Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 456 posts

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#251

Post by noirbot »

seydor wrote: post #195
noirbot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.

The layoffs prove them right though no? Plenty of companies seem to have had layoffs without loss of profits

Only once they lay off another 400+ people. If anything, the fact that Jack had anyone but himself to lay off isn't proving OP right.

Being over-staffed is different from "one person can run this as a saas business"

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#252

Post by d23 »

deathanatos wrote: post #244
ShamelessC wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens more and more when I visit Twitter now, too. _Really_ annoying and I have zero intention of creating an account on either of those sites.

With Twitter, I find you can click the log in button, and then there is an X to dismiss the modal with, which then lets you read the page. (And this is absolutely annoying, terrible UX, and I wish to God people would stop putting things on Twitter.)

The existence of these backdoors is a bad excuse these teams use to justify user-hostile UX. I had no idea this was possible, so for me this might as well have not existed. I simply skipped reading twitter threads when I was on a device I wasn't logged in on.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#253

Post by jzb »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #84
unity1001 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say there's 3 months of pay, healthcare, mental care until the end of the year too. And they contracted a placement company to hook people up with new jobs.

Decency demonstrated, and hopefully recognized at large regardless of the criticisms of the business strategy and execution.

I had some unkind feelings about Patreon when it was announced / made public that they laid off their entire security team. I still think that was a poor move and any company responsible for handling payments ought to have an in-house security team.

That said - I've held off on any criticisms around their strategy/execution for the moment (aside from that) since it's unclear what happened. I'm wondering if Patreon is getting hit with lots of people backing off support of artists after a big jump due to the pandemic.

Given inflation and a lot of feelings of uncertainty around the economy, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that their revenue went way down in a hurry this year.

I back four artists on Patreon, down from five a year ago. In all 4 cases I'm either too busy to get full "value" out of sponsoring (e.g., I don't have time to read the updates or listen to all the demos), or there's not really any benefit other than funneling money to support the artist in hopes they'll continue working as an artist.

Each month I look at the bill from Patreon and wonder "do I really need to keep spending this money?" So far I've elected to - but I haven't been hit super hard by inflation or a layoff like many folks...

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#254

Post by Test0129 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133
fckgw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is because of the WARN Act in California [0], which requires 60-day notice before any mass layoff. Employers can also fulfill the requirements of this mandate by letting employees go now but having their actual termination date 60+ days in advance. I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. Good for Patreon to go beyond the 60-day mandated period though [0] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Traini…

> I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. How many times have you been laid off?!

I joke with my friends in other industries about how often I have been laid off. For me, it's been uh...5 times? Maybe 6. I am probably forgetting them. None of them were very small but like usual characteristically overextended. One company I survived 4 full rounds of layoffs before getting axed. Another one I survived 3.

It's the nature of playing around in the high stakes startup world. As I've gotten older I've found more stable companies. But it was quite funny coming home once every few years to tell my girlfriend I was laid off again and then picking up another job a week later.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#255

Post by ricardobeat »

bgro wrote: post #229
julienb_sea wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's taking responsibility for over-hiring relative to the needs of his business, and taking corrective action for the long term health and viability of the business. This is the right thing to do. Yes, it sucks for the people who lose their jobs, but unfortunately some risk is always involved in an employment arrangement. It would be far more unfortunate if Patreon overspent to the point that their business had to c…

You're textbook correct, I think, but in general I never really understand the CEO who makes a statement about trying to do everything they could to prevent this from happening but there was no possible other situation than laying off X amount of people who were significantly contributing to the company. Not that this was said in this particular case so directly. This is just a general thought. How is funding so tigh…

They’re listed as having 885 employees. If the average cost is $100k per head, 88M/year looks like a pretty high burn rate (they’ve had ~400M in funding). Saving 10% in one swoop is huge.

> it'd be easier to take a personal hit

Jack Conte, the CEO, was not previously wealthy (that we know of). At this stage he might be getting paid very well, maybe even in the mid six figures, but definitely not spending $8M/year on golfing to make that a viable alternative to layoffs.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#256

Post by dc-programmer »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #231
battery_glasses wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its reasonable that a lot of creators don't want to distribute their work along side porn. Does Only Fans have any non-porn content? I really don't know because in my head Only Fans is a place for porn.

Patreon has a shit ton of NSFW stuff so I'm not sure if this decision was overturned or if it's just limited to actual live actor pornography.

Maybe I’m biased due to the content I subscribe to, but Patreon seems to be going for a more sophisticated aesthetic. This comes through even in the name. The word Patreon conjures images of the Medici’s and “elevated” art forms. I think if they started to cater to the NSFW side of things it would result in brand confusion for producers and consumers.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#257

Post by phpisthebest »

kube-system wrote: post #245
phpisthebest wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes replace your likely 6-figure dev job with a $15/hr job stocking the shelves at walmart...

Walmart has 943 software engineering positions open right now. They're making more than $15/hr: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/walmart-global-tech/salarie...

While true the parent comment was talking about Seasonal jobs that retail adds at the end of the year, these are not programming jobs that are added but cashiers, stockers, etc.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#258

Post by bolyarche »

remram wrote: post #209
davezatch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would non-“meaningless virtue signaling” look like to you? This seems quite decent as far as these things go.

Removing that meaningless sentence, or replacing it with an apology.

No post body was provided.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#259

Post by tptacek »

AngeloR wrote: post #169

I think this is just the start for some bad things are patreon... This video of execs at Patreon apparently turning a blind eye to employees calling out patreon users that were selling images of underage children: https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1315626557688483841?s=20... They also laid off their ENTIRE security team: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/09/patreon-security-layoffs/

It's not actually that unusual to absorb security into engineering; if engineering is already doing most of software security, and engineering/ops is already handling IT security, then the rest of security might in fact be duplicative of stuff third parties can do just as well.

I have no inside knowledge as to whether this was the case at Patreon; no opinions about Patreon whatsoever. But re-orging security into and out of engineering is not unprecedented.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#260

Post by compiler-guy »

hedora wrote: post #193
noirbot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them? Can you give an example of a 5 person competitor competing with a large company? And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?

Craigslist has 50 employees, which is closer to 5 than 500.

Craigslist is wildly profitable, but can't touch ebay or amazon.
Post reply on HN