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23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

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Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#51

Post by mdszy »

irrational wrote: post #36
mdszy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there's the fact that if your parents did it, why would you do it? My parents did it so now I have exactly zero reason to do it myself. Also all the negative publicity behind data being sold, which should surprise nobody.

That isn't really true though. You aren't some kind of clone of your parents. Imagine that both of your parents sit down at a table. Each one has 100 dominoes in front of them. Each parent will randomly take 50 of their dominoes and put them in the center of the table. Those are your 100 dominoes. It could be that your mother has 20 "scottish" dominoes, but not a single one of those dominoes are in the set given to y…

>You might look at your mother's dna results and say "I'm 20% scottish!" No you're not. You got zip from the scottish side of the family.

So then the DNA results themselves are wrong since they're based on exactly this logic, just for your parents...

Therefore making the entire thing completely useless.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#52

Post by jgalt212 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #10

Everyone paying attention the pattern of layoffs? Ebay, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, 23andMe, Intel... Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.

> Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.

If you think you're about to get sacked, the last thing to do is pay down debt regardless of the interest rate.

If you're about to get sacked, I'd recommend opening a home equity line of credit. You can live off this while you plot your next move.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#53

Post by ThrowawayH4MCb »

spike021 wrote: post #22
toomuchtodo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This breaks my heart to hear. I interviewed there in 2011 as an infra guy, and not only was the infra team personable (the winning question was rapidly identifying the symptoms of a duplex mismatch on a switch ethernet port), the VP of Engineering was awesome as well. He even went so far as to say, "As a tech person, you belong out here in the Bay, even if it's not with us". I turned down the offer, but it was one of…

Well, like I said, could just be that my perspective was tainted a bit by not doing as well as I'd have liked. But I think sometimes these things just happen too. I think I interviewed in 2018, so that'd be 7 years after you did. I'm sure a lot changes in that much time.

A bunch of engineering directors were brought in from external sources a few years back, and that really changed the atmosphere.

Before then, we seemed to try to hire smart engineers and give them independence to solve problems. Those new directors lowered the hiring bars to grow their teams, and the culture got way more rigid and corporate.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#54

Post by angmarsbane »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #10

Everyone paying attention the pattern of layoffs? Ebay, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, 23andMe, Intel... Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.

Papyrus is closing 200+ retail stores, Express is closing retail stores...the retail apocalypse growing every day too.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#55

Post by ilamont »

ThrowawayH4MCb wrote: post #47

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons. A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling. The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell. I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy con…

Ancestry.com has also stepped up its marketing game. Used to be a follower with DNA, now a leader, and discounting heavily.

And, unlike 23andMe which got rid of family tree tools used by genealogists, Ancestry still has a very strong suite of trees and traditional genealogy tools. Some people really want to have both genetic and traditional genealogy accounts under the same provider, and are either unaware or don't really care about the privacy concerns.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#56

Post by laurencerowe »

irrational wrote: post #36
mdszy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there's the fact that if your parents did it, why would you do it? My parents did it so now I have exactly zero reason to do it myself. Also all the negative publicity behind data being sold, which should surprise nobody.

That isn't really true though. You aren't some kind of clone of your parents. Imagine that both of your parents sit down at a table. Each one has 100 dominoes in front of them. Each parent will randomly take 50 of their dominoes and put them in the center of the table. Those are your 100 dominoes. It could be that your mother has 20 "scottish" dominoes, but not a single one of those dominoes are in the set given to y…

With 23 pairs of chromosomes we have 46 dominoes each (ignoring recombination.) This changes the odds of inheriting none of your mother's Scottish dominoes from 1 in a million (2^20) to 1 in 512 (2^9).

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#57

Post by igetspam »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #46
t_serpico wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a tech person, you belong out here in the Bay, even if it's not with us" - What the fuck does that mean? People working in tech not in the bay aren't second tier.

> People working in tech not in the bay aren't second tier. Are we though? If we were to establish criteria by which to judge tiers how would anywhere else in the world compare to the Bay? My intuition is that the Bay is probably more productive and gets paid far more for it. The bay certainly drives just about about every tech trend worth a note. Innovation as well how much tech came out out of that region. Disclaim…

30 year bay area veteran here.

There is nothing special about the bay area that isn't geography. The density of workers means you meet a ton of talentless people who shuffle along with the crowd and are rewarded for it because it's unnoticed. I'm paid more to be remote than I was in the bay area and my money goes a lot further. I'm also exponentially more productive not being in a sardine can office. Your intuition is shaped by your inexperience of the reality of the situation. The grass isn't greener in my old backyard than it is in my new pasture but I have a lot more of it now.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#58

Post by wahern »

dekhn wrote: post #8

I can't believe they've received three quarters of a billion dollars of investment.

The largest chunk, $300 million, was a buy-in from GlaxoSmithKline, with which it purchased access to the database and research.

Given the slowing pace of drug development, that was probably a very good "investment" by GSK. But maybe it was a bad one for 23andMe if it limits the scope of deals they can do with other pharmaceutical companies.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#59

Post by AviationAtom »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #10

Everyone paying attention the pattern of layoffs? Ebay, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, 23andMe, Intel... Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.

People's heads are in the clouds again, ala 1999 and 2008. You can't believe people are delivering anything more than hopes and dreams unless you lay eyes on said product. Most these startups sell hype and vaporware, but people get starry-eyed over them and turn into Phil "Take My Money" Fry. Cynicism isn't a bad thing when it comes to money.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#60

Post by AviationAtom »

That's what they get for only allowing people to pay their way into their ecosystem via a test kit.

Their service would much more useful if they had a larger database of people, but only so many people that have already done a kit through Ancestry DNA are willing to pay for yet another DNA kit through 23andMe to get access to their database of people,a s they already have access to Ancestry's larger database.

More or less 23andMe is starting to hit saturation and need to build their database more if they want to increase usage of their service, get more time on site, and thereby draw existing users towards their current and future monetized offerings. There was one time in there history that they allowed you to import your DNA data for free from other services, but they shut that down long ago.

They are going to face more competition in their once-unique area of DNA health data, as Promethease was just acquired by MyHeritage.

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