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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

#441

Post by senordevnyc »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #410
input_sh wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engi…

This is so true, and it's been genuinely painful for me to realize how fucking lazy and close-minded many in our industry actually are when you get down to it.

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

#442

Post by senordevnyc »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #406
aetherson wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

The point for me is that "a trusting career" costs far more than it's worth. I would much rather make 3x as much in America with less job security.

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

#443

Post by senordevnyc »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #393
aetherson wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founders are probably not the owners of a large majority of the business. Most of the owners are not drawing any salary. Look, lying is bad sure. It would be better if they had been honest in November. But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.

>Most of the owners are not drawing any salary. If they are founders and they chose to leave, that's their freedom to do so. Just like any employee you don't get a salary for leaving just because you used to work there. if you're an owner who bought in, you already got your money. You got a steady profit from sitting there and operating a business at best. At worst you made a bad business decision. You're not owed pr…

Just like any employee you don't get a salary for leaving just because you used to work there.

Yeah, and also just like any employee, you don't get the benefits of ownership just because you were paid to work on something.

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

#444

Post by daemin »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #371
Nextgrid wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually depends what kind of application you are building and maintaining.

From the sounds of it I assume you're talking about developing and maintaing a SaaS application, where there is no real maintanence of it, and instead what you end up doing is developing it further to support larger data sets and more people. That is of course assuming that the software is successful and the usage is growing.

For traditional desktop software you can declare it finished and then maintanence is minimal and limited to only critical bugs, so you'd have a team of 5 develop it and then 1 person or less maintain it.

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

#445

Post by psteinweber »

dsign wrote: post #262

I was planning to use Vimeo for some video hosting... I guess I'll have to self-host now. Oh well. At least this happened before I actually committed to buying a plan or even creating an account. With private equity poisoning the well like this I'll probably be better off hosting my videos in AWS; doubt anybody will be buying them anytime soon.

Try Bunny Stream, really super simple and affordable

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

#447

Post by pjc50 »

muglug wrote: post #310
Animats wrote: post #261

Is there a solid source for this? Vimeo laid off most of their operation in Israel recently.[1] At least according to "www.calcalistech.com", which seems to be some minor news source in Israel. Their comment was that the office was damaged in a recent war. Rebuilding may not have been worth it. Their headquarters is in New York. [1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx

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.

They're not publicly traded (they appear to be pre-IPO "startup", made out of acquisitions), but it seems weird to me that there can be such a thing as secret layoffs.

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

#448

Post by matteocontrini »

Animats wrote: post #261

Is there a solid source for this? Vimeo laid off most of their operation in Israel recently.[1] At least according to "www.calcalistech.com", which seems to be some minor news source in Israel. Their comment was that the office was damaged in a recent war. Rebuilding may not have been worth it. Their headquarters is in New York. [1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx

Someone that worked at Vimeo until last month tweeted:

> Reviving this account to say: Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off yesterday, including the entire video team. If you're looking for talented engineers, there are a few on the market.

https://x.com/daemon404/status/2013988239829303624

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

#449

Post by pjc50 »

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 biggest piece of evidence for this worldview is the Twitter acquisition. A lot of people were very confident that it would quickly fall over after mass layoffs. That turned out not to be the case: the site can be kept running on a much lower staff.

They've not really been able to add new features to the backend, but on the other hand: old @Jack Dorsey Twitter was so bad about this that there were memes ("likes are now florps"). And the features they have added (indecent image autogeneration) have caused as much brand damage in Europe as the Nazi salute. Yet the site continues to stay up almost all the time.

(I don't think ZIRP is where the blame should lie, though. It's SaaS, which turns software into rentierism rather than purchase)

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

#450

Post by ralfd »

Ekaros wrote: post #417
johnnyanmac wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm. So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most a…

They were at-will employment. That should have been considered with their every purchasing decision ever. Their personal and moral failures is not their employers failures. Budgeting is trivial thing. Spend less than you earn. And it is not like these were minimum wage workers. They should have known to have plenty of buffers at this point. It is entirely their own fault of not reach that point.

You didn’t answer how you would feel if you are fired tomorrow friday?
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