How is this responsibility defined? How is this responsibility measured? What aspects of the ex-Prisma people does this responsibility cover? What measurable and practical effects does this responsibility have when measured in one week, one month, three months, one year from now? If these targets are not met, what are the consequences of that? What are the means of enforcing that responsibility?
I seriously think we need to start asking these sorts of questions and defining some sorts of standards for this "responsibility" this sentence mentions. In all other contexts, responsibility has its very tangible practical grounding and means of enforcing that grounding. In announcements like these, it reads just like a random and inconsequential "I'm sorry".
That's what I'm worried about and that's why I'm calling BS on this. The executive uses big words like "responsibility", I'd like to know what concrete measures are then hidden behind it.
Corporations talk only BS for the past 10-15 years, words have no longer a meaning. Failures are usually rewarded, not punished, failing upwards is the norm in many places. Expectations of real responsibility, actions, etc are for people from other times, that are old or retired.
If it does not start with a 28% reduction in all areas of compensation, and full elimination of all bonus opportunities for the current calendar and fiscal year, then no responsibility has been taken.
What track record you're talking about? Last time layoffs of this size hit the market was about 15 years ago. Through these years average compensation in IT steadily rose, usually faster than market.
The responsibility companies have towards people are generally defined in (i) the contract of employment, (ii) company policies, and (iii) legislation within the relevant jurisdiction.
Outside of anything defined in these areas a company doesn't have any responsibility towards the people, including those laid off. It's an incredibly good idea to have that clear in your mind when you accept a job.
Many of us are working for, or help lead, much smaller companies who - because they weren't so spendy - are much less likely to need to invoke large scale layoffs during the current economic turmoil (no matter how careful you are, things can still go sideways though).
Nevertheless, many of our companies have been subject to the disruption of companies like Prisma (and plenty of others: Meta, Google, Shopify, and the rest) hoovering up every developer they could get at inflated salaries just because they had plenty of money to spent and a bit of an anti-competitive streak (and I note that many of the layoffs I've read about so far have mostly included staff outside of engineering and product development, so not much has changed on the latter). This has hurt our businesses, set back projects, caused a lot of stress amongst employees who've remained, and of course cost us a huge amount in rehiring.
I can't blame anyone for accepting a role with a 30 - 50% pay increase elsewhere: everyone is under financial pressure, particularly at the moment, and everyone has aspirations for their future (nothing wrong with that). But it's not all upside, and I do wish people would be more careful in assessing possible outcomes - in particular understand what they're signing up for.
When a market changes as much as it has, as rapidly as it has, over the past 3 years - be that employment or any other market - there is always going to be some sort of regression to the mean, and some element of bullwhip effect.
> I mean metrics for measuring responsibility towards the people, especially the laid-off ones - there seems to be absolutely none of these.
First: The people being laid off are shareholders too. Prisma is offering part of their salary in equity.
Second: How would a responsible lay-off other than this look like?
Severance pay: All departing team members will receive one month of additional pay per year of service, plus the payout of any accrued PTO.
Healthcare benefits:
Prismas health benefits for US employees will remain in place through February.
International contractors who don’t have government funded medical cover available will receive an extra $1,000 severance.
Equity vesting: We are waiving the equity cliff for team members who have been with us for more than 6 months but less than 1 year.
Job search support: For all those who wish to, we will do our best to connect you with the various recruitment groups within our investor community.
Equipment: Keep all of the equipment that has been issued to you during the course of your employment with Prisma.
He is taking responsibility by: 1) probably not making the same mistake in the near future again, and 2) taking money out of the company's bags and giving it to employees.
What is the alternative to this? Should Prisma keep the workers, which became unnecessary for reaching the company's goals?
Yes, it's most likely they over hired like every other tech company. But now are in an environment, where it's difficult to raise additional funds. Obviously, Prisma is now adapting and tries to lower the cash burn rate.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that most tech companies massively hired in 2019, 2020 and 2021. If it now becomes obvious, that they hired too many people, what should they do besides cutting?
Right, but on the other hand there’s no responsibility if there’s no metric. Someone took responsibility on them to have revenue enough to keep people around, someone failed at that. Maybe revenue was enough but there was a decision to cut people anyways - someone who had responsibility to keep people they’ve hired. Someone might’ve hired HR people in order to grow the company, and now they’ve decided they don’t want to so let’s cut HR people.. nothing outside of contract stands between management and a worker if there’s no syndicate. Contract is easily terminated though, with or without penalties - depending. I guess companies aren’t our friends after all?
> Right, but on the other hand there’s no responsibility if there’s no metric.
That's why I call BS on the executive saying "I take full responsibility."
> I guess companies aren’t our friends after all?
They never were and never will be unless they decide to be friends. They may create a pleasing environment to do work in and care for good atmosphere in the workplace and press for decent interpersonal communication so that work gets done smoother, but it's all about the common goal of getting work done so they can get paid so you can get paid. This isn't friendship, it's optimization.
Until your employment contract has an explicit friendship clause of some sort, or unless you own or co-own the company, you have no guarantees you are anything more than a mercenary with some legal protections that kick in if you are let go. That's the very basis of capitalism where workers are one of the many manageable resources.
I don’t care how much he was pushed. He’s the guy at the helm. Part of that lavish comp package should be the ability to say “we don’t need that many employees; that hiring is not in the best interests of investors/customers”.
this. my small company in 2020 & 2021, grew with COVID like most tech companies. But last year, we scaled back hiring more, heck we struggled to hire as anybody worth a penny was picked up for higher wages by the big boys. we are not laying anyone off. heck I am looking to hire aggressively this year, as others lay off.
Part of being a competent leader is correctly assessing staffing needs of your org. If you suck at upsizing your staffing needs correctly, why should we trust that you don't also suck at downsizing correctly. I have little respect for leaderships that overhire then layoff. I view them as incompetent.
There is consequence you may not consider. This company may not make it making the CEOs efforts worthless. I suspect many companies will not make it in this cycle.
Taking responsibiliy means you have work to do to correct the problem.
You spilled coffee on the table? Clean it up. That's your responsibility. It doesn't mean you need to be "punished".
In the case of layoffs, taking responsibility might mean having to face the public and the employees with the decision and having to endure the public shaming you, etc. All on behalf of the board and shareholders.
They are taking the responsibility for having overhired and are acting on this responsibility by laying off.
They are not taking responsibility in front of laid off staff in any actionable way but "you can blame me rather than human resources, PMs that cried for more engineers, investors that were looking for signs of growth via head count..." which again is a sign of taking responsibility in front of shareholders, not really employees.
You're taking it out on a guy who graduated in 2013, managed to found a company in Europe! and have it survive long enough to make it to SF, and created ~100 jobs in the process?!?!
This behavior should be celebrated, and so should the people who supported his growth as CEO of his company.
The alternative is to install a class of professional CEO punching bags at the helm of every early-stage company. Not doing that is exactly what defined Silicon Valley post dot-com.
It's measured as I get paid a ton of money because of the responsibility I have but then nothing happens when things go to shit because well, nothing happens. BTW when's my next bonus pay day?
The company was doomed the moment they started hiring at unreasonable pace because VC $$$. I have seen the same at other startups I worked at: VC pump $$$ into the company, the CEO starts bragging on doubling headcount every other quarter; people look at each other asking themselves what all this new people are going to do. Engineering now spend most of the time interviewing rather than building and delivering awesome products.
Eventually growth slows down, customers are upset because the product sucks and here we are.
Who is to blame? The CEO along with the board. So a change of CEO might be the only thing saving the company.
> The company was doomed the moment they started hiring at unreasonable pace
History disagrees. And the only reason the company exists in the first place is because of VC money. Don't join a startup if you don't want the risks associated with a startup.
> Who is to blame?
No one, because humans can't predict the future. Why are you so eager to see people punished? It's so easy to be critical when you're not the one actually responsible for building and running a company. This entire thread is an example of "tell me you know nothing about running a business without saying you know nothing about running a business".
I recently had to fire my landscaper, so based on this logic I should probably sell my house so that I can "take responsibility".
Based on LinkedIn they grew from 134 to 164 in the last 6 months. I get taking a bet in 2021 on the post-covid world being different but making that same bet in mid 2022 doesn't seem a good decision.
I'd be ok with this and other lies having legal (civil) consequences, i.e. CEOs who say this are personally liable. Obviously, this phrase would die and that's the point.
Really, it's not hard to remain authentic. Statements like "I feel terrible" are fine and even "we're trying to support everyone through this transition, both staff directly affected and their families, as well as the remaining staff who we realize shoulder increased burden." Without saying "we're doing everything we can" and other obvious lies.
“I take full responsibility” means “I am not firing these people because of their faults, I am firing them because I need to and had I better foresight, I wouldn’t have hired them in the first place”
The firing is a necessary consequence of the hiring. You can, if you want, make it harder to fire people — but if you do you will also find companies will be less willing to hire people.
Perhaps that's what the speaker intends but not what affected listeners are likely to hear. In the west, it's the speaker's responsibility to make themselves understood by the majority of listeners.
I explained the other day to a friend how Prisma looks great but it's very unresponsive on Github [1], specially surprising since they raised a lot of money so I thought they'd have more resources. So he introduced me to the concept of FOSS-washing (in relation to greenwashing). Launch a cool open source piece of software, get big clients and funding thanks to it and then basically ignore Github or just dedicate enough resources to it so that it doesn't seem "dead".
I had seen and complained about this before here in HN, how when Github said they were sunsetting Atom for lack of engagement I pointed out that the lack of engagement was... by them, not a single commit in few years so of course there was no activity [2]
Edit: looking at the Github tracker now, it seems that now they use Github as the main tracking software? So there's a bunch of new issues by internal contributors with "bad description" (meaning it's probably the tip of the iceberg of an internal issue just for tracking, not the typical issue someone finds and reports), but the old ones sit there unanswered.
I’ve had PRs open since last March with them and have been somewhat disappointed at their response to adding features through OSS contributions. These aren’t minor contributions either.
For example, I want to add ltree support to Prisma (which could also extend to MSSQL’s Hierarchy). I’ve shepherded this whole thing through at least 4 repos, adding the necessary pieces in order to make it work.
Their communication and follow up has been generally poor. The engineers they have on staff are capable but they either don’t see the value in larger OSS contributions or don’t have the time to manage both the internal and external roadmapping?
Luckily I've had enough skin in the game contributing that, seeing a few (non) responses in very useful community-opened issues and PRs, decided that it was likely not worth investing too many hours fixing the issue I linked by myself, since I suspected a possible PR might end up exactly in the situation you are at right now...
I think all these layoffs really come down to haves and have nots. You don’t need prisma, to be completely honest. You do need a lot of other software, otherwise some companies that depend on it cannot operate.
I have tried my best over my short (just six years so far in swe, and a few years in a non tech role) career to be on teams where our work is basically in the top 1-3 annual initiatives. It guarantees I keep my job 99% because I work on the things that make money for the company. It’s not my company, so that’s my terms of employment I set for myself. Don’t work on things that push the envelope too far (moonshot), if things don’t work out you lose as an employee (granted if you’re at a big tech company layoffs don’t really mean much with 3+ month severance packages and cozy amounts of additional support).
If I’m on an employee vesting schedule I’m gonna make sure I win as much as I can.
They have a ton of VC money to spend somewhere. The VCs get mad if you don't spend the money, it makes them feel like you asked for it under false pretenses...or if you are spending it too slowly, that you are not trying hard enough.
It does sound a bit inflated. Over the years though I’ve learned that whatever your engineering gut instinct tells you, you need to double that amount and that’ll be the actual number of people and then double to triple that amount in order to account for vacations, illnesses, maternities, people leaving and also having a new stream of people being trained in (not to be in a situation where someone leaves and no one to replace) AND then also add 10% of support staff or budget for external. This all without sales, marketing, etc.. that’s how easy it is to get inflated numbers, while it all still makes sense.
100 people is a big number for a SQL transpiler with some SaaS "value add".
From a technological point of view I can't fathom how anyone would add this level of bloat to their project. Just write your SQL queries like a normal person.
i have a company of that size (~100 employees, 60engineers) and we do not have a lawyer on staff. We have a law firm we hire for big things, and an old corporate lawyer friend on as-needed basis who does the small things. Done
for what its worth they are not "just" a DB interface layer. they are at this point or soon to be one of the most popular ORM in JS (~100% market share for new projects among early adopter types) and a cross-db "super ORM" at that (ya i know what i typed, i have my doubts too but hey that seems to be what people want).
A company like Vercel needs significant infrastructure and the people associated with it, as well as supporting admin (HR, lawyers, accountants), proper customer support (for 24/7 coverage so that can be quite a lot of people), UI/UX people, documentation/education people, etc. etc. Of course also sales and account managers, presales engineers.
Just because you think you can make their product in a weekend all on your own doesn't mean that to get to where they are a ton of people aren't needed.
I agree it’s odd, and I’m not sure, but it feels to me like a big chunk of their staff might be involved with building Next.js and also running the annual conference of the same name which gets a lot of attention. I think maybe they see this as their moat. Any product that is just a thin layer around AWS is in danger of being suddenly eaten by a competitor or an OSS alternative or AWS itself. For Vercel, owning one of the world’s most popular web frameworks, which just happens to be particularly optimised for their own platform (both the deployment DX and performance), probably gives them a decent moat in that it keeps a huge number of devs around the world familiar with and positive about Vercel.
They say GTM and it sounds like mid-market/enterprise sales. Scaling these teams requires a lot of support staff and if they’re ineffective things go sideways fast.
According to my employer, coming from google makes your opinions facts. Since alot of googlers come from stanford, coming from stanford makes your opinion a fact. QED
It gets to the point where it's hard to even know what to say about the nth tech layoff announcement.
It's a good reminder, if we needed one, of how fragile the good times are, for anyone who is an ordinary professional working in an economy like this. I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other - like something more concrete than "sure I would recommend people from my network for jobs once we aren't in a hiring freeze."
> I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other
Unionisation would help. We don't do ourselves any favours by not unionising.
Almost all job security and employment rights were won by unions and strike action. No wonder unions are a dirty word—according to corporate America.
Even when the jobs can't be saved, employment rights are helpful. The Google? Microsoft? announcement basically said, we've already fired some of the American staff, but in other countries were are merely starting the statutory consultation process. That means a longer period of pay.
Job security might be a good thing at the individual level, but imo it's pretty awful at the system level. It promotes inefficiencies.
It's much better to have a liquid employment market with a solid social net instead.
Switzerland does it pretty well. Employment is at will (in that employers can fire anyone without a justification), but health insurance is mostly not tied to employment, and you get 70% of your salary for up to two years. Compare to say France, where short term contracts are very common and other shitty employment practices abounds because employers are scared to commit.
>Even when the jobs can't be saved, employment rights are helpful. The Google? Microsoft? announcement basically said, we've already fired some of the American staff, but in other countries were are merely starting the statutory consultation process. That means a longer period of pay.
The American staff are also paid decently more than other countries. Is getting a 40% pay cut worth getting a few more months of pay before being laid off?
> It gets to the point where it's hard to even know what to say about the nth tech layoff announcement.
Investors don't get free helicopter money, thus they can't pump money into startups/tech companies thus companies have to cut the dead weight. There will be more lay offs coming - because the free money economy is currently suspended.
This has always been true, in good or bad economies. But There was a culture of throwing money away with insane valuations and insane financing rounds. It always seemed to me that all those things that these startups were doing at $X rounds, could be done at $X/10. But they gave $X, and supported insane hiring, now they're firing people they should not have hired, some of which maybe have issues such as long term healthcare needs, debt, etc and could have gotten more stable jobs elsewhere had they known these companies didn't really need them but were just flexing. Seems to me that this "responsibility" should be enforced by some labor protection laws.
Like the unemployment system run by the government(s)? We all pay in, those let go get to draw on it, the government seems willing to augment and extend eligibility length
I defaulted to Prisma for edge apps I'm experimenting with (supabase db). Given it's not possible to connect via TCP to a database and I'm stuck with JS/TS for the edge, I opted for Prisma's data proxy and henceforth Prisma.
Using the ORM means I'm tied to this mess of an abstraction, migrations and scripts that require so many workarounds and experimentation to make it worthwhile when your app is not a simple CRUD or you want performance optimizations without ending up writing your own queries yet again. The generated TS API is the only pleasant feature, but doing things the Prisma way I noticed my app is now tied to this ecosystem and its quirks and I dread it. Being unable to check generated queries' SQL beforehand is also a huge issue that is not getting solved any time soon from what I've gathered on their github.
You could also use Prisma as a SQL client and leverage their data proxy, without needing to use the ORM and execute SQL migrations and queries directly, which is what I intend to do from now on. Please do let me know if there are any other generic alternatives database-wise (for "the edge"), I miss raw [Postgre]SQL. Supabase's client is the closest I can think of and it also generates types from your db, but it's obviously not a generic solution.
Lastly, one particular thing that disgusts me (I believe it's not on Prisma but due to how the edge works) is that you cannot use a local database for development. Perhaps ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually - I need to experiment more on that.
For typesafe queries at the edge I'm using kysely + planetscale over http (look for database.js).
The only drawback is collapsing rows into neat objects is slower than Prisma (client written in rust) but I'm mostly writing graphql stuff this days so less of a problem.
> ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually
If you pay for ngrok you get a stable hostname. That said...looks like their price has decreased somewhat dramatically for an individual license. There are other competing services like https://expose.dev/#pro
Damn, I use Prisma, it's a good way to have a unified database schema for which you can generate code in any language you want. It was very useful for converting a TypeScript project to a Rust one, I use prisma-client-rust in particular.
I'd be interested to know the age (or any other) demographic of HN'ers commenting on posts like these. Lot of people sounding very personally slighted by companies trying to remain profitable (or just in business).
I don't think FAANG is trying to just stay in business. My point is not that they should not be laying off, is that they should not have hired this bloat in the first place, and responsibility should come from that. If you need to fire 10k people, as a CEO you should not get out unscathed from the decisions that let to having hired these people, especially if your company would remain highly profitable whether you fired them or not.
I’ve seen Zoomers think Tech is the safest, best job. They’ve only seen the 3 years of boom. I’ve been around for much longer - tech jobs are great but very much come and go.
> Lot of people sounding very personally slighted by companies trying to remain profitable (or just in business).
Do you really need to make an effort to figure out why employees feel slighted for being fired without notice, and specially by an employer whose profitability is not questioned?
You made it sound like only unreasonable people would be bothered by being forced out of a job while having rent/mortgage and bills to pay.
I haven't made any comment on the manner, nor assumed that those "HN'ers" were the ones layed off (which I think is a bit of a stretch anyways). I'm only commenting that whenever one of these "x company lays off x people" posts get made, you have this pitchfork-party effect happening.
It's the same industry where it's common wisdom that you should take a new, better offer every two years and change jobs. Shouldn't come as a shock that sometimes it work the other way.
> Shouldn't come as a shock that sometimes it work the other way.
Isn’t “the other way” the norm on all US companies?
What “the same industry” taught its professionals is that loyalty should not be a one-way deal when corporate dictates that every person can and should be automatically discarded at the drop of a hat, and benefitting from a demand-driven job market is shown to be the only option that employees have to safeguard their livelihood.
I’ve lost count of the number of LinkedIn posts of veterans with >10years in FANGs being summarily fired during the night and only finding out because their access was revoked. This is exactly why people proactively switch jobs. This is the consequence, not the cause. Using these cases to justify labour abuses is victim-blaming.
One of the comments there made the excellent point that the lib was still 'early access' which most mature devs wouldn't use for production. Maybe if it was 1.0.0 prod-ready, use would have skyrocketed but Prisma would never know that.
Looking at other popular JS projects, they monetise by basically creating a ‘cloud’ offering which is just re-selling AWS resources in a highly specialised way.
Not an answer to your question, but just to shed light on the framing, it's slightly more abstracted than just a Node ORM - firstly it's Javascript and you can use it with any runtime other than Node, but it currently works with Go too and I believe their goal is to offer more languages in the future.
It's also a bit more abstracted on the 'data' side too. They offer a web interface, Prisma Studio, that abstracts over the physical database actually being used to allow you to do CRUD on the data. I think this is pretty useful.
In my mind (no connection to the company or knowledge beyond being a user) the business to be found there is in being the aggregation and intermediation layer of databases of different services, accessible to people with and without technical skills, in a uniform way.
Ugg the whole node stack ecosystem is so good, but so shakey. It makes me nervous building on these foundations managed by relatively small companies - Vercel and Prisma. Who knows if one day they’ll just collapse. Also React, is Meta really committed to it?
This is why we gravitate towards more stable platforms like .Net for big important projects, but their current client/server stack is not very good (Blazor)
The issues with "enterprise offerings", is that they never tell about their "weakness, shorcomings or disadvantages" comparing to other tools. Why ?
I found it's kinda like an "asshole" behaviour, because it tricks people into illusion of a "one tool to do it all". The reality is not, far from truth.
When I evaluated the Prisma client, which I must highlight is by my estimation free, it was very apparent to me that the nature of their business affected the messaging in even their technical documentation.
I had to find the gaping holes myself in a way that a typical open-source project would tend to be more up-front about.
There's many comments about what does "I the take full responsibility mean" in these threads about layoffs. I'm curious - what do you think it means and should mean? I take that a company offering better severance than required by law is taking at least some responsibility.
Unless there's an apology and resignation It means they executed as expected when the money was pouring and not pouring. For some reason workers tend to believe that the CEO is taking responsibility for the hardships the workers will face and that's obviously not true. If the CEO was the one in fault and the workers were great talent that must be let go, then obviously the CEO should have been fired and not the workers.
When they take responsibility they don't admit wrongdoing or remorse, they simply explain what they did and probably expect a pat on the back. CEO's and workers have different responsibilities.
If you think that people shouldn't be fired in hired at whim, that's why employment are for. If you think that you are being wronged, that's why there are worker rights.
It's easy to say that Europe or UK are socialist in a booming market. As it might turn out, maybe they have a point.
Taking full responsibility should probably mean change in leadership. People are getting fired for their mistake, why should they also not step down?
I’m indifferent tbh, leadership and investors can do what they want, but “taking full responsibility” is not the same as “feeling bad about firing colleagues”
2 months of severance is to follow with state laws that require a 60 day notice or something like this. The 2 months severance works out accounting-wise to be like you are employed with no responsibilities and no access to company resources after you've been issued the 60 day notice.
Is the word “impact” the latest way of saying “fired” without saying it? We are seeing that particular word in nearly every note regarding these types of action.
Why this word and why is everyone using it? It’s not only CEOs and HR but on LinkedIn I see many people referring to themselves as “impacted” and open to word, etc.
Is there a word for this type of memetic term suddenly being used everywhere as a substitute for previous words? Wasn’t “downsized” the word like 20 years ago?
Being fired means you were terminated but the position is still needed. It’ll be hired for again.
Being made redundant means the position itself is no longer required, so you’re let go because your job isn’t there any more. Depending on the law in your country or jurisdiction this will also mean you can’t hire for that position again for some time.
There are more legal protections for the latter and businesses can’t just fire hundreds or thousands of people at once and claim it’s not a redundancy process.
Beyond all that thought, ‘impacted’ is just a euphemism for ‘laid off’ or ‘made redundant’.
One of the most insidious of such words for mass firing is "efficiencies".
Enterprises adopted the euphemism then forgot there are any other cost or overhead reducing approaches to improve efficiency other than "efficiencies".
The question I asked is why is the word “impacted” suddenly being used everywhere when it never has been for these types events before. It’s so pervasive that you and another commentator just assumed it’s typically used (it never has been until recently) and you overlooked the actual question and decides to explain an obvious thing.
> This decision will impact 28% of the Prisma team, and those affected have already been notified via personal and work email.
Do you see the English word “impact”? The word “impacted” comes from this. This has been used over and over in this context by many companies and people. So my question was why has this word suddenly come into vogue for this type of event? Why not layoff or w/e was always used?
We're quickly approaching a tipping-point, where the now-traditional promises of wealth (or at least, wealth's possibility) are less plausible, and meanwhile, the inequality between winners and losers is skyrocketing.
I'm excited to see what contributions the tech industry's workers wind up making to the union movement. That's a whole lot of big, juicy, pissed-off brains, and a whole lotta matches.
> “those affected have already been notified via personal and work email”
Even for remote staff, there are many more human ways of informing someone they are out of a job than shooting an email. Am I the only one who feels that way? Is it actually better to get an email an process the blow in async? Genuinely curious as I didn’t see this comment yet.
I'd prefer an email. I'd want to think about it, try and calm down etc before talking to anyone at work about it. There is no value in my manager or HR getting my hot take (or just watching me get upset) by firing me one-on-one, and firing in a webinar-style zoom call seems even more impersonal (remember that guy). So yeah, email seems a good way, or the least shitty imo.
I don't think there are good ways to inform people they are laid off. Personally, I prefer to receive an email than being told in person. At least I can keep my emotions for myself. The best thing that the company can do is to give a good severance package.
Right. Hitting someone with that out of nowhere and the inevitable "I have two sentences to save my job" response is awful. I would never want to be terminated in person.
Yes but the idea is you need to fire a lot of people at once and a consequence of that is that their access needs to be cut off immediately. So you cut access, remove access to everyone that’s being fired, and then deal with each individual over the following weeks.
I’m at Google and had reports get laid off. I don’t just have their personal contact information or whatever and neither does my team. No opportunity to easily say goodbye or thank them for their hard work or offer references or whatever. Just poof. A name on a dashboard.
I've used Prisma before, and I will note that there pace of feature development seemed mind numbingly slow for a company as large as they were. Entirely possible I'm missing a lot of things, but it was just a big disappointment overall.
Short version: Do an internet search for “the hidden job market”.
Unlike most people’s “passive” strategy of posting a resume on LinkedIn or sending resumes to job postings then hoping that someone takes notice of you, you’ll develop an “active” strategy of finding openings before they’re ever posted publicly. It takes more work and planning, which is why you should start now while you’re employed.
Is there a communication strategy that recommends that the heads of companies state that they “take full responsibility”? This seems to be a common statement in the recent layoff memos, but it doesn’t appear that the C-suite ever faces substantial consequences.
If I ever had to layoff a double digit number of employees, I would also layoff myself. I couldn’t in good conscience externalize the impact of my bad decisions on employees whilst leaving myself unaffected.
yes it's pretty bad, but this is not Google sitting on billions of cash and dedicated groups analyzing macroeconomic conditions, this is a small startup with a complicated product and a complicated unpredictable b2b sales process.
As a counterpart, if you have to layoff that many people, is it really the right time to also put the stress of a leadership shift into the company?
I can see the argument for this triggering an eventual change, but having _both_ the chock of a CEO change _and_ 28% of the company being layed off at the same time seems unwise.
Where did I say that I, in this hypothetical, would leave immediately? If the whole point is that I’ve realized I’m damaging the firm with my actions, why uncharitably assume I would choose an exit path that exacerbated the damage I already caused?
The point is to make some sort of communication that you’re taking on board the consequences of your action, consequences that go well beyond trite platitudes of how difficult the process has been and how next time will be different.
Not really. CEOs can make or break a business if they start enacting bad policies in the company. So the employees will notice too, not just other CEOs.
If you wish to auto-generate migrations, there are declarative schema change tools available for most relational databases. I'm the creator of Skeema [1] which provides them for MySQL, but there are options for other DBs too [2][3][4].
Prisma's migration system actually partially copied Skeema's design, while giving credit in a rather odd fashion which really rubbed me the wrong way. From Prisma Migrate's architecture doc: "The workflow of working with temporary databases and introspecting it to determine differences between schemas seems to be pretty common, this is for example what skeema does." [5]
While I doubt I was the first person to ever use that technique, I absolutely didn't copy it from anywhere, and I'm not aware of any other older schema change systems that work this way. It was certainly never "pretty common" prior to Skeema or even outside of Skeema. Pretty disappointing when a VC-backed company uses a bootstrapped open source project as free R&D and doesn't even give credit in a respectful manner!
I do think that ORMs are a bad abstraction. SQL is a good abstraction. Devs love it when they can be lazy and have something slightly convenient without thinking about it’s downsides
That’s rarely a good use of time. Complex queries might require some kind of DSL (hopefully closer to Spark than raw SQL) but we should automate data validation and row marshaling for the same reasons we automate register allocation, stack frames, and garbage collection.
I don’t want to be another HN commenter saying I could build Prisma in a weekend, because I can’t. I couldn’t build Prisma in a year, in five years, in large part because I’m not smart enough.
But bloody hell, VC backing and that many employees? I happened to recently give Prisma a whirl, and even for my simple toy project, the holes in the client functionality do not feel consistent with my understanding of what that many people can do, even taking to account a large percentage of non-eng roles.
The JS ecosystem seems particularly tolerant of VC funded for-profit efforts (try saying that five times fast) holding this sort of prominence. Who remembers all the drama at npm before Microsoft bought it? The whole thing puts me into a deeply cynical, judgemental headspace. The JS ecosystem feels way more enamoured with branding, celebrity, and money, than what I am personally used to. I’m no old-timer either by any measure. There’s certainly more effort put into marketing to developers, and there’s much less of a sense of collaborative goodwill because everyone wants their piece. Either money, or this new higher standard of tech micro-celebrity.
Say what you want about the massive shortcomings of the previous generation/s of tech culture but at least we had a pretty good run of not letting this happen.
I’m too tired and worn out to have this sort of boom and bust cycle so directly implicate tooling that can have so many points of interaction with something I’m building.
I used prisma a couple of years ago, not sure how many employees they had then, but beyond 1-3 people working on it I would be completely shocked. To know there are 168 employees working on it up until recently boggles the mind.
It's not at all uncommon in restructuring to be both (doing a lot of) hiring & firing - the current filled roles are out of whack with where you want to be, and not things you can transition people between because the skills/qualifications are different or whatever.
E.g. if Microsoft decided to sunset its incredible GitHub journey, it would probably find itself with too many web developers. If it got out of Xboxes, too many embedded. If it went full remote, too many office managers and IT.
Many of these headline grabbing layoffs are primarily back office roles.
And what you say simply isn't true anyway - I even studied EE, but all my professional experience is on the web, I would have a long ramp up to be productive on an embedded team. I probably shouldn't even be hired for a grad position on such a team, a fresh graduate would have better memory of domain-specific stuff.
What Occam's razor actually says is that in the face of multiple possible explanations, the simpler one is the more likely one. Your suggested explanation seems a more complicated conspiracy than simply not needing/being able to afford people to me.
>Occam's Razor says: or the companies just want to rehire new people at lower pay.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to recruit replacement developers? Between the cost for recruiters, the amount of time spent on interviews, and ramp-up time for new hires, you'd need to lower wages by a significant amount (eg. 30%) for you to be able to get payback in a reasonable amount of time. Not to mention, if you're a startup, the loss of institutional knowledge will greatly hamper your ability to execute.
Salary cuts are strongly resented, so I think employers prefer to use turnover as an opportunity to hire at the market rate when it has gone down (due to competitors no longer making better offers).
Depends on the laws in your country. In the UK for example, if you make a position redundant and then immediately rehire for it, the laid off employee can take you to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, as the redundancy wasn’t genuine.
Given that redundancy is a more complicated legal process it’s unlikely you’d use it for this purpose.
P&O famously fired a lot of people in the UK, a year ago, and immediately replaced them with agency staff.
This was widely considered to be fire and rehire, although the government position was that it was “just fire”. So companies are willing to skirt the intention of the law.
A 150 person start-up is significantly more likely to 'pivot' in a way that makes a lot of roles or business lines redundant than Microsoft is.
The size of company doesn't matter to the point anyway - I used Microsoft as a well-known example so I could say 'imagine if they stopped doing GitHub' et al. I can't do that if I pick some random small start-up that I'm familiar with. (Maybe I could have said 'if Notion went all-in on AI' or something? But I wouldn't have had multiple examples.)
-- microsoft pivots - makes sense they still hire while laying off - if 150 person venture funded startup pivots - it does not - look at Prisma career page - they have 1 open job open - point i was making is - for ceo of small company - having this on linkedin - is tone deaf --
He gets to learn from his mistake while 28% of his company is held accountable for the company’s lack of productivity. What’s so complicated about that?
Why should he face consequences? Instead he should focus on learning from the mistake so that the company can try to avoid making the same mistake again. Punishing him isn't going to solve any of the company's problems.
The blunt truth is that layoffs are not really failures from a business perspective. Employees and their employment don't really matter independent of other things. Could be the symptom of a mistake or could just be a failed bet but that's all. It's just a question of risk, reward and cost. Not a question of people. If the layoffs targets low performing employees or departments then it's actually a business win.
If you don't like that then consider pushing for unions, government regulations or join an employee co-op. However many people don't like that option because they prefer to not risk the massive compensation packages that big tech gives them.
I'm reminded of the Street Fighter quote:
"For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday."
One miscalculation can result in them over hiring. Are you suggesting they should have instead every month lay off a few people depending on how the current environment looks instead of 28% at once?
Sure it is. Google for example increased headcount by 24% in a year and cut it 6% in the next year, a clear sign they made a bad decision.
Further in Google’s case they have plenty of money to pay these people until headcount naturally shrinks, but they don’t have anything useful enough for them to do that waiting and avoiding a large severance package is cheaper.
I just do not believe in a worldview where almost all CEOs of large tech companies are incompetent. Whatever the explanation for layoffs is, incompetence ain't it.
Greed would still try and avoid the need for a layoff because they are quite expensive. Google’s 6+ weeks salary + 6 months health insurance isn’t cheap.
No I am suggesting that they clearly over hired over a long period of time. Surely they recalculated over that period of time...if not then that sums the incompetence up
Yeah, if I was on one of the core teams I'd be quite annoyed at having given a big chunk of my time bringing coworkers on board just to see them laid off.
You're right. The deeper issue here is that we do not live in a meritocracy. People are frustrated. Digging into why the CEO gets another chance eventually leads us to these larger societal issues.
His mistake cost 28% of the company their jobs. Usually mistakes of that magnitude get you fired. Unless you’re the CEO. Then other people get fired and have to deal with the consequences, you play sad for a few days then go play with piles of cash.
