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There's a large contingent on hacker news that still thinks it's some kind of moral failure to fire people
by Invictus0 9mo ago
There's a large contingent on hacker news that still thinks it's some kind of moral failure to fire people
- bagels 9mo agoObviously sometimes a business is unsustainable, and it's unavoidable, but it's pretty sociopathic to not consider that people are harmed by being laid off.
- Invictus0 9mo agoThey are literally not harmed. The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>The end of an at-will employment agreement is not a harm. So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most asinine thing I've heard here yet. I didn't have a choice in my society on what contract to take. And the power dynamic is unequal. I don't consider being suddenly laid off as "harmless" with that in mind.
- Ekaros 9mo agoThey were at-will employment. That should have been considered with their every purchasing decision ever. Their personal and moral failures is not their employers failures. Budgeting is trivial thing. Spend less than you earn. And it is not like these were minimum wage workers. They should have known to have plenty of buffers at this point. It is entirely their own fault of not reach that point.
- ralfd 9mo agoYou didn’t answer how you would feel if you are fired tomorrow friday?
- serf 9mo agoit's not immoral to fire people. it's immoral to lie to people. very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired." at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors. The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people . And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.
- hi_hi 9mo agoThis was exactly my sentiment. Going from "you're fine" to "you're fired", when it was always going to be "you're fired".
- csallen 9mo ago[flagged]
- nehal3m 9mo agoYou're not wrong, but how screwed up is it that we expect leadership at companies we spend most of our waking time on to bullshit through their teeth at the people that make the damn thing work in the first place? I'm so tired of the investor driven economy.
- Remnant44 9mo agoWhile you may be correct in the sense that, in a public acquisition statement, people should be inferring enormous context and not taking anything said at face value. It's simultaneously true that this is the farthest thing from effective, honest, and clear communication. Reading between the lines here is required precisely because we all know that any acquisition statements made are, at best heavily coded, if not completely just fluff. You can recognize that and still get angry that it's par for the course for such things to be not just devoid of useful information, but often actively deceiving.
- Quarrelsome 9mo agosome people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc. You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
- Invictus0 9mo agoOption A: the business goes bankrupt, investors lose money, customers lose the product, all employees get fired. Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance. You think option A is superior?
- supoxblade 9mo agoHere's the rub: Vimeo was profitable, and had no debt. Per their last public filing(s), in 2025 the company had: - ~$400M expenses - ~$420M revenue (therefore ~$20M profit for the year) - ~$300M of cash in the bank (no debt) Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.
- makeitrain 9mo agoFor a company that makes a flat $20 mil per year, how long will it take to make back the $1.4 billion they paid for it?
- Nextgrid 9mo agoPresumably Bending Spoons believes they can optimize a lot of that 400M expenses while keeping revenue flat or even growing it. At least they believe enough to make a 1.4B bet on it.
- 9mo ago
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoIt's a moral failure to fire people without any notice for reasons unrelated to your company failining and not being able to afford you, yes. Let's not mince words here. There are proper ways to let go of people, but that's not how it's done in the US.