I would be more inclined to give to people via Patreon if there was a way to set a desired income amount and a transparent "overflow pipeline" for what happens with any extra money.
Patreon laying off 20% of staff
251–260 of 293 posts
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah, no, for sure you can just cut the salary by 50%? And believe me, most people in well-managed company would accept it to keep the company alive. And y CTO with 400k wont "just find a new job with same payment" next day, thats an illusion. Especially nowdays in these times. If I would be asked: "reduce your salary by 50% or get fired", for sure I would stay if there is a perspective that the situation may recover i…
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Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#253Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#254Patreon just does this every few years. At least Jack Conte didn’t post a video of himself crying about it this time.
oh but he did - just in the conext of AI instead of his workers:
timestamp(s): ~33min and ~41mins
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon cut 80% of twitter staff and...well it's still there. Every tech CEO was watching that closely, and it didn't come out in the workers favor.
Twitter is nothing like it used to be.
True. Your comment prompted me to take a trip down memory land and look at the accounts I followed. A few are still at it, but the vast majority of them stop posting around 2016, which matches my recollection of the timeframe when most everyone stopped thinking about Twitter.
However, that doesn't answer why a company that wasn't what it used to be still needed so many people for so long.
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pretty sure they opened their excel sheet, ordered the employees by salary, and got rid of the highest paid 10% of each department. Or the lowest performing 10% based on a score in the excel. They are just numbers to them
Maybe, more likely in my experience is that each manager solely selects for most obedient and flattering managees.
Pretty much, if you have a spine (even a scoliosis spine), you are out.
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
if a company is doing poorly enough to lay off people the c suite has already taken drastic pay cuts from their stock compensation
it's not as if stocks can't go up in value following a layoff. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/26/tech-layoffs-jump-in-january...
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#258The rich get richer and the poor get more AI edited and toned condolence posting.
I still don't understand the economics of the full AI rollout. Who the hell is buying anything if more than 50% of the workforce is unemployed? And among the post-AI employable, every job that isn't highly skilled is going to have the wages pushed to the floor due to rampant unemployment. None of this shit works unless we figure out "Star Trek welfare"...
When you think about it, we're only "useful" to billionaires because we have something that they want, and that something is not called "work". Work is just that thing that people must figure out before they can generate wealth. Money is the goal, work is just something in the way.
As most human tasks are automated away, the bargaining power of the (figurative) 99.9% of people who were actually producing wealth by doing actual work will converge towards zero.
I wish I had something positive to share, but if you don not happen to be a billionaire, then the future looks grim.
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
Whatsapp had 55 employees until the buyout (of reported 19B).
And how much money did they make and distribute at that time?
My point is that pure tech-plays are relatively easy as far as headcount, right?
Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff
#260They have 465 employees? That seems like a lot for what Patreon is.
Why does someone always say this about a tech company when they have layoffs, regardless of company size?
465 employees is not that large. Patreon handles millions of transactions. They need support, sales, engineers, etc. If anything I'm surprised they're not well over 1000.