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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#371

Post by sharmi »

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…

Consider this in contrast to claiming:

1. We are laying off underperformers to strengthen the company (Has happened)

2. We are laying off poorly performing divisions (again, indirectly foisting the responsibility on the employees, because their division is underperforming)

3. We are laying off to cut costs and keep the company profitable (This may be the truth, but it treats employees like they are replaceable cogs in the machine they can throw out and bring back in any time).

4. Making the employees quit by themselves by creating toxic work environments (recently, forcibly enforcing back to office rules to shed all employees who cannot make it back or prefer remote).

5. Just layoff without any reason, not worrying about the mental health of the leaving employees or the ones who remain.

Just owning up his responsibilities means, the relieved employee atleast does not have to add the stress of "did-I-do-something-wrong" to his/her list of woes. This can sometimes be debilitating.

It also adds to the confidence of the existing employees that the company will do right by them, if it comes to letting them go in the future.

Ideally, no one should get laid off. But companies cannot be forever profitable and the government or no other body is going to bail them out. Considering that, this seems to be a more mature way of handling a terribly difficult situation.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#372

Post by Barrin92 »

pc86 wrote: post #358
COGlory wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Do you expect him to commit seppuku in the town square or something?

how about cutting executive pay first? That is what usually happens in Japanese companies if leadership doesn't live up to expectations.

During covid lawmakers cut their own salary by 20%. A little bit of honor in a culture when ordinary people are taking hits goes a long way, rather than lipservice and PR.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#373

Post by ROTMetro »

rchaud wrote: post #186
cbozeman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like people didn't read the statement at all. He clearly says they're going to invest more into engineering and some other shit... so it's not about money. They're going to spend more fucking money. This sounds like a bunch of people got their jobs automated away through algorithms or intelligent systems or just whatever innovation you wanna chalk it up to, and they redundant to the company, so they gotta go. Th…

Forget about CEO, could you even be a competent manager if that's how you think?

That is the one and only purpose of high tech. To automate work and improve efficiency (I.E. make people redundant). Be that automating the work of acquiring and connecting eyeballs to adds or getting rid of Janice the nice secretary from the 80s to going from 50 to 5 production planners at a factory.

It was fine when I was an external developer, but when I switched over to an in-house role it sucked seeing the fear in departments that I turned my gaze to :(

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#374

Post by jxramos »

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…

> it has become clear that the original plan we built doe he year,

I think something got lost along the way there.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#375

Post by chrisseaton »

unity1001 wrote: post #64
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #53

This bit from the employee announcement about how they're handling equity vesting [1] is worth highlighting as a pretty classy move, all things considered: > We’re waiving the one-year equity vesting cliff for all departing employees so that everyone has an opportunity to be a shareholder, regardless of your tenure. [...] All departing teammates will qualify for an extended option exercise period of 5 years, and we h…

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.

Isn’t 3 months a pretty standard severance compensation?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#376

Post by stoicjumbotron »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #356
xenadu02 wrote: post #341

I subscribe to a single Patreon. It's an artist publishing an online comic. I pay for day-ahead access vs the public site. Reading the thing I pay for is fucking _painful_ on Patreon. So is trying to use their comment system to interact with the creator or other fans. Everything is slow-loading infinite scroll with tons of "load more" links. It is absolutely dreadful and every time I interact with the site I'm remind…

As a creator it sucks too. I manage a small patreon page for a Discord bot and every time I edit our page I have to relearn how to use the interface. Every time I want to make a post I forget how to...make a post? How in god's name is it possible to make an interface so bad that one has to remember how to make a post? It's completely unintuitive. This is not something that should be difficult lol. (The part I forget…

Apart from Ko-fi is there any good alternative?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#377

Post by guywithahat »

voxl wrote: post #185
kradeelav wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscribestar, which I'm much more of a fan of since they have more common sense rules around NSFW art.

Common sense rules == completely banning all NSFW work? https://www.subscribestar.com/prohibited_content I'm all for having some SFW platforms, but let's not pretend that there isn't a dramatic, dramatic demand for NSFW content, and that banning it is nothing short of prudish.

They have two URL's, one for adult content and one for SFW content. You're looking at the SFW rules

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#378

Post by acchow »

avg_dev wrote: post #320
aeyes wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Options are usually "in the money" so if you don't exercise them you are throwing away money which you already earned.

Perhaps I’ve had bad luck but I’ve never had options that would have been worth anything.

That's expected. Most startups never recoup the funding they raised.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#379

Post by chrisseaton »

sk5t wrote: post #339
avg_dev wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I’ve had bad luck but I’ve never had options that would have been worth anything.

That's regular luck, or at least not bad. Options worth > $0 is an occasion of very, very good luck.

> Options worth > $0 is an occasion of very, very good luck.

Why do you think that?

It doesn’t require ‘very, very good luck’ for most companies shares to not collapse.

If you work for a big company like Oracle or IBM your options have cash value no luck needed.

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