Random shot here, but I work for a non profit interested in building a better kind of education (focused on programming, ml, and data science). We've been having a hard time figuring out how to hire qualified people to build top-notch educational content because we pay less than industry rates. The upside is that we do meaningful work, have good health care, decent pay, good work environment, (edit: also fully remote…
what kinda positions are you looking to fill? I currently work for less than industry rates by far but I enjoy the work life balance and generous PTO, and I wouldn't mind doing some more interesting work for the same.
Stripe stresses me out. I really cringe worrying about having too many financial eggs in the Stripe basket. But Paypal is no alternative and traditional CC processors are awful. How does one hedge their bets with Stripe? I worry one day we'll hit some transaction "trigger" and then all our money will get locked up in Stripe with no customer support recourse. I fear being "too successful" with no recourse if I depend…
There is Adyen over in Europe. I don't know/doubt they do as much business as Stripe but they aren't insignificant
>"Earlier today, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison sent the following note to Stripe employees."
>"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date. We’re reducing the size of our team by around 14% and saying goodbye to many talented Stripes in the process"
We are "reducing the size of our team" and "saying goodbye"? I'm of the opinion that words matter and more so when they are from the company CEO. Is there some reason why a CEO who is "announcing the hardest change we have had make" is unable to use the language that reflects the reality? Can the person who is paid the big bucks to make the big decisions really not bring himself to use the word "layoff" in announcing layoffs? Is he really that cowardly? A CEO is supposed to be a leader. It takes him 8 paragraphs before he uses the actual word "layoff."
I know this isn't new or unique to Stripe, but the language used in these announcements to distance leadership from their choices is always so slimy. "We're not 'firing' or 'terminating' anyone; some people are just 'impacted' by our announcement that we have to 'say goodbye'." It makes repeated mentions of those who are "leaving" (the subject is the former employee) and avoids active verbs where the founders are the…
"Firing" would just be the wrong word, since it normally implies that the employee wasn't doing something right. It's a layoff. They're not saying anyone (other than them) did anything wrong.
No offence, but they're not putting anybody in the electric chair. They're letting people go with pay until almost March - if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, and maybe they weren't wrong to give you up. A dynamic job market includes hiring and firings. At most they have to apologize for some disruption, and they more than made up for that with the severance packages. And about the language - "fire"…
If a well position and well oiled company is in fear of losing business and firing people how come you expect to find jobs let alone stable jobs. You give your 4-5 years to a company and the company dumps you at the first sight of hardship. I think Stripe made a bad choice when firing people. They should have decreased salaries, percentage wise more at the management level and try to keep their workers. I wouldn't wa…
I won’t pretend I know what the ideal solution is, but lowering salaries across the board doesn’t seem like a great choice. If someone is a high performing employee and then sees a cut to their paycheck, that’s an incentive for them to leave, and that’s also extra bad for the company because of course better performing employees will be more capable of finding another job. With layoffs, companies remove their “worst” employees instead, which theoretically improves productivity, assuming of course the rest of the company doesn’t think they’ll get laid off too.
I work at a company that did layoffs recently as well, about double this size. Our managers also had no idea until day of. The entire day was spent watching co workers google calendars and slack accounts. Once they got a meeting booked with HR, their meeting titles all turned into "busy", so we would know who is getting cut and who wasn't. It was a brutal day. In our case I don't think they were picking people based…
Is it "really weird," though? Layoffs, especially when you start talking about entire teams, divisions, products, etc. is about revenue, profitability, and righting the ship (or safeguarding the ship so you don't have to right it 6 months from now). Whether Jim got "exceeds expectations" or "greatly exceeds expectations" is irrelevant when an EVP needs to trim $12M off their budget and Jim's department lost $9M last…
I work at a company that did layoffs recently as well, about double this size. Our managers also had no idea until day of. The entire day was spent watching co workers google calendars and slack accounts. Once they got a meeting booked with HR, their meeting titles all turned into "busy", so we would know who is getting cut and who wasn't. It was a brutal day. In our case I don't think they were picking people based…
Is it "really weird," though? Layoffs, especially when you start talking about entire teams, divisions, products, etc. is about revenue, profitability, and righting the ship (or safeguarding the ship so you don't have to right it 6 months from now). Whether Jim got "exceeds expectations" or "greatly exceeds expectations" is irrelevant when an EVP needs to trim $12M off their budget and Jim's department lost $9M last…
A common sentiment you see on the internet (especially from younger people who haven't experience a tough labor market) is that only the low performers get laid off. So I can see how they think it's really weird if managers aren't involved.
This is the part I don't like. Stripe is a hugely successful company and they have no urgent material need to let people go. This is an optimization effort. I actually do believe that 'pruning' is a healthy thing for organizations, to enable them to be nimble and dynamic - however - obviously this comes at great social cost. The benefits of 'pruning' come at the cost of externalizing regular, creating real human chal…
>"I feel that the whole 'California' project elides the negatives: ..."
Random shot here, but I work for a non profit interested in building a better kind of education (focused on programming, ml, and data science). We've been having a hard time figuring out how to hire qualified people to build top-notch educational content because we pay less than industry rates. The upside is that we do meaningful work, have good health care, decent pay, good work environment, (edit: also fully remote…
> to build top-notch educational content I'm confused as to whether you are looking to hire Instructional Designers (who probably have a masters degree in educational/instructional psychology) to design/build educational content, or if you are looking for programmers to build the learning management system (LMS) to host the content the Instructional Designers are building. Or... maybe you are looking for programmers…
In short: we're looking for people with overlap between instructional design experience and programing+ml industry experience, to create instructional content.
A masters in education/instructional psychology isn't needed, so long as you can demonstrate pedagogical aptitude. In other words, can you put yourself in the mind of a beginner, and craft an explanation which is clear, intuitive, and anticipates common student questions/pitfalls?
I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We'll at least I'll get a break. I worked nights and weekends all of October.
Ya'll are hyper focusing on the nights and weekends. That was my personal decision, not part of the culture.
Don’t worry. Online forums are always like that. They’ll pretend like they’ve never had a high pressure job that paid out handsomely if you applied yourself and hence motivated you to work harder. To them, they think everyone should have work life balance from the age of 23 just because they’ve discovered its importance at 32 years of age.
Young people have to work hard. I don’t expect my reports to work on any evenings or weekends and if they even suggest it, I tell them not to and give them more lead. At the same time, if they override my decision and work through the evening, I am ready to answer questions over IM if I’m free too. I’m not going to say “why are you working evenings?”.