Robinhood lays off 23% of staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#541

Post by kaidon » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:31 AM UTC

happyopossum wrote: post #215

paxys wrote: post #29

> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…

> Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021 No he did not in fact receive $800m. You seem to know a lot about the performance of RH stock, but you’ve completely missed the fact that the poor performance means he won’t be seeing that $800m worth of stock - almost none in fact. He got a comp plan that could get him up to that much in stock if certain goals were met, but none of those have been met…

> laying off anyone

Laying off 23% of staff is _literally_ how he will make the stock go up enough to get a good % of his compensation, if not 100%.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#542

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:39 AM UTC

moneywoes wrote: post #489

tenpies wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Unfortunately I agree but what can we aka a western tech worker do to combat this?

[deleted]

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#543

Post by MikeTheRocker » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

muglug wrote: post #500

tenpies wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 > You've never worked a job that isn't 30 minutes of work and then the rest of the day is posting "day in the life of a FAANG employee" Tiktoks or being a paid activist. That is incredibly not what it's like to work in tech in the US. I doubt you've been anywhere near a…

In my experience, it varies highly between teams. I've personally worked at 3 FAANG companies and the culture was meaningfully different between them. There were times we were doing 12+ hour days, and times where you could get by working an hour or less. They all pay competitively, so it's really up to the individual to decide how hard they want to work and whether to focus on something of interest.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#544

Post by lmm » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:41 AM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #433

adam_arthur wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

> (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?

> What about Dev leads who mentor/architect stuff instead of writing code day to day.

Those are precisely the negative-impact people I want to get rid of!

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#545

Post by sershe » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

bumby wrote: post #426

bastardoperator wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people gambling their stimulus money because they didn't need it to make ends meet How did you quantify this statement?

One estimate puts it at $170 billion extra flowing into retail investing.[1] Also, it may be reasonable to use the savings rate as a rough proxy. That rate was higher than it has been for decades when the stimulus was active and has since dropped. [2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/business/stimulus-check-s... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

How much of that was due to inflation? People could just be trying to get rid of cash.

I had a bunch of excess cash due to falling behind on D.C.A.-ing, and I accelerated that (which was not a good idea in the short term, but that's what D.C.A.-ing is all about - wish I hadn't fallen behind on it over the years!) and bought a bunch of under-par bonds and utilities for the yield, sold a lot of now-expired SPY puts and stock calls too ;) More trading than I've done in my life, mostly because of inflation, not stimulus.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#546

Post by cudgy » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:43 AM UTC

ceeplusplus wrote: post #392

bsuvc wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand your point of view. Are you saying executive compensation should be orthogonal to company performance? Overpaid executives failed, so workers lost their jobs, but the executives get to keep theirs all the while saying things like "I take responsibility for this" when it is objectively false that they are taking responsibility. Does that seem right to you? Is that a good way to run a business,…

Executives also have to hold lots of stock that tanks when the company does poorly. Should workers also be forced to hold 100% of their RSUs as long as they work there and be paid 80% in RSUs? Even senior SWEs make 50% tops in RSUs and can sell their stock as soon as it vests with no restrictions. They get top ups to make up for poor stock performance. Their personal exposure to the company (risk!) is way lower than…

If it’s so risky, why do CEO’s end up making 350x the typical employee? Those poor CEO’s taking all that risk to be compensated at a rate equivalent to 351 employees.

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#547

Post by spookthesunset » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

bagels wrote: post #445

adam_arthur wrote: post #358

The 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…

Covid and the wide scale embracing of remote work is really going to combine with layoffs to massacre our wages. Some FAANG companies will likely prioritize hiring in Europe and Asia and use that to pressure bay area salaries down.

That remote work stuff will go away. People are kidding if they think large organizations can innovate and remain competitive when everybody on a team isn’t in the same room.

Individually people might think they are more productive (at least coders do) but the communication issues that arise from remote work are gonna really become an issue soon enough.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#548

Post by lmm » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

015a wrote: post #506

humanrebar wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 &…

> 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.

If they were claiming this was something unique about tech I'd be sceptical. But if they're claiming it's just regular corporate dysfunction I'm not so sure. I've watched whole teams of extremely talented engineers put multiple years into building something that never saw the light of day, not because of any technical flaw but because of shifting organisational politics. The idea that less than 50% of employees contribute to the bottom line doesn't seem so implausible.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#549

Post by cudgy » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:47 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #188

jonas21 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the ~$800M in stock-based compensation described here [1]? Nearly all of that only vests if Robinhood stock hits price targets between $120 and $300 per share. The remainder requires a price of $50.75 to be sustained for 60 days. Since none of these goals have been met, Vlad has not received any of it. And unless the company turns around dramatically - it's currently around $9/share - it's likel…

Exactly - all these articles about CEO compensation are misleading. Case in point: Intel's CEO's 2021 salary was reported as almost $180M. In reality, he got only about $10M. He hit literally none of the targets that would allow him to get the rest of the compensation (although in theory he has a few years to hit those targets).

Only 10M to fail to meet any benchmarks? Now that is a nice performance plan … for the CEO!

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#550

Post by twawaaay » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:48 AM UTC

adam_arthur wrote: post #429

strix_varius wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Totally agree. The problem is, nobody knows how to tell which ones. On the ground it's obvious. I'm sure everyone here knows who on their team is crucial to their current production stack, and also knows others who would have no impact (or even positive impact!) if they left. One level up - the direct EM - has most of that context to…

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

> No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't.

If you are factory line worker, yes.

If you are a developer or a manager (a "knowledge worker") -- what you could be observed to be doing has usually little correlation with result for the company.

I know people who are busy producing total crap, managers completing tons of projects achieving bad results, very energetically with huge fanfare. And I know admins that have everything so well automated and working reliably that they are watching youtube whole day, their managers none the wiser about what could have been. Or people who do nothing and have one brilliant idea a year that saves the company tons of expenses. And every other type inbetween.

In a lot of teams it is usual for senior developers to produce relatively little code compared to juniors, when looking at the value they are creating. Maybe because they spent most of their time doing other things like helping juniors, doing code reviews, designing new solutions, talking to clients. Or maybe because they are getting the most complex problems.

If you can measure this you would deserve Nobel Prize. A more likely explanation, though, is that you have no idea how complex the problem is.

In those cases I like to remind people of this famous little story: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

In my experience working many decades, in most teams there are few individuals who are making things go and frequently not even their direct managers understand how people are exactly contributing to productivity.