Buffer overflow. Oops!
Buffer Layoffs
191–200 of 429 posts
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#192This may be a little cynical but: "With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..." In the American business world, you are an employee until you aren't. Confusing being an employee with being "family" is a mistake, both for the company and the employee. When times get bad, companies do what it takes to survive, including throwing employees overboard.…
So how do you account for companies like ours when, during hard times the CEO and CTO took no pay for two months so that they could continue paying employees? Or by offering employees the same class of stock as the founders with the same voting rights etc...?
That they needed the employees to continue to work so that they could later get rich with their hugely disproportionate equity stakes?
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#193This may be a little cynical but: "With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..." In the American business world, you are an employee until you aren't. Confusing being an employee with being "family" is a mistake, both for the company and the employee. When times get bad, companies do what it takes to survive, including throwing employees overboard.…
"With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..." It's moronic drivel, isn't it. Apart from being nonsensical (how can you bring less than your whole self to work, unless you've had some sort of psychotic breakdown) and the poor English ("seeing team as family") it just reads like corporate babble. It's not a family. I care about my family. I don't ca…
> moronic drivel
^ why I downvoted you.
> how can you bring less than your whole self to work
This means basically wanting to be somewhere else rather than at work. i.e., their culture is one of being dedicated to work when you're at work; at least that's how I understand it.
> poor English
This is not uncommon colloquial English. “Team” and “family” here act roughly like “mind” does in the term “theory of mind”—basically nonspecific nouns.
> I don't care about my job…
Sounds like you are a poor fit for the culture they are trying to build. Presumably you would not enjoy working there. That does not make their concept of how to manage their company moronic, nor an explanation of it drivel, however.
Your comment is blazingly condescending toward a post that is clearly very well thought-out and considered, based solely on your disagreement with Buffer's approach to organizing their team and company. That seems wholly unnecessary, particularly since you present zero actual evidence of Buffer's approach being objectively worse, just your opinion that it is.
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kicking your child out of the house for doing what a child does is not in your long-term self interest or his.
It's painful watching you futilely try to impart some basic wisdom to a bunch of junior high school students. I recommend an episode of RadioLab called "The Good Show"[1]. 1. http://www.radiolab.org/story/103951-the-good-show/
I'm enjoying the podcast you recommended. Thank you.
I've liked some of the work by Sam Harris, as well.
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#195we always talk about 3rd party platform risk for startups and to me Buffer is the prototypical example of one. If Twitter has a bad day they can cut off their API access and they'd be dead (ok they support Facebook and others but that's still 1/2 of your core)
So it seemed quite absurd they'd spend so much on things like retreats when they have so much risk.
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admire Buffer for being so transparent with their salaries, but I don't think I would ever decide to work for a company that mandated it. In my (admittedly limited) experience, mandating salary transparency tends to increase the salaries of low performers and reduce the salaries of high performers. It usually eliminates the potential for negotiating raises and poses difficult questions about paying some employees m…
The $155k salary might be due to the transparency, but could it also be due to a simple inability to pay developers $300k+? That's well over double the CEO's salary. I think it's clear they simply don't have the revenue and cash reserves to pay developers that kind of money. I suspect you'll find this to be true at a lot of smaller startups that rely on actually making money instead of fundraising.
The salary is peanuts compared to what that CEO gets compensated.
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how do you account for companies like ours when, during hard times the CEO and CTO took no pay for two months so that they could continue paying employees? Or by offering employees the same class of stock as the founders with the same voting rights etc...?
That they needed the employees to continue to work so that they could later get rich with their hugely disproportionate equity stakes?
I find this an interesting, if cynical response. It's as though there is no possible set of actions that would be enough.
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#198[deleted]
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#199This may be a little cynical but: "With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..." In the American business world, you are an employee until you aren't. Confusing being an employee with being "family" is a mistake, both for the company and the employee. When times get bad, companies do what it takes to survive, including throwing employees overboard.…
So how do you account for companies like ours when, during hard times the CEO and CTO took no pay for two months so that they could continue paying employees? Or by offering employees the same class of stock as the founders with the same voting rights etc...?
Typically if you don't pay the employees then you will have no employees ;)
Re: Buffer Layoffs
#200The comments so far all seem focused on the language Joel uses (family, etc). While that may be fair, if you simply change those terms into whatever you think is more accurate, this is a very, very good piece of insight into the perils of growing too quickly, as well as an (as usual) extremely transparent look into how a company that is reasonably successful adapts.