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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#421

Post by hutattedonmyarm »

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…

Completely agree! Ideally, I'd just get an RSS feed for everything posted by the creators I follow.

I ended up automatically forwarding emails from Patreon to my RSS host, and that mostly works. Sometimes I don't get an email, sometimes only one of multiple images is included, and recently they started cropping images in the email (and stopped after a bunch of people complained)

This caused me to stop subscribing to new ones altogether

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#423

Post by ajg36 »

mepiethree wrote: post #325
alecbz wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't most options expire a handful of months after leaving the company?

They extended the option exercise period to 5 years

The ability to extend that period isn't always up to the option-granting company; while it is possible for non-qualified stock options (NSOs), incentive stock options (ISOs) must be exercised within 90 days of termination of employment, by law.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#424

Post by ajg36 »

xhrpost wrote: post #235
PopAlongKid wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what they did here with the equity, especially the option exercise period, is a nice touch. But it's not all that great. Patreon is not publicly traded, so it seems likely that exercising any options will require cash up front, plus it will immediately trigger taxable compensation (income tax plus FICA). And how will the FMV be determined, if there is no public market trading? (ans.: usually just some number voted…

I believe the 90day limit for ISOs is just the time to get the tax benefits. You can still exercise after 90days, you just pay more.

This is incorrect. You cannot exercise ISOs after 90 days post-employment. What you pay to the company at exercise isn't time dependent: the strike price is fixed at time of grant. What you may be referring to is the AMT, which does fluctuate depending on FMV at time of exercise, but that doesn't affect the 90-day limit.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#425

Post by honkdaddy »

xani_ wrote: post #355
honkdaddy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's what they think they are saying. What it actually means is "It is my mistake that I admit is mine, you get fucked, I keep my chair and take zero actual consequences for it"

I mean if it's helpful to you, people can deconstruct the meanings of their colloquialisms so it's more clear, but for most English speakers it's not really necessary. Are you ESL?

If I told someone "we'll be working on this report til the cows come home", I wouldn't expect that it's necessary to explain that the expression doesn't actually have anything to do with cattle, and instead just means I'm expecting this to take a long but indeterminant amount of time. If someone found it clever to point out what I _actually_ meant, I wouldn't find their input very helpful, just socially unintelligent and annoying.

Usually it's more helpful to just research what an expression means, rather than trying to argue about what you personally think it _should_ mean.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#426

Post by viridian »

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.

I don't like a lot of their business decisions (I know much of this is driven by credit card/payment processors) but this is the most respectable mass layoff I've ever seen from a company, and should be lauded.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#427

Post by xhrpost »

ajg36 wrote: post #424
xhrpost wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the 90day limit for ISOs is just the time to get the tax benefits. You can still exercise after 90days, you just pay more.

This is incorrect. You cannot exercise ISOs after 90 days post-employment. What you pay to the company at exercise isn't time dependent: the strike price is fixed at time of grant. What you may be referring to is the AMT, which does fluctuate depending on FMV at time of exercise, but that doesn't affect the 90-day limit.

Yea I wasn't completely clear I the description, not remembering exactly at the moment. Thanks for pointing out. I was referring to the option some employers will offer to convert ISOs to NSOs after 90 days. So yes you're technically not exercising ISOs after 90days. My point more being that there are options with some employers to not completely loose all rights to equity after 90days.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#428

Post by bArray »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #386
bArray wrote: post #296

> 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…

I have no idea how their team was composed previously, but it could be that they had a lot of folks who were analysts but weren't contributing much to remediating issues. It sounds like (and I have no idea again) that they're hiring a small number of security engineers (maybe even one) to not only actively look for security issues, but to also actively work to remediate them and improve code security posture as well.…

> but it could be that they had a lot of folks who were analysts but weren't contributing much to remediating issues.

Neither feature testers (does it behave as expected) or security testers (is it secure as it does it) are expected to write fixes. Writing fixes needs to be planned in the sprint and is better worked on by an expert on that system.

> they're hiring a small number of security engineers (maybe even one) to not only actively look for security issues, but to also actively work to remediate them and improve code security posture as well.

If this is true, it could seriously affect their ability to ensure the system remains secure. Sometimes a security issue will take a long time to hunt down, and perhaps require a large rewrite to deal with it. Whilst this person is dealing with this, they are no longer looking for new issues.

I'm just not sold this is anything but a cost cutting exercise, and could (theoretically) lead to bad practices in the future.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#429

Post by bArray »

dehrmann wrote: post #402
bArray wrote: post #296

> 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…

Why would you not wait a week and bundle these layoffs together? Unless the security decision came from a mid-level manager who didn't know this was coming.

Exactly. And why would it be so sudden? It's just not adding up.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#430

Post by RheingoldRiver »

stoicjumbotron wrote: post #376
RheingoldRiver wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Discord is slowly rolling out a premium service, and I think that will be a HUGE blow to Patreon. Creators already put Discord rewards into their Patreons, they already have Discord servers, their fans are already in Discord, having the payment processing go through Discord just streamlines the process; plus, a lot of people will have CC details saved in Discord due to Nitro.

Right now afaik it's only available for select partnered creators, but I hope the end goal is to make it available for any server that wants it, and truly compete with Patreon that way. We will certainly accept pledges that way. It'll be a huge hassle cos no one will want to cancel Patreon so creators will have to do updates in two places etc but I imagine most people will want to move to Discord.

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