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Ask HN: Who is firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#91

Post by malbs »

bbcbasic wrote: post #76
malbs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh FuckedCompany.com I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?" "Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?" "Oh, don't worr…

> "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company" Translation: "don't worry about that, that's just the company you are applying for"

I was young and really wanted the job! It was easy to overlook the obvious

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#93

Post by diamondo25 »

The company I worked (Treatwell) for has lost a lot of good developers since the acquirement from the london based company Wahanda. 2 months ago they basically fired eveyone tech related in the Amsterdam office. Its a shame, I guess thats normal when you acquire a company for $38M[0] and figuring out everything is double.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/european-salon-booking-sit...

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#95

Post by ryhamz »

patmcguire wrote: post #46
Keverw wrote: post #5

Twitter is firing the people who worked on Vine. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3... Really love how you are doing the opposite for this thread. I guess It helps people get prospective on both sides :)

Twitter is a known tire fire. When I was out in San Francisco everyone who worked at Twitter had a shell-shocked look and talked about the experience the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body.

"the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body."

If that restroom had been basically showing for weeks that it was going to have a dead body in it any time now. Would still be surprising, but I'd be somewhat braced for it.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#96

Post by 1474295912 »

VisualMeta GmbH in Berlin. They're a 'start-up' backed by Axel Springer, Berlin.

They fired about 60-70 people recently, some of them on their first day of work. Most of their devs come from non-existent countries (China/Eritrea/Pakistan etc) and they're paid abysmally (€32-34k).

It's a surprise that this news wasn't covered at all in Berlin start-up press.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#97

Post by hinkley »

throw1988_9121 wrote: post #79

The company where I work has been going through problems and for the past few months people keep being let go. After 4 months of watching an average of 2 people loose their jobs per month, I had the idea to register dayssincelastlayoff.com. My idea was to have a 'X Days Since Last Injury' kind of image on the site that would just show this stat for various companies. My thinking was that knowing how frequently a comp…

Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off.

And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#98

Post by Raed667 »

1474295912 wrote: post #96

VisualMeta GmbH in Berlin. They're a 'start-up' backed by Axel Springer, Berlin. They fired about 60-70 people recently, some of them on their first day of work. Most of their devs come from non-existent countries (China/Eritrea/Pakistan etc) and they're paid abysmally (€32-34k). It's a surprise that this news wasn't covered at all in Berlin start-up press.

34k € is a bad salary in Germany? Because I think it is an average 1st salary in France (or the companies I've been talking to are also planning to get me paid abysmally)

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#100

Post by flukus »

ryandrake wrote: post #59
danieltillett wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time. Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.

No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn. But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupi…

> Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

It came off as an old timers rant, but I still enjoyed it :)

Maybe we strayed a bit too far from the "greed is good" 80's. There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make money.

It's more pervasive than just dotcoms though. I see the same things we stuff like solar roadways or hyper loop is criticized.

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