Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 893 posts

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

#821

Post by pier25 »

usef- wrote: post #600
pier25 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.

They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well. Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human…

It's not only the computational cost though. Hardware requirements are much higher and GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years. Plus model training expenses which are considerable. I imagine it's easily 100x more expensive and the margins (if there's ever any profit) will be very low.

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

#822

Post by pier25 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #331
pier25 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that. There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.

You mean CSS-in-JS?

No. For example, scoped CSS in Vue, Svelte, or Astro components.

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

#823

Post by port11 »

windowshopping wrote: post #658
port11 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, that’s indeed much cleverer. Unfortunately I’ve closed my account this year, trying to put my money where my mouth is and not furthering the goals of GitHub or Microsoft.

What's wrong with microsoft and github? I can't lie, between this comment and the "writing down people's github handles out of spite just in case" you are coming off as someone with a lot of grievances.

Understandable, but I’m definitely a lot less bitter than it seems.

Well, Microsoft is vile. I won’t expand because there’s plenty online on the topic. And I don’t like their acquisition of GitHub, which has turned into an ecosystem for laundering open-source code through LLMs.

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

#824

Post by port11 »

jmtame wrote: post #812
port11 wrote: 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.

Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.

Oh, it’s not the criticism. It’s the hatred, the vile attacks on open-source maintainers. I wouldn’t want to work with people like that, would you?

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

#825

Post by lifetimerubyist »

b34r wrote: post #794
lifetimerubyist wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “community” doesn’t decide what goes into the project, TailwindLabs does. Tailwind is not a community developed project. It’s a project that sometimes accepts outside contributors when they feel like it and the are under no obligation to do so. You did work that nobody from the project asked for and you’re throwing a fit because they have different priorities and said they don’t want it. They don’t owe you anythi…

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#826

Post by yencabulator »

bobthepanda wrote: post #218
sosodev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.

Accessibility is an interesting space for quality because under the ADA you can be sued for it and be exposed to huge liability.

Accessibility testing sounds like something an LLM might be good at. Provide it with tools to access your website only through a screen reader (simulated, text not audio), ask it to complete tasks, measure success rate. That should be way easier for an LLM than image-based driving a web browser.

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

#827

Post by javier123454321 »

lionkor wrote: post #811
306bobby wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What? He could have said 3 if he wanted, but he wanted it to sound worse so he said 75. I know its inferrable how many people it is, but if the guy laying them off doesn't care to say the number, why should someone else when posting this?

Both of those numbers in isolation dont tell the whole story. Saying firing 3 people sounds like a wednesday at a big company. Saying firing 75% of the staff indicates the impact that those changes will have on everything about the company. The latter is more useful.

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

#828

Post by camdenreslink »

nickjj wrote: post #129

I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business. The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me. I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tank…

Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other marketing channels such as social media, youtube or paid ads?

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

#829

Post by refulgentis »

GlacierFox wrote: post #749
refulgentis wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said he isn’t a good guy. Just that it was weird to have 15 comments saying “ignore the haters you’re a good guy!” The “madness” here was you replying as if I said he wasn’t.

I'll be sure to avoid you during a time of crisis...

May I humbly suggest taking a breath or two? It is extremely taxing mentally to select strangers to tell you don’t trust them in an imaginary crisis. (Especially ones on a tech discussion board! Especially just because they noted there were no negative comments and only fawning ones! Especially when you think fawning feels fine in a crisis!)

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

#830

Post by nickjj »

camdenreslink wrote: post #828
nickjj wrote: post #129

I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business. The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me. I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tank…

Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other market…

I think it's both but I think the end result is less traffic means less sales.

I don't have paid ads, everything has been organic with the blog being the main funnel into everything. For quite a few years I tried creating a podcast and also have 5+ years of weekly YouTube videos but the traffic back to the courses from those are close to nothing.

Conversion percent rates haven't changed, they have remained consistent.

My figures almost track perfectly with StackOverflow's chart: https://i.sstatic.net/IY0g8JZW.png

Post reply on HN