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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#511
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will be a big loss for retail investors You mean it will be a big loss for retail traders

If you’re investing monthly or dollar cost averaging into a position. Those $5 per trade add up.

Careful, you might turn into a Boggle-head if you follow that logic too far...

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#512

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.

lmfao people gambled what, $1k? $2k?

sheesh...

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#513
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) What about Dev leads who mentor/architect stuff instead of writing code day to day. How will you measure that?

> architect stuff how can someone be good at architect-ing stuff if they never code or code very little. seems like the method GP is describing would be good to weed out such imposters.

I am in that condition, so personal experience here:

- i do most meetings with internal stakeholders to understand needs and changes, and document them

- i do most "architecting", as i have most context on the systems my team is responsible for (also I am the oncall escalation point all the time as I am the senior person)

- i write about 10% of the code, usually what other colleagues aren't comfortable with (legacy systems mainly these days)

"Development" is not only writing code, and senior roles tend to code far less because we get wrapped up with the rest of the company so other folks can code and deliver. My team, manager and customers seem very happy about the whole thing (but hey, maybe everyone hates me!). I do want to code more, maybe with a good PM i would be able to, but I have no illusions about that.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, does he deserve $55M for founding a f(l)ailing company? If he wasn't a founder, would you say "No, never mind the $55M he pulled out of the company last year, last year everything was fine. The massive cash shortfall the company is experiencing today has nothing to do with those $55M that are no longer in the company's coffers."?

Mate, ultimately the point is that if you sell $55 m of your stock in a company you're not taking money out of the company. That stuff ceased to be owned by the company when those shares (or derivatives that control them) were granted (way before this point).

I think ultimately the point is that this guy who fucking sucks at running a company made $55mm, and several hundred people just lost their jobs due to his ineptitude. Seems pretty cut and dried to me that he's a pile of shit; if he really cared about his employees he would truly take responsibility and reinvest some of his money in the company.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#515
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea that companies should maximize return on shareholder value has only been around since around the late 70s. It wasn’t always like that.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#516

"Last year, we staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the COVID era would persist into 2022..." We are now at the point when we will find out which of the changes to behavior (financial and otherwise) that came about with the onset of the covid-19 pandemic are going to be lasting, and which are not. I…

I think people are going to be more tech focused as a result of the pandemic. I notice that the majority of my meetings, even mundane meetings, are virtual rather than face-to-face for example.

The big difference that is happening currently is inflation, recession fears, and fear among the general public about financial turmoil. The entire situation has been very poorly handled by governments and institutions around the world who seem to have collectively pretended that nothing was wrong. In particular inflation has been poorly fought because a huge percentage of the left wing were insistent that public spending would not cause inflation, but did not have a chance to implement that public spending in the 2010s due to the rise of the far-right so have absolutely nothing to show for it except inflation. Now the US is trying to cause a recession so that inflation and economy instability can be brought back under some resemblance of control, but the US is still acting as if it's the only major economic power in the world - Asia for example has been far less hit by inflation and many countries (including India) are not predicting a recession.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#517

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…

Aren’t we complaining we can’t reach anyone human at Google Support?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may be true but people here aren't talking about firing the bottom 10% of ICs, they're talking about firing "50% of Google".

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brokerage is such a competitive space, their valuation never made any sense. And big money players would never use Robinhood over Schwab et all

> And big money players would never use Robinhood over schwab et all Their entire business model is PFOF [0]. That is, a huge fucking scam against retail. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paymentoforderflow.asp

Why would a typical retail investor prefer commissions to PFOF? Seems like a much better deal.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And so what if it is? Causes asset inflation making them out of reach for the 'unprivileged'. See housing market.

Housing market appreciation happens because homeowners vote to restrict housing supply. Turns out it’s hard to convince people to vote for lowering the price of something when most of their net worth is tied up in it.

Ridiculous housing appreciation is practically a global phenomena that is due to artificially low interest rates and easy credit driven by many of the central banks around the world. What you describe (housing supply restrictions) is a local phenomena in a few markets like San Francisco and not the primary reason behind the incredible speculative nature of the recent housing market. China has been building in hyper-sonic mode for decades and look at the bubble happening there, for example.
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