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Wayfair is laying off 1,750 workers
- FlyingSnake 4y agohttps://archive.ph/l85GP https://archive.ph/l85GP
- bamboozled 4y agoIt would be cool if we could have a dedicated section of hacker news or something for these announcements? Like, who cares? What about a weekly "Who's firing" thread instead ? Edit: I'm actually sorry for people who've lost their jobs and are negatively impacted by this, but HN is going to get pretty lame if it's just page after page of layoff announcements for the entire recession period.
- drstewart 4y agoYeah, this is getting a bit fearpornish. Shunt it off to somewhere else at this point.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago"Sucks that you got let go, but I don't like reading about these things so let's throw your misery and sorrow into an incinerator so I don't have to see it"
- drstewart 4y agoI bet approximately 0 people are using whether links to their company's layoffs have been posted on HN as a coping mechanism.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoI'm sure that people who have been affected, whether by a specific company mentioned or otherwise, will appreciate reading the comments in the layoff threads such as those talking about employee's worth. What they probably don't appreciate reading is people moaning about having to spend a second reading about yet another layoff. To say that nobody who has ever been laid off has gotten some amount of coping value from the threads is as asinine as declaring they need to be abolished to the deep dark pits of HN. These are people's lives we're talking about. Any amount of positive energy is going to be immediately taken when your life has been upended.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI think the parent may be missing the trees for the forest here. I am not going to dismiss 'misery loves company' take, because there is a solid psychological basis for it. I certainly would not put it at zero. Still, I think one somewhat unspoken reason for some of those posts is to indicate something along the lines of: 'hey. i was affected. i am available for x if you need me' I am not going to give any specifics, but I know when me and my colleagues went through rounds of layoffs and this kind of informal job search helps to help one gain ground.
- drstewart 4y agoSo by the same token, there are people without jobs that get anxiety by seeing additional layoffs and getting concerned about their prospects. Do they not deserve sympathy?
- mynameisvlad 4y agoYou didn't really show concern for them the last two comments. I might believe it were genuine had it been the argument you led with instead of complaining about it being "fearpornish". And if anything, they'd be the most emphatic towards those laid off.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoIf there are really going to be that many layoffs, then it seems like an important thing to be covering. Maybe with a weekly roundup, though, like you suggest.
- xnorswap 4y agoIs it important? It's news, but as the guidelines suggest, "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic". The earliest and biggest lay-offs fall under the criteria of "new phenomenon", but posting every company stretches that credibility. "Hacker news" is different to "Tech news", and hopefully the voting will reflect that difference and these
- otoburb 4y ago>>Like, who cares? The HN voting mechanism suggests that some HNers care enough to upvote these types of announcements to the front page.
- FlyingSnake 4y agoThere's https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi which tracks these layoffs. Edit: corrected the link
- locopati 4y agoNobody's forcing you to read them. Or... is someone forcing you to read them? Are you in need of help? Reply with an innocuous emoji if it's not safe to be direct.
- bamboozled 4y agoWell, no one is forcing people to post this on HN either. If people posted well written articles backed by solid journalism and presented statistics and analysis about the cause of the majority of these lays offs then it would be interesting to read and intellectual, IMO it would fit in better with the "theme" of HN. I don't think these articles have a place on the "Hacker news", maybe in the financial review? Honestly, what's the motive for posting these things one after the other? Is it to help signal some type of financial meltdown, so we feel sympathetic and know "company x" is bad, I just don't really understand why it's interesting to read about or relevant to this community. Wayfair, like many of these firms, aggressively added staff during the pandemic to expand its warehouse operations and customer-service teams. It had 16,681 full-time equivalent employees as of the end of 2021, up from 12,100 at the end of 2018. Its customer-service staff roughly doubled over that period to about 4,900 people, according to company filings. So it's pretty clear to see what happened here, a furniture company hired like crazy to meet the surge in demand for WFH furniture and now, demand has slowed and doesn't really need so many people, is that a surprise ? I feel people must enjoy upvoting these titles because it's a bit dramatic, else there is nothing else interesting to read in that article.
- ethanbond 4y agoUsually people who are on an industry news site are trying to keep a pulse on the industry. Mass layoffs are an important part of that pulse and layoff after layoff after layoff makes it a bigger part of the story, not a smaller one. Downvote it and move on if you don’t like it.
- bamboozled 4y agoWayfair is a furniture reseller, what industry are you referring too?
- acheron 4y agoI'm pretty sure I've seen a Who's Firing thread before. Agree a regular one like that would be better.
- kyleee 4y agoInteresting; there could be a standardized format for the terms of the layoff too similar to the hiring threads
- tryagainynot 4y agoConsidering that currently Hacker News is page after page of ChatGPT, I think this is an improvement.
- bamboozled 4y agoVery true.
- forgotusername6 4y agoFor a moment I thought you were referring to the comments being AI generated. Who knows, perhaps many of them are.
- rabuse 4y agoMan... HN is full of doomscrolling today with all the layoff articles.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago"Engineers over the age of 50 sent to a farm in upstate New York to live out the rest their days in peace"
- JshWright 4y agoLucky for me, I'm already up here! (I've got a little over a decade to go before hitting the 50 milestone, but I figured I'd beat the rush)
- tjr225 4y ago[dead]
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoCongrats! It's beautiful up there. You're doing it right [=
- berkle4455 4y agoIndeed I believe that's the goal of FIRE.
- sph 4y agoWhere do I sign? No, I swear I'm in my 50s. I just have a youthful appearance.
- jgalt212 4y agoThose are the lucky ones. Others are just put on an ice floe.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ecf 4y agoHow about weekly articles about companies who aren’t doing layoffs to celebrate them?
- csours 4y agoThere is a tiger in the forest, and it might be stalking me. It's gotten some of my friends, and I might be next. No emotion is forever, there are brighter days ahead. edit: I should be clear that I am fine. I am not affected by layoffs, I do not currently have persistent negative emotions. If you do, it is appropriate and good to find help.
- xnx 4y agoAre layoffs at a furniture reseller something hackers find interesting?
- ethanbond 4y agoThat’s like asking whether layoffs at “a bookstore” are interesting
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hideo 4y agoWayfair is a major player in e-commerce and a very "tech heavy" place. They offer work and salaries that are highly competitive outside of the FAANG bubble. Chewy is another similar company that people often disregard. E-commerce players in specific verticals (furniture and pet supplies, respectively) are large. We just don't see them because of the absolute fucking behemoth that's Amazon.
- robofanatic 4y agoI assume a lot of the people affected are probably from their tech department. wondering how this was missed. or may didn't get much traction on HN https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-tech-positions-source-2023-01-19/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-t...
- rchaud 4y agoYes, as it should. Most of what passes for 'tech' is a snazzy UI over low-margin services like dropshipping, food delivery and short term sublets. The ax is swinging at a number of them. Besides that, Wayfair shares the same 5-10 benefactors whose cash has been holding up numerous unviable companies.
- jsf01 4y agoTheir lack of success might not be entirely pandemic economy driven as the article suggests. I was part of that cohort that discovered and ordered from Wayfair around the start of the pandemic. In 3/3 cases, what I ordered turned out to be of poor quality and slightly different from what was pictured on their website. I’ve had this experience with Amazon and other platforms from time to time, too, but never so consistently. So I decided not to order from there again. I have to wonder if their declining popularity is just a result of other customers like myself having been burned too many times.
- UseStrict 4y agoSame experience. Poor quality items, confusing dupes with different prices, not particularly cheap compared to other retailers. That said, their customer service was great, likely at great expense to them. Often they would replace an incorrect item without requesting the original be returned, and in one case they shipped a family member the wrong item 3 times before finally sending the correct item. They were told to keep all 4 items.
- fatnoah 4y agoDamage and returns are a huge cost for the company, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.
- leeches 4y agoSame here. First time order, and it was poor quality so I requested a return. They refunded and didn’t even want it back. It was $200 but I guess they knew it was junk and not worth the shipping.
- gertrunde 4y agoWhile I've browsed around Wayfair in the past, I was mostly put off by the way that there usually seem to be a lot of identical items from different manufacturers - which always gave it a somewhat unscrupulous feel.
- 4y ago
- robofanatic 4y agowow! one little website is busy these days https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- berelig 4y ago20 days into the new year and there have already been more than 1/3 of 2022's total layoffs. Admittedly most of those have come from a handful of large companies.
- mandeepj 4y agoIt's their 3rd layoff in the last two years. Last year, they were shouting from the roof about opening of three new engineering offices - Austin, SFO, and Toronto. I used to work there during 2019-2020, so I could say - No, you don't need these new offices. Not sure why their leadership took that step.