691–700 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of engineer are you and how many years of experience?
16 years. Working at the Senior/Staff level. Most recently Clojure work. I’ve done a lot of Java of course, although I’ve been rejected from some of those jobs because I spent the last year doing Clojure full time instead of Java.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, and don't let anybody ask what compensation the EVP is getting, there's definitely no fat to trim there...
* 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 regions where tha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 eveni…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There doesn't appear to be any attempt to distance themselves. He basically said: "We hired too many people. The decision to hire them was ours. It was a mistake. We have to let them go. We are at least going to cover salaries/healthcare for a decent amount of time." There is probably too much business jargon, but that's how people actually talk in many companies (certainly in Stripe there is overuse of jargon). It's…
"Let them go" is itself a euphemism, in that if it is taken literally, it presumes "they" _would_ go if "let". The active party making an intentional choice describes their actions in a way that places agency with everyone else. > The email is to the staff, not to you. No, it's on the 'newsroom' section of their public website. Though it is _addressed_ to staff (or former staff) it is _for_ a dual audience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes sense. There is an expectation that they might want to welcome some of these people back at some point.
Would anyone go back and work at an office where they were laid off?
I don't take these events personally, it's strictly business after all, esp when the termination agreement is generous enough, and conduct is kept professional and decent between the employer and employees.
It's like a breakup but on very amicable terms, it sucks at first esp when it's abrupt but you get used to it, and there's always the chance of you getting back together.
No hard feelings!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are rarely if ever any serious consequences to top execs screwing up wealthy companies. Such execs are usually already so wealthy that they never have to work another day in their life, no matter what happens or how much they screw up. They can always find other prestigious, high paid jobs, and sometimes even get rewarded with huge amounts of money from the very companies they screwed over.
> There are rarely if ever any serious consequences to top execs screwing up wealthy companies. That is because any exec worth her salt would negotiate a generous golden parachute even before starting the job. And why is she able to do that? Because there are very few competent candidates available in the market. If you think the job is easy, just go and get one of those exec positions and you will learn.
Just because you're hired for one of those positions doesn't mean you're competent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember: especially when getting laid off in tech - eventually this will commonly be very good for personal growth. Lots of opportunities in the coming downturn as in full tandem with ever-ongoing neoliberal capitalism: software is still eating the world. This is true when you don't have a family to support and/or have a second more reliable income, but it is extremely stressful if you don't have a decent cushion…
It always does, I agree. Then again most people in that cohort probably have the corresponding level of financial means / literacy [to have a cushion]. Either way just read above that in this case specifically the severance seems generous enough. I’m not worried for the typical stripe worker here. This will be good for them if they don’t get bogged down by shock / sadness.
Also, being laid off usually means being in a down economy where not much hiring is going on, so recovery takes longer.
* 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 regions where tha…
what is "unused PTO" - I thought every company was now on the unlimited/zero PTO model
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's normal for layoffs to be planned and executed by a very small group, typically to avoid leaks or creating hysteria ahead of decisions being finalized. This in turn means less-than-perfect information is available, and so less-than-scientific cuts are made. "Ideally", your layoff strategy dictates some cuts regardless of performance: Say we're shutting down the self-driving car division, folding up recruitin…
> Say we're shutting down the self-driving car division, folding up recruiting, or choosing to accept the risk that comes with getting rid of the whole security team. Did you intend this to be a spit take? The sentence read about the same as “Say you’re taking a stroll around town, visit a few cafés, or decide to end the day by jumping into an active volcano.”
The point was more that layoffs can take out big slugs of staff without considering the individual, in a few different ways: initiatives we can just cancel completely (self driving cars); people we will likely need later but less in the shorter term (recruiting); or places where we consciously take on added risk (losing security).
I do think that for the company that sacked their security team, the executives may very well have had a full understanding of the risks it created — but couldn’t easily say so publicly (“we chose to 10x our risk of a security incident, so we keep 1 more product initiative staffed which might save us”). Just speculation. Not a situation I think many of us would be comfortable in.