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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#491

Post by WonderBuilder »

tombert wrote: post #468

I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring. I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way t…

I have little to offer but my acknowledgement. The "song and dance" routine of getting and new job (especially in the tech industry at least) is dispiriting, embarrassing, exasperating, and disempowering. Even with an impressive amount of skill and dedication to the interview process, the method is indistinguishable from a particularly unrewarding lottery.

I'm sorry, you're in this situation. Eventually, as you said, it will end...

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#492

Post by RDaneel0livaw »

sebmellen wrote: post #490
RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using StandardNotes for years and been happy with them. Is there a reason I should look elsewhere at these or other alternatives? It's just interested I am not seeing this product mentioned anywhere here!

I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is mentioned.

I really like it ... the ios app is great, it syncs super fast, I love how easy it is to switch between plain text, markdown, todo list, etc... It's perfect for my workflow, I just find it odd that nobody else was mentioning it.

So here I am doing so! If you don't use it, check it out.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#494

Post by oshoma »

suzzer99 wrote: post #181
briHass wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been a…

Maybe I have simple needs, but iOS notes does everything I want. 1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I happen to be in that anyway) 2. Create folders 3. Paste images 4. Fonts/bullets etc. Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.

I love the design of Notes, and I used it a lot for the past few years to store work and personal notes, but I found the sync to be very unreliable. Notes on my iPhone keeps getting out of sync with Notes on my laptop. It happens every few weeks, and I have to log out and login again to fix it. Maddening.

I switched recently to Obsidian and am really enjoying the speed, simplicity, extensibility, and being back in control of my files.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#495

Post by sib »

dragonwriter wrote: post #471
sib wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the founders on HN are far above the 85th percentile in intelligence (let's not get into the philosophical arguments about it), so why would they be satisfied with that?

Because, being over 85th percentile in intelligence, they would be more likely than average to realize that the marginal impact of income on experienced utility declines sharply the higher you go on the income distribution. (Especially if they’ve experienced life at a variety of income levels, including some near the 85th percentile.)

Marginal impact decreases, but the absolute impact is still positive... And the marginal impact is still quite high at the 85th percentile of income because the income distribution is very skewed (the absolute dollar difference from 85th percentile to 99th percentile, where most HN / YC founders probably are on the intelligence scale, is probably much greater than the absolute dollar difference from 15th to 29th percentile, as an example).

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#496

Post by TheKarateKid »

prepend wrote: post #332
belthesar wrote: post #79

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost. Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap. It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user. When Evernote started charging for dumb features and loc…

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.

This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.

Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#497

Post by whywhywhywhy »

tombert wrote: post #468

I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring. I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way t…

> Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world

Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it.

> You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck

You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries for it.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#498

Post by fluidcruft »

acdha wrote: post #488
fluidcruft wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped Dropbox with extreme prejudice (was a paying customer) when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use. Will never use them ever again. Randomly demanding I drop everything and re-engineer my stack is an invitation for me to re-engineer them out of my life.

Like everyone else, they have to decide what they support – their core product pretty heavily depends on known file system semantics – and they gave advanced notice specifically so you didn’t have to “drop everything” if you for some reason cannot have a partition using a supported file system. Put another way, do you think the combined users of file systems which aren’t supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs are willing…

Oh are those all supported now? They've clearly backtracked massively. When I bounced they were insisting on ext4 only. Glad I didn't bother rebuild all my machines to ext4 only for them to change their damn minds. They gave us less than three months notice. I'm not playing chicken for three months paying their professional tier in the hopes they change their mind. Freaking circus.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#499

Post by jon_adler »

tempestn wrote: post #209
janxgeist wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side. I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app. Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work. For some r…

Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable. I kept…

Fastmail is an excellent example of a very reliable, slow changing product with a consistent price. I’ve been a subscriber for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled that it hardly ever changes in perceptible ways and just does it’s job. In more recent years, they have started to introduce some changes but seem very careful about it.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#500

Post by fencepost »

THIS APPEARS TO BE UNSOURCED.

There's a TechCrunch article about layoffs of 129 people in February, a Wikipedia edit today (July 6) links to that implying that it's happened now instead of 4+ months ago and also states (unsourced) that the 129 is more than half the remaining staff (the article link was retrieved today but is from Feb). The price increase referenced was announced in April 2023 and took effect in May so also not new.

The Wikipedia article has now been updated to reflect the above.

Edit: I see that OP has noted that it was heard directly from affected employees, with 98 gone and ~30 remaining (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945)

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