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The layoffs at Klarna

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#131

Post by dento »

stormbrew wrote: post #83
curiousllama wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?" Judging from your reaction, it sounds like yall had a great work environment, and that this was a good way to handle the layoff for your team. It sounds like it…

Fwiw there is a more normalized practice that resembles this and is, afaik, not a massive hr risk: openly offering a voluntary severance with defined benefits. Obviously it's not a great signal to those who don't take it about the health of the company, and you might lose a bunch of people you'd rather not, but I think allowing some level of self-selection is good when it's possible.

I find it rather rare that a relatively compentent dev couldn't get approximately equal compensation working for some other company. So if offered $X for volutary severance, where $X at least N months total compensation, most devs who can get a similar job in less than N months will leave. This leaves you with least capable people, which is (usually) not what's wanted when doing layoffs. (This is of course assuming that interview performance is correlated with work performance, which is not necessarily a great assumption to do)

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#132

Post by eschneider »

ygram wrote: post #66

I have never understood why health ensurance is handled by the employer in the US, why don't people buy private health insurance instead? It feels insane to put yourself in that kind of dependency on your employer.

It started that way because it got around WWII-era wage caps and it remains advantageous because it gets paid for with pre-tax dollars. (Which isn't, I know, carved in stone. But that's the way it is atm.)

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#133

Post by rsanek »

alkonaut wrote: post #92

Should be noted that employment in Sweden is as far from “at will” as you can get. There is basically no legal difference between a union worker at a paper mill and a software developer at a startup (once it reaches a certain size). The law basically says that the last one in must be first out, and sidestepping this order requires negotiating severance with unions (yes also for white collar tech workers). So if you n…

It seems like the article is saying that the fact that there isn't a union is actually a big help in the ability to do this kind of lay-off.

> Swedish companies must negotiate with unions before layoffs. However, this was not the case at Klarna, nor is it the case at most Swedish tech companies. Klarna does not have a collective bargaining agreement (called “kollektivavtal” in Swedish) in place. This means that Klarna as an employer is not forced to negotiate layoffs with a union. Instead, Klarna is entitled to negotiate directly with each affected employee, which they are doing.

Klarna is also pretty big (7500 employees according to the article) so I imagine it doesn't have to do with the company size.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#134

Post by georgeecollins »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #115
chrsig wrote: post #14

> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…

I really think this just comes from the fact that most startups are either: 1) from California and/or 2) have founders that worked in California and/or 3) raised money from VCs in California I'm all on-board with it being better to be an optimist than a pessimist, and also on-board that destructive criticism doesn't really "serve" anyone. But there's just this rampant over-optimism like nowhere I've experienced. The…

Interesting point, but the example here is HQ'd in Ohio. I think some of what you talk about in California is true but you could say that about New York, or once upon a time Hong Kong. Places where ambitious people come to breed a certain mindset. California is a big state and very rural parts California arre like Idaho (I'm not talking exurbs).

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#135

Post by aledalgrande »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #115
chrsig wrote: post #14

> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…

I really think this just comes from the fact that most startups are either: 1) from California and/or 2) have founders that worked in California and/or 3) raised money from VCs in California I'm all on-board with it being better to be an optimist than a pessimist, and also on-board that destructive criticism doesn't really "serve" anyone. But there's just this rampant over-optimism like nowhere I've experienced. The…

Nah the Vancouver scene is the same. Maybe it's a West coast thing?

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#136

Post by pjot »

alecbz wrote: post #33
chrsig wrote: post #14

> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…

Stripe had a few “official” principles that I really liked along these lines: “We haven’t won yet”, “macro-optimism but micro-pessimism”. They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).

I like the saying, “strong opinions, loosely held” which I feel hits in the same vein.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#137

Post by dymk »

alkonaut wrote: post #92

Should be noted that employment in Sweden is as far from “at will” as you can get. There is basically no legal difference between a union worker at a paper mill and a software developer at a startup (once it reaches a certain size). The law basically says that the last one in must be first out, and sidestepping this order requires negotiating severance with unions (yes also for white collar tech workers). So if you n…

The article makes it sound like this is a suggestion, not a requirement, for layoffs

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#138

Post by [deleted] »

chrsig wrote: post #14

> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…

[deleted]

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#139

Post by VLM »

speedgoose wrote: post #4

I’m surprised to read that Klarna had 7500 employees. It seems to be a lot for an online payment company offering consumer loans. What were the people doing?

The problem with a secret sauce is the market needs more than sauce.

So even if they could proactively leverage their synergies using mobile apps or whatever their secret sauce was, activities like, I donno, collections maybe, still scales up linear with size like legacy companies.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#140

Post by akudha »

throwaway859383 wrote: post #100

I still currently work at Klarna. The article is a very good write up of what happened. I'm going to talk about what the current internal situation is and how people are feeling based on what I'm seeing. Since the layoffs there has been a noticeable shift in atmosphere. Previously quite a few people would regularly come to the offices, now not so much. Some still do come but significantly less. Performance has gone f…

One of my ex-colleagues simply quit one day - no emails, no notice...nothing.

Another one of my ex-colleagues told me he was doing two jobs, but only working 8 hours in total per day, if that.

Then COVID layoffs happened. In the first case, the company simply turned off the logins - it was their way of laying people off (one laid off guy had been with the company for 15 years, another one had health issues and needed the insurance). In the second guy's case, they told him one Friday afternoon that it was his last day. We were in different teams at the time, but neither of us had any work, despite asking our respective managers for work daily. He got frustrated with having no work and took another job. Also, it took them three more months to give us the last two paychecks (for two months).

Both times, I thought my colleagues were nuts and were unethical - doing second job, not giving notice etc just felt ugly. Now I feel different. If employers treat employees like crap, why should any employee show any loyalty? When my colleague was laid off, he didn't care, as he was already had another job. I on the other hand, spent the next month looking for one.

In every contract job I worked, the first thing they say is "you can (and should) work more than 40 hours if we need you to, but you can only bill us for 40 hours".

If this is the treatment in a sophisticated, (relatively) high paid industry like software, I wonder how people are treated in service industries, retail etc. No wonder so many workers are striking and trying to unionize... Maybe it is time for software developers to unionize too

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