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Kraken lays off 30% of staff

blog.kraken.com

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Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#171

Post by mrweasel »

jiveturkey wrote: post #131
eloff wrote: post #52

I'm so glad I turned down the job offer at Kraken. The reason I turned it down was because I felt that crypto was a bubble waiting to pop (back in March, but that's been my "wrong" opinion for the last 5 years or more.) The tech stack was nice, the pay was excellent, the product I would have been working on is comparable to Bloomberg Terminal, so it was pretty cool too. But I just thought the job might go away in the…

If you've held that opinion for so long, why did you even apply to Kraken at all? What would have swayed you to accept their offer?

Maybe they didn't apply, but was approached with an offer?

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#172

Post by timruffles »

dylan604 wrote: post #20
Veen wrote: post #11

I'm flabbergasted they had so many employees that 30% is over 1000. Still, terrible time of year for this to happen to their employees.

Why is it that approaching a Hallmark made up consumerism focused holiday supposed to be more terrible to be laid off than any other time ?

Your take is cliché, factually wrong, and makes you look callous all at once, congrats! Any other major religions' holidays you'd like to dismiss while you're at it?

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#173

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

stickfigure wrote: post #83
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like HN should just auto add a comment that says "Why does need employees?" with a follow up comment that explains how large corporations work. It literally comes up in every single layoff announcement or other discussion of company size in some way, and the follow on comments are essentially the same every single time. I'm not saying that a lot of these companies aren't overstaffed (indeed, that's why they ar…

I've come to look at it the other way. "Because that's how large companies work" is a lazy non-answer. An honest answer to this question would break it down: # of engineers, # of ops, # of sales, # of hr, etc. And ideally break it down by business division. Of course that requires some real domain knowledge. I've personally watched morons come in, hire lots of useless employees, and destroy millions of dollars of cas…

The problem is that the numbers depend on a bunch of decisions made under a variety of pressures and constraints to solve a collection of business goals that we (the `people not involved in running the company) may only have a limited view of. There may be situations where it's justifiable to throw people at a problem versus a solution that uses less people. Inertia can keep the results of those decisions around for a long time.

Someone could certainly go through the exercise of deciding how many employees Kraken, Twitter, etc "should" have to perform the functions that someone is aware of, but it's an imprecise straw man at best.

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#174

Post by lordnacho »

ceejayoz wrote: post #144
suh_dude wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, why would they do this?

As one example: in the US, employers with more than 100 employees have to give 60 days notice of layoffs of a certain size. Outsource customer service to small, closely held subcontractors and you can avoid the requirement.

It's ridiculous that you can circumvent the rules that easily.

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#175

Post by concordDance »

autotune wrote: post #142
brezelgoring wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Perhaps if the CEO had gone to Stanford, he would have been better educated in effective altruism and have placed their needs higher Careful, some might infer a snide on their church and bite back to you. Not me, I share your view.

Is anyone actually defending effective altruism right now? SBF has effectively flushed it down the drain along with the investors he scammed.

Me. The movement and ideas are good even if the most famous person connected to it is bad.

You don't hear about the vast majority of EAs who just quietly try and improve girl's education in Indian or distribute malaria nets (to mention two I know personally).

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#176

Post by awinder »

autotune wrote: post #142
brezelgoring wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Perhaps if the CEO had gone to Stanford, he would have been better educated in effective altruism and have placed their needs higher Careful, some might infer a snide on their church and bite back to you. Not me, I share your view.

Is anyone actually defending effective altruism right now? SBF has effectively flushed it down the drain along with the investors he scammed.

Why would one conman’s association with an ideology condemn the entire ideology? Because he said he was using it as a ruse? Why are you still selectively believing the conman?

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#177

Post by feyes »

stickfigure wrote: post #83
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like HN should just auto add a comment that says "Why does need employees?" with a follow up comment that explains how large corporations work. It literally comes up in every single layoff announcement or other discussion of company size in some way, and the follow on comments are essentially the same every single time. I'm not saying that a lot of these companies aren't overstaffed (indeed, that's why they ar…

I've come to look at it the other way. "Because that's how large companies work" is a lazy non-answer. An honest answer to this question would break it down: # of engineers, # of ops, # of sales, # of hr, etc. And ideally break it down by business division. Of course that requires some real domain knowledge. I've personally watched morons come in, hire lots of useless employees, and destroy millions of dollars of cas…

When a company grows at a steady rate staffing can be carefully managed alongside the implementation of new technology to manage said growth.

However, when a company grows rapidly due to high interest in their product, the quickest way to manage that growth is typically going to be manpower.

There are indeed better solutions, but manpower works in a lot of industries, particularly those that grow their volume quickly.

I think the surging popularity of crypto prior to our current downturn sparked some rapid growth and the need for more workers.

On the technical side you really want to build your infrastructure so that it can scale up quickly, but on the customer facing side that's not always possible and thus you might need more personnel to man the chats and phones.

It's sometimes easy to look at a problem from an external view and go wow why do they do it that way, but in my own experience there are unseen internal reasons or obstacles for why a company is not doing it in a seemingly obvious better way.

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#178

Post by skulk »

cwkoss wrote: post #145
gigatexal wrote: post #137

For a company built on a Ponzi-scheme (crypto) they sure are being good to their employees and that’s laudable. “Separation pay: We will pay 16 weeks of base pay for all departing Krakenites inclusive of the paid leave period. Performance bonus: For those eligible, we will pay each departing Krakenite their bonus as determined by their manager. Benefits: We will offer eligible Krakenites 4 months of healthcare contin…

People who don't understand what ponzi schemes are love calling crypto a ponzi scheme.

People who profit from Ponzi schemes love pretending that their returns represent real value from the economy.

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#179

Post by SkyMarshal »

woodruffw wrote: post #53
setgree wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We learned about the fraud because of macroeconomic factors! inflation -> rising interest rates -> crypto less attractive [0] -> people ask for their deposits back -> company can't meet obligations -> company folds -> scrutiny -> fraud revealed Is my basic model of things. [0] from https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/th... : "When interest rates are very low a dollar in the far future is worth a…

I completely agree! My point was that it's very funny to blame the macro (and even funnier to blame geopolitics), when it's clearly just serving a revelatory purpose.

Rising inflation and correspondant rising interest rates would have resulted in a major crypto market decline with or without the fraud. Bitcoin had already fallen from $60k+ to ~$20k before the waves of failures even began happening.

All of cryptocurrency is a risk asset. When credit and money is cheap and flowing freely, it flows into risk assets like crypto, driving up their price and forming bubbles. When rates rise and credit and money is no longer flowing freely, it flows out of risk assets into safer havens, popping the bubbles. That's what happened to crypto this year.

The collapses and fraud revelations were a consequence of that, not the cause. Blaming the macro is accurate.

Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff

#180

Post by rich_sasha »

woodruffw wrote: post #122
rich_sasha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Kraken is regulated and I suspect can't be involved in any of the crypto scams. I'd imagine they really hold deposits as they should etc. So for them it's the fact that markets are down and people aren't punting crypto, rather than "we took the USD deposits, turned them into shit coins and we're insolvent" kind of thing. I think.

Right: to be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing Kraken of anything untoward (at least, nothing more untoward than being involved in this whole industry). The statement just came across as very roundabout: we all understand that the current downturn in cryptocurrency is driven in part by a decline in "easy money" from retail customers, which in turn is partially driven by a lot of that "easy money" outright evaporatin…

Ok, I just meant, when SBF comes out and says, "liquidity crunch, bank run", he means, he stole the money, or charitably, let someone steal it on his watch. Or even more charitably, invested it in an unacceptably stupid way.

For Kraken the slowdown is less business. Crypto is down, as are equity markets, and these are highly correlated (go figure - "inflation hedge").

I'm not even sure if FTX blow up itself is bad for them. Not only is a competitor out, but also people might appreciate a regulated crypto exchange.

So I think maybe "geopolitical" is not outrageously wrong a term to use here.

Any other critiques of crypto are not affected.

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