[flagged]
I logged in just to tell you you're being a non-empathic ass.
What have _you_ created that makes money sustainably? What challenges have _you_ navigated around AI driving traffic to your docs down by 80%?
Some people...
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
61–70 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#62When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain.
Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#63[flagged]
he wasn't, he was calling the person who responded to the individual who got laid off
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#64Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#65It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with. Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].
Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies.
[0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
[1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just had a more-detailed look, and I'm not sure where I'd find the pure-HTML stuff? From https://tailwindcss.com/plus/templates/pocket#pricing : "Our website templates are built using Next.js, so all of the markup is written using React" And the individual components that make up these templates don't seem to have pricing attached, nor non-React usage examples?
Oh, yeah the templates are React/Next.js, but the components and things are not (they are what I described above). Templates are great but 95% of the value I get is the components and things
So, my initial reaction that "Tailwind Plus" only offers apparent value for React users is... entirely valid?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#67The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface. EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam ment…
I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#68I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue. I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
Tailwind is a UI styling and components company. Are you thinking of Tailscale?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#69[flagged]
You might want to clarify that Adam responded to someone commenting about another individual being laid off from Laracasts; he did not call the individual who was laid off an idiot