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

121–130 of 522 posts

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

#121

Post by reaperducer »

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 -…

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

A very analytical, technological, short-sighted view of things. But not necessarily how the customers think.

For many customers, a company that isn't growing is shrinking. If a company isn't willing to invest in growth, that's a red flag.

I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?

I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.

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

#122

Post by johng »

coffeefirst wrote: post #14
johng wrote: post #7

I just cancelled my account that I've had for about 10 years... maybe longer. I barely used it, but it's now >$100/year for my plan. I had maybe 15 videos uploaded that I would share occasionally.

I used to be an indie filmmaker and used it to host features when nothing else could. I’ve been paying since 2008. The price would go up but they were great so I let it be. I guess I’ll be exporting everything today.

This is actually my favorite Vimeo video of all time. I wish they would have made a TV show. This was just the pilot, but it's hilarious.

https://vimeo.com/86146321?share=copy&fl=cl&fe=ci

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

#123

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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 -…

The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]:

   With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.
It's easy for companies to fall into such pits of inefficiency because climbing out of those pits entails utterly gutting the headcount [*].

I wonder if the same is true at Vimeo, which employed ~250 engineers [1], which seems high for a mature product that's deliberately conservative (most of Vimeo's customers are B2B whitelabelers, for whom a constantly changing product is a massive downside.) It's not like video codecs or storage systems or web standards are changing daily. I would imagine a well-engineered codebase from 10 years ago would work well today with only minimal changes, mostly centered around updating libraries for security patches. The fact that they had 250 engineers on staff who presumably did more than play ping-pong all day makes me wonder if the codebase was not, in fact, well-engineered.

[0] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/vimeo

[*] Imagine the equivalent for a building: "we don't have automatic circuit breakers in this building; instead, we have a 24 hour staff of electricians who measure current with an ammeter and manually cut the power if it gets too high."

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

#124

Post by refulgentis »

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.

I'd love to do this and have a quite marketable resume, but it is extremely, extremely, unclear to me how you build a clientele or where you'd even start.

Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of it, $50K/year flat salary, and building a reputation without management taking credit for your successes, somehow.

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

#125

Post by Refreeze5224 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #58
mrtksn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk acquired Twitter and fired %80 of the employees and it was just fine. I bet there's so many more people that can be let go from all tech industry. It's mature and product discovery is mostly locked behind advertisement so what's left is exploitation. If you think about it, as long as you don't mingle much with the product that works it keeps working indefinitely. It's no different than running Excel or What…

If it wasn’t for all the political histrionics we would all be celebrating Elon’s amazing abilities.

[flagged]

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

#126

Post by wavemode »

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 -…

The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves.

But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.

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

#128

Post by mendelmaleh »

alistairSH wrote: post #95
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, they bought the German hiking and cycling app Komoot. It's a mature app in terms of functionality, with a stable user base. There's little chance of hypergrowth with this type of app. It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult. They laid off 90% of the teams. They migrated the app to their infrastructure to pool costs. Since…

It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult. Not really, sync everything through Strava, and then drop whichever service you don't want. Basically any bike ride I've done in the past decade is on 3+ services because they all sync.

I think by routes he means the trails database, not user activity

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

#129

Post by everfrustrated »

munk-a wrote: post #80
everfrustrated wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That usually means stripping the company for parts. Bending Spoons is just trying to run the company sustainably.

Vimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.

They will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.

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

#130

Post by torben-friis »

jcynix wrote: post #93
torben-friis wrote: post #62

Can someone in the know explain Bending Spoons? I routinely see job postings by them in my local dev circles, significantly above market rate, and the offers seem to keep reappearing forever. Their site namedrops known apps and services like wetransfer but otherwise seems to be just buzzwords. Are they VC buying existing IPs? What is exactly going on?

Hundreds of millions in revenue and three acquisitions in 2024 — what’s behind Bending Spoons’ success? | Sifted https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo So private equity is behind it.

Yeah, but AFAIK that means people buying companies, leaving them with a skeleton crew and milking the remaining users as long as possible.

How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.

Post reply on HN