Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#741

Post by dboreham » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

dmurdoch wrote: post #466

TorKlingberg wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sucks because my manager was only told this morning As a manager I find their really curious. I guess they were trying to avoid leaks. I wonder how they chose who to lay off. Most recent performance rating? Next level managers impression?

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…

Hmm. I think we were at the same place.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#742

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:47 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #485

dmurdoch wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Assuming perfect information, Jim's skill being transferable, and Jim's performance eval being objective, you'd expect that the company would profit from transferring Jim and other top performers to their profitable products, and cutting the worst employees from those projects (after all, even a department making profit is likely to have some employees on the low end of the performance bell curve).

Of course that isn't as easy because of morale, team cohesion, performance evals rarely being comparable across teams, and people being not as fungible as the above suggests. Not to mention all the work this takes, in a time when you probably have other worries. So maybe it's not "really weird", just "not immediately obvious"

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#743

Post by jvanderbot » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

travismark wrote: post #693

gzer0 wrote: post #633

* 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

Wait, you really thought every company had unlimited PTO? Like, every single one?

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#744

Post by vimda » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

travismark wrote: post #693

gzer0 wrote: post #633

* 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

Under non-US countries, they're still required to offer time off in employment contracts, and payout for unused time off under that contract

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#745

Post by itsoktocry » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #36

I feel bad for employees that have waited a decade to cash out. No reason why Stripe couldn’t have gone public in 2020-2021 at a huge valuation but from past interviews it sounds like the decision to remain private was just a founder preference thing because “focus” or something. Now the IPO market is completely frozen and its valuation is likely cut in half from peak, at least.

>its valuation is likely cut in half from peak, at least

So you wish they would have got to dump overpriced shares on the public to further enrich insiders?

It's not like Stripe engineers were earning minimum wage digging ditches for 10 years...

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#746

Post by latortuga » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

travismark wrote: post #693

gzer0 wrote: post #633

* 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

Unlimited PTO sucks for employees. It isn't the case in every state but some states, including mine, require employers to pay out PTO upon separation. So having unlimited automatically means you get paid out nothing on separation, a bad deal for employees. If you're allowed to take time off, then you have earned it but because of the policy, you don't get to realize the benefit of having earned it upon separation.

Unlimited PTO also discourages using PTO because nobody wants to be seen as the person taking the most vacation. And there are therefore no useful guidelines about how much is reasonable or allowed. A written or de facto company policy of "if you take more than 2 weeks of PTO per year, you'll be seen as abusing the system" is not unlimited PTO, it's an excuse to not pay people.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#747

Post by oblio » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

xyst wrote: post #729

gzer0 wrote: post #633

* 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…

I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. I do agree this is generous af. Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.

> I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway.

Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT.

If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants.

We'll be back to the days of:

Sure, you can code, your algorithms are efficient and your CV is impressive, but can you tell me how many overloads of string.contains are there in the Foo lang standard library? Ah, you say that's unfair? Well, the previous 10 candidates where just as good as you so we need more. We need you to hit the ground running, be productive the first week and be coaching our experienced devs within the first month.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#748

Post by eclipxe » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

travismark wrote: post #693

gzer0 wrote: post #633

* 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

What made you think every company had unlimited PTO?!

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#749

Post by lr4444lr » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

system2 wrote: post #661

udev wrote: post #636

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?

Companies that come crawling back on their knees to you are usually ready to substantially up your comp. or improve your work duties, considering the position they must be in to be trying it.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#750

Post by yodsanklai » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

system2 wrote: post #661

udev wrote: post #636

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?

In a big company with thousands of employees, for sure. You probably won't even see the same faces. It's totally impersonal. In a smaller company, it's different. I actually left a (small) company in very good terms, but yet, I feel it would be weird going back there.