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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

#401

Post by johnnyanmac »

Glawen wrote: post #144
bilekas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient. > Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2)…

I'm discovering Bending Sppon withn this thread, and I think they really got their business right. I hope they IPO soon

I'm not privy to support, as another reply put it, "Enshittification as a Servce".

And this is just modern private equity. The whole point is to avoid all those pesky regulations going public brings.

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

#402

Post by johnnyanmac »

dangoor wrote: post #202
gulugawa wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering what Bending Spoons did to Meetup.com after buying the site, I wouldn't trust them to improve a product. Here are some of the issues I noticed. - Group searches consistently return irrelevant results across multiple cities. As a test, I tried searching for soccer groups in Dallas, Texas, and one of the results was for a backgammon group. Users will also often have a hard time finding events I host on Meet…

As a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.

This is why "running lean" for a B2C business is never something to take as a good sign from the consumer standpoint. Let alone the client. Those savings are not being passed to you, quite the contrary. they will in fact have their care and eat it by trying to throw more costs at you despite the supposed lower overhead.

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

#403

Post by johnnyanmac »

altairprime wrote: post #136
bilekas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient. > Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2)…

Honestly, I wish more businesses would do this. It turns out that grandiose dreams make grandiose staffing, but a lot of great business ideas would thrive and bloom if the gardeners would just prune them back more often.

The part about "they get more expensive" makes me actively not want this, despite otherwise being someone obsessed with optimization. I'm not here to optimize billionaires' pockets at the expense of the people I actually make the product for.

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

#404

Post by johnnyanmac »

a_victorp wrote: post #142
torben-friis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but AFAIK that means people buying companies, leaving them with a skeleton crew and milking the remaining users as long as possible. How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.

They hire at higher pay because they want people that can/are willing to do the job of multiple people

And often at places cheaper than US talent, so that above average pay in the EU comes out to below average pay overall.

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

#405

Post by x0x0 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #385
x0x0 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bending Spoon's business model has been -- at least for a decade -- buying companies that didn't operate profitably; stopping or slowing ongoing eng investments; and operating them profitably. Often that involves raising prices, but everyone is adults here. Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.

We just demontrated why it was a lie. Gaslighting the workers with "well you should have known he was a liar" does not absolve the liar of lying. >and probably will even have targeted ongoing development. well, 15 of them or so.

You can't point out the place where they promised the workers jobs. Because there was no such commitment, either before or after the sale.

The company failed. In 4 years, they managed to turn the valuation from $8.5B to $1.4B. No employee should be in any way surprised by what happens when you watch your company's valuation fall that much. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics (they only made $27m last year!) to a negligent extent.

It sucks for the people let go, but they can't be surprised.

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

#406

Post by johnnyanmac »

aetherson wrote: post #392
johnnyanmac wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The US has enriched a vastly larger number of software engineers through at will employment that Europe has through making it very hard to fire people who aren't adding value.

1. I don't know how that's relevant to my argument at all. This is just "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" dismissal.

2. This is like saying "Asia has better rice because it employs more rice makers than the US". Besides being dubious in truth, that also isn't a good measurement for "enrichment" nor "quality". It's just saying that there's more money being put into the industry in this country than another counry's industry.

3. Even if I took this as truth, this didnt happen overnight. I worry about how Gen Z will be "enriched" in this model, and saying "but millenials/Gen X had great careers" is condescending to Gen Z at best. The rules changed over their careers, and we're still using the old rules to talk about how good we have it. Or had it. Gen Z doesn't know what those rules are anymore, so there's nothing to fall in love with.

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

#407

Post by johnnyanmac »

x0x0 wrote: post #405
johnnyanmac wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just demontrated why it was a lie. Gaslighting the workers with "well you should have known he was a liar" does not absolve the liar of lying. >and probably will even have targeted ongoing development. well, 15 of them or so.

You can't point out the place where they promised the workers jobs. Because there was no such commitment, either before or after the sale. The company failed. In 4 years, they managed to turn the valuation from $8.5B to $1.4B. No employee should be in any way surprised by what happens when you watch your company's valuation fall that much. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operatin…

you're arguing de facto with de jure. Not a historically healthy way to argue. We aren't lawyers here.

>Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics

Dude, I just want layoffs to be signaled ahead of time. You can defend billionaires all you want and gaslight engineers for not being marketing majors. My demands are very simple.

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

#408

Post by wavemode »

daemin wrote: post #300
wavemode wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as mu…

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…

> You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum.

I agree. I never claimed anyone needs to do this.

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

#409

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #341
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the free cash flow of those who seek fewer regulations of this sort on thing exceeds the free cash flow of those who seek more. People that are being squeezed by PE have less money to wield as political influence partially because they are being squeezed by PE. The ones doing the squeezing are ok with that. The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough or don't have enough…

>The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough That lack of care is going to cost us all in ways we'll be forced to care about one day. Not necessarily for Vimeo, but definitely much more important things that people are ignorant or actively turning their heads against. > They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to. We call them our represenatives. We exp…

> That lack of care is going to cost us all in ways we'll be forced to care about one day.

By then, it'll be too late. The ruling party has a monopoly on violence, perpetrated by sycophants and enabled by wide-area surveillance analyzed by AI. We're a matter of months (maybe years) away from kill-drones being used with impunity against the populace.

> We expense it to them with our votes

Gerrymandering by the ruling party has ensured that your vote won't make a difference. Even if it did, election interference by the ruling party has ensured that it won't be counted. Even if it is, the ruling party has expressed its wishes to cancel elections, and who's gonna stop them when they have all the kill-drones and thugs, paid out of a bottomless bank account?

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

#410

Post by CamperBob2 »

input_sh wrote: post #285
yieldcrv wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Claude Opus 4.5 within Claude Code? it's only been released for two months but its changed the calculus entirely if its been over two months since you've tried any LLM generated code solution, or are still occasionally copy pasting code requirements into a browser chat session as if its still 2023, then I can't put any weight into the opinion

I've read this same comment for every model since GPT-3.

That's because it's been true for every major new model release since GPT-3.

HN is full of people who tried the free version of ChatGPT a couple of years ago, got a load of random hallucinated slop, and concluded it was all a bunch of useless hype. They enjoy parroting a lot of obsolete stuff they read once about stochastic parrots, without the slightest sense of irony.

When I was growing up, my old man recalled engineers who reacted the same way to transistors, which sucked even more than early-generation LLMs when they first came out. Most of them got over vacuum tubes eventually, though. So will most of the HN'ers, likely including you.

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