Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#211

Post by squeaky-clean » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

jesuspiece wrote: post #102

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?

I've wondered this as well. Look at Uber, how are they not profitable? How many more engineers/general personnel do they possibly need to hire?

Looking at their app they do a lot more than just give rides nowadays. UberEats delivers from restaurants, but also apparently groceries now? They have a short-distance package delivery option. Rental cars. And some kind of tool to book a plane and hotel for travel?

I don't know if it's the right business call, but Uber is like 10 different companies now.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#212

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

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/

[deleted]

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#213

Post by Aachen » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

Recently signed up for patreon but couldn't figure out a payment method. The only option available, paypal, would succeed and I'd be redirected back to the merchant (patreon) but then neither show up in my patreon account nor on the paypal side - and I'd rather avoid giving paypal a cut so this was already a last resort. Open source liberapay was a no brainer (for K9 and F-Droid iirc) but very few creators have a liberapay. Surely there's more going on than this, but the news doesn't surprise me with this amount of friction and very handful of payment methods available. It'll work for the 90% or they'd not be in business at all, but still.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#214

Post by cmeacham98 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #46

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.

The main significance here is "please hire the people we're letting go as if they were normal Patreon employees you'd want to poach; they weren't let go for performance or other individual reasons".

This is what a layoff means no? My understanding was "Fired = Your Fault" and "Laid Off = Your Employer's Fault".

Is it possible to be "laid off" for performance reasons?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#215

Post by remram » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

shtopointo wrote: post #146

"I take full responsibility" - ok, what's the responsibility you take?

*I* take responsibility by having *you* be unemployed. It makes sense if you don't think about it.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#216

Post by gabereiser » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #210

gabereiser wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I've been laid off about 6 times, only once because of my own accord (and I freely admit my fault there). I've left a company 2x that count. I started my career in 1999. What a year to start...

In 23 years you have worked at 18 companies? Has this hurt you during interviews?

Very much so. I've had to explain that some of them were just contracts, some of them cease to exist anymore, and some went through layoffs. The reality is it's more like 13 companies but yeah.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#217

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #163

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis. If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!

> If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!

This depends on where you worked. Most of the developers I know were around for the dotcom bust, but only 2 have experienced a layoff. But none were working for dotcom companies.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#218

Post by quux » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #197

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…

WARN Act is federal law not CA Law. I highlight this because there is a belief that only CA has employment protections laws, and while CA does have more of these; other parts of the US also have employment protection laws often times not really that much different than CA

I think WARN is 60 days at the federal level and some states like CA and NY extend it to 90 days.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#219

Post by yieldcrv » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

ginger2016 wrote: post #153

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…

I am not a user or an employee of Patreon, still I appreciate Patreon being generous about equity vesting.

The progressive thing is 10-year option exercise, and the more progressive thing has been 1-month cliff which some of big tech does now

This is "mid", as my friends have started to say

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#220

Post by squeaky-clean » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 8:03 PM UTC

tester756 wrote: post #201

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.

Discord had small engineering team and they outperformed Teams, Google's VoIPs, Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Zoom

They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why.

Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.