On one hand, the CEO is upbeat about the future and yaks on about strategy and in the same breath says "you're fired".
Seems very insensitive.
Laying people off isn't the time for a pep talk and ra ra rally on the strategy.
IMO if you have to lay people off then the focus should be the people being laid off, nothing else.
"Deeply sorry, we did our best to avoid this and we don't see any choice at this stage. All benefits have been paid immediately plus a severance package in line with statutory requirements. We have engaged a search firm to assist the people impacted with their job search.
We believe this is the right move to ensure stability in the current challenging economic conditions and I do not anticipate further layoffs.
I want to thank the impacted people for their service in building the company to this point."
Then that's supposed to go onto a private email addressed directly to the investors.
If you want to announce layoffs, do so with humility and lots of goodwill to the people that helped build your company, especially when you're announcing on your website for public scrutiny.
Is it? Our system from the beginning was optimized for personal liberty, almost always at the cost of community. Those same values enabled and entrenched the classist society we have today, then further bolstered a completely useless and unresponsive political class. That's by design from the beginning. Oligarchy under the guise of false democracy... has it ever been any other way in this country? If not, there's no reason to mince words.
> Our system from the beginning was optimized for personal liberty,
Really? The US had legal chattel slavery for the first 89 years of its independent existence. And the abolition of slavery was followed not long after by the imposition of legally enforced racial segregation, which then endured for another (approximately) 90 years. Doesn’t sound at all like a “system from the beginning… optimized for personal liberty”
They didn't say everybody's personal liberty. Of course working people are still all subject to exploitation hand over fist. Regardless, your comment is nothing but a pointless deviation.
Legally enforced racial segregation denied everybody's personal liberty – although of course, African-Americans bore the brunt of that denial.
Berea College, founded by abolitionists in 1855, was the only desegregated and coeducational college in Kentucky – it admitted all students irrespective of their race or sex. Even though the state of Kentucky enforced racial segregation on all public educational institutions, Berea College was exempt from that as a private institution. Until 1904, when the Kentucky state legislature passed the "Day Law" (named for its sponsor, Democratic politician Carl Day), banning racially integrated private educational institutions. Since Berea was the only such institution in the entire state, it was a direct attack on Berea College's existence. Berea College refused to comply with the new law, and was convicted of the crime of being a racially integrated school; the College appealed the conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court, who in the 1908 case of Berea College v Kentucky, upheld Kentucky's law, on the rather specious grounds that the law did not infringe personal liberty, since Berea College is a corporation, and corporations don't have constitutional rights (such as personal liberty). Berea College was forced to expel all its African-American students; Andrew Carnegie gave them a large grant to open a new college for African-American students (the Lincoln Institute), although it was never very successful. Berea resumed admitting African-American students in 1950, when the Kentucky legislature revoked the ban on racial integration in private education.
So legally enforced racial segregation didn't just infringe on the personal liberty of African-Americans, it also infringed on the personal liberty of European-Americans, by denying them the freedom to associate with African-Americans when they freely desired to do so
Sure. I didn't need and I doubt anybody else needed any convincing of this, but it's still an utter deviation from and completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Congratulations on derailing yet another meaningful conversation into a one-sided race war.
Are you referring to chattel slaves and victims of racial segregation as working people? If so that seems like a very simplistic way to reframe it when their status hinged entirely on the color of their skin. I ask because I may be misreading your comment entirely and I don’t want to be uncharitable in my interpretation.
You are misreading, if reading at all. I have no idea what you're responding to. I definitely didn't do that.
However, their status only ostensibly depended on the color of their skin. Their function was of course literally to labor for the profits of the southern gentile.
Racism is a byproduct of capitalism. The Black Panthers did not repeat this ad nauseam for no reason.
If that were true, how do you explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union (calling the Soviet Union "state capitalist" doesn't help here–it threatens to dilute the definition of "capitalist" to the point of meaninglessness; also, many of the Maoist advocates of "the Soviet Union was state capitalist" theory consider Soviet state capitalism to have begun with Stalin's death, yet the worst of Soviet racism, its genocidal excesses of mass deportation and mass murder, the antisemitic Doctors Plot, etc, occurred under Stalin's rule)
Is there any evidence for a correlation between how much capitalism a society has and how much racism it has? I'm not aware of any. Without evidence, it is just an unjustified assertion.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Regardless of which $ideology you favor, you can't use HN merely/primarily as a platform for propagating it—that's not what this site is for.
Obviously, personal attacks and name-calling aren't ok either, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
None of the issues you raise are inherent to individualism, you can find historic examples of community-focused societies that also have social classes and useless politicians.
You also seen to be coming at it with a personal preference towards the community rather that the individual. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and both have pros/cons, but course you aren't going to like the focus on individual freedoms.
Oligarchy was also absolutely not the plan from the beginning. Washington set the standard for a two-term limit precisely because he didn't want to see it turn into a lifetime appointment. What we have today evolved over time, though I would argue or problem today is fascism rather than an oligarchy.
I would only disagree that such people are inherently bad. Rather, they are fulfilling the role that the dictates of capitalism requires of their given class.
All people are inherently good, however all people are inherently social beings. Since capitalism is dominated by humans' relations to capital instead of humans' relations to eachother, the social nature of the human species is repressed, and as such people cannot be their true selves under capitalism.
Capitalists would love nothing more than for you to believe that some of them are good and some of them are bad, which is the guiding narrative behind nearly all capitalist propaganda. In reality, they are humans just like ourselves and the system is to blame.
A strong statement. I think it's more likely that most people are inherently ignorant clannish jerks who care to some degree about the fifty or so people they interact with often enough to see as real humans, and largely fail to give much moral consideration one way or another to everyone else except in ways that signal the virtues that gain them social status inside of their close circle. Some people are better or worse than that, and a few people are on the extremes at either end.
I don't think people are cookie-cutter clones of each other, or blank slates at birth either. There's hereditary/genetic components to selfishness, psychopathy, etc. Not every human born will be compatible with a given societal system. Some personalities, whether by evolution or upbringing or personal development, will succeed more in some systems than others.
Our current system favors sociopaths. I'd say they are, as a general rule, overwhelmingly bad.
Respectfully disagree. It's important to explain why, and he does that in a standard 3-point structure without getting too carried away on the hype train. It could be worse.
Also, this part is worth emphasizing:
> For those amazing Netlifolk that are leaving us today, our team is... waving [sic] the first year stock option cliff for newer employees, and extending the exercise period to 7 years.
This is a classy move. They didn't have to do this, but they did. Layoffs suck, and no amount of wordsmithing on the email is really going to make a huge difference. It's worth noting and encouraging when companies at least take the time to do something for the people they're letting go.
I fully agree with you on one thing, though: the word "sorry" is conspicuously missing. A little more ownership would go a long way.
It's interesting to see the continued waves of layoffs. I'm starting to hear from friends at startups that their companies are going through pretty significant layoffs. Makes sense since we're basically at the 1 year mark from when the VC money dried up.
I wonder how many companies had 12 to 18 months of runway left and we're about to see them slowly turn off the lights.
Such weirdly worded announcement. Reflecting into public about a private company announcement but also it’s “announcement to the Netlify team”? And three bold highlights for (who?) investors?
I guess the image for investors was built, what about the image for anyone considering joining Netlify at any time in future (probably not right now since they need to exercise their financial discipline).
What strikes me is that in 3 years they added extra management layers and made team slow and now instead of solving this they just let people go. What does this say about the top management?
> From 2020 to 2023 we grew our team substantially and added layers of management. We now need to simplify Netlify to be more nimble
While management layers certainly do add overhead to varying degrees, simply getting rid of it and trying to be move faster and be more nimble, in my experience, leads to one of two things:
1. The existing management layer work gets offloaded to multiple people who have no interest in those topics, usually without any extra pay for them as well.
2. The management layers get removed without any replacement, which usually leads to long-term overhead across all departments that's often hard to quantify.
Combined with the wish to expand and evolve, especially within the enterprise sector, neither of the above options is a good choice. The only thing such change is good for is cutting expenses in the short term to inflate company value on paper.
Netlify did so much very fast to encourage and help move a certain are of web dev into the Jamstack realm or at least promote the main tenets of it as it rapidly became a mainstream option. Now after all that, the mainstreaming/normalization, they're left where I do not know. Sadly, I don't think CEO Matt knows either, but trying to find a way, despite it being a rough road now.
I think the problem was their pricing and arbitrary limitations. Like 7 day audit log.. 7 day user metrics, up to 100 form submissions per month. That's their paid professional plan. Seems extremely hard sell when I tell customers they are limited to 100 form submissions.
It would have been better to offer a low monthly charge per website (and bundle in the features)
It’s worse than that. We love their core service, but every single non-core service is utterly mediocre.
You can’t even set a custom no reply email or create a custom template for their form service. Why would I pay $20/mo for that when I could pay a different SaaS like Sendgrid virtually the same and get better features for roughly the same amount of work?
You’re definitely right on some level about the pricing too. There’s nothing quite like whackamole downgrading sites monthly because they may or may not exceed the free tier that month.
Anyone have an idea of what percentage of the workforce affected? They already laid off 16% back in December. Since it's not mentioned in the blog post I fear it may be quite high.
Glassdoor reports Netlify as having 51-200 employees, so based on your 46 number this layoff affected anywhere between 23% and 90% of Netlify's employees. Pretty disturbing.
I was part of the first round in December where they laid off 48/300 or 16% I heard from a former colleague who was impacted by the latest round that they laid off 46 of roughly 200.
On one hand, the CEO is upbeat about the future and yaks on about strategy and in the same breath says "you're fired".
Seems very insensitive.
Laying people off isn't the time for a pep talk and ra ra rally on the strategy.
IMO if you have to lay people off then the focus should be the people being laid off, nothing else.
"Deeply sorry, we did our best to avoid this and we don't see any choice at this stage. All benefits have been paid immediately plus a severance package in line with statutory requirements. We have engaged a search firm to assist the people impacted with their job search.
We believe this is the right move to ensure stability in the current challenging economic conditions and I do not anticipate further layoffs.
I want to thank the impacted people for their service in building the company to this point."
Something like that anyway.