If anyone reading this was part of the affected, please DM me. I have an SRE type role open that would almost certainly be a good fit for anyone from eng. Totally remote, good company culture.
Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
161–170 of 329 posts
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it’s a funny joke. But this attitude only upsets people who thought jobs were not transactional. Kind of reminds me of stories by people who paid for sex and found out the sex worker didn’t want to cuddle afterwards.
The very idea of separating humanity from the system we live in will never sit right with me. Jobs are purely transactional on paper, sure, but in the end, we're not _just_ dealing with jobs, but people and their livelihoods. We're simply lucky enough to be in a field where saving up and building a financial security cushion is doable. In practice, accountability only seems to go up so far. I shortly did consulting f…
what about accountability to the people who took a risk investing in the company?
maybe the CEO didn't predict the future however many months or years ago to get to a point where no layoffs would've been necessary, but maybe this would've been at the cost of less growth, possibly having worse consequences
the idea of "humanity" is completely opaque, it's not that hard to look at the reality instead
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. They never are. A recent study investigated this and neither stock price nor productivity nor profitability improved. All mass layoffs do is crater employee morale. And yes, it's a "others are jumping into the lake with their clothes on, let's get our brooks brothers shirts wet, too" thing without any rational cogitation involved..
What should a business do that has more people on payroll than their revenues can support?
I mean if your company makes ~150M a quarter and has operating expenses of 217M and cost of revenues of 53M a 6% cut towards your operating expenses isn't going to get you anywhere close to profitable.
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#164Granted, tech companies generally do not have unions.
Companies with union agreements, have not been laying off people.
I think it's silly when companies present the nonsensical rationale of "due to prevailing economic conditions" without qualification. As if these conditions (everyone else is doing it for some reason, so let's ride the stock boost) is obvious, decided, and not worth talking about.
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#165DAE feel it all started with Elon laying off half the company without destroying Twitter completely? These other managers must have thought if Elon can lay off half the company , we can atleast do away with like 10% without much negative consequences? Time will tell if such hire and fire will cause unintended consquences. Software as a whole is quite resilient though, you don't need much resources to maintain code once it's written, creating new features is where skilled individuals are needed. So companies will definitely survive even if they lay off half the company, but the question is will they thrive when opportunity comes knocking again?
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#166I really get the feeling that many companies are just blindly doing whatever other companies do. One starts large layoffs, and suddenly everybody is doing it. At other times, when one goes on a hiring spree, they all go. One tries to reduce salaries, they all do. One pays enormous bonuses, and they all do. It's like CEOs aren't really thinking for themselves, just copying whatever the market does.
The dominoes started falling with Elon laying off half the company without much problems. Copycat managers thought if Elon can lay off half the company, they can surely get away with 10% layoffs.
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In your hyper-financialized viewpoint, the CEO's job should be to make as much money for him/herself as possible. No, the CEO is meant to optimize not for themselves, but for the owners of the company. If the CEO didn't do that, the board should fire them.
But what if the board are optimizing for themselves as well?
Then the board is breaking their fiduciary duty and the shareholders will sue them into oblivion.
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some businesses, sure. Some of the big tech companies that are doing layoffs though (like Google) are just fine financially, and are losing two decades' worth of employee morale and goodwill for a temporary stock bump that is already dissipating. Memegen is a firestorm, and everyone is now talking about the importance of being on safe projects and staying away from experimental/unproven ones. That's going to hurt Goo…
Google hasn’t really demonstrated a good track record of revolutionary launches. Doing so requires risk and long term investment and vision. Bigger companies have more to lose with risk and thus take much “safer” risks because CEO and middle management are incentivized to do that - risky bets might cause you to be on the losing side of a bet and end up regressing from where you are now. Risky bets are also how you ca…
> Google hasn’t really demonstrated a good track record of revolutionary launches.
I disagree. Search was the original product, and since then, Google has launched the following other products/technologies that I would also describe as revolutionary: Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, Ads/AdSense, YouTube (depending on who you give credit to), MapReduce, Kubernetes, TPUs, TensorFlow, and I'm sure I'm missing some.
The trajectory of these revolutionary launches over time does seem to be decelerating though even as the company gets larger. And with these layoffs it'll likely get even worse, not better.
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some businesses, sure. Some of the big tech companies that are doing layoffs though (like Google) are just fine financially, and are losing two decades' worth of employee morale and goodwill for a temporary stock bump that is already dissipating. Memegen is a firestorm, and everyone is now talking about the importance of being on safe projects and staying away from experimental/unproven ones. That's going to hurt Goo…
What is memegen?
A Google Monopoly that needs to be broken up and opened to the public (mainly, xooglers).
Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CEO's job (responsibility) is not to give people jobs, but to steer a company for success on behalf of the owners. If your comment ("CEO takes full responsibility") is suggesting s/he should be fired or compensation reduced because of their misread of the future, that would be quite silly. Companies don't fire people for making mistakes (in fact if you make no mistakes you probably should be let go because you're…
It's a reference to the Google CEO's statement about their layoffs and I think the point is that it's an empty platitude.
Only an empty platitude if one interprets it as meant for those laid off.
But if you think about it as a message to remaining employees, the board, and to shareholders, it isn't an empty platitude at all.