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

Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 522 posts

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#111

Post by publicdebates »

Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades, and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#112

Post by ragall »

Recursing wrote: post #44
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

My best guess is that a part of it is replacing US (or in this case Israeli) devs with much cheaper Italian/European ones, earning ~a quarter of their US counterparts and working longer hours, as Bending Spoons has an extremely competitive hiring process, and is probably the highest paying tech company in Italy

Actually they're paying very competitive salaries. For example: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db....

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#113

Post by dostick »

Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

It’s a mystery to me, almost every product on market has serious user-facing issues that never get fixed. As if every company indeed have no development team, while all of them retain teams of developers.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#114

Post by Nextgrid »

publicdebates wrote: post #111
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades , and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.

Won't be giving exact figures but that's my business model as well - I charge a premium because my job for clients is to make myself obsolete. If I "deliver" something that needs my constant presence then I haven't actually delivered. Of course, my price is high upfront because I'm budgeting in the fact that I strive to be out of there as soon as feasible instead of trying to stick around.

Some clients are ok with it, some don't; this is normal and what a competitive market should look like. I tell clients openly when my premium service is not the right fit for their current requirements or budget, and there are cases where cheaper labor or LLMs are absolutely a better fit (and they should come back once when/if they outgrow the cheaper, lower-quality product).

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#115

Post by ryoshoe »

cheschire wrote: post #72
bradleybuda wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN: VC is a cancer, businesses don't need to grow forever at all costs, products can be finished, what we need is sustainable small companies Also HN: No, not like that

It’s almost as if HN were a community of voices instead of just one…

The Goomba Fallacy strikes once again

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#116

Post by mannyv »

stenuto wrote: post #103

As a longtime user of Vimeo (since 2009), I was afraid this was going to happen. I built our own HLS video streaming in-house a couple of years ago and never looked back. Way faster, lightweight player, uses modern apis and codecs. Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)

Building video streaming is easy. Selling video streaming is difficult.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#117

Post by refulgentis »

Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

I think you're entirely correct.

I put it to not-tech people as: "[insert_ridiculous_valuation] is because you can fire everyone tomorrow and keep operating"

> "Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product despite it being essentially finished."

This is wrong, though, it's unnecessarily tying in a pop-finance obsession with ZIRP.

Unnecessary is the right word because it's not necessary for the rest of your post, you could cut it out and it wouldn't affect your argument or anyone's understanding.

Wrong is the right word because the dynamics it assumes are fantastical - companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done?

Additionally, ZIRP didn't induce this, this stuff happened, exactly the same, during ZIRP as well. Saw it in the iPad point of sale industry in early to mid 2010s.

A real finance nerd would point out ZIRP would in fact induce more of this behavior. It makes it cheaper for private equity/entities like Bending Spoons to take on debt to buy out companies and strip mine them. (strip mine being my word for this behavior)

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#118

Post by cheschire »

ryoshoe wrote: post #115
cheschire wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost as if HN were a community of voices instead of just one…

The Goomba Fallacy strikes once again

Thanks for sharing the name of the phenomenon! I was not aware of it before.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#119

Post by ecshafer »

bovermyer wrote: post #98

Can someone give me some examples of private equity firms that aren't driven purely by avarice? I have a bet going with a colleague.

Your question doesn't really make sense. What business isn't driven by the goal of making money ultimately?

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#120

Post by DANmode »

dostick wrote: post #113
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

It’s a mystery to me, almost every product on market has serious user-facing issues that never get fixed. As if every company indeed have no development team, while all of them retain teams of developers.

If you finish the backlog, you’ll get laid off,

the backlog keeps being increased (by you and your manager at times),

so it never gets finished.

Seems easy enough to explain.

There has to be a dragon being fought to account for all this money. Even if the dragon is bs.

Post reply on HN