3 ms·

Regarding velocity I echo that I've never run into such a situation either and that it is plausible but odd if really the root problem. Regarding when you chop

Regarding velocity I echo that I've never run into such a situation either and that it is plausible but odd if really the root problem. Regarding when you chop upper leadership... if a company is run by sitting around waiting to fire someone the instant they do something that causes a loss/underperformance instead of comparing the relative long term expected performance of their options for the role then you're going to fire a lot of amazing employees (of any type) and hire a lot of employees focused on lowering their short term risk instead of maximizing the business's long term growth. A company I work at had to lay off 10% one year despite having the best CEO I've ever run across - things just didn't line up, things fell through, and for the first year we had -10% revenue growth instead of 30+% revenue growth. If they had started with laying off the CEO because of that not only do I think the company would have had a hell of a time in the next 2 years instead of restabilizing its growth I also think myself and a few others would have straight up left as a result. It would have been clear the company had no clue how to properly gauge and set its long term direction by taking such an action in response to the first growth impacting mistakes made by the guy. Now I don't know VRChat as a company and I certainly don't know anything about Graham. Perhaps he's complete shit at the role and really does need to be fired for more than what's covered in this email. What I do know is I strongly disagree with that kind of generalizing logic about how management must need to go the instant employees are let go the same way as I disagree when upper management gets protected long term from or golden parachuted out of solid reasons to get fired. Upper management isn't a magical layer where you must find people that never fail the same as it isn't a magical layer that should be protected from any negative repercussions. It's just another layer of the business where you need to see how you want to place your best bets for the long term performance of the company. The main thing from this email that rubs me a bit in the wrong way from is all of the recent over-hires only get 3 months of severance. This could make everyone finding new things a bit tough given the current VR market and need to branch out into other areas. At the same time, I'd much rather someone hire me for 2 years and then find out they need to get rid of me with some semi decent severance and health coverage than someone be afraid to hire me in the first place because some risk model said something like it's a 50/50 what will happen. By taking a job I'm not expecting you are betting your position on me still being there 2-3 years later, just don't be a dick and fire me a few months after hiring me because you wanted to keep the layoffs a secret or some other poor reasoning.

kstrauser 2y ago
You raise good points and I don’t disagree. It’s just that the tone of the letter seemed to me to be, hey, we made a whole series of bad decisions, so now we’re getting rid of the people who weren’t in charge of making decisions. He went on about how great the ex-employees were while explaining how the problems were due to mismanagement. In a flat company, the CEO must be willing to shoulder the responsibility for making those decisions (or not making them). If they’re not, they’re missing a fundamental job requirement.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Is there a better alternative way to shoulder responsibility that will not just have the tone "and 10 years in because I made a bad bet and we had some negative growth for the first time I'm excusing myself/being excused from the company. Good luck with the 2nd best choice being thrown in to try and fix it" instead? This of course assuming the upper echelon of management has the majority of their real compensation set via ownership value, performance based bonuses which are now severely minimized, or that kind of typical outcome based thing rather than mostly from direct salary equal to last years (there's not really a reasonable way to take a massive payday for tanking the business for the year to the point you have to fire people. Places that do that are, IMO, severely misaligned as well). It's one thing to empathize with someone that gets let go for no fault of their performance, even if it's because data entry clerks were replaced by electronic records technology rather than an erroneous business strategy bet pinned to a single person, but it's another to actually have an answer which provides a better outcome to the situation and health of the business vs saying there is a best candidate for fall guy which meets some definition of "sounds nicest" and leaving it at that.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Interesting points again. But still, the end result was that management executed so poorly, in ways they enumerated, that they had to fire a third of their staff. That’s very often the death knell of a company. Of the remaining 70%, how many want to stick around to see if their turn is next? A lot of the most experienced staff are likely to look for more stable roles, as that’s typically how such things play out. And who’d blame them? Are there other systemic problems that are going to bite the remaining staff in the rear, and will anyone know before it’s too late? Outside severe outside happenings, layoffs are ultimately failures of leadership. I don’t know how many times we let those leaders make the same life-affecting mistakes.

kstrauser 2y ago

You raise good points and I don’t disagree. It’s just that the tone of the letter seemed to me to be, hey, we made a whole series of bad decisions, so now we’re getting rid of the people who weren’t in charge of making decisions. He went on about how great the ex-employees were while explaining how the problems were due to mismanagement. In a flat company, the CEO must be willing to shoulder the responsibility for making those decisions (or not making them). If they’re not, they’re missing a fundamental job requirement.

zamadatix 2y ago
Is there a better alternative way to shoulder responsibility that will not just have the tone "and 10 years in because I made a bad bet and we had some negative growth for the first time I'm excusing myself/being excused from the company. Good luck with the 2nd best choice being thrown in to try and fix it" instead? This of course assuming the upper echelon of management has the majority of their real compensation set via ownership value, performance based bonuses which are now severely minimized, or that kind of typical outcome based thing rather than mostly from direct salary equal to last years (there's not really a reasonable way to take a massive payday for tanking the business for the year to the point you have to fire people. Places that do that are, IMO, severely misaligned as well). It's one thing to empathize with someone that gets let go for no fault of their performance, even if it's because data entry clerks were replaced by electronic records technology rather than an erroneous business strategy bet pinned to a single person, but it's another to actually have an answer which provides a better outcome to the situation and health of the business vs saying there is a best candidate for fall guy which meets some definition of "sounds nicest" and leaving it at that.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Interesting points again. But still, the end result was that management executed so poorly, in ways they enumerated, that they had to fire a third of their staff. That’s very often the death knell of a company. Of the remaining 70%, how many want to stick around to see if their turn is next? A lot of the most experienced staff are likely to look for more stable roles, as that’s typically how such things play out. And who’d blame them? Are there other systemic problems that are going to bite the remaining staff in the rear, and will anyone know before it’s too late? Outside severe outside happenings, layoffs are ultimately failures of leadership. I don’t know how many times we let those leaders make the same life-affecting mistakes.