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Patreon laying off 20% of staff

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Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#271

Post by happytoexplain »

fourseventy wrote: post #140
officialchicken wrote: post #19

Bottom line: How do these layoffs increase the successful outcome of product launches on the platform in any way?

Well if the company goes out of business because its not making enough profit then all product launches will cease.

We like to point this out - but it's very rarely the actual stakes on the table. It's just something we point to to justify layoffs. It's very rare that the thing standing between a business existing and not being able to exist is a round of layoffs. We almost always do layoffs to make more profit, not to save ourselves existentially (which are two related-but-different things, as much as some of us would like to pretend that they are the same thing).

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#272

Post by happytoexplain »

jcfrei wrote: post #27

Upvoting this so more people see how cringey it's written.

I'm the opposite - I wish people wrote like this more often. Basic humanity needs to make a comeback before we all kill each other.

With the enormous caveat that this writing is honest, and I imagine you are implicitly including "it's not honest" in your grievance, which is a totally reasonable guess. We rightly assume CEOs are usually not honest when it comes to sympathizing with employees.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#275

Post by wisty »

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…

> If you feel genuine responsibility for the people, then figure out a way to NOT fire them.

That kind of sounds like saying "if you're poor, make more money". It's not bad advice but odds are, they tried.

If a company can take a hit to its bottom line by being bloated and inefficient but saves jobs, is that the right thing to do?

Edit: I can see good arguments either way. The neoliberal idea that all waste should be eliminated seems almost communist / soviet IMO. The USSR grew like crazy by putting people into factories and working them as hard as possible, removing all waste. But with no slack they couldn't innovate and productivity growth stalled. Our productivity growth has also stalled. We outsource or privatise so much that everything is just a race to the bottom with no space to grow, and finding looopholes in metrics or rules is the way to get ahead (like soviet factories finding out that they can churn out crappier products that no one wants but it helps hit a quota).

OTOH boated orgs kinda suck.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#276

Post by dylan604 »

nickv wrote: post #264
KellyCriterion wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does adding $200k back to payroll help pay for 96 employee salaries (plus benefits which tend to be an invisible 25-30% on top of salaries)?

If the CEO is only making $400k, that's not a very big company

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#277

Post by archagon »

dormento wrote: post #258
ryandvm wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Do you think 99.9% of people will elect to just lay down and die?

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#278

Post by K0balt »

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…

That’s not always an option, and with the reckless exceptions aside, that’s usually been thoroughly explored. Any company would rather grow revenue and employ more people that shrink to accommodate changing markets.

Needing to make more money is a given, and they’ve probably explored that as thoroughly as possible. Cutting costs assumes that they have been so wasteful that the costs they can cut for meaningful savings doesn’t include employees that are no longer fuelling growth or revenue. Because if they were, they wouldn’t be letting them go.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#279

Post by scott_w »

whatever1 wrote: post #218
scott_w wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why a company has to survive but not its people? If the company collapses, those people lose their jobs anyway? > Why the employees do not deserve this? It's not about what employees "deserve," it's about the simple fact that the law allows the tax authorities to wind up a business to cover the tax bill. See the UK, where HMRC wound up Rangers FC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administration_and_liquidation... ).

Exactly. With stroke of a pen a company is less important than its ability to pay taxes. So we can put people above companies. With a stroke of a pen.

Did you miss this part?

> If the company collapses, those people lose their jobs anyway?

We can do what you suggest but the result is the same for the people being laid off.

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