421–430 of 522 posts
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Bending Spoons understandably don’t want a final percentage out there, because the more people know about this, the less likely they are to use Vimeo. Most everyone I knew there was just laid off, with a skeleton crew that’s been asked to stay on until April.
People use Vimeo?
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> hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part. Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
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Society depends on long-term 'happiness'. Short-term 'happiness' often makes society worse.
what you are actually saying is that a certain class of people "know better" than what another class thinks they want. If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
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some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc. You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
> some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong. as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the…
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
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some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc. You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
Option A: the business goes bankrupt, investors lose money, customers lose the product, all employees get fired. Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance. You think option A is superior?
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I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. Plenty of software I've built is finished, it does the thing I need it to do and I haven't touched it in years. Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context.
> Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context. You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your re…
You can, but do you really need the same sized team to add an extra lane to a drive-through as you needed to build the entire restaurant's building, kitchens, etc?
Do you need the same sized team to add a new wing to a building as the team that built the existing building(s)?
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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'…
That's one way to run that ROI, sure, but is it correct?
1. The original $3.5k you spent is a sunk cost; you should ignore it, so your total cost of getting a running car is only $3k.
2. Even if you don't ignore it, your total bill to get a running car is $7.5k
In either of the above situations, you should be comparing the cost to get a running car by fixing your existing car (either $3k or $7.5k) to the cost of getting a running car by selling it as-is (so, perhaps +$500 as a parts donor -$X for a replacement running car).
Regardless of which calculus you are using, it's still going to come cheaper to fix the running car.
What the car is "worth" (however you define it) is irrelevant to the calculus.
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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.
That's not marketing or gaslighting, that's expecting people to pay minimal attention to their employer's financial performance. Minimal here being on the level of possessing object permanence.
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 -…
I see a lot of negative comments here on HN, and I partly agree, but no one is recognizing here their try to optimize.
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 house is a bad analogy the more appropriate analogy is a car company. They still need engineers because they need to keep coming out with new model and technology in order to remain competitive. Ford didn't fire its engineering team once it had built a car.