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Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

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Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#371

Post by johnnyanmac »

Nextgrid wrote: post #356
daemin wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely true that software can be finished, it's just that software appears to be dead if it hasn't had any work done on it for years. You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum. Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a…

My argument is that the maintenance overhead of a finished product (or car, or building) should require much less effort than what it takes to build it - otherwise you should seek a refund from the original manufacturer(s).

That's absolutely not true in pretty much any mid scale software. You can have a team of 5 people make the core of an app, then need 50 people to help with support for customers. scaling up is never cheap, but software scalability is really low despite that.

That's not even true with a car. I'm about to spend 3000 dollars on a big repair for a car I bought 9 years ago used @ 3500. Even if you adjust for inflation we're still talking about 70% of the car's worth just to keep it running. As for a refund, the blue book value tops at 850 dollars.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#372

Post by johnnyanmac »

Nextgrid wrote: post #286
captain_coffee wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK so in this case how do you set the price? Based on the final solution to be delivered? Can you give one (or a few) concrete examples by any chance? I am not sure if I fully understood what you meant exactly with your (detailed) reply.

You judge how valuable the solution is to your customer and then structure your pricing to maximize your profits while still being palatable to your client. Let's say your client has a problem that will bring them 1k/hr of revenue when fixed. You think you can fix it in an hour. You could quote them 5k/hour, because you think you can fix it in one hour and you estimate it'll take them at least 5 hours to find and tal…

Such consultancies feel like a dying art for the new work force. To consult, you need to be trusted. To be trusted, you need to already have experience working with software at scale. To get that experience you need to go through events like mass layoffs every few years, which limits your expertiese built.

I very much worry for Gen Z. Through no fault of their own.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#373

Post by johnnyanmac »

shermantanktop wrote: post #279
captain_coffee wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK so in this case how do you set the price? Based on the final solution to be delivered? Can you give one (or a few) concrete examples by any chance? I am not sure if I fully understood what you meant exactly with your (detailed) reply.

I read it as: “This is the price for me to do work I don’t want to do, but will do, if you make it impossible for me to say no.” It’s not about justifying the rate, that’s the wrong way to think of it.

And if no one takes your price, you fail as a business. I think that's the concern. There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr" without getting some bulging eyes. Because I don't have the credibility to back that up.

How to get credibilty? Well, you gotta be in industry. The thing the two consultants here are besmirching. You can't win.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#374

Post by johnnyanmac »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #123
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]: With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architectur…

>It's easy for companies to fall into such pits of inefficiency because climbing out of those pits entails utterly gutting the headcount [*].

It's also simply because no one will give you clearance to get out of those pitfalls. When you grow, you're focused on features, not optimization.

Bending spoons' approach isn't to grow, so you finally get to optimize what you couldn't... assuming you weren't already laid off by then.

>Imagine the equivalent for a building

buildings have regulations. And that word is still a boogeyman to many in the field of software.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#375

Post by mindslight »

fsckboy wrote: post #367
mindslight wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not. For life's necessities (eg food, shelter) this is straightforwardly obvious. And you are making this claim in the context of the employment market, which is one step removed from that. But even in the general case your argument still does not make sense. When we talk of a business providing societal utility, we don't include the business owner themselve…

> No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not. I didn't say you could, pay closer attention or you will not be able to understand arguments or learn anything. What I said was, "as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin." however, your mistake does contain a germ of reinforcement to what I said: if you cannot choose to pa…

Try harder to not be a condescending dweeb, or you will not be able to have amicable discussions or overcome your own airtight but inapplicable logic.

I did not "reinforce" the exception of what you said, I pointed out an error in your framing that necessitates coming at the analysis a different way. The context of what you're responding to is a company laying people off - reducing the number of choices in the employment market. We're not talking about the dynamic of someone creating a new business and having to emphasize one or the other, but rather an existing business where the owners are choosing to change things to be closer to one end of the spectrum between the two.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#376

Post by johnnyanmac »

CiccioNizzo wrote: post #139
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]: With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architectur…

> With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability. And accidentally turned it into a shitty product in the process :-)

"accidentally", huh. Such a charitable take.

Well, the goal of the optimizations wasn't to benefit the customer or even make the app faster. It was to make it easier for a skeleton crew to maintain. If that chopped out a few features, oh well.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#377

Post by johnnyanmac »

ahmadyan wrote: post #281
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

why do you think the previous management team couldn't pull an Elon and fire 80% of the engineering staff themselves? why they needed an external leadership to take over and do it? Part that i can't wrap my head around was at least in case of twitter, it was a hostile take over. In case of Vimeo, it didn't look hostile at all.

Maybe they could have. But they have 1.4 billion reasons to just walk away and either retire or try something else instead.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#378

Post by johnnyanmac »

aetherson wrote: post #364
johnnyanmac wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"? >No one wonders why loyalty is dead. I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing h…

Yes, the owners were paid by the sale . The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen, or vice versa that the sale should happen only to people who were committed to continuing to spend the company's money on supporting employees who are stipulated to not be adding much value (and, thus, are not willing to pay much for the company). Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off…

> the owners were paid by the sale.

the owners didn't have shares in their company? they weren't paid for their labor? They only get money when they sell off and are working for free out of a labor of love until then?

>The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen...

I guess it wasn't in this chain, but my argument was focused on the human element. I don't care if the owners got a trillion dollars and never shared. I don't think it's right to be able to lie to your employees only to let them go with no notice a few months later.

You're never going to convince me that "it's good for society" to prop up livliehoods on convinient lies and instability. That's how suddenly everyone starts talking less about Star Trek and more about Luigi.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#379

Post by johnnyanmac »

aetherson wrote: post #366
johnnyanmac wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a hosting space like Vimeo, I'd be surprised if this gave them 5 years. And remember, they acquired Vimeo for over a billion dollars. This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "act…

I mean, if your argument is, "Bending Spoons made a bad investment," then sure, okay. That's not implausible! Companies make bad investments. But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

>But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

So many chains to keep up with. There wasn't really a lesson here. Just "Vimeo is not Evernote"?

My wider lesson unrelated to this chain is that US at will employnent sucks and we need to overhaul it. You don't create a trusting career by treating employees like toys to discard.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#380

Post by johnnyanmac »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #206
hi_hi wrote: post #172

From the previous press about the aquisition: BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together" Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards ou…

Nothing the bending spoons ceo said isn’t true. They are still operating Vimeo.

>unlock even greater focus for our team

I guess that's the new buzzword for "by removing most of the team from the equation and focusing the rest on everything". Noted.

>our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses

2 issues here

1. why would I trust a company who will flip around and remove nearly all its labor overnight?

2. I don't know how this move makes them more "innovative". You're just going to be burning out the very few people left to support the product.

I'm bold enough to call this a blatant lie.

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