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Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

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Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#161

Post by roflyear »

nsxwolf wrote: post #130
memish wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's in the email: Severance pay. We will pay 14 weeks of severance for all departing employees, and more for those with longer tenure. That is, those departing will be paid until at least February 21st 2023. Bonus. We will pay our 2022 annual bonus for all departing employees, regardless of their departure date. (It will be prorated for people hired in 2022.) PTO. We’ll pay for all unused PTO time (including in re…

The last time I got laid off, my severance was basically enough to buy a bus ticket to the unemployment office. What they're doing here is incredible. (Almost felt compelled to name names here but took a breath)

Yeah this is pretty good. Would make me feel good about getting a job at Stripe for sure. My current company I'm sure would pay NOTHING and we don't get bonuses anyway, so...!

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#162

Post by ryandrake »

colechristensen wrote: post #93
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i hate this trend of ceos saying they take responsibility. Reminds me of lord farquuad, "some of you may die, but that is a price i'm willing to pay"

I think whatever a leader does which isn’t ritual suicide when announcing layoffs is going to get criticism. People in power hired when expecting an uptick and fired when expecting a downtick.

That's kind of the fundamental problem of megawealth: You can't actually be held accountable for anything short of "ritual suicide". When a senior exec or CxO screws up, what conceivably could punish them? Lose their salary for a year? Ineffective. The wealthy make more from interest on their investments than they could ever need to live. What else could punish them? Their stock value going down? Oooh.. Mark Zuckerberg's personally lost $76B in the last 12 months, more than the entire shareholder value loss of Enron's collapse. Zucc still has so much money that an uncountable number of generations of his offspring will still never need to work again in their lives.

Why do people keep working and earning more when they are set for life--what actual practical purpose does megawealth serve once you've guaranteed your standard of living for you and your offspring? The purpose is lack of accountability. Megawealth means you can spend every remaining day of your life screwing up, and besides doing something illegal that lands you in jail, you'll never suffer a consequence.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#163

Post by nobleach »

sharkweek wrote: post #142
ericb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did they screw up, though? Their psychic abilities failed? A coin flip came up tails but they bet on heads?

Yes, essentially. “Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks? I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.” -John Tuld, Margin Call

Imagine that they DIDN'T hire more people when they grew by 3x. See how much people complain about the grind at AWS. People are extraordinarily overworked. We'd be reading "Why I left Stripe" posts and calling out the CEOs for not scaling up properly.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#165

Post by bryant »

joegahona wrote: post #151
bryant wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They know what accountability is. That's why they never use the word. Yeah we know you're responsible for it, but how are you being held accountable for it? No one will remember in two years time, but my hope is it'll factor into candidates' decisions around whether to pursue a career with Stripe. If I've got senior executives without accountability, it's a distraction to my ability to deliver the product as well as…

Do you have an example handy of a CEO who has provided acceptable accountability in a situation like this?

Good examples of self accountability? Sadly not. (Edit: see huffmsa for a good example)

Good examples of accountability to the board? All over. But boards care (by mandate) only about profit unless specified otherwise. There's no incentive for a board to care about whether people are put out on the street either; it's one of the major reasons for why unions exist and are successful: they provide a mechanism for accountability that ties adverse employee decisions back to future revenue loss.

Tl;Dr: nope, and that's sadly by design because why would anyone be self-accountable when the consequences hit the wallet? I was hoping for a ray of light to pierce the dark.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#166

Post by MichaelZuo »

hnbad wrote: post #49
danpalmer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group. I don't think you can only cut "poor performers" in any sort of bulk layoffs. You can avoid it in aggregate, but there will be enough mistakes, enough teams that need to cut a number but don't have enough poor performers, or even enough high performers who are just on teams that are deemed no longer necessary…

I've seen a company's culture effectively be killed overnight because one "low performer" was cut off. Not every impact an employee has is directly represented in their own bottom line. The company in question was able to stomach this because it would go on to undergo significant structural changes anway but it basically had to start building a new company culture from scratch and doing it top-down is much harder tha…

The dynamics of a low 2 digit employee company is very different from the dynamics of a company with many thousands.

In the latter case it's simply impossible for a single person, not in middle-management or exec level, to be in a critical 'social glue' position.

Dunbar's number, etc.,

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#167

Post by willcipriano »

jesuscript wrote: post #112
jtaft wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many find the r word offensive. Can you please be kinder and express yourself differently? https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-is-the-r-word-3105651 Your post brings up interesting view points, thanks for sharing.

Quoted post unavailable.

For what it's worth, when I was a kid, I objected to the idea that I was legally compelled to attend public school, I did and do believe it is unconstitutional on a number of grounds and thus I refused to participate. In retaliation they placed me in special education classes and I spent my time in school being called a retard by the other kids on a daily basis. I'm not offended.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#168

Post by pixl97 »

marcinzm wrote: post #30
benjaminwootton wrote: post #18

“On Tuesday we set a new record for total daily transaction volume processed.” How does a company breaking records 36 hours ago conclude they need to lay off 14% of the workforce? Even with economic storm clouds on the horizon that seems very jumpy.

They hired 150% more people (yes the company grew to 2.5x since 2020) expecting metrics to grow 150% but metrics only are on track for growing 100%.

Heh, the average forum poster, I believe, drives their car at 100MPH and turns 3 feet before a large hole in the road. :D

As much as people complain about businesses only looking at the next quarter, they do typically have a longer horizon than that. When you have the US fed raising interest rates every meeting and outright saying "unemployment is going to increase" then you should expect pretty much every business to take note of this and adjust appropriately.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#169

Post by eganist »

czbond wrote: post #147
eganist wrote: post #47

Hey pc, if you're around: > John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it. What are the two of you doing to show accountability? Are you slashing your own future stock grants, cutting your own salaries, diluting your positions with stock grants to everyone else? What's the consequence for this decision on your end that shows you're accountable for what happened, not just responsible for it? Sinc…

Ya know.... Founders and CEO's are responsible every day. They created the business for people to have jobs, they have to deal with it when the business cannot support the jobs. When things in the macro economy change, sometimes the business can't operate at the same level it was before. People like to on CEO's & leaders in good times, but employees often forget that while the employee can just go get another job, th…

Responsibility and accountability are different things.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#170

Post by JshWright »

jesuscript wrote: post #112
jtaft wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many find the r word offensive. Can you please be kinder and express yourself differently? https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-is-the-r-word-3105651 Your post brings up interesting view points, thanks for sharing.

Quoted post unavailable.

The problem is how you're using that word. You're using a word that is used to describe actual people in your search for a "vicious" word. Would you feel as comfortable swapping that word out for a different slur targeting a different demographic?

Your anger at Stripe is reasonable, why are you belittling an entirely unrelated set of people in your attempt to express that anger?

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