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I just got laid off from Stripe on Thursday. Our team was up to it's neck with work that needed to be done. Other teams as well we're in disparate need of more

I just got laid off from Stripe on Thursday. Our team was up to it's neck with work that needed to be done. Other teams as well we're in disparate need of more engineers. They didn't do layoffs because they had excess employees, it was because they wanted to reduce run rate in the face of uncertainty.

Temporary_31337 4y ago
I wonder if you are at liberty to write about the type of work you were doing? Looking from a far it’s hard to see such incremental changes and I wonder how will that affect Stripes future capabilities
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I think your post highlights a good point. The article talks about needing "OSS maintainers", but of course OSS isn't really a thing you sell for money (yes, I know in the broader sense people have tried business models around OSS, but nobody is paying for OpenSSL). It's entirely an economic problem, not a "too many" or "not enough" people problem. Sorry you got laid off. If anything, I felt like the Stripe layoffs we're a bit of a special case, because I've seen Stripe churn out tons of useful new features and functionality over the past couple years, in contrast to some of the other tech layoffs where the companies seem like they've been treading water for years.
- pabs3 4y ago
  OpenSSL absolutely does get paid, but not for access to the code itself, only donations and support contracts: https://www.openssl.org/support/ https://www.openssl.org/support/
hectorlorenzo 4y ago
Sorry to hear that, best of luck looking for a new job. I hope the following comment does not come off as offensive. Do you think that this work that had to be done was business critical? My experience while working at FAANGs is that everyone was working a lot but a sizable number of projects were vanity/promotion/keep-em-distracted projects. People imagine overstaffed companies as full of idle engineers but I've seen instances of very busy overstaffed companies working on the wrong projects (migrating to Go because, using Protobuffs for a simple eCommerce API that does not need it, creating a component library for a small internal tool that will not grow much, building your own chat system, etc).
- jupp0r 4y ago
  If you think this point further though: does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged? Apparently cash flow supports companies to have these dev teams on staff, what if they worked on something that was a good investment of their time? Being overstaffed would mean that there was no way for companies to create more revenue by investing more in the right areas and I think this is a fallacy. The world is still so mindblowingly analog and inefficient in so many places that I don't think software is done eating the world yet.
  - hectorlorenzo 4y ago
    > does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged? Good point. The end result is the same: inefficient allocation of resources that could pass for productivity. Weird incentives at the management level.
    - tompt 4y ago
      The results may look similar, but they call for very different responses. Firing productive engineers isn't going to fix managers whose vision is not aligned with business needs.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        This is the part the really got to me once I started to realize that my contributions started really impact a team in a positive way, but the vast benefit of that impact was bestowed upon the manager. More annoyingly, even when the manager was poor ( and, I do not understand why, there seem to be a lot of those around ), the blame was always that of underlings. I was under clearly deluded impression that leaders gets blame and glory. In my corporate life, I saw total of two exceptions to that rule ( now and my previous boss ).
        jupp0r 4y ago
        That's the exact opposite of what a good manager would do. They'd take the blame for things that go wrong and credit the team for everything good that was accomplished. They'd be an advocate for their team and their reports individually. I've been fortunate to work with a few of those managers and they've been the ones that have been really successful long term. Keep searching or take the management route yourself and show them. It's very rewarding!
commandlinefan 4y ago
I've hit that (inevitable, apparently) point as an "IC" with my current employer where I'm so "indispensable" that I'm a required participant in at least 8 hours of meetings a day, which means that it's more or less impossible to meet whatever low-trust gamification metrics like LOC committed or # bugs fixed have been put in place by hands-off upper management. My direct boss knows and appreciates what I do, but when Elon buys the company, he'll just be looking at a spreadsheet that I'll look terrible on BECAUSE I'm good at what I do.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Temporary_31337 4y ago

I wonder if you are at liberty to write about the type of work you were doing? Looking from a far it’s hard to see such incremental changes and I wonder how will that affect Stripes future capabilities

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I think your post highlights a good point. The article talks about needing "OSS maintainers", but of course OSS isn't really a thing you sell for money (yes, I know in the broader sense people have tried business models around OSS, but nobody is paying for OpenSSL). It's entirely an economic problem, not a "too many" or "not enough" people problem. Sorry you got laid off. If anything, I felt like the Stripe layoffs we're a bit of a special case, because I've seen Stripe churn out tons of useful new features and functionality over the past couple years, in contrast to some of the other tech layoffs where the companies seem like they've been treading water for years.

pabs3 4y ago
OpenSSL absolutely does get paid, but not for access to the code itself, only donations and support contracts: https://www.openssl.org/support/ https://www.openssl.org/support/

hectorlorenzo 4y ago

Sorry to hear that, best of luck looking for a new job. I hope the following comment does not come off as offensive. Do you think that this work that had to be done was business critical? My experience while working at FAANGs is that everyone was working a lot but a sizable number of projects were vanity/promotion/keep-em-distracted projects. People imagine overstaffed companies as full of idle engineers but I've seen instances of very busy overstaffed companies working on the wrong projects (migrating to Go because, using Protobuffs for a simple eCommerce API that does not need it, creating a component library for a small internal tool that will not grow much, building your own chat system, etc).

jupp0r 4y ago
If you think this point further though: does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged? Apparently cash flow supports companies to have these dev teams on staff, what if they worked on something that was a good investment of their time? Being overstaffed would mean that there was no way for companies to create more revenue by investing more in the right areas and I think this is a fallacy. The world is still so mindblowingly analog and inefficient in so many places that I don't think software is done eating the world yet.
- hectorlorenzo 4y ago
  > does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged? Good point. The end result is the same: inefficient allocation of resources that could pass for productivity. Weird incentives at the management level.
  - tompt 4y ago
    The results may look similar, but they call for very different responses. Firing productive engineers isn't going to fix managers whose vision is not aligned with business needs.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      This is the part the really got to me once I started to realize that my contributions started really impact a team in a positive way, but the vast benefit of that impact was bestowed upon the manager. More annoyingly, even when the manager was poor ( and, I do not understand why, there seem to be a lot of those around ), the blame was always that of underlings. I was under clearly deluded impression that leaders gets blame and glory. In my corporate life, I saw total of two exceptions to that rule ( now and my previous boss ).
      - jupp0r 4y ago
        That's the exact opposite of what a good manager would do. They'd take the blame for things that go wrong and credit the team for everything good that was accomplished. They'd be an advocate for their team and their reports individually. I've been fortunate to work with a few of those managers and they've been the ones that have been really successful long term. Keep searching or take the management route yourself and show them. It's very rewarding!

commandlinefan 4y ago

I've hit that (inevitable, apparently) point as an "IC" with my current employer where I'm so "indispensable" that I'm a required participant in at least 8 hours of meetings a day, which means that it's more or less impossible to meet whatever low-trust gamification metrics like LOC committed or # bugs fixed have been put in place by hands-off upper management. My direct boss knows and appreciates what I do, but when Elon buys the company, he'll just be looking at a spreadsheet that I'll look terrible on BECAUSE I'm good at what I do.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]