[HN Gopher] Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up
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Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up
Author : jzig
Score : 464 points
Date : 2022-07-26 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| saos wrote:
| > Shopify's workforce has increased from 1,900 in 2016 to roughly
| 10,000 in 2021
|
| That's pretty insane growth. No wonder
|
| What are the safest industries in tech right now? Feel like it's
| gonna get worse
| tenpies wrote:
| Energy, especially oil and gas.
|
| The physics of civilization and general incompetence of Western
| leaders is raining cash on these companies, but the
| demonization of the sector by the globalist elites[1] mentioned
| above means that they are desperately short for people in every
| position. From well tech to field IT, to the guys in HQ
| handling well-management software, all these positions will
| need to be filled.
|
| It is a boom/bust industry, but it looks like we're about to
| begin a prolonged bull cycle.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| Historically enterprise SaaS with strong product/market fit has
| been (comparatively) safe. Companies tend to get hit in order
| of consumer > SMB > mid-market > enterprise. The above does not
| apply if you're a high burn organization that overhired, those
| jobs are at risk in every industry except maybe the government.
|
| (Of course nowhere is entirely safe, even in good times)
| jameshart wrote:
| In a downturn, enterprise SaaS vendors have to cut back on
| development and hold on to the customers they have. They
| aren't winning new big contracts, and losing a few big
| customers could be fatal.
|
| And when you cut back on roadmap on a product like that,
| consolidation starts looking sensible. That's when you get
| bought out by Oracle or ADP or someone.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| The only industry I wouldn't want to be in now is Crypto.
|
| Everything else, it's just a blip. Upward and onward. Be greedy
| when others are fearful etc
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| start up is probably not a good place to be.
|
| if Peter Zeihan is right about population and boomers. our
| world is shrinking with less young people for consumption,
| boomers retiring and taking their money to less risky
| investment. the money that prop up start up could be dry
| pretty soon.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Healthcare, energy, government should be safe. I spent a
| year at a DOE lab during an economic crisis. The pay sucked
| but the checks cleared.
| ghaff wrote:
| >The pay sucked but the checks cleared.
|
| That's really the calculation people need to make.
|
| At a large tech employer? How are they doing? Is what
| you're working on strategic? Do you seem to be valued or
| are you maybe a bit on the bubble?
|
| Depending on the answers, it may make sense to stay put
| or it may make sense to find a life raft even if it isn't
| as cushy in some ways as where you are. And, as someone
| else noted, industries aren't homogeneous. Individual
| employers matter.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Well, these people are getting at least 16 weeks
| severance. 4 months paid to grind at interviews. Then
| unemployment after.
|
| I wouldn't worry too much if I were at a similar company.
|
| Getting laid off during Covid was a boon for many people
| ghaff wrote:
| It's certainly a nice severance package for this day and
| age. That said, hiring is pretty broadly more selective
| right now and may well become more so.
|
| During dot-bomb, I got lucky and landed another (lower
| paying) job with someone I knew at a small company. But
| there were a lot of people who were out of work or
| underemployed for a long time. And some I knew on the
| older side never really recovered I think.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I had lost a job at the time (company dissolved) and had
| been unemployed for six months by the time the offer was
| extended, so the choice was easy. If you currently have a
| high income job and a robust emergency fund, you can make
| other choices.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Ironically, crypto VCs are sitting on a lot of dry powder and
| the narrative is much stronger (WEB3! METAVERSE!) since it is
| completely detached from reality.
|
| In situations like these where the wealthy still have a ton
| of money, it is far better to be in a business that a) the
| wealthy don't understand, and b) is so outlandish that you
| can't assign a hard value to it.
|
| If you make $1 in profit, then investors can assign it a hard
| value (10-15x ARR). If you make $0 in profit, then investors
| can spin up narratives about your "potential".
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| If you're looking for safety in tech, look at the individual
| companies rather than the industries. Sure there are some
| industries that are slightly better or worse than others, but
| overall there isn't a huge difference.
|
| Why look at the companies? See who's growing in a logical
| fashion. If the company doubled in size at the start of COVID
| and keeps growing at similarly crazy rates - that might be a
| sign of trouble. It doesn't matter if the company is 100, 1000,
| or 10,000. The same general rules apply.
|
| Belts are tightening. If a company was hiring stupidly/risky,
| they are going to need to lay off people - unfortunately. Or
| maybe they don't "need to" layoff, but they will want to. We've
| already seen this at some of the bigger tech companies.
| ProAm wrote:
| > What are the safest industries in tech right now?
|
| Just be good at your job. Ive been through many layoff cycles
| and its be extremely rare to see the good people laid off. Be
| undeniably the best and you'll always be safe and compensated.
| pcurve wrote:
| Large healthcare. Always.
| papito wrote:
| The safest companies are the ones that understand the basics of
| burn rate and do not hoover up VC money to show fake growth, by
| growing its headcount to insane levels (and employ an army of
| engineers who design and maintain ridiculously complicated
| systems as part of resume-driven development).
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > What are the safest industries in tech right now?
|
| If anyone knew what's safe then you'd see investor dollars
| pouring into those industries right now. At the company level
| you'll have a much better chance of survival if your company
| makes a profit (which is frighteningly rare these days). But
| overall, during downturns, it's only possible to know what was
| safe when looking backwards.
|
| My experience, having entered the work force in the shadow of
| the dotcom bust, is that the best path to safety in tech is to
| be in the highest percentile of skill you can be.
|
| As boom periods extend more and more people flock to tech
| because of the money. If you were in industry pre-2008 you'll
| likely recall that most programmers in tech were in it because
| they had a passion for programming (especially in the growing
| startup scene at the time). Eventually we get to more recent
| years when you have boot camps just churning out mediocre devs.
|
| Things were very similar in the dotcom boom, and after it went
| bust there were many programmers who never went back to
| programming. And nearly everyone took pay cuts.
|
| One good thing that changes in crashes is people start looking
| for sincerely good and experienced people more and more. A
| seasoned dev, who during boom times is an annoying hire when
| you're just trying to drive up head count, becomes a valuable
| asset when you need just enough devs to get the job done.
|
| So depending on how bad this gets determines which percentile
| you need to be in to maximize your probability of keeping your
| career. A small correction just means the bottom 10% disappear,
| in more severe cases only the top X% might survive. The other
| thing that changes is that interviewing will become as
| challenging as it was for the previous cohorts lower
| percentile. For example if you're just above average getting a
| job in the future will feel more like a newbie programmer just
| out of a bootcamp, if you're in the top 10% and previously
| didn't have to try to get jobs, it's going to feel more like an
| average dev struggling with their first leetcode interview.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Safe for investors is not the same as safe for workers.
| biohax2015 wrote:
| Enough of this "passion" nonsense. Most people just want a
| well-paying job. This was true before 2008 and after 2008.
| rsanek wrote:
| > you'll have a much better chance of survival if your
| company makes a profit (which is frighteningly rare these
| days)
|
| What do you mean by rare? The biggest employers in the world
| [0] have massive, healthy profits. I tried to find the
| biggest company that was money-losing but gave up after
| looking at the top 25. Even in you look specifically at tech
| [1] this is true.
|
| [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-
| number-o...
|
| [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-
| companies-b...
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| You didn't make it to Amazon, number 2 on your list, or
| have you not read their Q1 2022 earnings yet?[0]
|
| > Net loss was $3.8 billion in the first quarter
|
| 0.https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-
| details...
| benburleson wrote:
| InsureTech is one, I think.
| tfehring wrote:
| Lots of insurtechs - including Root, Lemonade, Policygenius,
| Next, and Vouch, just off the top of my head - have had
| layoffs this year. Insurtech is a really broad field, and the
| unit economics vary wildly depending on where in the value
| chain a particular company is operating, so it's hard to
| generalize.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| There is something I don't understand about the way those big
| companies work.
|
| From what I can see they are providing software and services.
|
| Even the biggest software teams I have seen were rarely larger
| than 50-80 people.
|
| And they were working on large complex codebase for AAA games.
|
| Of course you need support, admin, HR, and sales, and R&D on
| new projects, but still.
|
| How can they manage to productively use the time of 10000+
| people?
|
| What are they doing?
| foobiekr wrote:
| See the previous discussion of manager incentives to hire
| here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32149937#32171559
| dehrmann wrote:
| > What are they doing?
|
| Scale is harder to manage as the userbase grows. A lot of
| popular services could run on one machine if you can live
| with 3 nines of reliability and never scale past 100,000
| users.
|
| When you reach that scale, you also start doing lots of
| product work that's either exploratory and unlikely to
| matter, or micro optimizations trying to move the needle 1%.
| If you hit a win on one of these, because of your scale, the
| win can be huge.
| randomUserHere wrote:
| acatton wrote:
| > Even the biggest software teams I have seen were rarely
| larger than 50-80 people. And they were working on large
| complex codebase for AAA games. [...] How can they manage to
| productively use the time of 10000+ people?
|
| I work for a 100k-employees company. According to the
| internet, a third of it are engineers.[1] I think I can
| explain.
|
| First of all, I think the AAA game example is bad. Most of my
| acquaintances working in the gaming industry work long hours
| for a crappy salary compared to their skill, because most of
| them are passionate.
|
| Most business software is written by overpaid engineers who
| see the whole thing as a 9to5 job. So you can already divide
| the amount of hour worked per employees by at least 1.5 if
| not 2.
|
| Even then, if you take something which seems as simple as
| Shopify the system can be made complex for managers and
| directors to justify headcount.
|
| It's an e-commerce website, right? So you can split 100
| engineers over 5 teams. 10 "production engineers" (or
| SRE/DevOps/SysAdmins) and 10 software engineers for each
| team: - Product search team; - Payment team; - Authentication
| team; - Admin UI team; - CRM team.
|
| Once you have 100 engineers, you can multiply your headcount
| by 10 by just splitting each of these teams into five more.
| If you take the Payment team, you can create a credit card
| team, a paypal team, an alipay team, ... For product search,
| you can create a team to manage just the suggestions of the
| search bar, another team which optimizes term matching with
| products, another team which does the list of related
| products on the side bar, ...
|
| I just found jobs for 1,000 engineers, right at the top of my
| head! Now you have so many engineers and so many customers,
| you also need internal tools. You need an internal tool to
| manage customer refunds, customer support, etc... You need HR
| tools for vacations, performance review, ...
|
| Of course all of this comes with waste, but who cares as long
| as you're offsetting it with your revenue? -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Anyway, this is why I will never be a business person :) .
|
| [1] https://earthweb.com/how-many-software-engineers-does-
| google...
| petercooper wrote:
| _I just found jobs for 1,000 engineers, right at the top of
| my head! Now you have so many engineers and so many
| customers, you also need internal tools. You need an
| internal tool to manage customer refunds, customer support,
| etc... You need HR tools for vacations, performance review,
| ..._
|
| I think the complexity demonstrated in your post is a
| reasonable explainer for why companies like Salesforce and
| SAS are so highly valued - it stops a lot of those teams
| needing to exist at companies for which proprietary tech
| isn't a competitive advantage.
| hoten wrote:
| Not even to mention the impact Conway's Law suggests! As a
| company grows in number of specialized teams, you'd expect
| to see magnifying difficulty in having efficient
| communication, eventually impacting what the product looks
| like (or at least, how robust the code is and how easy it
| is to augment). Seems like it could be a bad feedback loop
| - code got more complex indirectly because of number of
| teams, so naturally you hire more people to maintain the
| same output.
|
| See this video by Casey M. https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > as you're offsetting it with your revenue
|
| This is the problem. IDK about Shopify specificially, but a
| lot of these companies don't have revenue, or it's far from
| offsetting their expenses. That was OK as long as more
| venture funding was readily available; today that's not the
| case.
| acatton wrote:
| I believe that you're biased by HN, since a lot of the
| discussion here revolve around over-valued VC-money-
| roided-up startups burning millions of dollar per months.
|
| If you're looking at big tech, telco, banks and finance,
| there are a lot of companies where headcount waste is
| offset by revenue. Many of which are even making profits.
| According to wikipedia, shopify had a net income of ~$3B
| for ~$5B of revenue in 2021.
| beambot wrote:
| SHOP: $4.8B in trailing 12-month revenue, growing 70%+
| YoY for last few years and $250M in positive free
| cashflow.
|
| They're likely predicting eCommerce growth slowing a bit
| (combination of post-COVID & reduced consumer spending),
| so pushing for better fiscal discipline & improving net
| margins going forward.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP
| rekrsiv wrote:
| I like this perspective a lot.
|
| I just got laid off from a ~1.5k-employees private company
| that applied the same method to split up a large monolithic
| cash cow (crafted from scratch by a small clique of hackers
| who met early in life) into microservice and microfrontend
| internal products because it looked like a good long term
| plan in Q2 of 2020 and we thought we could scale that
| forever and start selling our dog food as a service.
|
| Something went wrong, and we hit a ceiling very early. The
| amount of waste that was generated by the rigid management
| ecosystem that was created to sustain such a large scale up
| (for tracking purposes) became so strict that any and all
| attempts to use the scientific method to solve anything by
| the then-outnumbered engineering staff became impossible to
| justify to any non-engineering roles.
|
| If the task didn't fit in a 2 week sprint, it couldn't be
| planned.
|
| If it can't be planned to be shipped from scratch in a 2
| week sprint, from analysis by both your BE and FE devs to
| both of them shipping at the same time by end of the
| sprint, it couldn't be done.
|
| If you needed to solve for "what do people wish they could
| buy?" instead of optimizing for "what are the most humans
| currently using?", it couldn't be done.
|
| We constantly regretted not sticking to our engineering
| principles.
|
| The system collapsed. A lot of nice-to-have-but-working-at-
| a-distance positions were eliminated, as well as a few
| individual contributors that management hadn't realized
| were important to their core functions but were hired too
| recently and didn't have time to adjust to the point
| system.
|
| I wish I could tell you what happened next, but the layoff
| happened. Most of us thought it would happen because
| management would finally realize the (human) system was
| designed poorly and without a good feedback loop while
| growth happened. But it turns out they might have only
| reverted to a previous commit of the organization structure
| and are still intent on trying again with the same
| rulebook.
|
| Slower but infinite growth is still the objective,
| excessive tracking is still the norm.
|
| Their marketing had been doing poorly in recent years, and
| the layoff wasn't even mentioned in the news, but it seemed
| like it affected a lot of devs in my neck of the woods
| despite the near complete lack of media coverage.
|
| Does this happen often? Is this what scaling up always
| looks like?
| ActionHank wrote:
| Multiple products targeting multiple users, both internal and
| external.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Alright.
|
| Let's say that each product dev team is about 80 engineers.
| Let's double that number for support, HR, admin, etc. Let's
| add a team of 10 people for sales ( not needed for internal
| products but hey)
|
| Now let's round it up to 200 heads.
|
| That would make 50 large software products, is that right?
| woofcat wrote:
| On a large chunk of Enterprise Software you'd have teams
| of people working on specific features / subsets of a
| larger product.
|
| I.e. a team that is working on only Facebook Messenger
| back-end, a team working on Facebook Messenger Front-end,
| a team working on Friend Recommendation, etc.
|
| Each of these teams is let's say 10 Dev, 2-4 QA, 1
| Product Documentation, then all the normal overhead of
| HR, etc.
| ggreenbe wrote:
| It's more than 50... I mean just look at the number of
| API endpoints across multiple APIs both internal and
| external. It's easily hundreds then add sys ops, dev ops,
| dev content writing (docs/guides), frontend, design, pm,
| support, etc.
|
| I feel like most of you all are unaware of the complexity
| and scope of Shopify...
| perlgeek wrote:
| > How can they manage to productively use the time of 10000+
| people?
|
| Sales and support basically scale arbitrarily large, as long
| as the market is there.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Not much. They're now starting to fire a bunch to make the
| rest quit.
|
| I'm in a well run, immensely profitable, 100+ yo company, so
| big a country needs us to run, literaly, and a few others
| would be destroyed if we suddenly closed shop and ran with
| the money.
|
| We are 60 000 and feel too fat. I cannot understand what
| frigging shopify is doing with 10k people. We make 5bn a year
| profit these days, is shopify close to 1?
|
| Edit: waoh, they indeed were at 3 bn last year, 300mil the
| year before, -100 mil before, without reading the details.
| It's not regular profit but if it was, it'd just confirm
| we're too fat, not them :p
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| Marketing...
| nostrademons wrote:
| Your example is pretty illuminating. AAA games are one-and-
| done: you ship, and then the codebase is basically frozen,
| and you make money off expansions. The other area where team
| sizes top out at 50-100 people is desktop software, where
| (barring future versions) it's also one-and-done. You sell a
| software package, money comes in, that's it.
|
| The way the calculus works for Internet-based SaaS is: say
| you have revenues of $4B (like Shopify), and an engineer
| costs $400K. If the engineer works on a project that improves
| sales by 0.01%, it's profitable. If a team of 10 engineers
| works on a project that improves sales by 0.1%, or 100
| engineers improving sales by 1%, it's profitable. How many
| 0.1% opportunities do you see in the product? How many 1%
| opportunities? What if you add risk? An engineer might fail
| to see any effect on 4 of their projects, but if they improve
| sales by 0.1% on the 5th, they've still made the company
| twice as much as they cost.
|
| It's hill-climbing. There are usually lots of 0.1%
| opportunities available with a big worldwide SaaS. Things
| like localization and entering new markets will generate way
| more than that; even things like moving around CTAs and
| changing colors will usually generate more in profit than the
| engineer costs.
|
| Also add to that diminishing marginal productivity of each
| engineer. In a team of 5 moving a button around takes an
| afternoon. In a team of 1000 it often takes a couple
| quarters, because you need to get sign-offs from all the
| teams that the code touches, run it through QA, and gather
| metrics to show you didn't regress anything. The engineer is
| still profitable, because the effect of their change
| multiplied across millions of users is way more than their
| salary costs. But they're not _as_ profitable, because they
| work so slowly.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I've also seen this kind of operations in mobile games.
|
| At Supercell, they have some old titles generating around
| 400K of revenue per day, with a minimal team working on new
| features, fixing bugs, looking after numbers and trends,
| managing ads... All of that with less than 15 people.
|
| Of course this is not the same scale, but they have a LOT
| of daily users, and at their peak the company was about 200
| people.
|
| And I've been there, I can tell you that there is ample
| slack, most of them are barely working.
| majani wrote:
| Mobile gaming has been extremely commoditized though it's
| still possible to get a billion dollar company out of the
| sea of copycats
| rvba wrote:
| I understand what you mean. But then why cant the big tech
| hire support staff (looking at you Google).
|
| Probably lots of money could be made with better support.
|
| Microsoft seems to do it thr correct way - I worked at a
| "boring" company that had a lot of licenses and we had
| highest tier support - we found a bug in Excel (!) and they
| fixed it.
|
| If you are a small fish you wont get any support and often
| not give money. I wonder if this doesnt add up.
| moneywoes wrote:
| I feel it's a matter a growing faster than your competitors
| taf2 wrote:
| Lots of teams - working on lots of different products that
| all connect together.
| echelon wrote:
| > What are they doing?
|
| Microservices.
|
| I haven't worked there, but I've worked at incredibly similar
| companies with the same scale.
|
| Every single business function split into fine grained
| services, with teams of size 5-20 (larger teams have split
| services, oncall, etc.)
|
| Auth, API gateway. Layers of devops teams. Traffic,
| monitoring, data store, many different analytics support
| teams. Kubernetes maintenance.
|
| The payments platform is probably huge. The app teams too.
|
| Infosec of various flavors. Vendor integrations...
|
| Think about the sprawling functionality of a company at
| scale.
|
| Anyone else is sales or support. And other business
| functions, like various legal departments.
|
| 10,000 is the right size for an org like Shopify.
| ecshafer wrote:
| FWIW we don't really use Microservices at Shopify.
| ibawt wrote:
| cardserver, storefront renderer, remember-me... the list
| goes on.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| Needing to have a big team so that you can refactor into
| microservices, which you need because you have such a big
| team is a very "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the
| needs of the bureaucracy" sort of thing.
| echelon wrote:
| It's a business expanding to fill the market sort of
| thing.
|
| The people on those teams undoubtedly have plenty to work
| on.
| 40acres wrote:
| I agree with you for the most part. The number of people who
| could run Shopify at the current scale is definitely more
| than 80 people but probably less than 10000.
|
| They took a big bet on global growth and this would've
| exploded HC related to sales, marketing, compliance,
| recruiting, etc. They pulled hiring forward on an expectation
| that the market advanced 5 years during COVID and now have to
| cull that new growth. Lots of late stage private companies
| and recent IPOs are going through the same thing.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And in that light ten percent isn't even that much. It
| really sucks for those being laid off, Shopify seems to
| take their responsibility for their people serious so (if
| they follow through with what they promised). And yes,
| pulling your timetable and hiring forward was bet, but a
| less risky one than it turned out to be in hindsight.
|
| More general, we had the 2008 financial crisis after _one_
| not too big investment bank went under. Covid did, despite
| all the real world damage from lost lives to the economy,
| not doing anything like it. I always wondered why,
| aparently more free money, on top of all the free money we
| had since 2008, helped. I just hope that the postponement
| of hitting a wall doesn 't mean we ginna hit it much
| faster. We'll see...
| pc86 wrote:
| AAA gaming is probably the worst possible example you can
| look at for what a well-run, sane team would look like. So
| let's say if you only want your people working 40ish hours a
| week and not 70-90, you'll 2x or 2.5x that count. Shopify
| also has a lot of dev rel folks even if they don't call them
| that - people writing engineering blog posts, working on
| tutorials, documentation, etc. They're typically not the same
| people actually working on core code day to day. My guess is
| all the infrastructure and security people at Shopify are
| non-devs. You'll also have all the devops people who are
| managing all the pipelines and everything. My understanding
| is Shopify deploys to prod many many times a day (hundreds?).
| The pipelines to automate that, and automate or at least
| manage the rollbacks, would be at least as complicated as the
| code itself. And across all these different areas you have
| that amorphous "Staff/Principal Engineer" level where you're
| doing a lot of reviewing, pseudo-management, that sort of
| thing. Not to mention managers, directors, VPs, SVPs, etc.
|
| But you ask how they can productively use the time of 10k
| people and I think this post is sort of evidence that they
| couldn't.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I understand the need for support around a complex and
| constantly evolving codebase, but this is the scale of it
| that I can't grasp.
|
| Software is supposed to scale almost for free, they don't
| need people to actually make the transactions and push the
| bits by hand, this is all automated.
|
| My guess is they have a lot of sales and an enormous amount
| of overhead.
|
| According to Price's Law about 100 people are doing half of
| the work, but of course it is difficult to guess which ones
| and they still need the other half to be there.
| golergka wrote:
| The more your software touches real money and
| merchandise, the more time you have to spend to make sure
| you're not breaking the law in any country you're
| operating in. It's not fun, it's very error-prone and
| it's very important to get right.
| [deleted]
| conorcleary wrote:
| Customer support and new-build implementation tied to
| marketing is a large chunk of the people hours.
| neon_electro wrote:
| >Software is supposed to scale almost for free,
|
| Sure, that may be true, but startups don't suffer for
| lacking of scaling ability.
|
| Software does _not_ scale with changing requirements for
| free. Full stop.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Hard to say without knowing what they're working on.
| Maybe there's a lot to do with integrating other
| software/services. Maybe they've got a good devops org to
| help smooth the process for everyone. Sometimes having a
| few more people than you need on many levels makes the
| org a lot more resilient to individuals leaving so the
| org can keep on rolling without a hitch.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, the transition from 2k to 10k people isn't
| something done to add slack to create a flexible system.
| For that you at most double the number of people, you
| don't multiply it by 5.
|
| They must have changed something either on their product
| or on their procedures on those 5 years.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| My guess is they decided to start writing more tools
| internally instead of relying on external vendors to
| respond to their needs. Again, hard to say. How much did
| eng grow vs sales/support.
| kill_nate_kill wrote:
| If your system doesn't have any slack in it, how can it
| respond to change? Having a slightly underloaded system
| is definitely the way to go, it leaves you with some gas
| to change direction if you see that you're barreling
| towards a cliff.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| > What are the safest industries in tech right now? Feel like
| it's gonna get worse
|
| The ones that make the most money with little head count in a
| short amount of time and those who are selling shovels and
| offering services for financial institutions or in trading
| systems.
| boringg wrote:
| I disagree - I think fintech start ups are about to get
| squeezed hard. As capital gets more expensive their lack of
| growth will be hard to justify and they can no longer
| subsidize their subscriptions with low cost capital so will
| have to force users to pay for services that aren't very
| necessary. That and most of the financial services at the end
| of the day don't really provide a lot of real value that
| people are willing to pay for.
|
| Fin processing should be OK but if volume of processing drops
| significantly (main revenue driver) then they will have to
| look at ways to protect their margin.
|
| Crypto is already in a bad spot with low growth options.
| decafninja wrote:
| I think he means legacy finance - think IT department of
| Bank of America, not Stripe.
| boringg wrote:
| Stripe = fin processing.
|
| I'm not talking legacy - I'm talking startups that are
| trying to take market from the bank through subsidized VC
| and repackage it to sell to the banks which feels like a
| lot of the fin services business model.
|
| If anything fin legacy (i.e. IT dept) probably pretty
| safe.
| moneywoes wrote:
| See Brex dropping clients
| moneywoes wrote:
| Defense
| tempsy wrote:
| It's not insane when you look at the revenue growth over the
| same period. Especially if most are operations focused
| employees eg support staff.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I wonder if that growth includes minimum-wage workers for their
| warehouses.[0] I am not sure how many they've hired as part of
| this effort.
|
| 0. https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2022/shopify-
| makes-1b-bet...
| exhilaration wrote:
| Ha, nobody's paying minimum wage for warehouse workers. In
| warehouse-heavy Eastern Pennsylvania we're seeing billboards
| advertising $25/hour _starting_ wages:
| https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-
| hiri...
| Bilal_io wrote:
| > https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-
| hiri...
|
| Quoting the article you referenced > and is offering wages
| up to $25 hourly.
| TheCapn wrote:
| Safe? Probably anything supporting an industry that isn't
| affected as heavily by the downturn. There's no shortage of
| work in Industrial Controls. Most work isn't glamorous cutting
| edge tech, but there's sectors to work in that are engaging.
| odiroot wrote:
| > What are the safest industries in tech right now?
|
| Military industrial complex, as usual.
| Bayart wrote:
| Everything legacy. Defense, pharma, banking, insurance,
| manufacturing, energy etc.
| mathattack wrote:
| These industries all have layoffs too.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| True, but I feel like Defense is pretty safe these days.
| ghaff wrote:
| Overall, probably yes. But contractors and their subs can
| still take big hits if some contract they were banking on
| goes to the other guy instead.
| mathattack wrote:
| I love your name in a defense thread. :-)
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
|
| Defense has a lot of challenges. The government isn't a
| great or reliable customer. The contractors tend to lay
| off on great waves if they lose and important contract.
| They have quarterly earnings targets to hit like everyone
| else.
|
| People used to think the phone company was a safe spot to
| lay your hat but they found layoffs too be an easier way
| to goose earnings than growing revenue.
| infamouscow wrote:
| If you're doing something genuinely innovative and disruptive,
| investor money is flowing and it's easier than any time in the
| last decade.
| boringg wrote:
| Completely disagree.
|
| It's like saying, if you are building the next google (early
| days) you can still easily get cash. Sure but not as much as
| say 6 months ago. It isn't easier than any time in the last
| decade - 6 months ago people didn't even do due diligence
| before the wrote massive checks.
|
| edited: for politeness as per comment.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Maybe it's a signal-to-noise thing.
|
| Companies that have been growing sustainably and building
| innovative technology that reduces costs 10x (in a
| recession) get a lot of attention. Especially if they are
| turning a profit without any accounting tricks.
|
| Companies that were never going to be profitable are having
| problems raising money now and sounding the horns. There
| are a lot of those companies, especially on HN, but please
| don't categorically dismiss my experience as a fantasy.
| boringg wrote:
| Still doesn't resonate and unfortunately I will point
| that your experience does not represent the broader
| market. Just because you (assumptions made on your
| comment about personal experience) made a fast round
| doesn't mean that the market is easier or better for
| raising - it probably means you found product-fit/sold it
| better or some other kind of micro strategy benefit.
|
| My comment is and still stands: if you are making
| something truly amazing then you will almost always find
| investors (which isn't a good metric). If you were making
| something amazing 6 months ago you would have gotten more
| money on more favorable terms. This market isn't easier
| or friendly at all - investor appetites have changed.
| ghaff wrote:
| See VMware during the dot-com bust.
| hluska wrote:
| There's no need to be that aggressive.
| rchaud wrote:
| Investor capital flows towards whatever will generate a
| return fastest. Money is flowing into shitcoins daily, should
| I take that as a signal that that's where innovation is
| happening? No, because innovation and investor sentiment do
| not map 1:1.
| altdataseller wrote:
| The safest companies in tech are bootstrapped, lean, profitable
| cash-flow companies.
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Civil servant?
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| Typically layoffs hit civil servants with a lag of a few
| years since government budgets are already decided _before_
| economic down turns, and only really impacted when the next
| budget is decided.
|
| For example the friends I had working in the public sector
| during 2008 didn't start to get really hit until 2010.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Typically layoffs hit civil servants with a lag of a few
| years since government budgets are already decided before
| economic down turns, and only really impacted when the next
| budget is decided.
|
| For federal government, it is usually delayed because
| downturns tend to provoke temporary countercyclical deficit
| spending, and thus _hiring_.
|
| For state governments it is often sooner because operating
| deficits are structurally more difficult for them, so
| revenue cuts are reflected in spending more directly,
| though short-term circumstances may be addressed by
| furloughs, hiring freezes, real pay cuts via wage freezes
| during inflation, effective (temporary or permanent) pay
| cuts by altering employer/employee sharing arrangements for
| benefits, attrition, and other non-layoff means.
| bumby wrote:
| Were they working as contractors for the government or as
| actual civil servants? It's common for hiring to
| essentially stop during downturns but still relatively rare
| for true govt employees to be laid off.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| This sucks... There were alot of good people that left github
| this year and went over to shopify. i pray they don't get laid
| off.
| notyourday wrote:
| Maybe they could assign some remaining people to fixing their god
| damn issue with ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE issue with Chrome that has
| been happening on and off for _years_
| intrasight wrote:
| Lately, I see such article titles that paint a 10% layoff as a
| "shake-up" or use some other doom and gloom language. But in
| business school I recall learning that a lot of companies have as
| their standard practice to prune off the lowest performing 10%
| every year.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I'm not going to buy from Shopify if they are going to do mass
| layoffs.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Their severance looks quite generous. Layoffs aren't great, but
| it seems like they're handling it responsibly.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| That's not even the bare minimum they should be doing. If it
| was some democratic process to allow employees to leave
| voluntarily or vote about the direction of the company
| explicitly, I would feel differently. These matters shouldn't
| be solely in the hands of owners.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| They're still listing open positions for lots of engineering
| jobs, it kind of seems like for all the engineering jobs...
| https://www.shopify.com/careers/search
|
| Curious if anyone with more context knows how to interpret that.
| The obvious one is that they didn't lay off and are still hiring
| like mad for engineering, but I don't know if that's the right
| read. Or they just haven't updated their job postings.
|
| Or they actually have fewer engineering positions open than they
| used to even though it looks like a lot -- most of these
| positions actually maybe look like "tech lead" positions; it
| doesn't look like there are any/many standard/non-senior engineer
| positions open, and I think maybe there were a few weeks ago? Not
| sure.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I have no knowledge of the situation and don't work for
| Shopify, but having worked corporate gigs my whole life, what
| probably happened is very few people knew this was coming, and
| that group excluded the part of HR that hires people. So the
| posting remain up while the news comes out, but the roles don't
| get filled and the postings eventually removed.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Part of the reason I got out of recruiting is that recruiting is
| always part of the first to go. Then a few months from now when
| Shopify decides it needs to hire again? Recruiting job posts go
| up like crazy.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Losers are not recruiting. It's a "win more" move,
| statistically. I don't know why it would be a bad idea to pick
| a career that tilts you toward being on a winning team if you
| care about the economics.
| c0balt wrote:
| For people more interested in a snapshot:
| https://archive.ph/q04Hb
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| What I don't get about these lay-offs, is that these companies
| usually start hiring again soon after
| chadash wrote:
| Yeah, but probably with lower total comp.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| They are almost certainly still hiring. It's correcting in some
| areas where they have enough fokls already.
| rr888 wrote:
| Often these 10% layoffs are an excuse to get rid of people that
| are overpaid, aren't performing or dont fit very well in the
| organization. Some companies do it every year.
| cpach wrote:
| Indeed. For some companies it's par for the course.
| onion2k wrote:
| When you decide that hiring good people is actually a hard
| problem the most obvious solution is to stop trying, and
| just accept some bad hires in the org temporarily that
| you'll let go in the next round of cuts if they don't work
| out.
|
| This actually works out fairly well for everyone - some
| people get hired and stay because they're good, some get
| hired and then dropped but they earn well and get a big
| name on their resume for their time, and the company
| eventually builds a stronger team.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| It certainly solves missing good people due to false-
| negatives during hiring.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yep. People complain about social strata discrimination,
| leetcode interviews, blatant racism and sexism on
| hiring... Well, any real solution to those requires
| accepting a few bad hires and dealing with them later.
|
| Otherwise people will always go into voodoo practices
| trying to avoid the inevitable failures.
| cpach wrote:
| I guess another strategy is to not hire a large amount of
| people. Companies like 37signals comes to mind.
| Obviously, this will not work for all companies.
| axg11 wrote:
| What don't you understand about that? People leave all the
| time, before and after layoff events. You need to replace those
| key roles.
|
| Layoffs are not always about reducing the size of the
| workforce, but can also be to remove the low performers.
| anthomtb wrote:
| The layoffs I experienced were explicitly about reducing size
| and cost of the workforce. Individual performance was a
| limited factor at best. This was the case at two different
| Fortune 500 companies.
|
| The only thing saving many high performers was better
| understanding of the company direction. Meaning a lot of the
| good folks figured out the "safe" teams/organizations and
| transitioned shortly before the lay off occurred.
| matt_s wrote:
| The bit that is viewable in the paywalled article indicates 1000
| people will be let go and their revenues are forecasted to shrink
| as people go back to pre-pandemic shopping habits. I believe they
| were on a hiring binge last year to get 2000+ engineers. Any
| indication if the layoffs are just engineering or across the
| board?
| tempest_ wrote:
| Further down in the article it says the following
|
| "The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its divisions,
| though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting, support
| and sales units, said Mr. Lutke. "We're also eliminating over-
| specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that
| were convenient to have but too far removed from building
| products," he wrote. Staff who are being let go will be
| notified on Tuesday."
| sarchertech wrote:
| The article indicates that the layouts aren't engineering.
| soneca wrote:
| As the large majority (if not all) of this year layoffs in tech
| companies, engineering is barely affected.
|
| > _"The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its
| divisions, though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting,
| support and sales units, said Mr. Lutke."_
| spamizbad wrote:
| Lots of rescinded offers and hiring freezes though. Seems
| like they're hoping for some natural shrinking to avoid
| pricey severances.
| boringg wrote:
| edit: Re-read the thread somehow missed that it was
| specific to engineering. Comment makes sense - engineering
| typically last to go for obvious reasons.
|
| I'll counter though that I don't think its about pricey
| severances but more related to keep core products operating
| and being built for the future. Lutke comes from software
| engineering.
| soneca wrote:
| It made sense to me. I was and their reply was talking
| about engineering jobs.
|
| I said that all these layoffs are not firing many, if
| any, software engineers. They replied that, while that's
| true, tech companies are not firing software engineers,
| they are on a hiring freeze and canceled offers that were
| out. So not firing, but not hiring any either.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| A hiring freeze for any one company generally means
| slowly bleeding in that area: people are still leaving,
| you're just not getting anyone new to replace them.
|
| But if basically every company is doing a hiring freeze,
| and employees are unable or unwilling to quit because of
| bad economic conditions, maybe less so.
| [deleted]
| eatonphil wrote:
| It wasn't clear from the article or comments but they've let go
| engineers too.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/joeldrapper/status/15519405008144...
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [deleted]
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I wonder if Deliverr.com will be impacted, given Shopify closed
| that acquisitions just 2 weeks ago.
|
| https://news.shopify.com/shopify-completes-acquisition-of-de...
| senttoschool wrote:
| How did they lose $1.47B on $1.2B revenue last quarter? Wow.
|
| Personally, I haven't bought a single item from a Shopify store.
| I prefer Amazon because of prime shipping, reviews, and the
| ability to compare similar products with one single search.
| wadely wrote:
| I can't think of an item I've bought from a store that was
| Shopify branded, but I know that a lot of big retailers online
| are using Shopify behind the scenes - Huel are, I believe
| Gymshark are - so unless you use Amazon exclusively (also
| entirely possible!), there's every chance you have used Shopify
| without knowing
| bdcravens wrote:
| I actually buy quite a bit from Shopify stores. A lot of
| products like personal care, zero-waste and sustainable
| products, etc, are on Shopify. Once you've seen one, the
| checkout flow is often recognizable.
| system16 wrote:
| I called it quits with Amazon after my last three orders:
|
| - Received a clearly counterfeit product (not even a good
| attempt at a fake)
|
| - Received a product that looked nothing like the description
| with a note included offering me a $10 Amazon Gift card for
| providing proof of giving the seller a 5 star review. I
| reported this to Amazon and no action was taken.
|
| - My last order, the product never even arrived. No response
| from the seller despite repeated attempts. (In Amazon's
| defence, a refund was quick and painless once the 2 week
| waiting period ended)
|
| In all of these cases, the sellers had thousands of 5 star
| reviews. I feel a turning point will come where Amazon will
| either have to do some major housecleaning to fix the gaming /
| fake reviews, scams, and counterfeit products that infest their
| entire business, or customers will reach a breaking point and
| leave en-masse.
| tempsy wrote:
| lol Amazon is now more like Ebay than a store with their own
| inventory, as in the majority of sales come from shady third
| party marketplace vendors. If you think it's safer it's most
| likely because they've gotten very good at rigging reviews.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Amazon is AliExpress with faster shipping.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| AliExpress allows you to select who you are buying from.
| Not allowing that is my one problem with Amazon.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| I too purchase a lot from the junk bin that has become Amazon.
| Even still if there is anything I want to buy from the
| specialty retailer - it is almost certainly a shopify store.
| Probably dozens in the last year. They white label them fairly
| well.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Personally, I haven't bought a single item from a Shopify
| store.
|
| Unless you literally only buy from Amazon, you probably
| wouldn't be able to tell. They are white labeled.
| https://store.ui.com is one for example.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm a uMatrix user. I can tell.
| kypro wrote:
| They reported a loss on an investment in Affirm iirc. They're
| actually cash flow positive as a company, the loss is mostly
| just an accounting quirk.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| The company might not be in major trouble, just using recent
| low share prices, tech industry layoffs and freezes to make
| some cuts on underperformers.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Yea, 10% doesn't scream disaster to me. A couple % from low
| performers across the company, a couple % from
| underperforming parts of the org, a couple % from reducing
| long-term/optimistic investments, and Shopify can drop 10%
| and keep growing.
|
| The layoff-consultant folks often say you can drop a third
| of a company and not see a major difference in performance.
| If Shopify were struggling, they might have seen if the
| consultants were right.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| 10% is pretty big actually for a public company not
| fighting for their life or with a runway, imagine 1 out
| of 10 of your coworkers gone, in addition to natural
| attrition.
| adventured wrote:
| $97 million operating loss on $1.2b in sales.
|
| That one isn't an accounting quirk. Nor is the wall that
| their sales growth just ran into. The pandemic pulled future
| results forward by many years, Shopify will suffer near-term
| accordingly.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| makes me think of my home town. built around a steelmill. always
| jobs being cut for any reasons. hope all those laid off will find
| a nother good place soon. one that keep them!
| unicornmama wrote:
| As I mentioned in several other threads over the past months.
| Companies will do whatever it takes to protect their stock price.
| Googlers will soon be presented to the chopping block.
|
| Top execs are compensated in stock. Almost all turn around and
| cash out like a revolving door. They will cause hell to protect
| their upside over the short term.
| skilled wrote:
| Hmm, this statement, _" Tobi Lutke, the company's founder and
| chief executive, told staff in a memo sent Tuesday that the
| layoffs are necessary as consumers resume old shopping habits and
| pull back on the online orders that fueled the company's recent
| growth."_ - sounds a bit bullshitty.
|
| But maybe they expected the pandemic to last for the rest of our
| lives.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Did you read the article? The CEO admits straight up that he
| bet on growth, and failed.
|
| The letter is actually very direct, with little PR speak.
| Generous severance benefits too. As far as layoffs go, it's way
| more responsible than normal.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Did you see Walmart's earnings? This is sector-wide.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| Makes sense to me: Shopify is adjusting to market conditions in
| real time.
|
| During lockdowns a lot of people moved their shopping online.
| When lockdowns lifted some shopping moved offline.
|
| Also during lockdowns, lots of people tried their hand at
| online sales. Some worked, some didn't.
| BryanBeshore wrote:
| Not really. This is the type of statement that would make the
| stock of the company drop further for the simple reason of
| being honest, transparent, and truthful.
| skilled wrote:
| I don't doubt it. Still strange to hear it. I think a number
| of the bigger companies tend to hire contractors for these
| kinds of situations. And the pandemic was/is definitely one
| of those situations.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| They clearly made a bet to try and become Amazon-esque that
| hasn't paid off and has been costly.
|
| To blame 'unforeseen' waning pandemic growth seems like a copout
| by management (not surprising)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| In business, optimism usually wins over pessimism - but reality
| always settles the account.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| optimisim wins over pessimism, right up to the point the ship
| sinks. somewhere in the middle is likely the way forward.
| marcinzm wrote:
| From a business perspective layoffs aren't the ship sinking
| but simply adjusting heading.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Pessimistic people don't get promoted, even when they're
| right.
|
| It's just better to be a hyper bull and optimistic and get
| lucky and be right.
| lrae wrote:
| Wonder how much money & resources Shopify spent on all of their
| NFT features & integrations over the last months, how many people
| worked on it and how many of those are part of the lay-off now.
| I'd guess the support you'd need to provide for it and their
| tokengated commerce isn't little either.
|
| Tobi removed all the NFT stuff from his Twitter profile and
| didn't tweet much about it for months now, after being pretty
| vocal about it until earlier this year.
|
| Would love to hear his real thoughts on it and why he/they even
| (seemingly) invested so much into it. One of the few things I
| never got about Tobi / Shopify. Just seemed so late and weird to
| be so bullish there. Don't think he's the kind of person to push
| it just for personal gain, nor that he'd have to, but ...
| bhouston wrote:
| We did some NFT stuff as well. Adding support for NFTs is not
| that hard to do. Some block chain contracts and some marketing.
| It definitely didn't involve significant costs nor the reason
| for these layoffs.
|
| The issue is the market growth that Shopify saw at the
| beginning of the pandemic is pulling back. And also we are
| likely entering into a recession which will also hit them. I am
| surprised they didn't cut deeper.
| pbowyer wrote:
| > And also we are likely entering into a recession which will
| also hit them.
|
| This is a key insight. The Shopify powered shops I buy from
| are luxury expenditure. The small producers who make nice
| stuff at high prices. The last couple of months I've been
| buying significantly less from them as inflation has cut into
| disposable income and, where I need a product, buying a
| cheaper alternative from eBay or Amazon.
|
| If others have been cutting back extra expenditure like I
| have, that's going to compound the post-pandemic online
| shopping slump.
| shafyy wrote:
| I was also disgusted and surprised by the NFT shit Tobi and
| Shopify pulled (still pull?). But I'd be surprised (again, lol)
| if they had more then a dozen people working on that stuff.
| upupandup wrote:
| wasn't NFT issue but it was a signal. Shopify has some
| questionable metrics and its marketcap was very iffy as well
| as its business practices with partners from what I read.
|
| spoiler: shopify isn't done yet with layoffs, it will go down
| as another Canadian failure (lots of those in this country)
| pxue wrote:
| SHOP has $8B cash on hand. is a profitable business. how is
| that anywhere close to the definition of a failed
| business??
| upupandup wrote:
| $6.85B net
|
| It's counterparts have far bigger amounts and most of its
| customer base are affiliate markters, drop shippers.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I'm honestly still in disbelief at how many very smart people
| fell for the NFT trap. If you've spent even a single bull cycle
| in the crypto community you could tell right away NFTs we're
| ICO level scams. The mental gymnastics very smart and technical
| people performed to rationalize paying for a jpeg still makes
| me question reality. I participate in crypto because I take a
| calculated risk, and I'm comfortable gambling. People who
| actually think something like an NFT has any real value still
| messes with my head. I really can't grasp how they actually
| believe this. And yes, I understand technically how NFTs work.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ig1 wrote:
| Do you think the markets for art prints or sports cards are
| also scams?
|
| Collectable markets behave fundamentally differently from
| utility good markets so it's often hard to reason about them
| when you try to apply logic from one type of market to
| another.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| The conclusion must be that they're not actually very smart
| people.
|
| Likely that a lot of these "smart" ceos are people that were
| in the right place at the right time that fortunately had
| hired the right people that drove their success. To them the
| internet was a golden goose. Maybe NFTs are the next golden
| goose? They're running on pure hopium trying to cargo cult
| their way into their next billion and not really
| understanding anything about how they got there.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| In your opinion, is Warren Buffet not smart because he
| doesn't know how to check his email?
| NhanH wrote:
| Warren Buffet is smart and he would also be telling
| everyone to not touch any cryptocurrency related project
| with a ten thousand foot pole
| unicornmama wrote:
| No one is categorically smart. It's domain specific. Know
| your weaknesses, protect yourself from yourself.
| dkrich wrote:
| Because people typically believe any narrative associated
| with a rising asset price. "This person was early and bullish
| and has made money so they must understand it."
|
| The ill-informed association of wealth and genius are age-old
| and in many ways a necessary ingredient for a bubble to form
| in the first place.
|
| The same is true on the way down by the way. People nobody
| listened to because they were incorrectly bearish in a bull
| market are suddenly entrusted. People who were bullish are
| disregarded. People believe any scary narrative associated
| with declining asset prices. This process plays out in a
| fraction of the time.
| philistine wrote:
| Be precise: paying for a _link_ to a JPEG.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I don't think they fell for anything. I think it's more
| likely that they saw an opportunity to make some money and
| had a loose enough moral compass to go through with it.
|
| I kind of wish I kept note of everyone who took part in the
| scam. It will be easy to forget once everyone scrubs their
| profiles clean.
| rob74 wrote:
| I think OP didn't mean the NFT _sellers_ (the ones who saw
| an opportunity to make some money) but the NFT _buyers_.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Shades of _Inglourious Basterds_.
| aantix wrote:
| >I kind of wish I kept note of everyone who took part in
| the scam.
|
| I don't understand those that are vocal with public
| "threats" like the above.
|
| I remember friends on Facebook with the same idle threats
| about those not wearing mask. Or those that voted for
| Trump.
|
| "I see you! I will remember this!"
|
| Ok.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| > I don't think they fell for anything. I think it's more
| likely that they saw an opportunity to make some money and
| had a loose enough moral compass to go through with it.
|
| But even this means they fell for it. There's very little
| money in providing access to NFTs in the short term. The
| money is made by dumping over hyped projects (ex: anything
| BAYC puts out).
|
| What Shopify probably saw were the transaction amounts that
| OpenSea was doing, and thought they could jump on that
| business thinking it was any sort of long term model. They
| "fell" for it because they thought building a branch of
| their business out for NFTs was a good idea. Anyone could
| have seen this was a bad idea, and not a great way to make
| money, and also something that would die and fall apart in
| a few months.
| jxf wrote:
| > There's very little money in providing access to NFTs
| in the short term.
|
| This isn't strictly true -- marketplaces take a cut of
| the fees, and there was a lot of ETH sloshing around at
| one point.
| and0 wrote:
| I think Shopify did an ICO (or the NFT equivalent) for
| their own little cheap blobby avatar art. They sold
| thousands, starting bids at around 20k. So that was the
| play.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| _Associating falling for scammers with stupidity leaves
| yourself vulnerable through arrogance. Scamming happens to
| everyone._
|
| The faster we collectively understand the above, the faster
| we can actually implement in solutions to do what we can to
| prevent scammers and also lift the shame from people who are
| victims.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Did they fall for it or did they think they were in on it and
| applying greater fool theory?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| If they truly understood the scam they'd know it doesn't
| end where they win. So yes, they actually fell for it
| because they publicly participated in it.
| oblio wrote:
| > If they truly understood the scam they'd know it
| doesn't end where they win.
|
| Why?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Because you don't make money by selling access to NFTs.
| You make money by accumulating over hyped projects and
| then dumping them on bullish retail, knowing full well
| that in another 12-18 months that same jpeg will be worth
| nothing in the resale market.
|
| Transactions on a few thousand NFTs per day is
| meaningless (yes volumes that low). So there's no other
| option than Shopify actually believing NFTs were a real
| viable, long term business.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Ah fair. Yes, I think the marketplace builders were truly
| in on it if they invested a lot of their own money.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Why? The middle people in a pyramid scheme are still
| winners.
| WalterSear wrote:
| NFTs aren't a pyramid scheme. They are a pump-and-dump
| scheme and involved lots of wash trading.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| You can be a winner if you're selling pickaxes during a
| gold rush, but less so if you're building a pickaxe
| factory. Shopify's NFT stuff was closer to the latter.
| rchaud wrote:
| Exactly. Plenty of smart people signal their acceptance of
| NFT nonsense because they see the gravy train and want a
| piece.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I generally share your view of NFTs, I don't think your
| dismissal of them is really fair.
|
| I think what it really boils down to is that, in the "real
| world", consumers are willing to pay many, many millions of
| dollars _solely based on provenance_. That is, one mediocre
| painting may be worth a couple hundred dollars, but if it can
| be validated that the painting was actually painted by some
| famous (dead) grand master, that painting is now suddenly
| worth millions of dollars, _even though nothing about that
| painting has changed_.
|
| So, what NFT boosters were arguing was that, if people are
| willing to pay millions of dollars for provenance in the
| physical world, why not the digital world? In my belief it's
| that humans have evolved to view 2 distinct physical object,
| even if they are exactly the same, as separate - an exact
| copy of a painting so that it is indistinguishable from the
| original to the human eye would still be a different painting
| and not have the provenance of the original. For digital
| jpegs, we don't view them that way - the same image on two
| different monitors is "the same image". For physicists out
| there it's kinda like the difference between fermi dirac
| statistics and bose einstein statistics.
|
| Thus, while I agree that NFTs are all scams, I think we
| should also be asking the question of why we are willing to
| assign so much value to provenance in the physical world -
| that seems crazy to me, too.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I don't know if it's provenance or attention. My gut says
| attention as many small NFTs projects start out with no
| provenance, and as the attention around the project builds,
| so too does the hype and price. This article is worth a
| read - https://cobie.substack.com/p/tokens-in-the-
| attention-economy...
| giaour wrote:
| Some of the value people associate with provenance comes
| from the mystery Ave human drama involved in establishing a
| provenance chain. (Think of Byatt's _Possession_ or the way
| a scholarly dispute raises the profile of a work of art.)
| Any digital record really drains the romance out of the
| whole process.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think the dismissal is fair.
|
| For physical objects, scarcity is an unescapable fact. It
| would be great if we could right-click on some Michelin
| starred chef's food and have another copy of it, but we
| can't.
|
| NFTs unnecessarily add _artificial_ scarcity to something
| that didn 't really need it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > For physical objects, scarcity is an unescapable fact.
|
| But when we're talking about very expensive paintings,
| the physical scarcity of the raw materials plays
| essentially no role in the valuation. Provenance is
| everything. Sure, the canvas and paint is scarce, but the
| cost of canvas and paint is vanishingly small. Make no
| mistake, provenance is the reason people pay lots of
| money for original paintings.
| bparsons wrote:
| And they didn't even do that. You could still view and
| reproduce a jpeg without paying for it. It was a classic
| ponzi scheme.
| andreilys wrote:
| You can pay a college art student to replicate the Mona
| Lisa, but the value will be nowhere close to the
| original.
|
| Artificial scarcity is merely a signal/status booster in
| a virtual world where post-abundance is present.
|
| If you are in a VR world and want to mingle with other
| fellow "tribe members", what signal do you go off of
| that's hard to replicate?
| com2kid wrote:
| Paintings are one of those goods where we are able to
| make almost exact reproductions that, unless you get up
| close with a magnifying glass, are visually identical to
| the original.
|
| The scarcity is not in the image itself, it is in a
| combination of image + canvas.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > For physical objects, scarcity is an unescapable fact.
|
| I disagree. It is pretty possible now to create a replica
| of a painting that would be _indistinguishable to the
| human eye_ from a distance of, say, 2 feet.
|
| Yes, the object could still be distinguished by other
| means, but presumably the only reason we enjoy art like
| paintings is for their visual effect - there is literally
| no other reason to appreciate it.
|
| So my point is that the scarcity _for the reason we value
| it in the first place_ is actually not an inescapable
| fact for something like a painting.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Art is something we can appreciate the beauty of and for
| that alone, we don't per se need originals.
|
| Arguably, however, someone wanting to own the original
| painting by a well regarded artist (say a van Gogh)
| you're stepping into Veblen goods territory[0] as its a
| display of wealth, status and prestige. This is what NFTs
| are trying to achieve
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
| pxue wrote:
| values of NFT is derived on the eagerness for the buyer
| to signal virtue. It's the same reason a gamer would
| spend $20,000 in purchases in game items/loot boxes.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I had an acquaintance who spent a week or so learning about
| ethereum and NFTs, threw together a quick NFT site, generated
| some images and make nearly 500k in a weekend selling these
| to suckers.
|
| I think he _did_ believe in it, but that 's independent of
| the fact that acting quick on this made him a good chunk of
| cash with very little effort.
|
| Is that sustainable? of course not. It's also not my
| particular cup of tea as far as making money goes, but I
| would hardly say he's "not smart" for getting involved when
| he did and turning a quick buck.
| Kiro wrote:
| I like non-fungible tokens. The jpeg stuff made no sense but
| the composability/interoperability is awesome, making items
| in one application that anyone can integrate into their own
| applications without restrictions. One developer can make a
| game where you can destroy your items from other games
| without the origin game having any say in it. An open API
| that no-one controls.
|
| Remember CryptoKitties? The first NFT game before it was
| called NFTs. Someone made a game where you bred dragons, but
| in order to do so you had to feed them CryptoKitties. That's
| the type of stuff I like, not the play-to-earn crap.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > And yes, I understand technically how NFTs work.
|
| That follows from what you said before. I have yet to see
| anyone not a scammer who understands them but still thinks
| they are great.
|
| And I say that as someone who's vastly more into crypto than
| the extremely anti-crypto HN.
| xtracto wrote:
| Just the other day I was reading the EIPs for NFTs and
| other stuff, because at my work we were investigating the
| idea of using them.
|
| I was surprised by what NFTs really are... it is so simple
| it is stupid. It is just some "standard" Solidity/EVM
| functions that you have to follow when writing your Smart
| Contract, and then it's an NFT. I don't know why I thought
| it was going to be something more complicated.
|
| At the end we just made our custom Solidity contract
| tailored to what we needed. We didn't need the whole NFT
| functionality (we just needed to store a bunch of hashes in
| an IFPS file and "imprint" the hash of the file in a Smart
| Contract Key/Value map. Adding some authentication to
| operate the smart contract.
| kypro wrote:
| Do you think they all fell for it or do you think some were
| just exploiting it?
|
| I agree by the way, it's just I hesitate a bit because a lot
| of people speaking positively of NFTs were too smart to be
| mindlessly bullish. I suspect some of them thought it would
| make for positive press and drive some hype. Like with Elon
| and Bitcoin/Dogecoin. I'm convinced 90% of the stuff he says
| and does is to keep Tesla and himself in the news.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| A lot of people were exploiting it, with one of the most
| egregious examples being Long Island Ice Tea, who
| apparently have been in trouble with the SEC recently too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I'm convinced 90% of the stuff he says and does is to keep
| Tesla and himself in the news.
|
| The connotation that no news is bad news is just such a sad
| statement on the human condition. If you're in the news for
| wrong reasons with negative connotations && still
| maintaining an overall positive image, then WTF is wrong
| with people?
|
| When a particular individual continues to be theirself in
| public like this, each instance makes me think less and
| less of them. It then starts to reflect on the
| compan[y|ies] they represent. I used to regard Tesla very
| highly, but no longer. The more they focus on FSD and stop
| progressing EV cars more in general, the less I care about
| Tesla. To the point now, I no longer consider them as a car
| I'd like to buy. I'm still holding onto liking SpaceX
| notwithstanding the CEO.
| amluto wrote:
| Worse than ICO. An ICO got you something vaguely resembling
| either equity or a Kickstarter-style prepurchase. Either way,
| an ICO had some plausible value. (None of that value had
| anything to do with blockchains, and the whole thing was
| probably fraudulent to some extent, but at least the
| potential value existed.)
|
| An NFT is just an NFT and has no plausible way to be worth
| anything.
| Entwickler wrote:
| Nowhere in the article does it mention NFTs being at the heart
| of the layoffs. The article later says, "The Ottawa-based
| company will cut jobs in all its divisions, though most of the
| layoffs will occur in recruiting, support and sales units, said
| Mr. Lutke".
|
| No mention of NFTs, though wouldn't be surprised if they scale
| back on that. I _would_ be surprised if they drop support and
| development for them completely.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Some companies did work on NFTs because they believe in the
| space and think it's the next big thing. Some do it for
| marketing to say "look, we have an NFT story!" If you did it
| for marketing, there's no reason to advertise you spun down
| that initiative.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Their marketing spin doctors have been preparing for this wave of
| firings for months, they just wouldn't stop spamming ads bragging
| about how many people they hire.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I don't have any special love for Shopify, but I think this is
| one of the best and most empathetic lay-off messages I've seen.
| No businessspeak, no buzzwords, no nonsense about great journeys.
| Total clarity about what's going to happen. Very generous and
| thought-through benefit package that protects those who are
| leaving.
|
| Now, just don't tie those benefits to an NDA, and you'll truly be
| a company I'd look forward to getting fired from, Shopify.
| golemiprague wrote:
| mabbo wrote:
| Honestly, it's exactly this that made me choose to work here
| over a higher total comp elsewhere. It's what's kept me even
| after the stock crashed so hard.
|
| Tobi isn't a sociopath. The people he puts at the top aren't
| sociopaths. They're genuinely nice people, trying their best,
| and trying to do their best for everyone despite hard
| situations.
|
| It truly is just a book club disguised as a publicly traded
| company.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| If you're working there now, what's your take on the layoffs?
| Necessary/sensible? Who seems to be leaving?
| shmatt wrote:
| I guess that explains the stock price. I would never invest
| in a book club
|
| In all seriousness, I would separate the fact the top
| executives are good people, with the fact (at least in the
| U.S) they have become notorious low ballers for top engineers
| tensor wrote:
| Interesting, I have the exact opposite view based what I hear
| from friends who work there. Kaz alone would make me never
| want to work at such an anti-intellectual, purely opinion and
| aggression driven workplace.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Who or what is Kaz?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I googled "Kaz Shopify" and got
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasranejatian/
| Gunnerhead wrote:
| Seems like VP of Merchant Services? Not familiar with
| him.
|
| https://ca.linkedin.com/in/kasranejatian
| altdataseller wrote:
| Same here, but my view is from interacting with some of
| them, specifically some higher-up engineers. They acted as
| if they were so much better than you somehow. I don't know
| if it was the fact their RSUs were making them rich, or
| something. Not everyone is like this of course, but it left
| an awful first impression on me.
| tensor wrote:
| Yeah, that's common from what I hear. Also on the UX side
| you need approvals all the way up the chain even to Toby
| who can just veto your project a week before release for
| what amounts to personal preferences.
|
| Maybe the dev side is better but my impression is that
| the design side has no ownership and is driven primarily
| by the loudest opinion rather than any sort of data or
| testing. And when you have five layers of approvals where
| people pick on the easiest and least important aspects
| that ends up being a very slow design by committee. The
| end result of this culture is very low efficiency and
| consistently mediocre outcomes.
|
| The people who thrive in their culture appear to be the
| loudest and most aggressive.
| s_dev wrote:
| >Those lines of code started a company and sent it on a
| fascinating journey full of wonder
|
| I looked forward to reading a lay off message without the
| obligatory "what a journey" message but like that was in the
| opening paragraph. I'd say the message was fairly standard.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| True, but it's one brief paragraph, not more than 50% of the
| message like we've seen.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| This is a good one. What I wish I'd see from all companies
| doing layoffs
| irajdeep wrote:
| Liked the mention of "comradery" over "family".
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Indeed. Compare this to Klarna's CEO
| https://www.klarna.com/uk/blog/company-announcement-from-ceo...
| who never mentioned the actual firing. 10% is "getting
| impacted". I find it ridiculous when people use language like
| this. Especially a CEO. Have some courage and say the thing out
| loud. Shopify seems to have a much better CEO.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| This is exactly the message I was thinking of when I wrote my
| original post, but I had forgotten which company it was.
| Thank you!
| simonhamp wrote:
| In the UK you are not allowed to talk about people getting
| fired; you must talk about redundancy and roles (not people)
| being made 'potentially' redundant (i.e. 'impacted')
|
| It's a very controlled legal wording and process for a large
| redundancy approach and must be adhered to very carefully so
| as not to fall foul of tribunals and unfair dismissals.
|
| I don't know Klarna or Shopify from the inside, but I suspect
| this difference is largely down to the differences in legal
| obligations between Canada and the UK
| vasco wrote:
| What happens if in the UK you say "getting fired"?
| barkingcat wrote:
| You get fired for saying you get fired?
| MEMORYC_RRUPTED wrote:
| There's more information available in the full email by Tobi (the
| CEO): https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
| hef19898 wrote:
| The funny thing is, and it shows in this mail, Tobi built a
| true profitable Unicorn. And outside of Shopify, and even
| within eCommmerce, he has such a low profile as a person.
| Founders here in germany look to Musk, I suspect (and now for a
| fact) a lot of them don't even know who he (Edit: Tobi) is.
|
| I like that mail, ckear, to the point, factual and self
| critical. Severence packages are good, really good. All in all,
| quite a change from other companies firing people over zoom.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| It's always been interesting to me --- most people dont
| realize it's way better to be rich and unknown then be known
| to be rich. Tobi can't hide that he is rich at this point,
| but I bet he can go into most restaurants or bars outside of
| CA without being accosted.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| I agree. Also I think Shopify is centered in Ottawa, Canada
| -- where I suspect he's also free from being accosted in
| restaurants and bars.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Hockey players are more likely to be accosted in Ottawa
| than a local CEO.
| kypro wrote:
| > Founders here in germany look to Musk, I suspect (and now
| for a fact) a lot of them don't even know who he (Edit: Tobi)
| is.
|
| Fyi for those who don't know Tobi is German, but moved to
| Canada where he started Shopify.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Tobi is a much more admirable CEO than Musk, even though Tobi
| appears to be a Musk fan.
| dayvid wrote:
| "Most of the impacted roles are in recruiting, support, and
| sales, and across the company we're also eliminating over-
| specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that
| were convenient to have but too far removed from building
| products."
|
| Important to keep in mind that engineering roles may not be as
| affected as other departments.
| neon_electro wrote:
| About to find out personally! (applying to Shopify for an eng
| role as of this comment)
| achow wrote:
| 16 weeks of severance pay.
|
| Additional week for every year of tenure at Shopify.
|
| No Equity cliff.
|
| Medical benefits (for 16 weeks?).
|
| Internet costs reimbursement (16 weeks?).
|
| Get to keep home office furniture.
|
| Kickstart allowance that can be used to buy new laptops.
|
| Outplacement services.
|
| Free Shopify account those who wants to start on their own.
| mberning wrote:
| I wish I could get that offer right now. I would take it
| straight away.
|
| That reminds me though. I went through quite a few big
| layoffs at GE and one of the better ones was when they were
| offering people 26 weeks of pay plus one week for each year
| of service. Many of these people had 20+ years so they would
| have gotten nearly a year of pay to quit. Almost nobody took
| it.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| I have been at startups where they just stop paying the
| office lease and salaries stop. These days i am just prepared
| for it. If you are in the backend side of things you can
| figure out most things with a few sql queries.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > stop paying the office lease and salaries stop
|
| Last job I had before this one, I came into work the week
| before Thanksgiving to a mandatory morning meeting that
| consisted of "the company is out of business effective
| immediately, you will all be emailed your severance details
| by personal email, please clean out your desks".
| evan_ wrote:
| if you have to query the database to tell how the company's
| doing- or you don't trust what they're telling you- that's
| probably a pretty big red flag by itself
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| > If you are in the backend side of things you can figure
| out most things with a few sql queries.
|
| Expand on this? You querying the prod db to sus out the
| health of the company?
| krallja wrote:
| Even without querying prod db,
| postgres://billing.and.analytics.internal is available to
| most engineers in small startups.
| akavi wrote:
| Yeah, the lack of a revenue dashboard at a startup would
| be a red flag in and of itself.
| willcipriano wrote:
| For the platforms I've built I've had access to the
| customers table for example, you know if it's growing or
| shrinking.
|
| You don't even have to explicitly nose around, looking at
| the logs you'll see customer IDs and if they are
| sequential a keen eye will notice if they stop getting
| any higher.
| bluedino wrote:
| We generated a report each week to let all the devs know
| how many customers we had starting that week, what
| products they were launching, how many users they each
| had...
|
| It was great for planning the on-call rotation as well as
| giving us a heads up on which nights we could go out
| drinking and how late we could come in the next morning.
| bushbaba wrote:
| This actually makes laying off a recent hire sr employee more
| expensive. As they'd need to pay out all the equity and 16
| weeks of expensive base salary.
| tempsy wrote:
| I don't think that's what no equity cliff means
|
| if it's a standard one year cliff then it just means if
| you've worked there for 5 months you get 5 months of equity
| whereas you would have gotten zero. it's not "all the
| equity"
|
| Also Shopify is -80% ytd so if you were hired the beginning
| of the year you were expecting a completely different
| compensation package than you are getting now.
| ant6n wrote:
| If the strike price for the options is 5x the current
| stock price (due to 80% drop), I wonder how useful the
| no-cliff rule is for recent hires.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Does Shopify give out options? I would have thought RSUs
| considering they've been public a while.
| TimPC wrote:
| Even RSUs are converted from a dollar value to a number
| of shares in the month you join. If you're getting them a
| year later with this level of stock decline a $220k/year
| salary and $220k/year of stock would be $264k of
| compensation when you were expecting somewhere near
| $440k. So even with RSUs the pain is real.
| samsolomon wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is correct. I've been in a position
| where the company that hired me couldn't keep paying me
| and we decided to part ways a few months short of a year.
| The founder offered me the amount of options that would
| have vested had there been no cliff.
| trdtaylor1 wrote:
| I would take this for my current job with which i'm
| moderately okay with currently holding. Stunningly generous
| benefits.
| tempsy wrote:
| I wonder how the free stuff is taxed. It sounds like it
| would fit under a fringe benefit and technically would mean
| it's taxable.
| User23 wrote:
| It's a taxable benefit and they do let you opt out if you
| don't want to pay the taxes.
| conorcleary wrote:
| O'Canada.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The first time is generous.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| The downside is that the worst performers get the best
| severance benefits - each round of layoffs reduces the
| benefits and gets rid of the less expendable folks.
| neon_electro wrote:
| You assume that the folks receiving severance are actually
| "bad performers"; layoffs are not the kind of mechanism
| that cleanly separate "good" from "bad" performers.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > actually "bad performers"
|
| Well, ok - "the most expendable" then.
| rsanek wrote:
| Well, when a company starts considering who to lay off,
| they're not gonna start with people who they think are
| rockstars. At worst those folks would get reassigned.
| TimPC wrote:
| Well considering that a large chunk of the layoffs were
| in recruiting and that you basically have a hiring freeze
| I am sure plenty of rockstar recruiters were nonetheless
| laid off.
| [deleted]
| foobiekr wrote:
| Only the first time and even then not really true.
| Reassignment assumes that reqs haven't previously been
| canceled as part of belt tightening in those other
| groups.
|
| Also, by layoff N, you're cutting meat unless you are a
| massively bloated company, which is somewhat rare this
| time around (unlike HP, Cisco, Sun, etc. in 2001).
| fallingknife wrote:
| I work at a series B startup, and even we are bloated. It
| would be next to impossible not to be given the
| prevailing funding environment of the last 10 years.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I don't know if the way this works really correlate to
| worst / best performers in this case or in my experience. I
| once worked for a company that after some great successes
| slowly went bankrupt. Naturally there were many episodes of
| layoffs and in general I would say people were let go based
| on changing priorities. You could have been a great
| employee in an area they were going to pursue and you were
| gone.
|
| After the first or second round of layoffs that I avoided,
| I mentioned to an older employee that I was really glad to
| dodge that bullet. "I don't know," he said. "The earlier
| ones usually get the better deal." This was so true! I
| stayed until the doors were closed for good and didn't even
| get vacation paid I was owed. I don't regret it though
| because as the company imploded I got to try my hand at new
| roles, and worked with a really clever team that tried
| heroically to turn the company around.
| tarellel wrote:
| Wow these are some amazing severance benefits. I'd love to
| see more companies as generous a this when reducing their
| staff load.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| I want to get laid off too :(
| georgeecollins wrote:
| To everyone who says they want to get laid off-- this is
| an obvious sign that you should find another job! If you
| would quit your job for four months pay, you might be
| able to get that in a signing bonus and a raise. Plus,
| why be somewhere that you are so happy to leave?
| sparkbII wrote:
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Because there is so much more in life than work, and I
| don't think there is any job somewhere that I would not
| be happy to leave, why people like jobs , how did we get
| to this point in time
| anony23 wrote:
| I think this just means you haven't had a great job. When
| you have a great job, it doesn't feel like work" in the
| same sense that a not so great job does.
| somebodythere wrote:
| I would rather have severance + sign on bonus than only
| sign on bonus!
| ghaff wrote:
| This sort of thing used to be pretty common with large
| employers. A classmate got caught up in maybe the first
| layoff round of one of the old-line East Coast computer
| companies. He'd only been there a few years but as I recall
| he still got something like 6 months severance and he took
| off to Greenland for an extended trip before even looking
| for another job.
| ezekg wrote:
| This is well written. Explains the problem well, and sincerely
| blames himself for the end result.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/FAWFt
| parkingrift wrote:
| Shopify stock is down 80% over the last 12 months, but their P/E
| ratio is still 250. I predict more rounds of layoffs for Shopify,
| and with less generous severance packages. This company is valued
| as if they are a hyper growth startup, and I just don't see it.
| Good luck to anyone buying or holding this stock.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _This company is valued as if they are a hyper growth
| startup_
|
| Agreed. I think Shopify is a great product, but they were
| _huge_ beneficiaries of the COVID-19 lockdowns and Robinhood
| culture of 2020 /2021 (their only profitable years?).
| adventured wrote:
| They're this era's Nortel (Canada has a primo bubble stock with
| each big run; during the housing bubble era it was Blackberry).
|
| There's very little that is special about their business. They
| have no great competitive moat. It hasn't even demonstrated
| good margins ala an eBay. The hype started with Amazon's stock
| liftoff, which was overwhelmingly due to AWS not retail.
| Investors went looking for the next Amazon in ecommerce and
| foolishly bought into the premise that Shopify would be that.
| Now all the bubbly ecommerce valuations are collapsing, as they
| should. Stocks like Etsy and Fiverr still need cut in half
| again at a minimum.
|
| Shopify is worth three to four times sales at most. Compress
| that further as their growth slows. The stock will stagnate for
| at least a decade vs the highs it hit during this bubble.
| parkingrift wrote:
| I mostly agree. I personally think Shopify should be valued
| at around $3-5 billion at most.
| setgree wrote:
| The article says that Shopify is reeling from a post-pandemic
| fall in demand that the execs didn't see it coming. But
| forecasting is hard, and even if they _had_ seen it coming, they
| probably would have needed to hire broadly anyway.
|
| One solution here is to move from 'at will' employment explicit
| 'tours of service' [0]. If you had hired a bunch of staff in June
| 2020 under a 2 year contract, with renewal not guaranteed or even
| expected, you essentially have a built-in mechanism to match
| employment to the at-home shopping surge.
|
| If you had thought the pandemic would just be one year, or three,
| you could write the contract accordingly.
|
| This is probably pretty hard for roles where it takes a while to
| get up and running, but not so hard for, e.g., sales and
| operations roles.
|
| I personally would appreciate this because every 1-2 years I
| yearn for a long break.
|
| [0]
| https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/waeDDnaQBTCNNu7hq/...
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| The only way I'd accept a contract that was not 'contract to
| hire with a high chance of conversion' is at a significant
| premium to compensate me for the hassle.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Ah yes, let's make peoples jobs even less secure. Why stop with
| two years? Why not just have everyone employed weekly and if an
| algorithm figures out they're not worthy, off they go?
| rmahan wrote:
| That would essentially be at will employment, our current
| system. "Stopping" at two years is an improvement from our
| current system because employment (or rather, a salary) would
| be a guaranteed via a contract. People wouldn't sign a weekly
| contract like that if a 2yr contract existed elsewhere
| chartpath wrote:
| At will employment is not legal in Canada.
| dehrmann wrote:
| People like to think that evil bosses will fire people for
| shits and giggles a la "Black Fridays" in Arrested
| Development, but finding and training people is such a
| hassle, the theoretical "you can be fired whenever for no
| reason" is rarely abused to that extent.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > the theoretical "you can be fired whenever for no
| reason" is rarely abused to that extent.
|
| I used to think this way until it happened to me. The CEO
| didn't care that she was losing a senior technical
| resource because it wasn't going to be her job to replace
| me. She found out I was interviewing and fired me because
| she hated it when people resigned. It was so bizarre, but
| those people do exist.
| neon_electro wrote:
| I think in organizations where the loss of an individual
| with years of institutional knowledge is felt, this
| applies more.
|
| Startup just acquired a competitor and doubled its
| headcount overnight? Who cares about retraining folks you
| want to fire after that? You have to reorganize the new
| merged organization anyways, what better than to realign
| salaries with existing budgets?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>I personally would appreciate this because every 1-2 years
|
| While you would, most of the labor sector would not. For me I
| explicitly reject fixed term contract employment, while on the
| surface it may seem more ideal, for me At-will employment
| through out my career has been pretty stable, and normally on
| the inside I can tell when layoffs are coming, and what segment
| so will be impacted so I can plan accordingly
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Canada is not at will! And they can already hire contract
| workers if they wanted to, that's just what you are proposing.
| Spoom wrote:
| You say "tours of service", I say "perma-temp", because that's
| what companies would do to make this a thing. Add a mandatory
| six month unpaid vacation (to keep up the legal fiction of them
| not being employees) and you have the dream of companies
| everywhere to underpay and deny benefits to their "temps" while
| never having to deal with formal layoffs because nobody was
| ever really "employed".
|
| Most people want stability. Do layoffs if you need to, but cut
| once, cut deep, and as Shopify did here, do well by the folks
| you're letting go. (And then evaluate if you should change your
| hiring targets to prevent this in the future.)
| happyopossum wrote:
| > This is probably pretty hard for roles where it takes a while
| to get up and running, but not so hard for, e.g., sales and
| operations roles.
|
| Aside from the manyfold problems that your 'solution' would
| cause or exacerbate, this shows a remarkable lack of cross-
| functional understanding. It's generally assumed it will take
| 1-2 quarters for sales teams to ramp up, and even the good ones
| don't hit their stride until a year in.
|
| It's also disrespectful to your customers to turn over their
| sales teams every year or two, as they have to endure 6 months
| of "I don't know, let me find out".
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