Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

betakit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 138 posts

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#51

Post by pj_mukh »

udba wrote: post #30

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same. Howev…

Blanket statements are silly, "SF is better", "Toronto/Wloo is better". Silly blanket statements.

If you are a company that NEEDS high growth to be sustainable in the long term (Uber, Google's ML products for example), then SF is your place. Capital to fund your growth flows like the Niagara. If you are a company that is serving other startups, SF is also great for that.

However, if your company is solving an interesting technical/scientific problem or is a niche industry product or if you are not affected by high/low growth or easy capital, then the "value" engineering talent in Toronto/Waterloo is perfect (see: Geoffrey Hinton's NN group at UToronto). Keep grinding, you'll win in the long run.

Joist probably should've made this call earlier on. No idea why they waited this long.

P.S: Most smart advice in Waterloo and Toronto will tell you this exact same thing.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#52

Post by p4wnc6 »

edude03 wrote: post #26

I interviewed with Joist 2ish years ago but after the first interview I didn't think the culture was conducive to my career goals. News like this makes me feel like I dodged a bullet.

Getting any tech job at this point in time is simply a matter of which bullet you will finally, defeatedly choose not to dodge. Every company wants your fealty, overt signals that you'll cower yourself to them, much, much more than any kind of technology competence or aptitude.

It's either this, or a person hasn't had enough experience yet to know this, and so they still have bright-eyed optimism that this one company is the one that's going to elevate their career, treat them in a minimally acceptable manner, etc., and you can bet the recruiting staff is banking on finding these people. It's very depressing.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#53

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

I relocated to Toronto SPECIFICALLY to work for Joist, exactly one week ago. I was laid off along with everyone else within 6 days of working for them! Prior to that I was working in the USA for a few years; I'm now in a position where I have to figure out next steps with regards to my career :/ I'm still unsure why they hired me and brought me down here? I'm also hoping that they pay me for my time there (I worked my hardest to impress them, albeit only a week!)

By the way by my count it was closer to 90 people laid off, so they are depressing these numbers.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#54

Post by psychometry »

johngalt wrote: post #3

This is a good example of why you should treat interviews as a two way street. Don't just worry about convincing them that you are the right candidate. You should also try to determine if they are the right employer.

Easy enough to say if you're a developer and can afford to be choosy. For most fields, though, the labor market is heavily biased in favor of the employer.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#55

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

cm3 wrote: post #20

> we need the best talent in the world So why didn't they allow people to remote from Toronto?

I think what they were saying is that the best talent in the world isn't in Toronto, so remoting from Toronto isn't the problem (according to them).

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#56

Post by wyager »

udba wrote: post #30

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same. Howev…

Canada is a country, not a dear friend. Workers and companies owe nothing to it. If it makes more sense for someone to leave, then more power to them. Canada can either try to make itself more appealing or deal with people leaving.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#57

Post by protomyth »

comment in that thread by James

Half the team were employees in every legal definition of what makes an employee (they deducted and punished "independent contractors" which you can only do with employees" - as the case was with Uber and they settled) but were categorized as "Independent Contractors" until April, they were forced to sign new contracts saying they employees but were under "probation" for another 3 months, so until the end of June. They planned this from the beginning, so they didn't have to have a lawsuit when they did this and say "hey you signed a contract" .... forced signed, they changed the pay structure in May without a change in contract either. These employees only got 2 weeks, despite being a week and a half away from passing probation.

Does anyone know if this is true, because this is really poor behavior.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#58

Post by setheron »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #53

I relocated to Toronto SPECIFICALLY to work for Joist, exactly one week ago. I was laid off along with everyone else within 6 days of working for them! Prior to that I was working in the USA for a few years; I'm now in a position where I have to figure out next steps with regards to my career :/ I'm still unsure why they hired me and brought me down here? I'm also hoping that they pay me for my time there (I worked m…

that sounds not right. I hope they give you a good severance if you relocated. That sounds like it should be illegal under something.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#59

Post by reustle »

vinceguidry wrote: post #45
reustle wrote: post #5

> Kathan told BetaKit that the “incredible difficulty” of acquiring senior-level talent in Toronto As some companies are (finally) starting to realize, there are incredibly talented people all over the world, who are not within 1.5 hours of your office. Allowing them to work remotely opens your company up to a much higher caliber of talent for the same, if not lower, cost. The tools are out there now and they work we…

EDIT: Why was this post flagged? Comments now disabled? I think you're running into the comment-cooldown feature. The reply button doesn't appear until a comment has been live for a couple of minutes. I'm not a big fan of the feature, it leads a lot of people to think they're being messed with by the moderators.

Hmm possibly. The story showed [flagged] on the left of the title, next to the upvote button. I don't think comment cooldown would trigger that?

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#60

Post by udba »

spullara wrote: post #38
udba wrote: post #30

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same. Howev…

If "most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV" then "companies make the move". You've laid out in your comment exactly why a company would rationally choose to move from Toronto to SF.

Most of the students that do leave for the US would be more than willing to stay in Canada, even if they were not paid as much. It's a familiar culture, the cost of living is cheaper, and in many ways Toronto is a better place to live than SF[0]. When they do go to the US, it's because they're getting huge sums of money mainly from SV giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and so on. While many grads are willing to stay here, even for a pay cut, the scale is tipping in SV's favor. Companies like Joist are what used to be turning the tide, they offered pretty good compensation, a decent job, and you got to stay in a sweet city.

Regardless, I don't believe these moves are rational. If you're the CEO, you're giving up close proximity to a lot of cheap talent, cheaper offices, cheaper cost of living etc. Sure, you can hire new engineers but you're gonna be paying a whole lot more money + 25% for the exchange rate to make them do so. Joist was paying engineers up to 130k CAD in Toronto[1], which ends up being around 100k USD. You're not gonna be attracting the best and brightest talent with 100k USD when Google is around the corner giving them 130k USD + 25k signing bonus and stock options. You're gonna have to pay at least 130k USD (=165k CAD) plus the signing bonuses and equity that are necessary to attract talent in SV. We're still not talking about how much more an office costs in SV, how much more of your employee's salary is going towards comically overpriced housing etc.

Let's dispense with the idea that moving to SV is some sort of rational or genius executive decision: does it really make sense to fire 2/3 of your staff, move everything to SV, and rehire 60 people in an expensive city for far higher rates?

[0] - http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/images/EIU_BestCities.pdf [1] - https://angel.co/joist/jobs/112984-data-warehouse-engineer?u...

Post reply on HN