26 ms·
Moving the Evernote center of operations to Europe
- sivadass 3y agoThe title could have been “Our Chile and US based employees are laid off”.
- bergeoisie 3y agoThe passive voice around laying off employees is always so gross. It didn't magically require you lay off those employees. Someone in your C-suite decided. Own it.
- foldr 3y agoMost of it's not technically in the passive voice (only 'be laid off' in the second paragraph).
- dangus 3y ago> In most cases, this package includes 16 weeks of salary, up to one year of health insurance coverage, and a performance bonus, paid pro-rata as if the year-end performance targets have already been achieved. Layoffs are amazing. Every layoff I’ve experienced has been a financial gain and reduction in my total workload. That’s the whole point of severance packages: to keep employees happy enough to not sue. And let me tell you, getting laid off is one of my favorite things. As long as my check clears, corporate PR can say whatever nonsense they want, nobody’s really listening to them anyway.
- JJMcJ 3y agoI've had zero severance or two weeks extra pay layoffs. Those are a lot less fun.
- mock-possum 3y agoWow every layoff I’ve experience has felt like a betrayal and has taken real time to get over, both emotionally and financially. You lucked out.
- ShakataGaNai 3y agoWow. That sucks. "Happy 4th of July. Hope you had a nice holiday... because you're all laid off"
- deafpolygon 3y agoJust a cost-cutting measurement - nothing to do with moving the Evernote center of operations. Business can be conducted globally.
- lamontcg 3y ago"Nobody who knows how Evernote runs is left with the company"
- thdespou 3y agoAaa Europe because it's cheaper to hire engineers is it?
- ElFitz 3y agoAnd because that’s where those who bought Evernote have always been located. Why bother with maintaining a US office, and the associated admin work?
- RamblingCTO 3y agoTimezones and wages make this a losing game and it actually prevents Evernote from growing imho
- dmode 3y agoEvernote is still around ?
- choas 3y agoBut they know that this isn't so easy in Europe: "[...] Evernote will need to allow a human review of your notes, and that’s not the only reason an employee would look at your notes." ... from 2016 https://lifehacker.com/evernote-employees-can-read-your-notes-and-theres-no-w-1790099958 https://lifehacker.com/evernote-employees-can-read-your-note...
- wodahs1 3y agowake me up when they fix the bug where pasting in a code block adds an unwanted newline
- dna_polymerase 3y ago> [..] to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe. What the fuck is Bending Spoons?
- ElFitz 3y agoI think they are overestimating their reputation. Basically an Italian app publisher with a weird over the top landing page: https://bendingspoons.com/ https://bendingspoons.com/
- prepend 3y agoI read this as a “we are loved in Belgium” kind of statement. No one knows bendingspoons. But they are European, so I guess they are slightly more known in Europe. This, of course, seems stupid to me as it’s not like work location corresponds to brand awareness. And this could be a reason to increase brand awareness, not give up. Just seems like stupid following more stupid. Or a decision is made for an unknown to us reason and they backed into an explanation. I think it’s better to just say nothing.
- rpgbr 3y agoDoes anyone know how many employees were fired?
- olgeni 3y ago"We’re taking this step to boost operational efficiency and to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe." Doesn't mean anything. Next time try with GPT.
- Scoundreller 3y agoI can understand the Bay Area workforce being costly, but how much are they saving by closing down the Chilean office/division? I guess it’s harder to say given that they never specified where in Europe the work is moving to.
- arcbyte 3y agoThere's a massive population of software developers that don't care about software, don't have a passion for the problem solving, don't feel accomplishment when they ship something. They just got into the business because of the money and the hype. These people will never amount to much and will cost companies lots of opportunity cost money. It makes sense to not pay Bay Area salaries for these people and to go pay people in Europe to have this attitude. But for the people who actually love shipping products to people, there will always be money and they will always be in demand. The only problem is you can't find them reliably through the front door application process - you have to get lucky or build a network to find them. They're worth their weight in gold
- beardedscotsman 3y agoI don’t understand your critique. Are you saying that European software developers don’t have a passion for shipping products?
- renlo 3y agoI took it to mean: it's better to pay an EU salary than a Bay Area salary if the SWE is unenthusiastic / an average performer. i.e. "Both EU and Bay Area have SWE who will ship code. Only pay Bay Area salaries for those who go above and beyond shipping code"
- martin8412 3y agoI use plenty of paid software developed in the Bay Area that I wouldn't even use for free if I had a choice in the matter. The reason for a lot of successful software companies in the Bay Area has nothing to do with the people. It's disposable cash willing to throw money at an idea with a 1/500 chance of working out. As already seen, cash is running out for a lot of startups and they won't be getting another round of funding. That will lead to wages significantly dropping. We don't see the same in Europe where the wages were never hyperinflated. Wages continue to increase albeit at a slow pace.
- kzrdude 3y ago
- throw-way-124 3y agoI'm afraid that this is a trend that is only going to accelerate in the new remote-first world that is now the reality for software engineering. Sure, some companies mint money and will always pay a premium for top talent. But for a mature product not bringing in huge amounts of revenue, why pay someone to work remotely in the US (especially in the bay area) versus paying someone a third of that salary in Europe?
- geswit2x 3y agoI'm afraid that "hell for some will be heaven for others." Haven't you stopped to think that many people in Europe will be glad about this? And it will bring development to places that would otherwise be unfeasible. Why is liberalism only good when it benefits us?
- tebbers 3y agoI’m not sure they’re saying it’s a bad thing? Just a thing that is happening.
- ghaff 3y agoWages are sticky on the downside. But yes over time—assuming a lot of remote work—why would I want to pay someone a premium to live in a high cost area like the Bay or Manhattan any more than to live somewhere like Aspen.
- lamontcg 3y agoBecause you fire everyone who knows how the systems work. And while Evernote sounds like a weekend project to everyone on HN, I'm certain that over the decade-plus of its existence that it has accreted a lot of technical debt and 'FIXME: we should rewrite this spaghetti' all over the codebase. You've now replaced anyone who knows how the product actually works with people who don't understand the product and aren't going to be incentivized to /care/ about the product at all. The codebase probably needs a rewrite, but the people who understood all the issues of the codebase are gone, so any future rewrite is just about guaranteed to fail. So what you're left with is a skeleton staff who just keeps it running, it won't grow it won't get new features, it'll stagnate and the profits will come from cutting staff even more aggressively. It is definitely a zombie product now. And any remaining users should already have jumped ship. The staff remaining won't know how it all works, they'll have cut staff down to the bone, and there's a high likelihood of everything getting hacked or just constant service interruptions.
- WinstonSmith84 3y ago> significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe.. What about a "significant boost in operational efficiency that would have come as a consequence of leveraging remote workers in the bay area, in the US, in Europe and elsewhere"? It feels like Evernote has not evolve for years, and they don't want to evolve their culture either.
- gedy 3y ago> It feels like Evernote has not evolve for years, and they don't want to evolve their culture either. Not defending Evernote but I think many folks are missing that they were bought by some EU company and folks in US and LATAM were all fired by new mgmt.
- jackhack 3y agoMy mother was a banker. She asked a hypothetical question of me, 30 years ago, that I've never been able to answer: "Name for me one company that was better, for the customer or the employees, after a merger."
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoApple/NeXT
- mistrial9 3y agoNeXT acquired Apple
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoI argued the same on here 12 years (and three days) ago, and got some hilariously snippy responses. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732235
- Gare 3y agoAirbus?
- isykt 3y agoThis was an acquisition, not a merger, but if we misquote your mother a bit to fit this situation: YouTube?
- Forgeties79 3y agoYouTube’s algorithm routinely drives people to more and more extreme content and is designed to be as addictive as possible so that users don’t leave. A lot of this is the result of Google’s acquiring them. I’m curious how you think it’s better. Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.
- juve1996 3y agoAnother product that only exists when cash is cheap and you can continually con VC. Not anymore. The underlying product simply doesn't provide enough value to justify $10!!! a month, and that's on sale.
- hirundo 3y agoI was't planning on leaving Evernote after many years of use. But I went to do a full export yesterday, just in case. It locked up mid way through four times in a row, 3x after fresh reboots. Now I'm planning on leaving Evernote.
- Bystander22 3y agoHere's how to do it: 1. Download and install the legacy Evernote v.6.25.x.x. Evernote has removed it from their website but you can get it at FileHippo. Download this now - I downloaded 6.25.3.9348 and used it, but now it's gone from FileHippo... not sure why. https://filehippo.com/download_evernote/6.25.1.9091/ https://filehippo.com/download_evernote/6.25.1.9091/ I installed on a separate computer, but probably you can run v10.x and v.6.25.x on the same one. 2. Follow the undocumented trick for downloading all notebooks at once. This will preserve tags as well. Archived here: https://archive.ph/XDnqN https://archive.ph/XDnqN - scroll down to KoZz's comment posted on "Tuesday at 11:53 AM". 3. Then if you want to move to Obsidian, use YARLE but note the template that automatically loads doesn't work (it has spaces and breaks other rules). https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle 4. Template block definitions here: https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle/blob/master/Templates.md https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle/blob/master/Templates.m... FWIW, I used this as my template (paste in the "Set Template" window for YARLE): {content-block}{content}{end-content-block} {tags-block} Tag(s): {tags} {end-tags-block}
- Bystander22 3y agoCorrecting myself for anyone searching for this later... Evernote v6.25.3.9348 (version that's guaranteed to work) was not on FileHippo. It was shared several times on the Evernote discussion boards, recently here: https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/146705-fatal-mistake/ https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/146705-fatal-mi..., which I've archived here: https://archive.ph/G4hdq https://archive.ph/G4hdq - scroll to PinkElephant's comment.
- impissedoff1 3y agoThese comments are getting worse than reddit... What does Evernote even need staff for, it's a super basic paid note platform, anything opensource is loads better
- ahmedfromtunis 3y agoI think for note taking apps there are only two ways to survive: enrich the offering and grow accordingly (e.g. Notion) or feature-freeze the app and stay small (e.g. Remember the milk). What brought Evernote down is it being stuck between the two worlds: it grew its corporate footprint without growing its offering.
- jitl 3y agoNotion makes money on team use & collaboration. I think notes apps that are laser focused on individual use are much harder to justify and pretty much have to stay small/lean/indie and they’re selling essentially a luxury product to a small user base.
- imchillyb 3y agoHumans are the most costly resource a business possesses. The new owners recognize this and have taken steps to minimize bleed. Second step will be moving their digital assets to another region, that's not in the EU. I imagine the third and final step will be to schlep the IP to someone else.
- Crontab 3y agoTurning Evernote into Nevernote.
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 - July 2023 (604 comments)
- dahwolf 3y agoOur brilliant European plan seems to be coming together. We're stagnating so hard that we rightfully have earned the slur Europoor. Even Indian expats are puzzled by the state of things. We can't even afford ACs. Hence we will become the new underdeveloped region to develop (or operate) your less exciting software. Might become big as the age of free capital in SV is over, costs matter again. I'm all for it. But not now, typing this from my 4 week holiday.