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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

#481

Post by ben_w »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #475
Nextgrid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is never "finished" Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.

> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. The search engine markets is finite, so Alphabet expanded elsewhere

> Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users.

Doch, even then.

Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example:

  Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart?
We nodded at "Porsche", as was the point.

  Except no; you didn't consider who the customer was. If this is for a kid who just wants to have some fun, they can't afford a Porsche, they've got no insurance, they don't know how to drive. A go-kart solves their problem, they get to have fun, a Porsche doesn't.
(I'm paraphrasing, it was over 20 years ago now).

* I was 19 or 20 when I wrote that, it was about as true as when ChatGPT writes the same: I didn't know any better.

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

#482

Post by criddell »

philipallstar wrote: post #222
criddell wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't user Evernote very often, but I have a bunch of stuff stored in there and use it basically in a read-only mode. For a long time I was able to get the $36 / year plan which I felt pretty good about. It was a great app and service which I didn't use very much, so that felt like a fair price and I felt good about supporting them at that level. Basically every time I opened Evernote, I was paying $2. But then the…

If everyone gets salaries and equity is paid for then everyone's done great. And then we can build another one, or an open source equivalent once all the money's been spent researching useful features, and then we're done.

I wouldn't classify a small number of people with equity scoring big and millions of users losing out as everyone doing great.

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

#483

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Nextgrid wrote: post #352
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buildings are built according to a standard, legal code, with architectural drawings, inspections, standard components and dimensions, etc. The people who work on them are trained and certified in specific practices with specific tools and materials, and follow rigid guidelines. Most jobs are the same tools, same parts, same basic construction, same tasks, there are plans available, and most of the time it was inspec…

> you need someone on staff who is familiar with them to fix them But that maintenance headcount is much lower than the headcount necessary to build that machine. The same should be the case in tech - once the product is built and the groundwork laid, ongoing maintenance and minor alterations should not require anywhere near the headcount it took to build.

I agree you don't need a large software engineering headcount for maintenance. But there's multiple factors that change the estimate:

  - You need redundancy in case someone leaves, is hit by a bus, gets sick, wants to go on vacation
  - The software is bespoke, so staff need to know the ins and outs of all of it
  - The more software to maintain, more knowledge needed, and more maintenance tasks
  - Poorly built software/systems need a lot more maintenance
  - The business leaders may (erroneously) keep asking for more changes, which creates a greater engineering load
  - If the business value is based on technological capability, you will eventually need radical changes to keep up with new tech
Now, in a few cases, you can cheat. Wordpress requires less maintenance if you rely on canned plugins. But security patching is constant, and eventually you have to upgrade the entire thing as old plugins and core version go EOL. Managed instances help a lot here but still break from upstream changes. And as browsers change, so do the frontend software's compatibility.

The more complex software you depend on, the more expertise you need to fix things. If your usage keeps growing, but your app wasn't designed to scale ("just use Postgres" is not a scaling solution; some things even buying more hardware won't fix), now you need someone to bust open walls and add extensions to the building. That's a lot more dangerous with software contractors than the original engineers.

If your entire stack and app is bespoke, and you run your own VMs, or god forbid, run your own metal, it's a much larger maintenance burden (to keep it running well; lots of people limp along for years on broken equipment and software, at high risk to the business)

If we actually did build software more like we build buildings, we could bring in contractors for short stints to do either maintenance or new construction. But the complexity of current software engineering trends makes that fail a lot of the time.

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

#484

Post by joncrane »

ben_w wrote: post #481
AbstractH24 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. The search engine markets is finite, so Alphabet expanded elsewhere

> Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. Doch, even then. Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example: Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart? We nodded at "Porsche", as wa…

This is a weird example because there are crappy go-karts and there are carefully designed and assembled go-karts. You can have a high quality anything: car, truck, go-kart, trailer, wagon.

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

#485

Post by Quarrelsome »

fsckboy wrote: post #413
HKH2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> they are the best estimates of the future

its plausible for companies to be worth less than their assets. While it might be the best estimate its still not necessarily the best one. aka the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. Markets measure confidence as much as they measure value.

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

#486

Post by constantinum »

tom_m wrote: post #317
muglug wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Vimeo’s editor’s pick is my go to place for getting/staying inspired…

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

#487

Post by tracker1 »

joncrane wrote: post #484
ben_w wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. Doch, even then. Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example: Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart? We nodded at "Porsche", as wa…

This is a weird example because there are crappy go-karts and there are carefully designed and assembled go-karts. You can have a high quality anything: car, truck, go-kart, trailer, wagon.

Even then... you reach a point where any additional quality or craftsmanship offers no more value. Aesthetics can have some arbitrary value, but even then it's a matter of taste.

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

#488

Post by CodeWriter23 »

everfrustrated wrote: post #197
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return You might think that. Then there's Earthlink and AOL still collecting $5 or $6/mo per mailbox as their cash cow.

They recently bought AOL too!

I was unaware, thanks for the update.

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

#489

Post by CamperBob2 »

input_sh wrote: post #451
CamperBob2 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know whose thoughts you're trying to attribute to me, but I've been pretty up-to-date myself (while still keeping myself to a $20/month budget that I switch between providers every few months). Every generation has at best been a 5% improvement, and nothing revolutionary compared to the last generation. Absolutely no significant improvements between me selecting say Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude Sonnet 4, or Clau…

I'll grant that progress in coding hasn't been as impressive, although if you don't see a difference between Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 4.5 Opus (which is the actual SotA for Claude) I'd suspect a skill issue. I haven't seen miraculous progress in baseline code generation, but there has been a lot of progress in tool use. I can tell Claude CLI to install a complex package, for instance, and it will handle all the Python versioning and dependency-hell issues for me, then test and evaluate the results. 3.7 Sonnet couldn't do that, at least not reliably.

What's really different now is that LLMs have become useful research tools. Three or four years ago, models couldn't cite their sources at all. Two or three years ago, they started to gain the capability, but a large proportion of the citations would either be hallucinated or irrelevant. About a year ago, significant improvements started to emerge. At this point, I can give Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2 Pro a multilayered research task, and end up with a report indistinguishable in accuracy and bibliographic quality from what a good human might produce in a couple of weeks.

It might take a half hour to get the answer, and I'm not sure if you could get the same result at the $20/month level, but the hype and promises we started hearing a couple of years ago are starting to bear fruit. The research models are now capable of performing at grad-student level. Not all the time, and not without making stuff up on occasion... but to argue that no progress at all has been made is nothing more or less than moon-landing denial.

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

#490

Post by soerxpso »

wavemode wrote: post #126
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 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…

> More features can always be added to software

How does that make it different? More features could always be added to most buildings. You could keep adding rooms onto the side, update the floors/ceilings/walls every year to stay trendy, add a water feature, expand the basement with a tunnel network, etc.

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