tight right now so the employees are better off going to a company that actually wants them.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#462

Post by bogomipz »

ab_testing wrote: post #47

Somehow I feel that all these VC backed firms just add employees for the sake of adding employees. I use Tastyworks - another free online brokerage that it almost at feature parity with Robinhood. They have stocks, options, futures and even some selective crypto. They also make money using PFOF just like Robinhood. However on Linkedin, their employee count is less than 100 (99 to be precise) On the other hand, Robinh…

>"They also make money using PFOF just like Robinhood."

What is "PFOF" here?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#463

Post by pipeline_peak »

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…

> The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees.

Then why are they hired? It can’t be image alone

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#464

Post by bboygravity »

bdlowery wrote: post #451
bboygravity wrote: post #449

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…

Source on your first point? Sounds a conspiracy from r/superstonk

I removed the reference to synthetics, because it is indeed a conspiracy/speculation (there can't really be evidence for it even if it's true). Though it has happened in the past and has been documented. Source: "Naked short and greedy" book.

There are some more hints though for the whole synthetics conspiracy ongoing. The most recent one, going on right now, being the GameStop stock split through stock dividend failing in Germany, because of DTC/DTCC issues.

These types of splits are not uncommon (Google did one a couple of weeks ago without any issues: https://capital.com/google-stock-split) and I've never heard of a stock split failing due to clearing issues before.

So there's that.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#465

Post by mikeyouse »

arcticbull wrote: post #89
sn_master wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much of that $800M was in stock vs cash?

The only thing that matters is how much he sold vs held. Cash is cash no matter how derived.

He's sold ~$55M worth: https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/TENEV%20VLADIMIR

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#466

Post by bboygravity »

irjustin wrote: post #456
bdlowery wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source on your first point? Sounds a conspiracy from r/superstonk

Yeah the 1st point is a "conspiracy" in that it's simply not true and what people who dislike Robinhood share amongst themselves as truth. Robinhood has lots of problems, this is not one of them. [edit] Forgot about fractionals where this statement is true, but that's well known/accepted?

Yes counterfeit stock trading by RH is a conspiracy. But the fact that it happens in the US is not really a conspiracy as it has been documented quite thoroughly. A source/book about it is "Naked short and greedy".

Internalizing trades however is less of a conspiracy. Almost all US brokers do this or offer this trade routing option.

Here's the head of the SEC stating that almost all retail market orders on any broker never hit a lit exchange and are internalized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg8onYvJW3Q

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#467

Post by nemo44x »

twblalock wrote: post #118

A lot of Robin Hood's growth in particular was driven by people gambling their stimulus money because they didn't need it to make ends meet, and by the Fed juicing the markets with low rates for far too long, and by the ridiculous meme stock phenomenon. It was a perfect storm of stupidity. Personally I'm glad that some sanity is returning to investing, and we are still a long way from getting back to normal.

The hardest part of this to me to deal with is that it’s the truth. For decades, the conservative line was if you give people money they’ll just blow it on gambling and booze. Turns out it’s true.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#468

Post by confounded »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #463
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…

> The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Then why are they hired? It can’t be image alone

Because managers are evaluated on their ability to grow teams and increase their scope. Organizations intrinsically "want" to hire.

What's unusual about the last 20 years is that there's been so much available capital to fund tech companies doing just that.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#469

Post by doliveira »

xyst wrote: post #127
fleddr wrote: post #85

We live in such morally bankrupt times. You can just say "you take responsibility" without actually taking responsibility at all. Our expectations have become so low and we've become so complacent that just the statement is enough. In similar vain, "we care about your mental health" as is the common internal email from HR. No actual care is offered though. Giving staff a day off is a tangible example of doing at leas…

This is where we balance it out with unions. Unions have historically gotten us everything today that most people think is just SOP. Limited work weeks (40 hrs). Monday thru Friday as business days. Paid vacations. Family and medical leave. Breaks. Paid holidays. Sick leave. It’s a shame there’s been a massive push from corporations pushing anti-union propaganda. We have been complacent. We need unions to make our vo…

One thing I find it weird in the US is company-specific unions, instead of specific to sectors. Seems to me they lose a lot of leverage that way

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#470

Post by bpodgursky »

nfiedel wrote: post #448
adam_arthur wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand this as theoretical possibility, and it could lead you astray if you're trying to tell a 40% developer from a 60% developer... but in practice I have never met a superstar IC who doesn't also ship a ton of code (even while they help out others). If you fire the 10% of ICs who push the least code, to within a rounding error you're extremely unlikely to regret it.
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