Live data from Hacker News

Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

techcrunch.com

691–700 of 936 posts

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#691
post #605
post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all good arguments for voluntarily paying for severance, or to agreeing to such a payment upfront in the employment contract. But they are no reason to legally require severance pay.

I agree completely unless required by law.

Oh, I meant that we shouldn't have such a law.

Voluntary severance payment and contractually agreed ones are fine, if people want those.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#692
post #607
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gardening leave is quite common in the US. No sure whether the term itself is known, though? Paying out a notice period is very different from severance pay. I can assure you that AirBnB does not have a 14 weeks notice period. (American companies also pay you out the notice period, and some send you on gardening leave, if they want you out of the office. But notice periods in America seem to be generally shorter, lik…

There is no right to the notice period in the US. They can fire you on the spot.

Many contracts still come with a notice period. So many people have contractual rights to a notice period. No requirement by law, yes.

Most contracts with a notice period still allow the company to just pay it out and send you home on the spot.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#693
post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I didn’t know you could stack factories on top of each other!

You literally can. Are you being facetious? What's going on with this discussion?

Try to go build your factory on top of an existing factory. I suspect someone will stop you.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#694
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally can. Are you being facetious? What's going on with this discussion?

Try to go build your factory on top of an existing factory. I suspect someone will stop you.

Skyscrapers and multistory industrial centers with multiple tenants already exist.

But really? The thing most preventing you from starting a factory today is... because you can't find the land? Alright then.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the car? Volkswagen is twice the size of Microsoft by revenue. I'm going with the OECD definition here: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm

The car was invented in the 1800s, and has seen mature competitors in many other countries like Japan. In the current century, Tesla is the auto giant leaving behind all the legacy manufacturers while also branching into energy products. Pivotal products are a better milestone than vague estimates of R&D spending.

That is a...wildly imaginative take.

Tesla sales are a fraction of any of the big three in terms of sales or revenue.

They sold 192,000 vehicles in the US in 2019. Each of the Big Three sold well over three million.

Tesla currently loses $2500 on every vehicle they sell

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#696
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car was invented in the 1800s, and has seen mature competitors in many other countries like Japan. In the current century, Tesla is the auto giant leaving behind all the legacy manufacturers while also branching into energy products. Pivotal products are a better milestone than vague estimates of R&D spending.

That is a...wildly imaginative take. Tesla sales are a fraction of any of the big three in terms of sales or revenue. They sold 192,000 vehicles in the US in 2019. Each of the Big Three sold well over three million. Tesla currently loses $2500 on every vehicle they sell

This thread is about innovation, not sales.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is stopping you from owning a factory. The workers are also free to leave anytime without any notice or responsibility to the employer. This is a flexible arrangement for both parties that focuses on individual freedom and responsibility. It also helps make it easy for entrepreneurs to start companies and create jobs in the US and is a direct reason why we don't see the same innovation in regulation-heavy regi…

Sweden and Germany, for example, are heavily regulated but have more innovation in terms of GDP% than the USA. If you're talking about why we don't see more visible commercial innovation from European countries then it's more about access to the enormous amounts of capital to build a big name startup like Uber etc. Nobody notices the legions of small bootstrapped or seed to profitable software businesses across the E…

How do you measure innovation? American companies are on average far wealthier than companies in Europe and spend more in R&D as a result.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zurich and London top out at $100k, any more and we're talking managerial responsibilities. Compared to SF or SEA they are only paying ~25% market rate. The safety net argument has no legs. Australia and Canada both have social benefits that far exceed the majority of EU nations, yet pre-pandemic there was no shortage of $150k+ dev roles.

I had an offer in London as a dev in finance at ~300k GBP total comp and a Series B startup offer over 100k GBP and that was more than 4 years ago. Ended up going with a much smaller seed-stage company in Berlin because I couldn't stomach the finance people and liked Berlin.

Is it ok if I ask your YOE and stack?

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really strange to me that companies in the US can just determine how much severance they're "willing" to pay. Why is it even up to them?

I mean, as an American... I'm not even sure why companies give severance pay in the first place. It doesn't feel like something they should be obligated to do.

The employment contract is usually for an indeterminate amount of time. Breaking that contract is why severance pay is required.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not the parent) I would think that since innovation and growth (caused by innovative use of resources or increase in efficiency or novel products and services) in general should be relative to the population and its state to begin with, nominal GDP growth per annum would be a reasonable metric as a proxy for the wildly non-measurable "innovation in terms of GDP"; for reference, here's the data for 2018: USA: 2.9% Ca…

No need to approximate: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm Germany is at 3.4% of GDP spending on R&D and the USA at 2.8% France is also right up there at 2.2%

Spending on research and development is an awful proxy for results delivered by said R&D, which is what we would actually want to measure if we're looking for innovation relative to GDP.
Post reply on HN