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I think you have the wrong country, PM of NZ is Jacinda Ardern, and I mean, who doesn't like her? Bond villains?
Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
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Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#932Quoted post unavailable.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460388.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#933Earlier 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?
Hey, at the big tech companies plenty of people get laid off and then just transfer to a new role at a different team instead of actually leaving the company.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#934Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I've been a continuously hired coder for 20 years, with zero qualifications, and have never experienced anything but demand even in recession. There's always non FAANG boring crud apps to code.
I would anticipate it's less that people won't find jobs and more that they'll get worse ones that they wouldn't have accepted before... but then again if you were already in the lower rung you're now competing with ex-FAANG guys
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#935Earlier quoted context omitted.
New Zealand gets the unfortunate legacy of having to share the "zero COVID" mantra with a small group of fellow partners like China (which the NZ PM promoted harder than any other leader via speaker circuits). But otherwise I don't know much about NZ to critique.
Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China. And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airbo…
>If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked.
A 50% or 100% mortality rate would keep even the most pro-liberty people home. The issue is that COVID was nowhere near the civilization killer that is was made out to be. Some countries/states recognized this and rightly decided to not lock society down.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#936The hypocrisy of HN is mindblowing. I have seen thread after thread people vouching they won't hire candidates who jump multiple times to optimize their paycheck and benefits, but have no problem with mass layoffs in name of optimisation. You can't have two different scales for the two sides.
Both are instances of trying to get the best deal, just as employees do when negotiating salary, so there isn’t anything hypocritical there.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#937Earlier quoted context omitted.
> , typically to avoid leaks or creating hysteria ahead of decisions being finalized When a layoff is known to be coming, the best and most employable people will often head for the doors quickly... leaving the company with a greater concentration of less desirable employees. If it's by surprise then you'll lose fewer of the people you wanted to keep.
I don't that's really generally true. If it seems like the company is a "sinking ship", then yes, people who can see the writing on the wall and have food opportunities elsewhere will often leave quickly. But in this case, nobody is worried about Stripe's long term trajectory or viability. I doubt the best and most employable people are leaving Stripe.
That assumes the "best and most employable people" are confident in their own status as such.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#938How come CEOs never get fired during layoffs? Laying off this much of the workforce is an indicator they have done their job poorly (I.e. failed to adequately forecast industry trends and demand). Any normal plebeian would be out the door in two minutes if they did something similar.
You are describing a static, failing company’s CEO. If you never overextend, you were too conservative and weren’t making the best decisions.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#939Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Stripe made a bad choice _hiring_ people, early this year. They were very explicit about this in the email. They overextended and didn't foresee the economy contracting the way it did - and now they have to correct.
Cutting salaries for everybody has a number of disadvantages, chief of which is that it will encourage the best of people to leave. Firing can be done strategically, targeting the most recent hires and the underperformers.
I do feel like I have to remind that the first duty of the management is to the company - not because the company is "Mother and Father", in an old communist wooden language, but because the company needs to survive in order to pay all salaries, and hopefully expand enough so it can hire again even more people (assumingly in a more sustainable way this time).
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#940Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
4 months is relatively generous but... > if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, This statement feels _wrong_. We are all subject to macro trends that we don't have control over. They impact our lives. Even the well off tech people but especially people in other industries.
Fair point. It's a bad situation for everybody. Digging for blame probably leads to lockdowns and printing money in the Corona days, and later to eco-legislation being passed in Europe right before Russia started WW3. Plus, of course, Russia for starting WW3. Ah, and China for using real estate as savings accounts, and burning a fair 50% of its international goodwill by squashing civil rights in Hong Kong.
Stripe CEOs are just trying to do right by their company and most of their employees. But yes, times are tough for everybody, and I probably shouldn't have minimized that.