511–520 of 522 posts
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 -…
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 -…
> Builders and electricians and tradesmen either work as contractors and take that into account okay. Salaries office workers don't work on contracts. If they do, they know an end is in sight and renewal is not guaranteed. If companies want contractors, they should just do that. Meanwhie, I'm sure your parents' generation for many industries expected to find one job and make a career around that company, maybe doing…
the idea that software is never done is a double edge sword: yes, its great to have a long term vision that keeps evolving and motivating people to continue to push boundaries. but it also creates this idea that "done" state is not possible or even desirable.
plenty of human (economic) activity is just operating, or maintaining. maybe some people who built products are happy to continue operating and operating it. not everyone, and certainly it would be hard to expecy society to guarantee employment under any circunstances.
i have never seen labor laws that prohibits lay off under any circunstances. some make it more onerous and/or more beneficial conditiona to employees than others. but certainly is it possible (and likely) that vimeo lay offs have been lawfull and even beneficial for many employees. i certainly know plenty of people who explicitly stick around "mature" organizations waiting for the fat check of layoff
Can someone give me some examples of private equity firms that aren't driven purely by avarice? I have a bet going with a colleague.
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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?
Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.
I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.
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Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
The honest answer is because I backup a large number of other things to backblaze anyways. I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host. I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different servi…
I've heard that Mercurial has competent binary diffing, so I might at some point try using that to sync my Obsidian stuff.
Anyway, it's not like 22 cents a month is going to bankrupt you so I am certainly not criticizing, I was just curious.
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This is the same business model that Computer Associates used successfully in the 1990s, so it's not new to IT or technology. The primary difference now is that the transition from bespoke IT on premises environments has been subsumed by the cloud hyperscalars and an entire hierarchy of products that use that infrastructure in a higher level of composability than in the past. Products like SAP will continue to requir…
The thing about this business model is that it inevitably falls apart when things break. Bending Spoons doesn’t care (yet), but they’re not at the point where stuff has proven unsustainable
Just like an old building, their business model is to sweat the asset until it's no longer viable. In the meantime, the cashflow goes directly to the bottom line.
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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.
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Yes, the owners were paid by the sale . The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen, or vice versa that the sale should happen only to people who were committed to continuing to spend the company's money on supporting employees who are stipulated to not be adding much value (and, thus, are not willing to pay much for the company). Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off…
> the owners were paid by the sale. the owners didn't have shares in their company? they weren't paid for their labor? They only get money when they sell off and are working for free out of a labor of love until then? >The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen... I guess it wasn't in this chain, but my argument was focused on the human element. I don't care if the owners got a trillion dollars a…
The shares in the company convert to money when they sell the company. They're not intrinsically valuable.