221–230 of 249 posts
This comment thread is just hilarious. When a CEO of a VC-backed startup that you admire does things you disagree with, you find ways to justify their actions. When a CEO that is running an actually successful business and wishes to defend that business legally, you trash him. Be better.
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I checked my list, and the fact that employees of Automattic are called "Automatticians" did not make my list of things to be outraged about. Maybe next week.
Pointing out the error in your claim implied nothing about outrage.
I wonder what this means for the future of Beeper.
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Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.
It is so hard to fathom that a leader trusted with millions of dollars of other people's money can be so disengaged from recruiting as to not see a hard wall of cash crunch, months if not years ahead. You can't assume fundraising will always go swimmingly. You have to always be in survival mode, and if that means not hiring aggressively, then you put on the breaks until the money comes in . Either as a leader you are…
If you are the CEO saying 'we are planning for bad things in the future' while every other CEO is saying 'the arrow only goes up' guess which company the stock market punishes and who gets removed by the board versus who's options become worth more?
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>The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and th…
It's kinda their job to not listen. CEOs get bombarded with thousands of pieces of information each week. If they shifted the company direction each time, the company would get nothing wrong. In the immortal words of Ribbonfarm, "CEOs don't steer": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/ A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to fo…
Still too simplistic. Yeah, they need to filter information and say no to things constantly, I get that is a core skill. If something is repeatedly being brought up by members of your core teams, you should at least look at what they're saying and ask where they are coming from. That is simply good sense. There is a persistence factor in involved in each of these cases that are the source of the frustration.
If what constitutes a good CEO is allowing in the 'little bit of information that can save the company' (really thats a call about identifying useful information before anyone else), objectively most companies have terrible CEOs, and I question the value of the position entirely on that basis, especially at larger public companies.
FWIW, at each of these companies I worked at, the headcount was at most in the hundreds. I was only 2 clicks below the executives in the company tree, there wasn't a lot of barrier to interaction there, which is what I find even more baffling about the whole thing.
>I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted?
I did this twice. In the one instance I wasn't able to get moving faster than things were going down hill. Partially, this is a symptom of just how long interview cycles have become over the years. Took me longer than expected, but moreover, the company conducted the layoff faster than I really thought they would. I got the timing wrong by a little bit, it happens.
Its not like you identify an issue one time either, its the repeated ignoring of what happens despite repeated sustained efforts to raise the awareness where it needs to be.
Huh. >> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline. https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hxnh73/automatt...
It's not uncommon for companies to be in a hiring mode until they're very much not in a hiring mode any more.
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>I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down. Oh, to be young and idealistic again! So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
An honest question: why is this being downvoted? I thought that downvoting is meant to be used when someone is trolling or bringing the level of discussion down, not when you simply disagree with someone's point. I mean sure, it's stated a bit sarcastically, but my gosh if we're going to downvote every sarcastic comment, that would include a good portion of HN comments.
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You can trust me, facile3232, instead. I will improve upon all things the leader of automattic.com failed to improve upon.
This messaging is compelling. Are you also perchance against all bad things, and in favor of all good things?
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> The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, whic…
Because they are publicly traded and subject to lots and lots of checks on corporate governance. The CEO actually didn't want to lay people off (and did a shit-poor job of it when he did). He was getting pressure from the board, who in turn was getting pressure from a lot of activist hedge funds. Small-fry who operate secretly are able to take the long view and enrich themselves off the masses' stupidity. CEOs of a m…
From my math, you're off by several orders of magnitude, unless somehow we're not talking about Automattic anymore.
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> made it clear that failure to return the equipment would be considered theft Is "please arrange for a courier to retrieve it" not the end of your obligations?
In a situation where everyone (including me) was acting reasonably, sure. But I was slightly gruntled from being pushed out for filing a safety report, and keeping it in my possession would have technically violated my new contract. Giving it to the police was clearly not stealing it and didn't require going out of my way to help them solve a problem of their own creation.
There are questions online about "what if a former employee doesn't return their laptop." They almost always end with "send a threatening letter in legalese." They stop after that because the the next step is get a $300 per hour lawyer involved for a $600 laptop.