Robinhood... like robbing from the rich to give to the poor... hold on a minute! What a name for a huge public corporation in the US. They almost had me!
Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
501–510 of 717 posts
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#502This is a red flag. Robinhood is struggling for capital, so I wouldn't trust them with my cash investments whatsoever. Not that anyone has trusted them for a while, but yeah.
agreed - had $50K in investments (I admit, it’s small fish). Transferred that to another brokerage following the GME sell button fiasco. Although in retrospect, I probably should have switched sooner than that
I wasn't involved at all with GameStop, but it was enough for me to switch.
Schwab's app isn't as modern, but I have a lot more faith in them.
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#503We live in such morally bankrupt times. You can just say "you take responsibility" without actually taking responsibility at all. Our expectations have become so low and we've become so complacent that just the statement is enough. In similar vain, "we care about your mental health" as is the common internal email from HR. No actual care is offered though. Giving staff a day off is a tangible example of doing at leas…
> "we care about your mental health" as is the common internal email from HR
I told my last boss I needed to take 3 months off because I was severely burnt out, without pay or benefits of course, and I am sure the team could handle it because there were 10 other devs including me and we didn't have that much work to do, and guess what happened? That's right, got fired a week later. I literally built the team, including hiring the team manager (I'm not interested in management), and built the first version of the product my team was developing and they didn't care; they wanted to eliminate my weakness. Their stock is worth 1/4th of what it was when I was "let go", so I feel pretty happy about that (because I'm a prick).
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminder that Vlad Tenev founded Robinhood, an incredibly successful app that disrupted an industry and is still best in class. There really is no replacement for a founder CEO.
Would you say the same about Travis Kalanick or Adam Neumann?
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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#505A lot of Robin Hood's growth in particular was driven by people gambling their stimulus money because they didn't need it to make ends meet, and by the Fed juicing the markets with low rates for far too long, and by the ridiculous meme stock phenomenon. It was a perfect storm of stupidity. Personally I'm glad that some sanity is returning to investing, and we are still a long way from getting back to normal.
The hardest part of this to me to deal with is that it’s the truth. For decades, the conservative line was if you give people money they’ll just blow it on gambling and booze. Turns out it’s true.
Ah yes, it’s completely fair that the only people who should be morally allowed to participate in the financial apparatus that sometimes leads to getting rich, are the people who are already rich. I see no incongruities whatsoever with this logic. rapid eye blinking
Bunch of people lost money. Some of them got rich. Booze is good and gambling is fun and it’s ok to blow their own money on exactly the things that everyone else blows their money on.
(This hits on the idea of “accredited investor,” and I have such a hard time not calling out that it’s a mechanism for already-rich people to participate in every deal that could make not-rich people rich. And that there are very few other ways to earn a fortune when you only have $10k in the bank. I lost my dad’s $11k when mt Gox exploded, which is objectively stupid. Meanwhile my friend is now a multi millionaire simply because he didn’t lose his coins and didn’t sell them. Was he stupid? Did I blow my money on gambling, but he was just lucky?)
Didn’t mean to rant, but it is what it is. You’re not wrong though.
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#506The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…
You say that, but companies that cut tech too deep will probably get crushed under a mountain of technical debt or gradually lose goodwill due to buggy or stale products. Point is, it's possible to ship crap with a small crew. But the cuts won't come uniformly from scoping back or removing low productivity engineers. You'll also see corners cut, upgrades delayed, security flaws ignored, and so on.
Obviously there's bias involved, but I really don't see a reality where this isn't the case. I've literally never worked at a company where half the team could be laid off and the product would still function at its current level of functionality for 12 months; let alone adding functionality. If you've worked at a company like this; I imagine there are some; then sure; the lights could be kept on. Hey there Oracle & IBM 2.0.
Then again, you (the company) just laid off hundreds of extremely talented engineers with few other marketable skills except "the industry you trained them in", you've been paying them insane salaries, they're just going to turn around and compete with you, except now they've got a clean slate and have learned from all the mistakes that caused them to be necessary in the first place.
The well paying, large companies are literally 7 of the 10 largest companies on the S&P. Oh, and by the way, one of those other 3, UHG, they have... 850 job openings with the word "software engineer" in the title; about 15% of all their openings. Johnson & Johnson, they're on there, 300 software engineering openings, out of 3000 total. Berkshire is also on the list, harder to get their count, but you get the point; software is EVERYWHERE.
I just... don't get it. I don't get how someone can believe what the grandparent believes. I mean, you can argue a more measured stance, that the outlier 99.9th percentile salaries we've seen in the past four years are probably going to stagnate. Maybe; I'm not convinced of this, but its a reasonable stance. You can argue it'll be harder to get into the industry, as companies want experience and not coding bootcamps; I'd bet on it. But to argue that tech companies don't need 50% of their employees, when they're the plurality of the wealth of the United States' public markets; its comical. Where else did that wealth come from, if not their (tech) employees? If the argument is they're overvalued, maybe, but that's speculation; buy Puts if you believe it, but I'd buy Calls on "you won't".
Then again, maybe the grandparent is talking about non-tech roles in tech companies? I can't tell; and moreover, I don't think even they know what they're arguing for.
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
If infosec won't give you the +1 on sharing, it's best you and they find some shared ground. I suspect app/othersec would actually agree here. Sending a wave of money into a group of historically underemployed seems like it'd result in normal expenditures, modulo some slush. Maybe it's the contemporaneous injection of many, many trabillions into 501c3s, individual funds, small businesses, and other groups who could s…
Your misconceptions about what I said somehow outnumber the things I actually said. Sending a wave of money into a group of historically underemployed seems like it'd result in normal expenditures, modulo some slush. Do you have hard data for that? (j/k) Far more importantly, "sending a wave of money into a group of historically underemployed" is not what happened. Pretty much every taxpayer got a series of stimulus…
>Your misconceptions about what I said somehow outnumber the things I actually said.
oops! let me rectify that!
> Do you have hard data for that? (j/k)
ach, i'd answer but you're just kidding. still, it might be worth looking into?
> is not what happened? Pretty much every taxpayer got a series of stimulus checks. It wasn't based on need
I didn't get one. I didn't get a second. In fact, nobody I know except for business owners and one person whose income was skewed for very VERY specific reasons got one. Maybe this is the source of our fundamental disconnect? Only my business owning friends got money, none of my non-business-owning friends got money. The money mostly went, in my experience, to those who were already well set up. Or to business owners, who largely got loans forgiven.
> Literally the only thought I've expressed this entire time is yup, that wave of money given to consumers seems like it had an effect on consumer spending habits
I mean, that's the thing I mostly disagree about, so sure- it can be small but it's all I'm keen on talking about?
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) What about Dev leads who mentor/architect stuff instead of writing code day to day. How will you measure that?
> architect stuff how can someone be good at architect-ing stuff if they never code or code very little. seems like the method GP is describing would be good to weed out such imposters.
They've coded for 10 or 20 years, and now just sit back and design interfaces, write specs, evaluate technologies, mentor juniors, do code review, and of course the ultimate mind blow when you're trying to figure out who to fire: they remove code instead of add it. Unfortunately for the company, these "imposters" do indeed get weeded out in preference to the recent college grad copy/pasting thousands of lines of StackOverflow answers. I usually escape before all that drama though!
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#509The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…
> Yet tech is such a small portion of the labor force that layoffs here basically mean zilch when it comes to the unemployment rate/inflation, and thus there's a long way for it to fall before the Fed adjusts policy The really scary thing for me is the possible macro environment for tech. Indians will soon overtake any of the Western countries as the largest English-speaking population on the internet. As I'm sure ma…
This gets said in every conversation about remote work but this has been the case for a few decades now. If the software business was just about chucking commodity CS grads at problems and YouTube videos and the man month theory was true then everyone would be running their companies on batteries of commodity Devs already.
>It could potentially get really ugly for the Western tech workers used to six figures for working 30 hours per day and then spending the rest of the day on activism or "day in the life of a X" Tiktoks
I don't know where you work but the people actually doing the core work that drives multi billion companies don't work like this.
Multi billion Companies aren't stupid they aren't paying these salaries because of cost of living they're paying them because the economics mean get more value from the work done than they're paying out. The best developers in India already get hired by FAANG and they're working in SV.
Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's literally all it was. No; that's really not what it was. This was not about margin lending to Robinhood customers. It was about a multi-billion dollar increase in collateral required by the NSCC due to a large volume of unsettled trades in highly volatile stocks. ref. https://fortune.com/2021/02/02/robinhood-gamestop-restricted...
And follow that to its logical conclusion. why were those unsettled trades? And no this isn't a T+2 issue.
It really is a T+2 issue.
The NSCC has a rule-driven model that tries to make sure that it holds an appropriate amount of collateral for each participant based on risk of default between trade and settlement.
That includes a core capital model that’s derived primarily from value-at-risk based on portfolio size, volatility and the usual things.
It also has an excess capital premium charge which varies according to the extent to which the core requirement is large vis-a-vis a participant’s excess net capital (excess over the minimum regulatory capital required by the SEC); because those are precisely the cases where default is more likely.
In the case of Robinhood, it seems like their internal risk management team had failed to take into account the excess capital premium (which is a large problem on its own), and that premium was particularly large based on how poorly capitalized Robinhood was.
You can go look up details on the NSCC model; it doesn’t care whether your clients are trading on margin.
You really are quite on the wrong side of this discussion: where are you getting your information?