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Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

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Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#131

Post by grandalf »

justin66 wrote: post #128
grandalf wrote: post #72

I've worked with Joist's CTO before and he's got a very high ethical standard and strong commitment to teams he's a part of. I'm sure this decision was not an easy one. Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business.

His company just hired a couple of people and let them go a week later in a layoff. Clearly, the problem is the international trade system, nothing to do with management's ethics or lack of commitment to its team members. OK...

I can't speak for the ethics of the other members of the management team, but I think it's unreasonable to assume that the decision was made for any other reason than necessity.

It may be that the decision to hire new people a week earlier was out of optimism that moving to the bay area was not going to be necessary.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#132

Post by st3v3r »

gist wrote: post #95
mabbo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be thrown off of Toronto by one douchebag company. There's lots of jobs here for developers, and it's just a great city (imho). I posted below, but the company I work for is hiring in Toronto and the pay is pretty good for this city.

> Don't be thrown off of Toronto by one douchebag company What do you think the company should do? It's a company not a person who left their spouse when they got cancer. They are doing what they feel they should do in order to thrive and survive. Now you can argue that you think they are wrong, that is that they don't need to move. But then again you won't suffer the downside of the wrong decision. They will. Compan…

Given the stories of how they continued hiring people until the end, laying off people who had moved there and had only worked for a month or less when it happened, I absolutely can refer to them as a douchebag company.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#133

Post by st3v3r »

spullara wrote: post #119
udba wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the students that do leave for the US would be more than willing to stay in Canada, even if they were not paid as much. It's a familiar culture, the cost of living is cheaper, and in many ways Toronto is a better place to live than SF[0]. When they do go to the US, it's because they're getting huge sums of money mainly from SV giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and so on. While many grads are willing…

Generally for a tech startup, I do think it can make sense to move. Plus, necessity is the mother of invention, Airbnb and Uber were both started because of how painful it can be to live in SF. What if the founders had been somewhere affordable with great public transportation?

They would have worked on something else, and someone else, preferably someone who doesn't believe in just snubbing labor laws, would have come up with the idea. Remember, Uber isn't a unique idea. There were at least 3 companies that came up with it around the same time.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#134

Post by st3v3r »

wyager wrote: post #56
udba wrote: post #30

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same. Howev…

Canada is a country, not a dear friend. Workers and companies owe nothing to it. If it makes more sense for someone to leave, then more power to them. Canada can either try to make itself more appealing or deal with people leaving.

See, this is why everyone hates businesses and businesspeople. They say they "owe nothing to the city/state/province/country", yet still expect all these places to bend over backwards for them at the expense of the people living there.

Maybe your business should give reason for why it should exist, and why anyone should care about it first.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#135

Post by st3v3r »

grandalf wrote: post #72

I've worked with Joist's CTO before and he's got a very high ethical standard and strong commitment to teams he's a part of. I'm sure this decision was not an easy one. Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business.

"I've worked with Joist's CTO before and he's got a very high ethical standard and strong commitment to teams he's a part of."

Clearly he doesn't, otherwise he wouldn't be doing shady stuff like having the company continue to hire people who have to relocate, only to lay them off a week later.

"Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business."

That isn't the problem here.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#136

Post by nasalgoat »

DanHulton wrote: post #48
udba wrote: post #30

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same. Howev…

As I hear it, it all comes down to financing. Talent's easy to find, sure, but raising money anywhere in Canada vs. SF is no contest. It's still a shitty way to treat people, but I can see why companies still want to be in the valley. I just wish we could attract more investors to Toronto. There are a lot of super-psyched tech and design folk in this city.

Yes, my current startup is finding it very, very difficult to raise the Series A financing here in Toronto. Canadian VC firms are few and far between, and concentrate on the oil/gas sector mostly, and find tech scary and unpredictable.

On the flip side, the SF VCs don't like investing outside their local sandbox.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#137

Post by jacquesm »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #53

I relocated to Toronto SPECIFICALLY to work for Joist, exactly one week ago. I was laid off along with everyone else within 6 days of working for them! Prior to that I was working in the USA for a few years; I'm now in a position where I have to figure out next steps with regards to my career :/ I'm still unsure why they hired me and brought me down here? I'm also hoping that they pay me for my time there (I worked m…

Something similar happened a few months ago in a Dutch company that I was sent to have a look at. Utterly disgusting, to cause people to uproot their lives knowing full well that there is no intention to follow through.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#138

Post by wyager »

jgw wrote: post #78
wyager wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is a country, not a dear friend. Workers and companies owe nothing to it. If it makes more sense for someone to leave, then more power to them. Canada can either try to make itself more appealing or deal with people leaving.

Re: "owe nothing to it", I respectfully disagree. Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them. Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed. I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a s…

This would all be conveniently solved if Canada didn't take so much of people's money to pay for so much other people's things.

> structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt

That's called a student loan.

The US government does exactly this in the form of "scholarships" where you're essentially indentured to the government for X years after graduating.

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