Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patreon laying off 20% of staff

patreon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 293 posts

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#151

Post by natbennett »

Ekaros wrote: post #53
cmiles8 wrote: post #28

Honestly the most interesting thing to me here is that to took nearly 500 people to run Patreon.

Make me always question what is going on in these companies. They are essentially a middle man reoffering payment providers services. Host some content. Lot of time just links to external platforms. There is some marketing but not really that much. They really should be running sustainable service for like tenth of that many employees... If even that. Most of the people don't care about them just the creators on thei…

They are not a “pure middle man.”

You should talk to someone who works at Patreon. Or a larger creator on their platform.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#152

Post by worldthruword »

codegeek wrote: post #42

The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences. Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these me…

> First, the people who work at Patreon are special, beautiful humans, through and through. The energy that our team has for Patreon’s mission is a force of nature. So many wonderful humans are going to lose their jobs today in an especially painful moment and market. I am the person responsible for that decision, and I take that with the utmost seriousness.

Reminds me of Ozymandias speech when he says to Dr. Manhattan, that he has personally exprienced the pain of millions of New Yorkers he is about to decimate in the Nuclear attack.

In both the Watchmen graphic novel and the 2009 film adaptation, Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt) claims that he deeply feels and absorbs the psychic pain and deaths of the millions of people he kills. He views this immense personal suffering as his own tragic sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#154

Post by cogman10 »

zamadatix wrote: post #78
codegeek wrote: post #42

The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences. Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these me…

There is no way to fire a lot of people in a way everyone likes, only ways which suck more than others for different people. Whether you think they are dramatic is not one of the sucks they are very concerned with as you're one if the ones who will forget this layoff in a few hours

All at once? Sure, no good way.

But there are ways to reduce headcount without causing waves. Those include things like simply not backfilling for people that leave the company or who are fired for low performance.

Letting a bunch of people go all at once is a sign of poor management and poor planning. Or it's a sign that Patreon wants to go public and ATM the stock market loves layoffs.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#155

Post by Barbing »

chrisss395 wrote: post #103

I see others mentioning the severance package being decent for a US company. I'm glad they received something, but I'm sorry, can we stop calling this decent? It's markedly lopsided when a company can one day decide to lay off a large portion of their workforce and think 4 months is anywhere near acceptable. The average time to find a new job is significantly longer, especially depending on role and seniority. I'm ti…

>instead of actively running the business.

I’d like to be convinced of this point.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#156

Post by win311fwg »

ryandrake wrote: post #96
Ekaros wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make me always question what is going on in these companies. They are essentially a middle man reoffering payment providers services. Host some content. Lot of time just links to external platforms. There is some marketing but not really that much. They really should be running sustainable service for like tenth of that many employees... If even that. Most of the people don't care about them just the creators on thei…

I never understand these replies. Has nobody ever worked for a medium sized, yet global-reach company? I think a lot of HN has a very narrow view of how many different roles are required to run a company bigger than a local diner. Feels like a weird confirmation bias where “I only see a dozen engineers around me every day, therefore companies only need engineers to function.”

> Has nobody ever worked for a medium sized, yet global-reach company?

I have, but it also publicized seven completely different business units. It is easier to reason about why what are effectively seven different businesses need so many employees. Each unit did not have all that many people, however. They would all be considered small businesses if the company broke up those business units into individual companies. Patreon, on the other hand, seems to have only one obvious business unit.

But also most haven't. Across most of the western world, 70% of workforce work for small businesses and in Asian markets that rises to 80%+. Medium-large businesses are unusual. The USA is a curious outlier where only around 40% of the workforce works for small businesses. Some HN accounts forget it’s a big world out there.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#157

Post by bpodgursky »

chrisss395 wrote: post #103

I see others mentioning the severance package being decent for a US company. I'm glad they received something, but I'm sorry, can we stop calling this decent? It's markedly lopsided when a company can one day decide to lay off a large portion of their workforce and think 4 months is anywhere near acceptable. The average time to find a new job is significantly longer, especially depending on role and seniority. I'm ti…

This attitude is why US engineers are 3x more than your European ones.

It doesn't take 4 months to find a job. Life goes on.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#158

Post by fourseventy »

dylan604 wrote: post #129
codegeek wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a founder/CEO myself (a very small company so I don't have experience of mass layoffs for full disclosure). However, I don't get this explanation. If you feel genuine responsibility for the people, then figure out a way to NOT fire them. Or be honest and admit that the company needs to make more money/cut costs. Trust me, no one wants to hear "we love you so much but we have to fire you and I feel so bad". It ju…

> then figure out a way to NOT fire them like reduce the salary of the c-suite staff by 50% so they are only making 300% more than the average workers. or reduce c-suite salary to the lowest wage while allowing them to live off of their stock and other benefits like company cars, expense accounts, etc. granted, that's for the larger companies, but the bigger companies never do anything like that

1.) The c-suite is like 6 people, reducing their salary isn't going to make much of a dent.

2.) The c-suite are compensated at market rate the same as anyone else. If the CTO at Patreon is making 400k/yr you can't just cut his salary to 200k, he will leave and take a job somewhere else.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#160

Post by roenxi »

codegeek wrote: post #92
K0balt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because, and I say this as a person who has made these calls, some leaders do feel a genuine responsibility for the people that work for them. Perhaps too, the ones that don’t, want people to think that they do. But as a founder and CEO by far the most emotionally taxing thing I have ever had to do is cut staff for the good of the company. You want to treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were…

I am a founder/CEO myself (a very small company so I don't have experience of mass layoffs for full disclosure). However, I don't get this explanation. If you feel genuine responsibility for the people, then figure out a way to NOT fire them. Or be honest and admit that the company needs to make more money/cut costs. Trust me, no one wants to hear "we love you so much but we have to fire you and I feel so bad". It ju…

The paradox can be resolved by assuming they are fallible and limited human beings - they're laying a bunch of people off, they understand at some level that this is evidence that their poor hiring and management decisions have caused some amount of unnecessary suffering, so they feel bad.

But they aren't foresighted enough to have handled the situation appropriately in advance. Or they might have run into the limits of their ability to empathise and only understand that they feel bad but not that the fired people probably feel worse. I'd bet more on the former.

In many ways it is a triumph of modern society how ordinary the people are who head these large and complicated world-spanning corporate entities.

Post reply on HN