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Airtable lays off over 250
- mongol 4y agoBefore this week, I had not heard of no-code. Now I see it all the time, at least 3 different occassions. Weird
- Bishonen88 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- dboreham 4y agoIt's just the buzzword that's (relatively) new. The most famous skeptical comment about the movement came from a guy who died in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis
- snapcaster 4y agowhat was the comment?
- SahAssar 4y agoI'm guessing they are referring to > When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop. http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
- ketzo 4y ago> The layoff was announced internally alongside an executive departure. Airtable’s chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer have all parted ways with the company, effective today That's gotta be a little worrying, huh? Also, in the article, it mentions that "20% of staff were affected". That puts Airtable at ~1250 employees (pre-layoff). They raised $725 million in 2021. So this can't possibly be a cash crunch, right? Feels more like opportunistic restructuring - a chance to make some painful changes with the justification of "the economy."
- malfist 4y agoIsn't this what everyone is asking for? If you over hire and have to layoff people, heads should roll at the executive level for leading to this.
- treis 4y agoI think the GP's implication was that it's more like rats fleeing a sinking ship rather than heads rolling.
- cokeandpepsi 4y agodo you think they are going to fire themselves? lolol
- endtime 4y agoPeople complain when layoffs don't touch execs and ask where the accountability is. Maybe this is that? (That doesn't preclude it being worrying for the business.)
- atomicnumber3 4y agoPersonally I always wonder if it's less "laid off to face consequences" and more "the adverse selection post-layoff quitting where people with the most opportunity leave for greener pastures".
- jcollins1991 4y agointeresting how the chief people officer was able to leave twice in one day... linked article makes it clear that it was the chief product officer https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/08/airtable-chief-revenue-officer-chief-people-officer-and-chief-product-officer-are-out/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/08/airtable-chief-revenue-off...
- friedman23 4y agoChief people officer was repeated in the article before, they probably edited it.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoAirtable being valued at $11B is completely nuts. Sure it's kinda useful but the valuation was completely bonkers and I wouldn't be surprised if it hurts them down the road as they'll never really meet expectations a $11B valuation brings.
- adam_arthur 4y agoI’m waiting for Postman news to drop. Got into a discussion with one of their recruiters in 2021 about their absurd valuation, and boy did he try to spin a tale
- com2kid 4y agoHoly crap postman is valued at 5.6 billion? I... thought it was someone's hobby project. Maybe something ran by a tiny team. Why did they even take funding? Surely making a profit from the get go wasn't a challenge for them? It isn't like there is some huge growth opportunity for them outside of "gain more customers", and pretty much every developer in the world has known who they are for ages now.
- tyingq 4y agoTheir enterprise pricing is $99 per user, per month. Wow.
- anonygler 4y agoThe previous Chief Product Officer has a great background in consumer products... which is at odds with Airtable's focus on Enterprise SaaS.
- breck 4y agoPD.pub is hiring! All your work will be public domain. I am a huge fan of AirTable, but obviously think they've missed something huge: (see my talk "If spreadsheets and programming languages had a baby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k). We've got lots of exciting stuff coming out!
- myth_drannon 4y agoso now layoffs.fyi which is using Airtable can have a row with Airtable layoff record inside an Airtable table component.
- dangrossman 4y agoIt's the first row on their homepage now.
- retroam 4y agoI am actually surprised at how correlated layoffs have been across the industry. Is there a decaunicorn that went against the grain and did not accelerate hiring in the prior 2 years?
- plra 4y agoFTX
- gkoberger 4y agoYou're only hearing about layoffs from the companies doing layoffs. Companies like Apple haven't done layoffs. But the answer is mostly no. You don't become a worth $10Bn+ by being slow and steady. You grow fast when money is cheap and you hibernate when money is tight. (I don't agree with this way of building a company, but that's not the point.)
- dv_dt 4y agoCompany sets a mature hiring strategy and continues to employ previous hires doesn’t make the news. Or maybe “mature” is an uncalled for judgement. Company correctly forecasts hiring needs and business environment is maybe more correct.
- dboreham 4y agoTheir investors are either literally the same people, or subject to the same herd mentality.
- nicolashahn 4y agoWhen layoffs are common, a new one isn't news. It's a great time for companies to offload unproductive employees. If they did layoffs during a bull market it'd draw a lot of attention and negative PR.
- henryfjordan 4y agoSundar Pichai went on a big media tour saying it was time for tech layoffs. Investors on wall street think he knows what he's talking about so they went around to all the board meetings and VCs saying "Google is cutting costs, we need to be doing the same at our companies". You won't be able to raise money or look good on wall street if you don't look "fiscally responsible" right now and that means "making the hard choice to let people go". Nevermind that it's actually easier to let people go than to fight with the board who's been listing to Pichai quotes on MSNBC for the last few months.
- philip1209 4y agoI heard second-hand that Airtable was paying far over-market rates to hire engineers last year.
- friedman23 4y agohttps://www.levels.fyi/companies/airtable/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/airtable/salaries/software-... Median engineer was making $370k (of course half of that is pre-ipo RSUs)
- darkwizard42 4y agoThat seems about right if they were trying to compete against FAANG for low-mid range engineers. I think FAANG pays more, but this doesn't seem like an absurd comp number for 4-6 YOE.
- scarface74 4y agoIf you value equity in any non public company at $0 as I do and it’s true that only half the compensation was in cash, the $185K is far less than a mid range engineer at any FAANG
- darkwizard42 4y agoOkay, but if you are going to make that comparison, then why bother comparing trillion dollar profitable companies with a startup. The goal is to make people whole on paper. If you don't think that is appropriate for your needs, you don't have to apply or join!
- scarface74 4y agoI care about my compensation. I know working for a public company, every six months I get RSUs deposited in my brokerage account that I can (and do) immediately sell and diversify. How am I “made whole” by illiquid equity? In the case of a private company, I have no guarantee that my equity will ever be worth anything and I have to wait until an exit event. Yes I know that there are ways to sell options in private company if your company allows it and if there is a market for it. This again is unlike logging into Fidelity and selling my stocks the day they vest.
- alx__ 4y agoI wonder what their headcount was pre-pandemic. To me, it feels like companies that did well for the past 3 years have reduced their staff to 2019 levels
- paxys 4y agoLots of companies doing mass layoffs have barely even gone back to their 2020 headcount. The pandemic was a wild period of overhiring for all of tech.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- henryfjordan 4y agoLast time I was looking for a job I used Airtable to track all of the companies I was interested in, applications I made, interviews, and points of contact. It was a really nice experience. If you worked at Airtable, thank you for making a cool product. I hope it helps you in your job searches too!
- e28eta 4y agoThey yanked the “memo” on how to use airtable to look for a job, I’m getting 404: https://www.airtable.com/newsroom/company/widespread-layoffs-spur-a-new-way-to-job-search https://www.airtable.com/newsroom/company/widespread-layoffs... Also, pivoting to enterprise worries me as a end user who likes their free plan
- Napkin-com 4y agosad. i wonder if the layoffs are going to go beyond tech. retail is next, for sure. thoughts? people keep saying we won't have a big recession because tech is the ONLY sector that will have layoffs. I am doubtful of that statement.
- to11mtm 4y agoThe housing market is also seeing a downturn. Interest rates have gone up substantially this year, and companies in that sector are definitely feeling the burn.
- joshstrange 4y agoI mean I assume that retail is about as close to the bone as food service is currently, meaning there just isn't really anything to cut.
- teg4n_ 4y agoWhy would retail have layoffs? It’s not like stores are over staffed, at least any of the ones I frequent. If anything they are super understaffed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vjulian 4y agoI find Smartsheet to be a superior platform.
- JohnDeHope 4y agoI just wanted to say that I used AirTable recently to organize some complicated, but business-facing data, and it was awesome. I highly recommend it.
- flappyeagle 4y agoHow big was the data?
- s1k3 4y agoIs notion eating their lunch?
- anonygler 4y agoDefinitely not. Different products.
- anaganisk 4y agoNotion is very substandard in what it does to compete with airtable, or in other words, they do not compete at all. Airtable is spreadsheets on steroids. And notion has tables.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI haven't used Notion for 2 years, but in the many years preceding I did use it. It was extremely slow for large projects. The company I was with left to use Slite instead and it was worse. It was a major head scratcher. I don't know why they were slow or why their lunch hasn't been eaten by someone making a much faster, more capable, fluid experience. I imagine it's pretty hard. Even so, we found the experience way too frustrating to pay for it.
- christophepas 4y agoThanks for sharing! What was inferior about Slite (and when did you use it)? I’m working on it, would love to hear your takes, especially as in term of performance and speed we worked heavily this year and believe to have reached something superior to alternatives.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI used it about 1.5 years ago. I wish I had access to the issues I was going back and forth with your team on, but I no longer have access to that email account. One big thing we wanted was relationships. Perhaps we’d keep data in a table and some entries would link to another document. At the time, this wasn’t possible but I was told it was on the horizon/being considered. Otherwise we had issues with performance slow downs when we allowed documents to get very large. This was generally bearable, but we had some documents we didn’t want to break apart (for reasons), and opening them up became a little frustrating. They didn’t scroll well and editing them was laggy, for example. I trust your team has been working hard on it because it was very evident that the team cared a lot and was super attentive. I constantly worried I was being annoying, but I got quick, steady, and very gracious responses, always looking to provide useful information. Super positive experience in that regard!