7 ms·

Npm Layoffs

75 points by gortok 8y ago

CydeWeys 8y ago
I need a lot more context here. What's Npm? All that means to me is "NodeJS Package Manager", but surely there isn't an entire company associated with that, right? Secondly, what did the severance package look like? Re-employment assistance is just one component to a severance package; if it includes several months' pay then it's still a comparatively good one even lacking this assistance. EDIT: So apparently NodeJS Package Manager is a company?! News to me.
- francislavoie 8y ago
  https://www.npmjs.com/about https://www.npmjs.com/about > npm, Inc. is the company that hosts and maintains all of the above.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  Someone has to host the 1000000+ packages for nodejs and maintain npm. I always wondered why npmjs, nexus, artifactory etc. don't consider a model where they act as middlemen for licensing F/OSS or post-AWS open source-licensed packages, taking their cut and give the rest to the developers, because I think something like that is seriously needed.
  - onemoresoop 8y ago
    I wonder how they make any profits. Consulting to corporations since this is open source?
    - nevir 8y ago
      Private package hosting
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  This is news to me as well as I didn't hear much about the company behind NPM, but makes a whole lot of sense to me. However, I don't see how they can make any profit.
- IHLayman 8y ago
  According to [0], there are 61 employees for a $10M company that runs the npm registry. That's news to me. Also, it means that your average 10% layoffs would mean 6 people. [0]: https://craft.co/npm https://craft.co/npm
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Good find. The US Department of Labor defines a "mass layoff" as one affecting 50 or more employees, which this definitely isn't because that'd require laying off almost the entire company (which to my knowledge hasn't happened). This is important because a lot of protections only come into force for mass layoffs. There may well not be any relevant protections for the laid off employees here; they may simply just be victims of at-will employment, and not technically laid off as deemed by the law.
igotsideas 8y ago
It always sucks to get laid off, not disregarding it. I empathize with the employees who weren’t expecting it. I can only speak for myself but the minute I get a job, I know that I can be terminated at any moment for whatever reason. There should never be any shock. Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. You have to always be prepared if you’re gonna be working under someone else’s roof.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  > Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. That's why I'd never move anywhere for a job that doesn't have plenty of alternate options if the first doesn't work out. That's why places like SF, Seattle, and NYC are so powerful for tech, and one-company towns like a lot of the Amazon HQ2 proposals would be are not. Good luck convincing top-tier talent to move somewhere where you're the only game in town.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  > Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. True, but in many places in the world employee rights are such that this might be a significantly less bad situation. If you're a month's severance pay, perhaps your signing bonus, etc, then you might not be out of pocket by the time you get a new job. Particularly if you're working in a high demand industry.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    Also countries like Germany have VERY massive employee protection. Once you're out of the probation period (usually 3-6 months) the company needs a very good reason (down-sizing being one) to fire you. Not even you slacking off, not doing job can immediately get you fired as you first need to receive a few warnings. The US is very bad regarding employee protection, other countries handle this differently.
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      Exactly. In fact in the UK if you want to lay off more than a certain (fairly small) number of staff then you get audited to ensure that you couldn't have possibly kept them on or found them jobs elsewhere in your company. Once you make someone redundant you're also not allowed to re-hire for that position for 6 months I believe, again to ensure that you're not using layoffs inappropriately. Note: this is all different to _firing_ someone. I understand in the US these two are often less distinct. Firing someone opens you up to a different kind of legal liability, you essentially have to be able to prove that they weren't good enough at their job, should they take you to court over being fired.
jatsign 8y ago
Anyone have details on this? Didn't see headcount & rationale in a quick scan of the twitter thread.
the_narrator 8y ago
Layoffs happen; these kind of whiny twitter rants aren't really helpful for anyone.
- maxaf 8y ago
  The rants make perfect sense in a world that expects every disagreement to be adjudicated in the court of public opinion.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    As long as ‘public opinion’ is in their favor of course, otherwise it’s cleanly removed, like this tweet. Disagreeing opinions need not apply.
    - tdurden 8y ago
      deleted because of hackernews "bros" https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110922957721731072 https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110922957721731072
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Exactly. If you’re recently laid off and looking for work, why jump on Twitter and be as obnoxious as possible? I know I wouldn’t hire this person and can’t help but think if they do this regularly that it makes sense that they were let go.
  - geodel 8y ago
    Well it may not get one hired in typical corporate but Woke companies or at least Woke hiring managers in other companies are quite likely to hire them.
    - outside1234 8y ago
      FYI: Woke hiring managers don't want people that go bezerk on Twitter either - it is a clear maturity issue in plain sight.
bfrydl 8y ago
Is it normal for an ex-employer to help laid-off employees find new jobs? I would never expect that.
- dagw 8y ago
  At least in Europe it is not uncommon. For example when the small animation studio I used to work for many years ago had to lay off 80% of its employees due to lack of work, the managers there called around to friends they had in the industry and helped set up at least informal meetings.
  - pbalau 8y ago
    One has to wonder if in this case, there was something else than a layoff... /edit: more info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501227 /edit-2-since-i-already-got-downvoted: Facebook used to have a 1 year cliff before the first vest, they removed it about 1 year before I left.
    - johnchristopher 8y ago
      In Belgium, the 2008 crisis struck 3d animators and cgi artists really hard. Most people I knew in the field could never get back into it.
      - pbalau 8y ago
        My bad, I was not clear enough, I'm talking about the npm layoffs.
    - dagw 8y ago
      What do you mean?
      - pbalau 8y ago
        My bad, I was not clear enough, I'm talking about the npm layoffs.
thresh 8y ago
Why would someone who wants you out help you find another job? What kind of mess is in the head of a person that thinks everyone owes them a helping hand?
- jkrems 8y ago
  Because you will be talking to other people, including the ones you have worked with and built a relationship with inside of the company. And the company has an interest in being seen as a viable place to work for others. So making sure that ex-employees are being taken care of (to a certain degree) is in the company's best interest.
  - algaeontoast 8y ago
    This is a ridiculously backwards and privileged / entitled position... Your employment / what you need money for is your problem, not your superior's...
    - rocketpastsix 8y ago
      To a degree sure. But at some point, if NPM continues to do this, they will get known as a less than great place to work. And if you get that type of name, it will be harder and harder to get quality talent to work there. If NPM/managers can help out, it gives them some goodwill.
      - algaeontoast 8y ago
        I sympathize with your point, however, in any case complaining about your manager / prior employer not doing this will label you as a whiner. Nobody likes whiners / being one is without a doubt a compromising position for future employment (i.e. knowing it's likely that if they hire you, you'll just complain about anything you don't like abt the company on twitter etc)
- f1l3m0t 8y ago
  Progressives that can't own up to anything or take responsibility — It's always the fault of someone else
ricardobeat 8y ago
Does anyone have more info? It looks like this person doesn’t work for NPM. EDIT: see this tweet 9h ago https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/1110766133660041216?s=21 https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/1110766133660041216?s=2... And here’s the story as told by another employee https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360?s=21 https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360?s=21
danpalmer 8y ago
Do these employees have a right to apologies from NPM and help finding a new job? No. Should these employees expect to be treated better by a company that claims that "Compassion is our strategy"? Yes, absolutely. Focusing on specifics of what they are asking for is the wrong approach here, it's a simple question: was this handled with "compassion"? I think between lack of acknowledgement from management, lack of understanding that vesting options can be an important part of compensation now being denied to employees, lack of help finding a job in the extensive social networks of the founding team, and laying off so soon after hiring some, all contributes to this.
sabana 8y ago
what the hell is that thing?
autotune 8y ago
> It's not your employers job to find you a position I find myself agreeing with this more than the initial tweets even as I sit here having recently quit my last job without something lined up quite yet.
mises 8y ago
It is mentioned that employees have not been helped to find new jobs. But there may be reason for that. It is sometimes the case that for a particularly high-performing, excellent employee, a manager or senior exec might call around to a few friends and see if they have openings. And of course, provide a reference for others. But that is not true of laying off a whole division. No team is comprised of 100%, or even 25%, top performers (usually). A manager shouldn't be expected to put his professional reputation on the line for every person in his division, even if they aren't the best (but good enough to keep on), just because of a lay-off.
- pwinnski 8y ago
  It is very common for a company of any reasonable size to provide third-party outplacement services to laid-off employees. Companies like RiseSmart (no association) exist for this. I don't know what the cost is, but it seems like the least a company should do if they want to be considered humane.
  - mises 8y ago
    RiseSmart costs $1,900 for three months for a single employee (their most popular "Ignite" plan). https://www.risesmart.com/talent-mobility-solutions/smb https://www.risesmart.com/talent-mobility-solutions/smb The question may become whether how the company is seen behaving toward its workers vs. how it actually behaves is more important. If layoffs are occurring due to financial struggles, it is very possible that purchasing such a service could force them to lay off more employees due to the unforeseen cost. $1,900 x 50 employees = $95,000, which is the salary of between one and three employees, depending on the industry and level. Should they lose their jobs to fund such a program? If they're actually just doing it for restructuring (not just as a euphemism for financial struggles), you're right that it could be worth doing.
nevir 8y ago
This HN thread appears to have been buried/removed from the main page
- petercooper 8y ago
  Enough flags will do that while not affecting the upvote count.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Archived Tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20190327150503/https:/twitter.com/kf/status/1110703814909165568 https://web.archive.org/web/20190327150503/https:/twitter.co...
apetresc 8y ago
Honestly until today I didn't even realize NPM was a company. I thought it was managed in the same vein as PyPI or rubygems.org ... why isn't it?
- dagw 8y ago
  Cynically, because npm came about during an era where you could easily raise millions of dollars for a simple web service, while pypi didn't.
dang 8y ago
We changed the URL from https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110703814909165568 https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110703814909165568, which is now deleted, to https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360 https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360, a contemporaneous thread on the same topic, which I believe was linked to from the original one.

75 points by gortok 8y ago

I need a lot more context here. What's Npm? All that means to me is "NodeJS Package Manager", but surely there isn't an entire company associated with that, right? Secondly, what did the severance package look like? Re-employment assistance is just one component to a severance package; if it includes several months' pay then it's still a comparatively good one even lacking this assistance. EDIT: So apparently NodeJS Package Manager is a company?! News to me.

francislavoie 8y ago
https://www.npmjs.com/about https://www.npmjs.com/about > npm, Inc. is the company that hosts and maintains all of the above.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
Someone has to host the 1000000+ packages for nodejs and maintain npm. I always wondered why npmjs, nexus, artifactory etc. don't consider a model where they act as middlemen for licensing F/OSS or post-AWS open source-licensed packages, taking their cut and give the rest to the developers, because I think something like that is seriously needed.
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  I wonder how they make any profits. Consulting to corporations since this is open source?
  - nevir 8y ago
    Private package hosting
onemoresoop 8y ago
This is news to me as well as I didn't hear much about the company behind NPM, but makes a whole lot of sense to me. However, I don't see how they can make any profit.
IHLayman 8y ago
According to [0], there are 61 employees for a $10M company that runs the npm registry. That's news to me. Also, it means that your average 10% layoffs would mean 6 people. [0]: https://craft.co/npm https://craft.co/npm
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Good find. The US Department of Labor defines a "mass layoff" as one affecting 50 or more employees, which this definitely isn't because that'd require laying off almost the entire company (which to my knowledge hasn't happened). This is important because a lot of protections only come into force for mass layoffs. There may well not be any relevant protections for the laid off employees here; they may simply just be victims of at-will employment, and not technically laid off as deemed by the law.

igotsideas 8y ago

It always sucks to get laid off, not disregarding it. I empathize with the employees who weren’t expecting it. I can only speak for myself but the minute I get a job, I know that I can be terminated at any moment for whatever reason. There should never be any shock. Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. You have to always be prepared if you’re gonna be working under someone else’s roof.

CydeWeys 8y ago
> Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. That's why I'd never move anywhere for a job that doesn't have plenty of alternate options if the first doesn't work out. That's why places like SF, Seattle, and NYC are so powerful for tech, and one-company towns like a lot of the Amazon HQ2 proposals would be are not. Good luck convincing top-tier talent to move somewhere where you're the only game in town.
danpalmer 8y ago
> Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. True, but in many places in the world employee rights are such that this might be a significantly less bad situation. If you're a month's severance pay, perhaps your signing bonus, etc, then you might not be out of pocket by the time you get a new job. Particularly if you're working in a high demand industry.
- akuji1993 8y ago
  Also countries like Germany have VERY massive employee protection. Once you're out of the probation period (usually 3-6 months) the company needs a very good reason (down-sizing being one) to fire you. Not even you slacking off, not doing job can immediately get you fired as you first need to receive a few warnings. The US is very bad regarding employee protection, other countries handle this differently.
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    Exactly. In fact in the UK if you want to lay off more than a certain (fairly small) number of staff then you get audited to ensure that you couldn't have possibly kept them on or found them jobs elsewhere in your company. Once you make someone redundant you're also not allowed to re-hire for that position for 6 months I believe, again to ensure that you're not using layoffs inappropriately. Note: this is all different to _firing_ someone. I understand in the US these two are often less distinct. Firing someone opens you up to a different kind of legal liability, you essentially have to be able to prove that they weren't good enough at their job, should they take you to court over being fired.

jatsign 8y ago

Anyone have details on this? Didn't see headcount & rationale in a quick scan of the twitter thread.

the_narrator 8y ago

Layoffs happen; these kind of whiny twitter rants aren't really helpful for anyone.

maxaf 8y ago
The rants make perfect sense in a world that expects every disagreement to be adjudicated in the court of public opinion.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  As long as ‘public opinion’ is in their favor of course, otherwise it’s cleanly removed, like this tweet. Disagreeing opinions need not apply.
  - tdurden 8y ago
    deleted because of hackernews "bros" https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110922957721731072 https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110922957721731072
malvosenior 8y ago
Exactly. If you’re recently laid off and looking for work, why jump on Twitter and be as obnoxious as possible? I know I wouldn’t hire this person and can’t help but think if they do this regularly that it makes sense that they were let go.
- geodel 8y ago
  Well it may not get one hired in typical corporate but Woke companies or at least Woke hiring managers in other companies are quite likely to hire them.
  - outside1234 8y ago
    FYI: Woke hiring managers don't want people that go bezerk on Twitter either - it is a clear maturity issue in plain sight.

bfrydl 8y ago

Is it normal for an ex-employer to help laid-off employees find new jobs? I would never expect that.

dagw 8y ago
At least in Europe it is not uncommon. For example when the small animation studio I used to work for many years ago had to lay off 80% of its employees due to lack of work, the managers there called around to friends they had in the industry and helped set up at least informal meetings.
- pbalau 8y ago
  One has to wonder if in this case, there was something else than a layoff... /edit: more info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501227 /edit-2-since-i-already-got-downvoted: Facebook used to have a 1 year cliff before the first vest, they removed it about 1 year before I left.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    In Belgium, the 2008 crisis struck 3d animators and cgi artists really hard. Most people I knew in the field could never get back into it.
    - pbalau 8y ago
      My bad, I was not clear enough, I'm talking about the npm layoffs.
  - dagw 8y ago
    What do you mean?
    - pbalau 8y ago
      My bad, I was not clear enough, I'm talking about the npm layoffs.

thresh 8y ago

Why would someone who wants you out help you find another job? What kind of mess is in the head of a person that thinks everyone owes them a helping hand?

jkrems 8y ago
Because you will be talking to other people, including the ones you have worked with and built a relationship with inside of the company. And the company has an interest in being seen as a viable place to work for others. So making sure that ex-employees are being taken care of (to a certain degree) is in the company's best interest.
- algaeontoast 8y ago
  This is a ridiculously backwards and privileged / entitled position... Your employment / what you need money for is your problem, not your superior's...
  - rocketpastsix 8y ago
    To a degree sure. But at some point, if NPM continues to do this, they will get known as a less than great place to work. And if you get that type of name, it will be harder and harder to get quality talent to work there. If NPM/managers can help out, it gives them some goodwill.
    - algaeontoast 8y ago
      I sympathize with your point, however, in any case complaining about your manager / prior employer not doing this will label you as a whiner. Nobody likes whiners / being one is without a doubt a compromising position for future employment (i.e. knowing it's likely that if they hire you, you'll just complain about anything you don't like abt the company on twitter etc)
f1l3m0t 8y ago
Progressives that can't own up to anything or take responsibility — It's always the fault of someone else

ricardobeat 8y ago

Does anyone have more info? It looks like this person doesn’t work for NPM. EDIT: see this tweet 9h ago https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/1110766133660041216?s=21 https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/1110766133660041216?s=2... And here’s the story as told by another employee https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360?s=21 https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360?s=21

danpalmer 8y ago

Do these employees have a right to apologies from NPM and help finding a new job? No. Should these employees expect to be treated better by a company that claims that "Compassion is our strategy"? Yes, absolutely. Focusing on specifics of what they are asking for is the wrong approach here, it's a simple question: was this handled with "compassion"? I think between lack of acknowledgement from management, lack of understanding that vesting options can be an important part of compensation now being denied to employees, lack of help finding a job in the extensive social networks of the founding team, and laying off so soon after hiring some, all contributes to this.

sabana 8y ago

what the hell is that thing?

autotune 8y ago

> It's not your employers job to find you a position I find myself agreeing with this more than the initial tweets even as I sit here having recently quit my last job without something lined up quite yet.

mises 8y ago

It is mentioned that employees have not been helped to find new jobs. But there may be reason for that. It is sometimes the case that for a particularly high-performing, excellent employee, a manager or senior exec might call around to a few friends and see if they have openings. And of course, provide a reference for others. But that is not true of laying off a whole division. No team is comprised of 100%, or even 25%, top performers (usually). A manager shouldn't be expected to put his professional reputation on the line for every person in his division, even if they aren't the best (but good enough to keep on), just because of a lay-off.

pwinnski 8y ago
It is very common for a company of any reasonable size to provide third-party outplacement services to laid-off employees. Companies like RiseSmart (no association) exist for this. I don't know what the cost is, but it seems like the least a company should do if they want to be considered humane.
- mises 8y ago
  RiseSmart costs $1,900 for three months for a single employee (their most popular "Ignite" plan). https://www.risesmart.com/talent-mobility-solutions/smb https://www.risesmart.com/talent-mobility-solutions/smb The question may become whether how the company is seen behaving toward its workers vs. how it actually behaves is more important. If layoffs are occurring due to financial struggles, it is very possible that purchasing such a service could force them to lay off more employees due to the unforeseen cost. $1,900 x 50 employees = $95,000, which is the salary of between one and three employees, depending on the industry and level. Should they lose their jobs to fund such a program? If they're actually just doing it for restructuring (not just as a euphemism for financial struggles), you're right that it could be worth doing.

nevir 8y ago

This HN thread appears to have been buried/removed from the main page

petercooper 8y ago
Enough flags will do that while not affecting the upvote count.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Archived Tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20190327150503/https:/twitter.com/kf/status/1110703814909165568 https://web.archive.org/web/20190327150503/https:/twitter.co...

apetresc 8y ago

Honestly until today I didn't even realize NPM was a company. I thought it was managed in the same vein as PyPI or rubygems.org ... why isn't it?

dagw 8y ago
Cynically, because npm came about during an era where you could easily raise millions of dollars for a simple web service, while pypi didn't.

dang 8y ago

We changed the URL from https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110703814909165568 https://twitter.com/kf/status/1110703814909165568, which is now deleted, to https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360 https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360, a contemporaneous thread on the same topic, which I believe was linked to from the original one.