160 ms·
Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MichaelZuo 4y agoStripe did seem to be somewhat overstaffed after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
- paganel 4y ago> after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Would be useful to see some charts of all those "hiring sprees" that happened during the last 2 years at the big US tech companies, and how the curves on those charts would compare to "normalized" charts had the pandemic/hiring sprees not existed (i.e. if the headcount in 2020-2021 would have increased following the same hiring trends of 2019, 2018 etc).
- khuey 4y agoCollison's email says this layoff returns Stripe to it's February (presumably 2022) headcount.
- danpalmer 4y ago> Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group. I don't think you can only cut "poor performers" in any sort of bulk layoffs. You can avoid it in aggregate, but there will be enough mistakes, enough teams that need to cut a number but don't have enough poor performers, or even enough high performers who are just on teams that are deemed no longer necessary.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoHigh performers on redundant teams would almost certainly be transferred, assuming there isn't some odd middle management infighting going on.
- danpalmer 4y agoI'd hope so, but it's a lot harder to identify the high performers, figure out where to transfer them to, cut low performers from the teams they're moving to, etc. Unfortunately much easier to just cut teams as the company cuts scope.
- ghaff 4y agoIt’s very easy to have people who are widely regarded as high performers. But transfers are often limited when layoffs are happening and, in practice, execs often don’t want to transfer headcount to other teams even if it’s probably the right thing to do from an overall company perspective.
- xfitm3 4y agoIdentifying high performers can be subjective, just look at Google's promotion practices. Productive engineers also tend to get paid more, making them an attractive target when reducing payroll spend.
- ghaff 4y agoYep. You have someone who the mythical company “they” think is awesome but their team was disbanded, there’s no ideal and obvious role for them, transfers are mostly on hold anyway, etc. At some point a bunch of people are sorry they couldn’t find a way to keep the person but they can’t really do anything. And parking them somewhere they aren’t really a good fit isn’t ideal anyway.
- okaram 4y agoThat's a pretty big assumption :) There's always management infighting, especially in lean times.
- peruvian 4y agoSeems like everyone was in a hiring spree in 2020 and 2021.
- danielvaughn 4y agoThis is my take on it. Everyone went crazy on hiring. Nothing is crashing, it's just the market returning to normal. Well, except for Meta. They're having a bad time lol.
- treis 4y agoEven that is mostly self inflicted
- spaceman_2020 4y agoYou should see the financials from some Indian unicorns that raised hundreds of millions in 2020-22. $5-6M in revenue, $50M in expenses. No money anywhere. VCs were way too exuberant and founders were more than happy to mop up the capital.
- danielvaughn 4y agoAnd here I was, working with a startup that had difficulty landing $500K. It was my first foray into being a founder, but I learned that I do not understand the investing landscape at all.
- theGnuMe 4y agoMatt Levine of Bloomberg has a quote about Adam Neumann that is just... amazing. It's about selling in a sellers market and basically about how he sold We Work shares to Softbank (and taking money out of it). I see stocks as fundamentally two things. A statistical thing (something that tracks the underlying fundamentals of a business, and a probability (a belief in that company). Yes, this alludes to classical frequentist statistics vs Bayesian statistics interpretations.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoWhy didn't Stripe SPAC or IPO during the boom? I imagine they could've went for 10-20x their current value like most IPOs during that time... IIUC - Stripe actually has good financials. As a comparison - Twitter had ~7500 employees. Stripe had ~8000. So I wouldn't be surprised if they have room to cut ~14%. Though, I'm interested why now. Are they planning to IPO soon or something? It just doesn't seem like a good time for that...
- rvz 4y agoVery good question. As I said before, the time to IPO was in 2019 [0] and Stripe should have hastened and IPO'ed then and now it had it's valuation slashed [1] and instead had to postpone and wait, just like the rest of the other startups who were too late. [2] So, not really a surprise that this happened to Stripe. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993919 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32566652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32566652 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062227
- ulfw 4y agoIt's impossible to cut 14% and making sure those are only bottom performers. You'd have to reorg the whole company if that were the case because some 8 person teams might have 1 bottom performer (and thus become 7), others might have 2 or 3 and thus become (5 or 6 people. They'd then want to add more people to be a big enough team again etc etc, so those would have to come from other teams that then get merged)
- goodpoint 4y ago> somewhat overstaffed somewhat? It has 8 THOUSAND employees to run a payment processor.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kache_ 4y agoYikes.. hang in there stripe bros Looks like we're going to see this eat through most software companies. Headcount planning is hard.
- corentin88 4y agoIs this confirmed? More sources?
- TSiege 4y agoAgreed, this is the thinnest source for being at the top of hacker news
- code51 4y agoThey say it was announced through company-wide email so I think pretty easy to be confirmed in around 1 hour by the media.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lxgr 4y agohttps://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
- o10449366 4y agoThey've been doing "layoffs" for quite some time, they've just been trying to keep it quiet. I know multiple people (including engineers) that were let go in the past two months.
- hobs 4y agoDon't forget not giving raises and promotions that are bonehead obvious, had several friends find new jobs after getting passed over from some BS.
- thrwwy95fab9d1 4y agoYeah, this is round 2. It would be nice if they retroactively provide this same support to those folks.
- petrusnonius 4y ago+1
- treis 4y agoDupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450152
- eatonphil 4y agoUnlike that, this is a stripe.com post.
- SeanAnderson 4y agoDang will merge the dupes
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- benjaminwootton 4y ago“On Tuesday we set a new record for total daily transaction volume processed.” How does a company breaking records 36 hours ago conclude they need to lay off 14% of the workforce? Even with economic storm clouds on the horizon that seems very jumpy.
- im-a-baby 4y agoBecause tech companies underwent an unprecedented hiring spree the last two years. Tech companies were so flush with cash due to the stock market (which also seeped into private valuations) that they basically green lit any headcount request that sounded remotely plausible. This allowed middle managers to grow their fiefdoms so they could add a little line on their resume: "Managed team of X at Stripe." Such spending is totally wasteful and unnecessary.
- randomdata 4y agoOverstaffed in the support department. They realized that they could have just one person watching Hacker News for people having problems.
- rexreed 4y agoThis is my concern - and it's sad but true. I really cringe worrying about having too many financial eggs in the Stripe basket. But Paypal is no alternative and traditional CC processors are awful. How does one hedge their bets with Stripe? I worry one day we'll hit some transaction "trigger" and then all our money will get locked up in Stripe with no customer support recourse.
- marcinzm 4y agoThey hired 150% more people (yes the company grew to 2.5x since 2020) expecting metrics to grow 150% but metrics only are on track for growing 100%.
- pixl97 4y agoHeh, the average forum poster, I believe, drives their car at 100MPH and turns 3 feet before a large hole in the road. :D As much as people complain about businesses only looking at the next quarter, they do typically have a longer horizon than that. When you have the US fed raising interest rates every meeting and outright saying "unemployment is going to increase" then you should expect pretty much every business to take note of this and adjust appropriately.
- pid-1 4y ago> In making these changes, you might reasonably wonder whether Stripe’s leadership made some errors of judgment. We’d go further than that. In our view, we made two very consequential mistakes, and we want to highlight them here since they’re important: > - We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown. > - We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in. https://stripe.com/br/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees https://stripe.com/br/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-em...
- iterati 4y agoAnd, of course, the leadership aren't suffering their mistakes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BaseballPhysics 4y agoThat first point is key, and I think they're being... less than honest. The reality is there's very little evidence for an actual "broader slowdown". GDP growth in the US was decent in the last quarter despite a huge decline in home sales and headwinds from inflation, and unemployment remains at record lows. There's certainly some signs for concern, but the only real, persistent decline has been in the stock market (which, honestly, is why this whole period is kinda weird). The truth, when I look at these stories, is many of these tech companies expected the major changes during COVID, which lead to huge boosts in revenue for a lot of tech companies, to persist post-COVID, and that simply didn't pan out. The result is a lot of businesses with bloated workforces predicated on long-term financial projections that haven't panned out. But, Stripe can't admit they made a major strategic blunder--the exact same blunder made by companies like Peloton--so they have to blame it on "a broader slowdown" since then they have an exogenous factor they can point to rather than admitting they were just caught up in the techno-optimism of a transformed post-COVID society.
- skidev 4y ago14% seems like a very high number to me to axe at once, how have you got 1 in 7 employees that your business doesn't need to function when it is growing.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y agoMoney was cheap to borrow and get from investors and now it isn’t.
- jagtesh 4y agoAh. It all makes sense now. It is cheaper for them to layoff with a decent 3 month severance than it is to pay high interest on the debt that is funding their salaries (interest rate will stay high > 1 year, going by Powell’s comments). I am glad they did it transparently, but I wish they had been more open about this fact. Shifts the entire perspective IMO.
- csa 4y agoThey are rolling back to February 2022 levels, after having grown a lot in 2020 and 2021. If this is the only cut (big if), then I imagine that most areas outside of HR will not feel much different.
- mritchie712 4y agobetter for morale to go big once then chip away. With this cut, they can confidently say: "this will be the only one".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- luxcem 4y agoWith 3x growth during the pandemic it seems that the layoff would be avoidable by reducing future growth factor. So what the letter doesn't say is that they layoff people to have better numbers to show to investors, not because it's not sustainable.
- gt565k 4y agoI mean it’s a pretty damn generous package. Hell, I’ll take it and chill for a month or two before jumping into another job. I’d love to get laid off with a quarter+ of a year paid for.
- tempsy 4y agoIt’s a little different when everyone is cutting staff at the same time and there’s lots of competition for a limited number of “good” jobs
- Xeoncross 4y agoIDK, there seem to be plenty of big tech jobs still open. I just got one. Overall, there are about 1.9 open jobs in the US for every person unemployed.
- tempsy 4y agoTech jobs follow a bimodal distribution. Only a few pay the $400k-$500k Google level salaries you hear about for mid level employees. It might be relatively easy to find a $120k job but that doesn’t mean every laid off person can now walk into Google with ease when even big tech is laying people off or freezing hiring.
- roflyear 4y agoNot everyone needs to make $500k? I don't understand this argument. Many companies are hiring seniors right now for $200k base. Small, medium, and large companies. That is a great salary. Don't compare yourself to the .1% of software devs.
- tempsy 4y ago$200k base is maybe $10k a month after tax and retirement contributions. A 2 bedroom apartment in NYC or another high cost area where these jobs are generally located will cost $4000-$6000
- tempsy 4y agoI feel bad for employees that have waited a decade to cash out. No reason why Stripe couldn’t have gone public in 2020-2021 at a huge valuation but from past interviews it sounds like the decision to remain private was just a founder preference thing because “focus” or something. Now the IPO market is completely frozen and its valuation is likely cut in half from peak, at least.
- mritchie712 4y agoThere's a healthy secondary market for companies like Stripe. Employees there can sell a good amount of their stock already (and have likely been able to for years).
- tempsy 4y agoPretty sure the company doesn’t let most employees sell. I have never seen Stripe shares offered on Forge or EquityZen.
- ohmanjjj 4y agoThey couldn’t IPO. Stripe is a bubble. They don’t want their financials under a microscope.
- topicseed 4y agoWhat leads you to believe they're a bubble?
- paganel 4y agoGenuine question, what’s the real value proposition of Stripe? They do have a slick integration process for outside developers, but is that enough for to justify the financial values attached to them in the recent past?
- celestialcheese 4y agoAs one of the earliest stripe customers, yes, that was the reason why we switched to them from Authorize.net. Developer docs and easy API integration was, and is still, their "stickyness". But the eco-system of new products they've added have grown that moat to make it easy and cost-efficient to offload more and more of the financial and subscription stack onto Stripe. It's a virtuous cycle
- yohannparis 4y agoGood controls of rumours to share the letter on their press page.
- BhavdeepSethi 4y ago14% translates to what number here? Anyone knows their approximate headcount?
- mritchie712 4y ago7k total after the cut, so ~1k people let go
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lovelearning 4y ago> which will return us to our February headcount of almost 7,000 people I guess about 8,150 employees and 1,150 are being laid-off.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- dabeeeenster 4y agoGrew tx volume 3x since the pandemic, but using the macro environment as an excuse to shave the bottom 14%. Just come out and say it.
- austenallred 4y agoUnless they were planning on growing transaction volume more
- dabeeeenster 4y agoI'm British, so I appreciate that there's a difference in approach across the pond, but I still think this is a shitty thing to do. They are still growing (and setting records it would seem). Just hold on to the staff and swallow the small dent in opex.
- mamonster 4y agoNot how it works from a financial analysis point of view. When interest rates rise money further down the line is rapidly devalued and cash flows in the near future are reprioritized. And firing people today and taking small layoff costs is much more accretive to the bottom line than growth down the line. Also: Seems like the whole of VC is now on the FCF/Opex control train.
- austenallred 4y agoPretty simple. You plan on x growth happening, so you hire assuming x will happen. Say x/2 happens. You now overhired. Even if x is still pretty good.
- csomar 4y agoCorporations have fiduciary duty to the their investors, not their employees.
- he_is_legend 4y agoIs that legally speaking? Ethically speaking? Or financially speaking? And which one is really more important to humanity?
- CarbonCycles 4y agoThat was one of the better letters written by execs....also a generous package. I feel bad for the folks who have been impacted.
- malfist 4y agoYikes, that's a huge cut. Hopefully this is part of defaulting alive and they won't have to make another cut like that. Layoffs are painful for everyone involved. I've been laid off twice, and it's always painful, hurtful and damaging to my mental health. Take care of yourself the best you can, there is a fair amount of research now that says layoffs can have lingering mental health affects for years to come. [1] Some resources that might be helpful: flexjobs.com is a good curated job board for remote work. teamblind.com is a professional social networking site for engineers, it's generally super toxic, but the community comes together for layoffs and a lot of people will offer referrals. [1]: https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/06/14/recession-layoff-scars https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/06/14/recession-layoff-scars
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymouse008 4y ago> We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown. This is one of the most interesting statements ever written. If you ran a 'Idea Fourier' on this signal, so many things fall out: cheap interest rates pushes crazy valuations and estimations, believing the low interest fantasy was a requirement to getting their funding in the first place, now how easy is it to just say 'oops, no take back-sies' Interesting time to be alive.
- krm01 4y agoAnd a refreshingly honest statement. Too often these layoffs are put on external factors. Having someone admit the actual mistake is due to human optimism (greed maybe) just +1’d my respect for Stripe.
- luxcem 4y agoCan you explain the "Idea Fourier"?
- reikonomusha 4y agoIt's a somewhat humorous misappropriation of a mathematical term being applied conceptually. Roughly speaking, a Fourier transform takes as input a signal (like audio) and produces a spectrogram (the signal's component frequencies). So "Idea Fourier" is a roundabout way of saying "take the component ideas from a statement". But really, GP just suggested making inferences or deductions, which has nothing to do with Fourier transforms.
- philod 4y agoI run revenue planning for a large-ish public SaaS company. We knew all of these factors were a risk this year but they were immediately shot down when brought up or part of models. "Focus on what we can control" "Usage and growth is so high there are no signs of slowdown". Whenever we used data to show that macro factors might be artificially driving up usage and demand it was dismissed. Politics plays a large role here as senior leaders want to take credit for all the growth. What's funny is now when it's all trending down of course macro is the factor and rarely anyone's fault.
- eganist 4y agoHey pc, if you're around: > John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it. What are the two of you doing to show accountability? Are you slashing your own future stock grants, cutting your own salaries, diluting your positions with stock grants to everyone else? What's the consequence for this decision on your end that shows you're accountable for what happened, not just responsible for it? Since you have no intention of cashing out, the valuation cut is ineffectual as a consequence to you, and the support/severance package will probably have minimal impact on your own bottom line since it's all largely been accounted for (payouts of planned bonuses, existing unvested stock etc)
- strikelaserclaw 4y agoi hate this trend of ceos saying they take responsibility. Reminds me of lord farquuad, "some of you may die, but that is a price i'm willing to pay"
- bryant 4y agoThey know what accountability is. That's why they never use the word. Yeah we know you're responsible for it, but how are you being held accountable for it? No one will remember in two years time, but my hope is it'll factor into candidates' decisions around whether to pursue a career with Stripe. If I've got senior executives without accountability, it's a distraction to my ability to deliver the product as well as to lead my own teams supporting their vision because it means I can't rely on them, and this outcome with absolutely no accountability behind it is a good enough reason for me to never want to join Stripe in the future.
- joegahona 4y agoDo you have an example handy of a CEO who has provided acceptable accountability in a situation like this?
- bryant 4y agoGood examples of self accountability? Sadly not. (Edit: see huffmsa for a good example) Good examples of accountability to the board? All over. But boards care (by mandate) only about profit unless specified otherwise. There's no incentive for a board to care about whether people are put out on the street either; it's one of the major reasons for why unions exist and are successful: they provide a mechanism for accountability that ties adverse employee decisions back to future revenue loss. Tl;Dr: nope, and that's sadly by design because why would anyone be self-accountable when the consequences hit the wallet? I was hoping for a ray of light to pierce the dark.
- breck 4y ago1) Any Stripers looking for work we have plenty (https://publicdomaincompany.com/ https://publicdomaincompany.com/) and it's as meaningful as it gets. breck7@gmail.com or 1-415-937-1984 2) Saving this in case I ever need to tell a portfolio company how to do a layoff.
- almost_usual 4y agoThat’s nice compensation for a lay off.
- augasur 4y agoAs it is sad news for those who have been impacted, severance packages seems quite generous, with 14 weeks of pay and vesting acceleration.
- kollayolla 4y agoTech workers need unions. This is becoming more clear by the day.
- SevenNation 4y ago> The world is now shifting again. We are facing stubborn inflation, energy shocks, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets, and sparser startup funding. (Tech company earnings last week provided lots of examples of changing circumstances.) On Tuesday, a former Treasury Secretary said that the US faces “as complex a set of macroeconomic challenges as at any time in 75 years”, and many parts of the developed world appear to be headed for recession. We think that 2022 represents the beginning of a different economic climate. To justify the move, Stripe is pointing in every direction except their own operational situation. What's going on at Stripe? > ... We provide an important foundation to our customers and Stripe is not a discretionary service that customers turn off if budget is squeezed. ... Ok, so are you saying that business has taken such a dive so quickly that you're trying to get in front of it? Or are there more announcements like this on tap?
- codegeek 4y agoA bit surprising considering they had 3x growth since 2020 according to this post. THen why the need to cut ? THe only answer could be "need higher returns for shareholders" because I honestly doubt their growth is at risk. So is Stripe saying that they are cutting because they grew much faster during Pandemic and now are not growing as fast so they need to slash 14% of workforce to keep the same returns for shareholders ? Would love to hear from Stripe CEO directly.
- staunch 4y agoThey're paying severance, bonus, healthcare, etc which is the only way to do an ethical layoff. CEOs that wait until the last minute to do layoffs and then pay little to no severance are shitty people, and no one should trust to work for them ever again. CEOs that provide a softer landing for laid off employees should be rewarded by not having their reputations destroyed in the mind of current and prospective employees. It's a display of ethics and competence.
- dmazin 4y agoReading this letter, seems like they're also going to try to cut cloud costs. A consultant who wanted to travel around companies and help them lower cloud costs could make a KILLING right now.
- pastor_bob 4y agoThey have almost 700 jobs listed on their careers page: https://stripe.com/jobs/search https://stripe.com/jobs/search Seems like a move to just dump some redundant people and blame the macro situation
- chipgap98 4y agoI'd wait a week or so to see how that changes. If you tell recruiting to pull down all of those job postings it kind of tips your hand that a big change is coming
- roflyear 4y agoMost interesting, is they seem to not care about the recent NYC law (see: https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/backend-engineer-enterprise-tax-product/4514175 https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/backend-engineer-enterprise-...), so yeah - they haven't updated this part of their business or paid much attention to it in a while. Likely, everyone has been busy with the layoffs.
- pastor_bob 4y agoWell this is their response to the CO law: >For candidates or potential candidates based in Colorado, please reach out to colorado-wages@stripe.com to request compensation and benefits information regarding particular roles. Please include the city in Colorado where you reside and the titles of the applicable roles and/or links to the roles along with your request. which seems to be a violation of the CO law[0]: >Effective January 1, 2021, Part 2 of the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, C.R.S. § 8-5-101 et seq., requires employers to include compensation in job postings So I doubt they care either way. I'm guessing they'll pursue a similar strategy if challenged. [0] https://cdle.colorado.gov/equalpaytransparency https://cdle.colorado.gov/equalpaytransparency
- pbiggar 4y ago- 14 weeks severance - 2022 bonus and PTO paid out - accelerated vesting - 6 months of healthcare. This is a phenomenal severance package and I hope one that will set the standard for companies doing layoffs. So many companies in the US do two weeks or less, with nothing else (not even healthcare) or even use it to claw back shares.
- donmb 4y agoJust some pre IPO moves.. leading to more productivity and revenues.
- dabeeeenster 4y agoGrew tx volume 3x since the pandemic, but using the macro environment as an excuse to shave the bottom 14%. Just come out and say it.
- lefstathiou 4y agoI believe hyperscaling is a factor here. I don't see how a company can successfully multiply their head count and integrate thousands of employees a year (unless you're already at massive scale like Amazon). When it falters, you're stuck with swarms of confused employees who havent been trained / integrated / given meaningful work and who may not even be in the office due to WFH which is difficult to recover from [I am curious what % were WFH in the layoffs]. At that point, whether you're growing or not, it's tempting to just get them off your payroll and start anew, only more slowly this time.
- rboyd 4y agofirst one of these I’ve seen that included an alumni email account
- laweijfmvo 4y agowhat would be the purpose of this? sincerely hope it's not so they can reach out to former employees for free consulting
- saos 4y ago> we’re very sorry to be taking this step and John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it. Fair enough but this seems to be common line every CEO is going for the two years. The severance Stripe are offering is nice though.
- breck 4y ago1) Any Stripers looking for work we have plenty (https://publicdomaincompany.com/ https://publicdomaincompany.com/) and it's as meaningful as it gets. breck7@gmail.com or 1-415-937-1984 2) Saving this in case I ever need to tell a portfolio company how to do a layoff.
- ZachSaucier 4y agoAs someone who went through the process at Stripe, I recommend giving managers more awareness ahead of time and perhaps some forewarning to the company at large ahead of time
- arberx 4y agoSo many BS roles at all these companies. I imagine we see a lot more of this going into Q4 when next year's budgets are finalized.
- e_commerce 4y ago
- codazoda 4y ago> If you are among those impacted, you will receive a notification email within the next 15 minutes. That seems very cold.
- Nifty3929 4y agoLayoffs are not an indication of failure. Not on those who get laid off, those that remain, or senior leadership. The universe is a dynamic, changing place. People [should] move in and out of jobs and industries in response to those changes in the world. This is a good thing, and much better than blindly doing the same thing forever, in the face of changes. I don't know the specifics of Stripe's business at all, but they may have been correct to hire a lot early in the pandemic, and then correct again to lay off many people now.
- mooreds 4y ago> Layoffs are not an indication of failure. Not on those who get laid off, those that remain, or senior leadership. I appreciate the sentiment, but think it is hard to believe when you are in it. As someone who got laid off, it sure doesn't feel that way. I felt like a failure, and was angry. It took me about a year to get over it. I've also been part of the "go forward" group (to use the parlance of our times) and that is difficult in a different way. I missed coworkers and worried about the long term stability of the company. I've never been in a position to have to lay folks off, but have been in positions where reports departed. That's tough too. Hard all around.
- Nifty3929 4y agoAgreed! Sorry you had to go through that, both ways. It's super tough for those being laid off.
- mooreds 4y agoThanks. I ended up writing about my experience, which helped. https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/05/04/how-to-go-through-a-layoff/ https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/05/04/how-to-go-thro...
- pcthrowaway 4y agoOn the other hand, I've survived several layoffs in my tenure in the industry, and for at least one of those was pissed off that I wasn't one of the laid off (would have gladly taken a paid vacation when I was burnt out on the job anyway)
- jasmer 4y agoThis is the part I don't like. Stripe is a hugely successful company and they have no urgent material need to let people go. This is an optimization effort. I actually do believe that 'pruning' is a healthy thing for organizations, to enable them to be nimble and dynamic - however - obviously this comes at great social cost. The benefits of 'pruning' come at the cost of externalizing regular, creating real human challenges. One somewhat obvious solution might be to 'reallocate' people for a while, and have them do 'window dressing' (like in Japan) while this happens. Some would argue this doesn't get you to the pruning, because there needs to be an element of existential churn, but I suggest otherwise. At minimum, growing companies should 'find stuff' for people to do. Stripe is 100% looking to the future, there is no doubt, so maybe we can try to find a way to make this work on their future endeavours. I feel that the whole 'California' project elides the negatives: homelessness in Los Angeles has reached impossible levels, there always were enormous problems with equality at least partially due to lack of civil resources, adverse school funding etc.. This is not a 'model' to brag about. I think we can do better.
- p0pcult 4y ago[flagged]
- dang 4y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please avoid generic ideological battle especially - it just makes threads predictable, therefore boring and eventually nasty.
- rexreed 4y agoStripe stresses me out. I really cringe worrying about having too many financial eggs in the Stripe basket. But Paypal is no alternative and traditional CC processors are awful. How does one hedge their bets with Stripe? I worry one day we'll hit some transaction "trigger" and then all our money will get locked up in Stripe with no customer support recourse. I fear being "too successful" with no recourse if I depend on Stripe too much.
- onion2k 4y agoHow does one hedge their bets with Stripe? Build your business in a way that doesn't lock you into Stripe where it's reasonable to, and accept that it'll be painful in places where you can't. ...then all our money will get locked up in Stripe with no customer support recourse. Don't leave all your money in Stripe.
- throwaway2203 4y agoWhat's wrong with PayPal?
- rexreed 4y agoYou might want to read the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658
- arnvald 4y agoBeen there with Braintree. One day they told us “your company profile is too risky, we won’t serve you unless you keep a deposit of $x million with us. We couldn’t afford that, so we migrated to another provider and then diversified - we integrated Stripe, Adyen and later a few local providers and we were able to dynamically switch between them. It was a lot of effort, but it made us more resilient and independent
- neivin 4y agoMost large Stripe clients split traffic. It doesn't make sense to have Stripe be a single point of failure if you're processing enough volume.
- Kairinz 4y agoThey were honest and that goes a long way. Sad to read about this, but still what they do for the people they lay off is pretty impressive.
- adam_arthur 4y agoThe Fed is telling you as explicitly as they're allowed to that they'll induce a recession to halt inflation, yet many tech cos aren't getting the message and continue to hire frantically. Doing their new hires a disservice, when in many cases they'll likely have to be laid off within the year. Looking at big tech here, primarily
- thunkle 4y agoI work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We'll at least I'll get a break. I worked nights and weekends all of October.
- gaws 4y ago> I worked nights and weekends all of October. Just in October? Has this happened before?
- tasuki 4y ago> I worked nights and weekends all of October. Sorry to hear that. Why were you working nights and weekends?
- par 4y agoProbably because they were scared of losing their job and were being asked to work harder.
- memish 4y agoOr they are a self motivated high achiever.
- hanspeter 4y agoOr they have fun coding.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI have fun coding. I can't get out of work fast enough. Partly to do my own coding.
- hklgny 4y ago
- anonym29 4y agoI would like to offer some tips for those faced with the potential of layoffs that I have compiled. I understand much of these come too late for those already affected, but for those worried about the prospect, these can help to ease the pain if it does happen: • Check if your company pays out unused PTO, sick days, etc as cash. If they do, do not use any of the applicable type(s) unless you are going to lose it. • Have a LinkedIn, fill out all the fields, add 500+ random people in your field. Once you have done all this, you get ranked way higher in the algo for recruiters who are searching (you will be granted a visible "All-Star" status, so you will know when you've reached this). After that, go add every recruiter in your field/industry you can find (ideally 500+). Internal recruiters are better than external recruiters / headhunters, but don't neglect the headhunters, especially the "rockstar" ones from more prestigious staffing firms. Finally, add a bunch (500+) of people in your field (who you should now have mutuals with, via the recruiters). Always respond politely to all recruiters even if you're happily employed. Try to be friendly with them, not strictly professional. Build up a rolodex of recruiters. You now have a list of people you can ask for work if you do get laid off. Recruiter-sourced candidates have MUCH better odds of being hired than cold applicants, provided you're not a known name in your industry. If you do this, you'll be able to schedule 40+ interviews in about 3 days, which take place over the following week or two, if you really want to pack them together. • Don't neglect contract work completely. Many companies have a surprisingly large hiring pipeline of contract -> FTE, provided you do a good job. • How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie. • Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro, if you're in an enterprise / corporate environment.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoIt is far better to be a massive underperformer at three jobs than be a good employee at one. Layoffs that are large usually have nothing to do with performance as if they did, word would leak. This is why I feel no guilt over letting my teams down repeatedly. It doesn't matter unless you are bad enough to fire.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago> It is far better to be a massive underperformer at three jobs than be a good employee at one Can you explain this? Do you mean working three jobs at once?
- throwawaysleep 4y agoYes. Find three remote jobs. It is what I do.
- endtime 4y agoYou contribute to anti-remote work sentiment by doing this.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoIn a tragedy of the commons, one should race to exploit the commons.
- danbolt 4y agoWhat makes you feel that way?
- colinmhayes 4y agoprobably game theory
- higlen22 4y ago
- break_the_bank 4y agoIn addition to normal things that suck about layoffs another thing I don't like about the layoffs from Lyft, Coinbase and Stripe is their equity policy. All of them went from fixing the 4 year grant on day one to a fixed yearly dollar value making the # of units you get every year variable. Obviously this only applied to ICs and not directors. Stock goes up you get fewer units, stock goes down you get more units. They said this is to help the employee during a downtime, but during downtimes they just end up laying people off.
- Vervious 4y agoIs it mostly engineering or other roles being laid off?
- AlwaysRock 4y agoLet go of the most of the recruiting team and low performers. Prepping for an IPO?
- tannhauser23 4y ago6 months of health insurance is huge. Props to Stripes for offering that.
- hinkley 4y agoSituations like this are part of my thesis on scaling employees vertically. People get into growth mode and overhire and then have to lay off when the bill comes due. Or permanent attrition which is also stressful. Productivity improvement via expensive tools and training is easier to pull back from when you get to the end. It slows the headcount ramp, which resides the fishtailing at the end. Plus I just feel far better when I can say that the team can produce more functionality per month today than six months ago. Teams that slowly grind to a halt are one of my personal Hells.
- DogLover_ 4y agoGo to their job page: https://stripe.com/jobs/search https://stripe.com/jobs/search Almost 700 open roles right now...
- tasuki 4y agoI'm all for layoffs, but this is indeed extremely curious.
- blahblah123456 4y agoIs it? They probably just haven't had time to update it. Also a lot of times online job listings mean nothing. They are just left up even if they are not actively hiring.
- csharpminor 4y agoI think it is. Firing is horrendously expensive, so most companies will follow a progression of cuts before resorting to layoffs. They'll typically start with perks (e.g. travel / team entertainment / office space) and then progress to a hiring freeze, and then move to layoffs. In Stripe's instance it seems like they went directly to layoffs. I heard that they did institute a PIP process last year but not sure what percent they cut.
- daxfohl 4y agoIt says they laid off much of the recruiting team, so nobody is left to remove the listings.
- DogLover_ 4y agoMy problem is that they signal that they hire until this layoff. The responsible thing would be to not hire for the last couple of months.
- soheil 4y agoRemoving the bottom 14% is not the same as hiring another 14% closer to the median.
- jchonphoenix 4y agoStripe has barely trimmed their internal valuation. Their best public comp, Square, has lost 80% of it's market cap since the peak. Stripe on the other hand, has trimmed theirs 22%. The people most hurt by this are employees at refresher and offer time given their yearly vest schedule.
- poorman 4y agoAny Java engineers that want to work on a blockchain, I'm hiring... https://swirldslabs.com/careers/ https://swirldslabs.com/careers/
- aliqot 4y agoGuys.. There's no Edwin on this post :(
- mandeepj 4y ago
- IChooseY0u 4y agoSounds like they are being more than reasonable. > 14 weeks of severance for all departing employees > will pay our 2022 annual bonus for all departing employees, regardless of their departure date > 6 months of existing healthcare premiums or healthcare continuation
- Knufferlbert 4y agoI make mistakes all the time as a developer, I would hate to be fired for them and if I would, I would never claim responsibility. And that's why I don't get how people expect directors/managers to be infallible. Taking responsibility isn't about walking away from the job, but learning from it and making it right. Whether that is done well in this case, I don't know, but that wasn't your point. As far as I can tell they got pretty decent severance packages.
- anm89 4y agoYeah, so you're going to go march in there and do something? What exactly are you proposing here? It's a layoff. It happens. It's ironically a sign of them being good executives and doing what they need to do to keep their company viable so they can keep the ship running going forward for the remaining sustainable head count.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- InCityDreams 4y agoApparently it's not a layoff until the eighth paragraph.
- tschellenbach 4y agoAnyone else think that Meta will be next?
- laweijfmvo 4y agoNo, not next; "eventually," maybe. I think they are still holding out hope that the ~15% they'd like to layoff will "self-select," and I fully expect them to send those people a message next perf cycle.
- pugio 4y agoRandom shot here, but I work for a non profit interested in building a better kind of education (focused on programming, ml, and data science). We've been having a hard time figuring out how to hire qualified people to build top-notch educational content because we pay less than industry rates. The upside is that we do meaningful work, have good health care, decent pay, good work environment, (edit: also fully remote-able), and job stability (we're funded by philanthropists and don't need to make a profit). If anyone hit by the recent layoffs is passionate about good education and would like a change of pace, feel free to email me (address in profile) to start a conversation.
- dimitrios1 4y agoI think most of us graybeards here might agree that a focus on STEM, and programming particularly, is not in any way shape or form a better education. The treatment of the humanities as "lesser" has been catastrophic, in my opinion.
- pugio 4y agoI didn't mean that "a better education is one which focuses on programming". We'd like to improve education across the board, but have chosen to focus our efforts on STEM topics at the moment. Humanities are by no means lesser, they're just not what we're focused on, presently. (Also, a really good humanities education probably looks very different from a really good STEM education setup. Different challenges, different problems to solve, at least initially.)
- selfmodruntime 4y agoHave you considered hiring outside of the US?
- irrational 4y ago> to build top-notch educational content I'm confused as to whether you are looking to hire Instructional Designers (who probably have a masters degree in educational/instructional psychology) to design/build educational content, or if you are looking for programmers to build the learning management system (LMS) to host the content the Instructional Designers are building. Or... maybe you are looking for programmers to be subject matter experts for the Instructional Designers? I sure hope you are not trying to get programmers to design and build top-notch educational content. That's like asking a programmer to also do the work of a graphic designer. They are two entirely different skill sets.
- bijection 4y agoWe’re hiring frontendy full stack engineers here at Farallon capital, located in the SF Financial district. If you’re departing Stripe and looking for new opportunities drop me a line at gw@farcap.com
- abeppu 4y agoI know this isn't new or unique to Stripe, but the language used in these announcements to distance leadership from their choices is always so slimy. "We're not 'firing' or 'terminating' anyone; some people are just 'impacted' by our announcement that we have to 'say goodbye'." It makes repeated mentions of those who are "leaving" (the subject is the former employee) and avoids active verbs where the founders are the subjects. Not "we're terminating", "we're laying off", etc. Even the first statement taking responsibility covers the "decisions leading up to [this step]", rather than the step/mass layoff itself.
- hikingsimulator 4y agoIt echoes the shift from "Personnel" to "Human Resources " to "Talent Acquisitions."
- radu_floricica 4y agoNo offence, but they're not putting anybody in the electric chair. They're letting people go with pay until almost March - if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, and maybe they weren't wrong to give you up. A dynamic job market includes hiring and firings. At most they have to apologize for some disruption, and they more than made up for that with the severance packages. And about the language - "fire" has a connotation of it being your fault. Being terminated or let go suggests a business decision first, and your performance second. They used the right word.
- jgoodhcg 4y ago4 months is relatively generous but... > if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, This statement feels _wrong_. We are all subject to macro trends that we don't have control over. They impact our lives. Even the well off tech people but especially people in other industries.
- verst 4y agoGood luck finding a job in this economy now. It's tough for everyone, even the most skilled. Many companies have outright hiring freezes. I just read that Amazon now has a hiring freeze for all corporate jobs, previously this only impacted retail, stores etc
- bogomipz 4y ago>"Earlier today, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison sent the following note to Stripe employees." >"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date. We’re reducing the size of our team by around 14% and saying goodbye to many talented Stripes in the process" We are "reducing the size of our team" and "saying goodbye"? I'm of the opinion that words matter and more so when they are from the company CEO. Is there some reason why a CEO who is "announcing the hardest change we have had make" is unable to use the language that reflects the reality? Can the person who is paid the big bucks to make the big decisions really not bring himself to use the word "layoff" in announcing layoffs? Is he really that cowardly? A CEO is supposed to be a leader. It takes him 8 paragraphs before he uses the actual word "layoff."
- jupp0r 4y agoGlad to see that Stripe has a pretty good package for the laid off employees. This is the right way to do this and I imagine the vast majority of people laid off will be able to find new jobs fast and pocket some of the severance pay.
- StopHammoTime 4y agoHow come CEOs never get fired during layoffs? Laying off this much of the workforce is an indicator they have done their job poorly (I.e. failed to adequately forecast industry trends and demand). Any normal plebeian would be out the door in two minutes if they did something similar.
- friedman23 4y agoWhen the CEO is the majority shareholder of a company it's a different calculus. Shareholders and the board are the two entities that can hold CEOs accountable. If they are one and the same nobody can hold the CEO accountable except customers via boycott.
- schemester 4y agoYou are describing a static, failing company’s CEO. If you never overextend, you were too conservative and weren’t making the best decisions.
- coayer 4y agoGodspeed to any other college seniors looking for new grad roles! What a nightmare of a time to graduate.
- testemailfordg2 4y agoI am suddenly seeing articles about multiple US tech companies doing layoffs / pausing hiring on HN as well, not sure why and how all this relates....Has global recession started???
- extheat 4y ago> Has global recession started Long ago. It's going to get worse before it gets any better, IMO. Companies have to be forward looking, not backward or just present looking. If there's tough times ahead, you want to be ahead of, not behind market headwinds.
- gzer0 4y ago* Severance pay. We will pay 14 weeks of severance for all departing employees, and more for those with longer tenure. That is, those departing will be paid until at least February 21st 2023. * Bonus. We will pay our 2022 annual bonus for all departing employees, regardless of their departure date. (It will be prorated for people hired in 2022.) * PTO. We’ll pay for all unused PTO time (including in regions where that’s not legally required). * Healthcare. We’ll pay the cash equivalent of 6 months of existing healthcare premiums or healthcare continuation. * RSU vesting. We’ll accelerate everyone who has already reached their one-year vesting cliff to the February 2023 vesting date (or longer, depending on departure date). For those who haven’t reached their vesting cliffs, we'll waive the cliff. While layoffs in general suck, the terms of this one are quite substantially better than many other companies.
- udev 4y agoMakes sense. There is an expectation that they might want to welcome some of these people back at some point.
- system2 4y agoWould anyone go back and work at an office where they were laid off?
- geuis 4y agoSure, depending on the circumstances. Had a friend just start back at a company in a different city after leaving for a couple years. He left mainly because of a bad manager the first time. That wasn't being laid off, but it's similar. Sometimes companies need to do layoffs to survive, or they merged and have duplicate roles. Lots of reasons. It makes sense to take care of good talent that have to be let go in case they come back later.
- baq 4y agoleaving on your own terms is most definitely not being laid off. not even close.
- jcadam 4y ago
- alexknowshtml 4y agoWhy?
- slantedview 4y agoShe's actually great.
- dmix 4y agoNew Zealand gets the unfortunate legacy of having to share the "zero COVID" mantra with a small group of fellow partners like China (which the NZ PM promoted harder than any other leader via speaker circuits). But otherwise I don't know much about NZ to critique.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoZero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China. And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airborne Rabies strain (100% mortality) are going to require a rapid, whole-of-society response to shut it down. If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked.
- Open-Sourcery 4y agoPretty much everyone here lives in dense areas like the rest of the world. Limited entry points probably helped though, and being small more to do with faster, more regional decisions rather than the China way of there is COVID? Lock everything down.
- dmix 4y ago> Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China. So why doesn't Japan and Sri Lanka and Hong Kong and Taiwan and every island Caribbean/Pacific nation not have limited zero-COVID policies right now? It works right? The data shows Delta is still kicking. At least be honest they made a very serious gamble with their citizen's freedoms, the economic well being of the poor, and the livelihood of small businesses and it didn't work. And every time a compromise is made in the future it will be easier to make the second time. You can argue it might have worked, people were scared, they were working with limited information, the media cheered them on for acting boldly, etc, etc. But that's how we evolve. We learn from mistakes. Which is critically important for discourse going forward.
- throway20221103 4y agoThrowaway because of obvious reasons, This process as Stripe reads as exceptionally cold and distanced to me. There's an ongoing downsizing at my workplace as well right now, and it's going a little like this: * Change in strategy and its consequences announced together in all-hands * Company strategy changed to focus less on rapid growth (something we'd been structured for) due to major changes in capital markets * All personnell changes are made directly to support and enable this change in strategy * No departures outside of C-suite had been determined at the point of announcement * Immediately after announcement, groups of teams gathered in breakout sessions to learn of changes to their structure * All changes are based on roles and not specific individuals * Everyone gets to be considered for new roles if their existing role changes, or if they wish to change roles * New managers to be decided about one week after announcement * Changes to IC positions to be determined within two weeks after that * Nobody will get a notice before a consultation meeting * HR and leadership are holding all-hands about every third day during the process, for QA and updates -- Mass layoffs by email just seems so immensely inhuman by this comparison. I wish everyone leaving Stripe as part of this all the best, and I hope you find great and inspiring opportunities <3 EDIT: Formatting
- striper123 4y agoI just went through it and I think they did it properly. Effectively the process went like this: At 9am PST we received the email, a minute or 2 later we received another email, "If your role is being impacted you will receive an email in the next 15 minutes." Then, 15 minutes later, we received another email "If you haven't received an email, you haven't been impacted." There was only 15 minutes of uncertainty for everybody. It felt well considered. Cold, maybe, but quick.
- likeabbas 4y agoI was impacted in a different manner. A small group of people were logged out of everything, including email, around 8am ET. This was before Patrick’s email went out. I thought I wasn’t going to get to say goodbye to my coworkers. It was not fun.
- musha68k 4y agoLooking forward to the released creativity though. Remember: especially when getting laid off in tech - eventually this will commonly be very good for personal growth. Lots of opportunities in the coming downturn as in full tandem with ever-ongoing neoliberal capitalism: software is still eating the world. Don’t be sad. Take the ticket - and maybe do something that’s more interesting / pressingly needed than… payment processing… The world is literally on fire, you are smart and hard working why not do something about that instead?
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago> Remember: especially when getting laid off in tech - eventually this will commonly be very good for personal growth. Lots of opportunities in the coming downturn as in full tandem with ever-ongoing neoliberal capitalism: software is still eating the world. This is true when you don't have a family to support and/or have a second more reliable income, but it is extremely stressful if you don't have a decent cushion and have responsibilities. I mean, you are partially right, but it depends on the situation.
- musha68k 4y agoIt always does, I agree. Then again most people in that cohort probably have the corresponding level of financial means / literacy [to have a cushion]. Either way just read above that in this case specifically the severance seems generous enough. I’m not worried for the typical stripe worker here. This will be good for them if they don’t get bogged down by shock / sadness.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoEven if you have a couple of years saved up, being out of work can put a damper on your plans quickly. It means your spouse's job is especially important for health insurance (in the states), and that is assuming they have a job already. If you were looking to buy a house soon, those plans just got cancelled, and if you just spent a lot of your cushion on a down payment (with the intention of rebuilding your cushion), things could be tight for awhile. This is true even for a FAANG or Stripe employee. Also, being laid off usually means being in a down economy where not much hiring is going on, so recovery takes longer.
- benreesman 4y agoStripe is a great company. I interviewed there once and they passed, and I still think it’s a great company. Pat Collison is one of the great hackers of our age, and he embodied the YC motto better than most: “Make something that people want.” I’m sure the cuts are painful, but as a person who is quite literally bereaved: life goes on, and Stripe will still be a great company 5 or 10 years from now.
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoI guess Thursday is better than Friday but do things like this in the beginning of the week. It's custom.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonny_eh 4y ago> we’ll be supporting transitions to non-employment visas wherever we can. wtf is that even?
- anoojb 4y agoI wonder how many of those let go have options that need to get exercised with some sort of tax consequences? Not only is it psychologically disorienting, but now it's financially taxing...literally. Yikes
- maerF0x0 4y agoAs a general comment about fears of layoffs and being rehired. Keep in mind the scale of these layoffs vs jobs reports. Sep Jobs report 263000[1] jobs added. The layoffs this year (according to layoffs.fyi) are about 195000-- less than a single month's added. Yes they're not the same job, yes they're likely at a lower total comp. But we're not talking about everyone having No job like in the great depression. We're talking about people having to shift into the sectors that are growing and maybe tighten up their budgets. Now, as for where my real concern is imagine making even $15 an hour and finding out that necessities[2] are outpacing your already pay check to pay check life? I really feel for those folks who didn't over leverage themselves and are suffering despite working full time. Remember that fear is a tool the capital class uses as leverage against those without options (or who believe they dont have options). Things like getting you to accept lower pay than they know they can offer, scaring you to take on excess load so they can fire your friends, and controlling the narrative and getting in front of it so they can profit when the masses shift sentiment. Focus on making yourself independent, resilient, and generally informed, and you'll have far more negotiating power. [1]: https://blog.dol.gov/2022/10/07/september-2022-jobs-report-strong-and-steady https://blog.dol.gov/2022/10/07/september-2022-jobs-report-s... [2]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/consumer-prices-up-9-1-percent-over-the-year-ended-june-2022-largest-increase-in-40-years.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/consumer-prices-up-9-1-per... eg Fuel to get to work is up 40% .
- wanderingmind 4y agoThe hypocrisy of HN is mindblowing. I have seen thread after thread people vouching they won't hire candidates who jump multiple times to optimize their paycheck and benefits, but have no problem with mass layoffs in name of optimisation. You can't have two different scales for the two sides.
- schemester 4y agoBoth are instances of trying to get the best deal, just as employees do when negotiating salary, so there isn’t anything hypocritical there.
- wanderingmind 4y agoThe shaming of employees when they jump multiple times while simultaneously celebrating companies doing mass layoff is the textbook definition of hypocrisy.
- schemester 4y agoWhat shaming? A candidate likely to job-hop is just less valuable.
- neilparikh 4y agoAre we reading the same thread? I see tons of comments here criticizing Stripe for this layoff.
- hsuduebc2 4y agoDoes anyone in which fields these layoffs usually are? Probably mostly support/marketing right?
- jongjong 4y agoAll these companies have way more employees than they need. 90% of employees mostly add complexity and the remaining 10% spend most of their time trying to refactor all the unnecessary complexity. So I'm not surprised by this. I hope these layoffs will be good for the industry as ex-employees join competitors... Maybe in such competitive environment, people will care about writing maintainable code again. The effects of the corporate employment bloat are visible all around us.
- DeathArrow 4y agoWell, people used to think that working for large companies is safer as they can whither economic downturns with more ease. It seems that that doesn't matter since they are going to optimize for profit and cut costs if needed.
- DeathArrow 4y agoIn many EU countries if you are fired without being your fault or there is a mass lay-off, the law demands the company pays you some compensation. The law also demands the company to give you a notice period, so you are able to find another employment. It seems many people are woved because Stripe has the generosity of granting severance pay to people they laid off. It doesn't seem like a generosity to me, it's more PR on one hand and on the other hand they want the developers good will if there is going to be a market growth in the near future and they will go again on a hiring spree. It's Stripe's management fault they did wrong calculations betting on explosive growth, going on a hiring spree to support that falsely accounted growth and the going to fire some hard working fault. But somehow they manage to turn this into a PR success and painting their mess as a win. It's not a win, it's a loss. And I would think twice before applying to Stripe in the future.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoSpeaking of layoffs: Meta needs to layoff 12% because they hired a lot of non-value-add, low-skilled, nontechnical employees just to meet DEI goals. They hangout in vast, empty offices and chat like they're on vacation and have nothing better to do. It's difficult to tell what most people do because they hired way too many people too fast without a clear understanding of how they're supposed to map to building the business. They need to cut 80% of building leases and 50% of CapEx spend too.
- iwiser 4y agoFolks from Stipe and other companies! I know that layoffs are brutal. We are primarily at tech-winter. At the same time, we, Wise (formerly TransferWise) - actively looking for engineers, product managers, and engineering managers, designers. Many roles are open, and we are growing quite a lot! We have a product our customers love, and we care about our employees a lot! We are pretty good financially and have a clear vision of which one we are executing. If you are interested - you can browse the list of open roles here: https://grnh.se/1f3d39a91us https://grnh.se/1f3d39a91us and apply for them. You can write me directly, and I will try to answer anything as much as possible.
- sidcool 4y agoThey way Stripe is handling this is orders of magnitude better than how Twitter will do. Elon once said something along the lines of "It's not just important how smart one is, but also how good a person they are". So far I see he's handling it poorly.