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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#171

Post by jrockway »

noirbot wrote: post #109
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.

If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.

What large company is beating the 5 person competitor in their industry?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#172

Post by D-Coder »

lxe wrote: post #93

Every SV company: 1. Start a company that does a thing well 2. Hire enough people to do the thing well 3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things 4. Hire more managers who hire even more people 5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done 6. Run out of money 7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary. Why not just stop at 2?

Many people do. They have a five-person company that does one thing and that you never hear of, either while it's running happily or when it goes out of business.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#173

Post by mwidell »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #141
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube and Facebook both offer monthly subscription plans for creators.

Which hardly anyone seems to use, at least for YouTube. I watch too much YouTube for my own good, and I can't remember the last time someone encouraged viewers to donate money on a recurring basis via any company except Patreon.

And the reason for this is likely that youtube takes at least 30% of the money, while patreon is around 5-8%

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#174

Post by flavmartins »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #126
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 tha…

People who say this have never worked in an enterprise, global software company. Or if they did, they may not be working on key projects.

Just SCALE ALONE is enough to expand a group of engineers a significant amount. A personal project is fine to run 1 AWS or Digital Ocean instance to run the application, database. But global distribution that has to support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million+ users concurrently globally? It's a big orchestration of applications and services that requires much larger teams.

Add in payment services and managing those integrations. Then, given that you're a global company and have to operate in multiple countries you have all sorts of regulatory compliance requirements. Who oversees that? Who manages all of these requirements? Not a single dev or a small team.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#175

Post by verall »

AngeloR wrote: post #169

I think this is just the start for some bad things are patreon... This video of execs at Patreon apparently turning a blind eye to employees calling out patreon users that were selling images of underage children: https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1315626557688483841?s=20... They also laid off their ENTIRE security team: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/09/patreon-security-layoffs/

I don't think that's the right twitter link

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#176

Post by lxe »

rmah wrote: post #110
lxe wrote: post #93

Every SV company: 1. Start a company that does a thing well 2. Hire enough people to do the thing well 3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things 4. Hire more managers who hire even more people 5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done 6. Run out of money 7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary. Why not just stop at 2?

Because if you stop at #2... 1) you won't attract any follow-on investment capital; 2) your original investor will be angry that you're sitting on a pile of money that is doing nothing; 3) you will likely grow slower than your other competitors. in some markets, this is death, in other markets, this is fine. Patreon had nearly 500 staff before layoffs. Now has about 400 staff. You may have a hard time understanding w…

> You may have a hard time understanding what all those people do, but I suspect they're all quite busy.

I'm guessing 100 managers at least. Busy hiring more people to staff their perpetually understaffed teams, each doing some disjoint initiative.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#177

Post by weego »

db579 wrote: post #131
ajkjk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post includes tons of details about complicated things Patreon is doing to help out the people affected. Do those count for nothing to you? It feels like you are insisting not on "support" or "generosity" but on "sacrifice".

Those are things the company is doing to take responsibility, not him personally which is what his statement should imply.

When you're +$400mil into venture capital raises 'the company' doing something like that can be an awful lot of time, effort and potentially political capital for a CEO to get through.

I'm astounded that so many supposed seasoned leaders were out there making crazy projections around maintaining covid levels of growth and I also don't think 'my bad' is enough in that context, but benefits above what's required are rarely handed over without someone committing to fighting for it.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#178

Post by noirbot »

jrockway wrote: post #171
noirbot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.

What large company is beating the 5 person competitor in their industry?

Most of them? Can you give an example of a 5 person competitor competing with a large company?

And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#179

Post by dlandis »

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.

Agreed. That part was not well written. It seems like a vacuous, self-important phrase unless it is immediately tied to something else like, "I take full responsibility and as such I will be .

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#180

Post by mleo »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133
fckgw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_Traini…

> I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. How many times have you been laid off?!

During the dot com downturn the consulting company I was at went through 2 or 3 rounds of layoffs. Then in the 2008 fallout, there was another round. If one is lucky enough to survive them, they could be witness to many but not be a recipient of any.
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