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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#291

Post by unity1001 »

jzb wrote: post #253
toomuchtodo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They didn't lay off their entire security team. What one person among the laid off ones thought to be 'security team' may not overlap with what their company had been doing since a long time. In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#292

Post by gausswho »

dougmwne wrote: post #19
darth_avocado wrote: post #15

What does “taking full responsibility” even mean? Like people lose their livelihood and you can get away with “I take full responsibility”. Taking full responsibility mean taking a pay cut or stepping down or basically taking consequences for yourself first before others have to.

That would be meaningless virtue signaling. Standard corporate speak.

The rest of the letter reads well to me. He should have avoided that phrase given how pilloried it's been recently, with reason. But that doesn't take away from the generous actions he's fought for for the departed.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#293

Post by donedealomg »

COGlory wrote: post #290
BryanBeshore wrote: post #42

Full post from Jack Conte's Instagram post: "Hi everyone - I have some sad news to share: today, Patreon is doing a layoff of about 80 employees, about 17% of our team. This was ultimately my decision, so I wanted you all to hear directly from me about the reasoning. Before I do, I want to say two things: first, today will be painful for many people, and I am deeply sorry to the incredible teammates who will be leavi…

>I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team. What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again? I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without…

No post body was provided.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#294

Post by honkdaddy »

COGlory wrote: post #290
BryanBeshore wrote: post #42

Full post from Jack Conte's Instagram post: "Hi everyone - I have some sad news to share: today, Patreon is doing a layoff of about 80 employees, about 17% of our team. This was ultimately my decision, so I wanted you all to hear directly from me about the reasoning. Before I do, I want to say two things: first, today will be painful for many people, and I am deeply sorry to the incredible teammates who will be leavi…

>I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team. What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again? I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without…

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the expression, but usually when English speakers say they "take full responsibility" for a tragedy or unfortunate occurrence, they mean from a moral and blame-based standpoint, it's rarely related to the finances of those affected.

The laid off employees are the ones ultimately worse off by the outcome, that goes without saying, what you're missing is that this is different from being morally or strategically responsible for why the situation played out this way. That's the ownership the CEO is trying to take.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#295

Post by cafed00d »

treis wrote: post #192
cafed00d wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any former employee is a future potential employee that you can re-recruit when the time comes Not only that, all former employees are de-facto "background check references" / "evagenlists" / "detractors" of your company. Forever! (well, not exactly forever... but close enough) I can't recall a single year over the last 10 years where younger engineers, cousins, nephews or friends have asked me about the 2 companie…

>friends have asked me Is this supposed to be haven't?

Whoops! Yes, you're right. Thanks! Wish I could edit it now.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#296

Post by bArray »

> Last week, we let go of 5 teammates from our security organization, which stemmed from a different set of reasons from the ones guiding today’s decisions. The change last week was part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team, bring new areas of expertise into Patreon internally, and continue partnering with external experts. Unfortunately, the change generated concern that we were reducing our security investment, but I wanted to make it clear, especially in light of today’s changes, that we are in fact increasing our investment in security.

This is interesting, and I'm not entirely convinced. It seems as though their security team was not warned and you would expect a handover process.

> The change last week was part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team

> Unfortunately, the change generated concern that we were reducing our security investment, but I wanted to make it clear, especially in light of today’s changes, that we are in fact increasing our investment in security.

This doesn't sound like an increased investment, it sounds like a decreased investment. "Why are we paying these people when we can just get the normal engineers to do this?". Maybe this is possible, but who's going to allocate sprint time to work on background pentesting and documenting?

You may say "we will get an external team to do this", but will they get access to source code? Will they get access to upcoming features?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#297

Post by Maursault »

gabereiser wrote: post #216
dahfizz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 23 years you have worked at 18 companies? Has this hurt you during interviews?

Very much so. I've had to explain that some of them were just contracts, some of them cease to exist anymore, and some went through layoffs. The reality is it's more like 13 companies but yeah.

Don't sweat it. Most human resource departments take their methods from Kafka's The Trial. The more you look the better you get at it, the easier the brutal process of some employers' hiring processes become. Fire and forget. The more applications you complete, the better your chances of getting hired, and once hired, the longer you work, the further disappointment retreats in your rearview.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#298

Post by bombcar »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #196
api wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Spotify doing podcast subscriptions maybe?

As a new user of Patreon (literally this week is the first time I've used it) I finally signed up because a content creator is posting their videos to Patreon a day early. Youtube could solve that problem. Does anyone have any other examples of what Patreon does for them?

It’s cross platform and PayPal hasn’t decided to eat it as a feature yet. That’s it.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#299

Post by egypturnash »

remram wrote: post #222

Patreon could have eaten OnlyFans' cake so easily, instead they seem to be struggling like everyone thought they would when they banned NSFW content in 2017. I don't understand why they thought that move would benefit them. I don't understand how Jack Conte is still CEO after such a stupid change or how he can say with a straight face that he's "taking responsibility".

There is a time-honored path that this choice to ban NSFW stuff is part of.

1. Make a way for people to get paid over the Internet for making stuff.

2. Be okay with horny stuff, possibly as an explicit choice in the beginning, possibly as a pivot when people who make horny stuff start shifting a lot of money through the pipeline you're providing.

3. Get big enough for Visa/Mastercard/Apple/Google to notice that you sure are pushing a lot of horny money through their payment systems. Which have a lot of clauses that basically boil down to "no horny".

4. You have a choice here: figure out how to work completely outside of whichever payment system's owner is saying "no horny", or ban horny. I've never seen anyone take the former option.

5. Make a wishy-washy blog post about how you are banning horny stuff that completely fails to come out and say "this really sucks and we hate to do it but we can either drop our horny creators and keep existing as a company, or we can pretty much pack up the entire affair; here are some ways you can go put pressure on Visa/MC/Google/Apple/your lawmakers/etc to maybe change this state of affairs for the next people to follow this path, seriously this is 100% happening because V/MC/G/A finally noticed we have been blatantly skirting these rules".

This has happened many times before, and it will continue to happen many times in the future until someone chooses "fuck all existing payment processors, we're finding a new way to get money from customers to creators" and makes it work.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#300

Post by rblatz »

Invictus0 wrote: post #148

It's a fine message and generous severance, but people need to wake up to the reality that companies don't really care about them when making plans for the future. Was it really so hard to predict a minor ~15% downturn after a period of lavish, extraordinary exuberance? Conservative, controlled, measured headcount growth is just not a consideration, as we've seen time and time again.

The broader economy was basically saying here is free money, grow the business at all costs, worry about growth then later we'll worry about profit. Now due to inflation the Fed has ended the free money era, and business plans have to change. Expect a lot more of these posts over the next few months.
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