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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

wsj.com

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#681

Post by recursive_ »

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…

You say that like these well established tech companies (like Google) haven't already optimized the employee counts and employee salaries needed to produce the (current) best ROI and also figuring for future company growth.

A bare-bones, scrappy team makes sense in the startup world but not the publicly traded enterprise engineering world. Move Google back into this world and it'll quickly crumble in a few quarters.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#682

Post by adam_arthur »

jupp0r wrote: post #536
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…

Well then - found a company that employs half the people and become the next Google. Should be easy if your magic insights can make you twice as profitable. Maybe this is not how innovation works though.

Google could fire their entire org outside of ads, search, and android and still roughly maintain the same revenue/growth.

It's quite obvious. They are dominant via first mover advantage and monopoly esque positioning in search.

And they could likely even not change search at all and stay on top for 10+ years.

What is the marginal value today of a given Google employee to the company's bottom line? Super low.

The tailwinds driving strong growth for these companies came primarily from macro/digitalization, not because they invented feature X which enhanced revenue

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#683

Post by nerdponx »

Keegs wrote: post #191
nerdponx wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article said it was around 1000 employees. So cutting his pay by $50m would mean $50k per laid-off employee . How as an investor or shareholder can you not look at this as downright robbery?

But the same $50m paid to a single employee (on top of hundreds more) is not robbery?

I might have been too obtuse with my post. I meant that it's robbery for the CEO to be compensated so much.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#684

Post by lmm »

ipython wrote: post #625
lmm wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, for me it was the opposite. I used to trust the experts and assume that most people in a position of power got there on their merits.

I think for me it was more a journey of understanding the necessity of the function and not the person. As in, I would question the need for management or marketing. As I matured and, in some cases, tried to perform those tasks myself, I had a respect for the function. The people may still suck but at least now I understand how good execution of that function is necessary for the organization as a whole.

I definitely see the value of management, marketing, and especially product management. Having worked at places with and without that function, I'm more convinced than ever that software architects are a net negative.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#685

Post by V__ »

ericd wrote: post #362
V__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you crash a company against the wall resulting in such a disaster and having to cut so much staff, resigning isn't enough. CEO's should have to pay back big parts of their compensation.

Do you want it to be very hard to fire people? If you make it that way, then companies become much more reluctant to hire people, and tend to start hiring on contracts instead of full time. My understanding is that that's been the effect in France, at least. And if you think about it, it's a completely rational response to essentially making it riskier to hire.

I'm talking about CEO's, CTO's, CFO's and the like. People whose decisions have an overwhelming impact on the company. Not Rob from accounting.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#686

Post by qaq »

kortilla wrote: post #659
qaq wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At market or better than market rate you have unlimited supply of trades without paying for order flow

But the people with the edge are there who can steamroll you. Better to just pay to not have them if you’re trying to make a market.

You have an example of market maker being steam rolled?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#687

Post by repentless_a »

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…

If they don't need 50%+ of their employees they probably need don't need 95+% of their management.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#688

Post by imgabe »

4ggr0 wrote: post #665
imgabe wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, as another comment mentioned, he didn’t actually get $800M because that was contingent on hitting various price targets that didn’t happen. For another, it’s not like it’s just cash sitting in a checking account. It would be stock in the company. Since he’s a CEO, he can’t just sell it whenever he wants, insider trader rules mean there’s only certain windows when he could buy or sell, and the CEO selli…

To counter that a bit, rich people with these kinds of assets can take out loans or cash with their assets as collateral. And of course these loans have way better rates than whatever kinds of loans you and me could get. Even better - This way, they don't even have to pay capital gains tax. What I'm saying is, Vlad could most likely buy an expensive yacht without ever having to actually sell stock, so the argument th…

Loans still have to be paid back at some point. It’s true that sometimes banks are happy to let the billionaires have the loans for their whole lives and get paid back out of their estate when they die. But, when you borrow against a security (like a stock) and the value of that security plummets (like pretty much every tech stock did recently) the terms of your loan can force you to sell the stock and pay it off right away. (and sell it at the worst possible time since it just crashed and now you’re locking in that loss) So it’s not really a good idea to over leverage yourself in that way.

Sure, he can borrow a bunch of money against his stock and buy a giant a yacht or give it away to people who got laid off, just like a normal person can borrow a year’s worth of salary from credit cards or take out a high interest loan to buy an expensive car, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#689

Post by fleddr »

ok_dad wrote: post #503
fleddr wrote: post #85

We 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, includi…

Absolutely terrible, sorry that happened.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#690

Post by nemo44x »

twblalock wrote: post #676
nemo44x wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same realization applies to UBI. What we had, in effect, was the closest thing we will ever get to a nationwide short-term UBI experiment and it was a complete disaster . The worst fears about UBI were realized with just a few payments: people gambling with the money, creating stock bubbles with meme stocks, and contributing to a rapid rise in inflation. People will say that wasn't really UBI -- but it's the clos…

The problem is being smart lands you in positions of power today but being wise has no value towards that.

Everyone knows UBI can’t possibly work but enough people who are or think they are smart will find every way possible to convince themselves and others it not only can work but it’s obvious why it will. Ignoring thousands of years of humans that said “no”.

We have a paleo-phobia problem today where for whatever reason there are a lot of people that are pretty sure the entire history of humanity has been wrong about most things and we are the fortunate ones to know better, today. Without ever considering that we are possibly just cascading our problems due to our unwise choices.

Regardless, history has shown that decadence is the end of a culture.

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