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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#761
post #440

Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you'…

I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer. Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. Tha…

>Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons.

As incentivized by temporarily-free licenses.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#762
post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.

Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.

What do you mean? If don't take a principled stance on something even when it hurts, you don't have principles.

Copyright is evil. Disliking LLMs doesn't change that.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#763
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization" Who trusted you with hiring

[deleted]

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#764
Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way.

They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free.

Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terraform, elastic).

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#765
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization" Who trusted you with hiring

That's part of a personality fit.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#766

Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business. > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than…

This is the most pragmatic, non-conformist and rational comment here.

Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.

So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).

> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.

Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?

I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!

They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.

I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.

There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#767

Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to exist. Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.

I've never used Tailwind. I guess it's just an alternative to Bootstrap from the docs?

There's plenty of alternative CSS frameworks.

I can absolutely see why it's difficult to monetize.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that just because they can't pay everyone, they should pay no one?

Yeah I know how that sounds but it's the most logical explanation.

Alternatively, they don't have a viable business model?

This isn't rocket science. If your business can't exist within the law, it doesn't get to exist.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#769

> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.

He fired a shitload of people, of course we can criticise him

Three. He fired three people.

Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that includes him or not as the remaining 25% as 1 member.

No it was the 3 co-founders, a part-time person and 4 engineers. Now they are 3 engineers down.

But surely the co-founders pay themselves too. I don't understand the logic in not counting them as part of the company.
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