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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#121

Post by mrtranscendence »

mathgeek wrote: post #103
Shindi wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure negativity and not true. Hiring might slow down because of seasonality overall, but I was hired the last two times end of year. It's a great time to get new employees ramped up when things are slower. A polite reminder that some companies are growing really fast and are even struggling with hiring.

Just wanted to throw in my $0.02 here as well. I've been hired in November/December twice in my career without issue.

Same here. My current position was a November hire, as was my first position.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#122

Post by m00x »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #86
unity1001 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody looks like they are going to lose their livelihood over this: https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack 3 months' of pay + longer depending on tenure at the company. Healthcare until the end of the year. Mental care up to 6 months. They contracted a placement company to place the laid off staff to other companies in the sector. A lot of those people will already get hooked up by a company within a week or so,…

Mid-November through December is a hiring no-man's land due to the accumulation of end-of-year vacations and family trips. Most of these employees have about a month and a half before the shutdown begins and they are stuck scrambling to try to find work in the new year.

January/February is the most active recruiting time though, 3 months pay is more than enough to make it there without any issues.

Most people in tech also don't live paycheck to paycheck. As an adult, your responsibility is to have an emergency fund. No career is safe.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#123

Post by nscalf »

darth_avocado wrote: post #15

What does “taking full responsibility” even mean? Like people lose their livelihood and you can get away with “I take full responsibility”. Taking full responsibility mean taking a pay cut or stepping down or basically taking consequences for yourself first before others have to.

Taking full responsibility used to look like getting fired for poor planning. Now taking full responsibility means "I say in public that this is my fault" versus trying to push the blame off.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#124

Post by mrtranscendence »

nomel wrote: post #104
awb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody looks like they are going to lose their livelihood over this We don’t know everyone’s unique situation, even if they did go beyond what most companies do.

No. That's not the social contract for employment. It's dangerous to think it is. There's a mutual need from both parties. When that need changes, both parties are free to respond. Forcing a company to keep someone would be just as bad as forcing someone to stay. What we also don't know is the companies financial situation. Keeping people on when they can't be afforded can be a way to make a company completely collap…

What are you responding to, exactly? That comment was claiming that we can't know for sure that "nobody" would lose their livelihood over this. And it's true, we can't know.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#125

Post by ivraatiems »

As layoff announcements go, this one is pretty solid. Cuts immediately to the chase. No sugarcoating. Takes full responsibility. Offers pretty solid severance packages.

I can only hope that if my organization has to lay people off, they'd be half as kind as some of the recent ones have been (and not at all like others, such as Klarna).

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#126

Post by TulliusCicero »

bilsbie wrote: post #101

It’s weird these companies grow this big. How many software engineers do you need to monthly bill a list of people and transfer it to a different list? That’s like a single person saas.

It's amazing how consistently HN people underestimate the workload involved in basically any software product, and how often this blog post is relevant: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.”

Products are nearly always more complicated internally than it appears to the user. Indeed, often the very ease of use that you see as an end user is because of higher complexity on the inside.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#127

Post by nostrademons »

loosescrews wrote: post #90
subsubzero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the same, Meta for sure, and a few folks at Goog have told me as well they are coming. For google this will be the first time they have ever done layoffs in the company history(2009 had 200 folks leave so not really layoffs so to speak) so that tells you the scale of this tech downturn.

I have heard that the 2009 layoffs were limited to recruiting. If these layoffs occur, they may be the company's first engineering layoffs. I find it surprising that they are considering layoffs. There have been a number of articles about Sundar's concerns over productivity [1,2,3], but layoffs have a tendency to reduce moral and productivity. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515458 [2] https://news.ycombin…

2009 layoffs were technically just a bunch of radio DJs that were hired into a product around revolutionizing radio and then had nowhere else to go in the company when their project was canceled. The recruiters let go were contractors, and Google just terminated their contracts.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#128

Post by dougmwne »

davezatch wrote: post #92
dougmwne wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be meaningless virtue signaling. Standard corporate speak.

What would non-“meaningless virtue signaling” look like to you? This seems quite decent as far as these things go.

Well, seeing as how saying that means nothing, adds nothing, and says nothing, then not saying it at all would be more meaningful.

The non-corporate speak translation would be “I tried my best to make this company bigger and more valuable, but it didn’t work. Some of you will now need to be sacrificed, but not me!”

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#129

Post by taylodl »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #111
unity1001 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters would fill that gap readily enough.

My comment comes directly from my experience in the past as a recruiter. We saw a 60%+ downturn in the hiring market From Nov 15 - Dec 31 regardless of how the hiring market was performing in general, and then they would spring back to life after Jan 1 when everyone was back in the office. It takes more than a hiring manager to hire employees. The slowdown comes from all the moving parts who need to be in place in or…

You speak the truth. Any recruiter with any experience at all will tell you hiring plunges late in the 4th quarter. It's been that way forever. There does tend to be an uptick in interviewing starting late in the 3rd quarter and early on in the 4th (i.e. now) so they can get the people they need in place for the start of the new year and next year's budget. Hopefully these folks will be able to take advantage of that and if they can't start immediately at least be ready to go at the end of the holidays, and if they've been paid through the end of the year then they can at least enjoy the holidays.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#130

Post by fckgw »

unity1001 wrote: post #64
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #53

This bit from the employee announcement about how they're handling equity vesting [1] is worth highlighting as a pretty classy move, all things considered: > We’re waiving the one-year equity vesting cliff for all departing employees so that everyone has an opportunity to be a shareholder, regardless of your tenure. [...] All departing teammates will qualify for an extended option exercise period of 5 years, and we h…

They say there's 3 months of pay, healthcare, mental care until the end of the year too. And they contracted a placement company to hook people up with new jobs.

Some of this is because of the WARN Act in California [0], which requires 60-day notice before any mass layoff. Employers can also fulfill the requirements of this mandate by letting employees go now but having their actual termination date 60+ days in advance. I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way.

Good for Patreon to go beyond the 60-day mandated period though

[0] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

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