Theranos fires 41% of staffers | Hacker News Reader

Theranos fires 41% of staffers

money.cnn.com

48 pointsempressplay24 comments

Previous thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13338996

I feel like any bad news about Theranos (or Yahoo) is just piling on what I perceive as the corpse of a company.

Am I the only one who is just mostly surprised that it’s still around, and enough people on Hacker News care about it?

If the two companies (Theranos and Yahoo) are in the same category, it's not because their descents have anything in common--it's just morbid curiosity around the mechanisms by which they descended. There's a bit of mystery that people want to examine if only to learn to pick up warning signs in other companies, employers, or investments.

With Yahoo, it seems like it's simple mismanagement and lack of strategy/vision after concrete success. There doesn't seem to be much mystery there other than speculation on what a leader can do to prevent a fall.

With Theranos, there's a little more mystery: from the dramatic standpoint, it's already gone from being a "Silicon Valley" spoof ("Pricks"[1]), to an upcoming JLaw screenplay[2] and now seems to be entering tragic opera territory. Is it fraud? Or is it "Moby Dick" set to music?

[1] http://www.pricks.com/

[2] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-wil...

Yahoo has valuable properties in Flickr and Tumblr.

I’m sure there are, and Yahoo itself has a large audience.

But I see Hacker News as a source of insight and inspiration: are we expecting interesting things to come from either of those? I co-wrote so many articles on Flickr tag graph more than a decade ago, but I have not seen many since. Yahoo (and Theranos) have a story to tell about Mayer trying to save the company, but neither CEO seem ready to tell that story.

Forcing Yahoo into this discussion is a bit of a stretch.

> and enough people on Hacker News care about it?

Sadly I feel the reason why it's still clinging on to Hacker News is because of Al Bundy syndrome. Some people like watching others fail because it makes them feel better about their current situation. Of course, I could always be completely wrong; I just don't have any other explanation as to why boring and predictable news gets voted up on HN. I'm just happy that it didn't get too much upvoting.

Better known as Schadenfreude:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

Personally, I don't like watching just anyone fail, but I do enjoy seeing actual bad people fail. I suppose it reassures me that justice occasionally exists.

It's just interesting because it's a preview of Magic Leap's trajectory.

What is really galling about the whole saga is that this will end up costing lives and pain.

1. Some people might have gotten incorrect blood work results as a consequence of hyped-but-BS techniques like the nano-tainers. Some portion of these will result in unnecessary treatments/pain/suffering.

2. Any future player in the same space must now work triple hard to bring real changes to healthcare stuff - this means delays and lives lost that would have been otherwise saved.

Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison - plain and simple. There is blood on her hands.

I think this is a little overstated (not much but a little).

I just read through their Yelp reviews (shockingly they're pretty good). What surprised me most was that doctors were sending people to Theranos centers to get tested. Perhaps the doctors should be similarly liable? FDA certainly screwed up also.

You're second point feels like a bigger issue. VCs seems to make some absolutely awful and huge investments in healthcare/science/biotech. Throw 100s of millions at companies based on the CEOs personally, and seemingly do little to no DD. I don't get it.

This attitude crushes many potential companies. Particularly science-based startups with CEOs with the ability to execute, and good technical background but who can't sell as well as someone like Holmes.

If we could get VCs to make saner decisions in health care that would be a major step forward for society.

What's the merit of using 'fired' instead of 'laid off' in this round?

100% more click baity. If you look at their url it says laid off, so someone changed the title after it was published.

cnn.com/2017/01/06/technology/theranos-layoffs-41-percent/index.html

Theranos said on Friday it has fired 155 employees

If you read the article it says fired. This is also reflected in the title, and in the headline.

Oh really. Well if you actually go read what they said on their website:

https://news.theranos.com/2017/01/06/company-re-engineers-op...

"company has identified a core team of 220 professionals to execute on its business plans, and informed 155 employees that their positions have been eliminated"

The company does not say it fired anyone, they use the word eliminated. Firing usually means someone is terminated for cause. Not that they are being let go because the company does not need them any more.

Good grief. They don't use the word 'terminated' either. They just say the positions were 'eliminated'.

Changing the text is just as easy as changing the title. The URL is harder as they don't want to break external links, so all three probably sail laid off.

You could use a redirect to point from the previous url to the new one.

'Laid off' is ambiguous: it can mean either a temporary suspension (i.e., a factory lays off some workers until conditions improve) or a permanent job loss. I haven't seen any suggestion that these job loses at Theranos are temporary, so I have no problem with the use of the word 'fired' in this context.

I always thought "fired" was the ambiguous word, because a firing can be with or without cause. A layoff is always without cause. In common usage, though, to contrast with "layoff", saying "I was fired" usually means "with cause."

Because of that, this headline actually feels like incorrect usage: a company wouldn't "fire" 41% of its staff unless they were all engaged in some secret after-hours lab-equipment smuggling ring (and probably not even then.)

The egregious misuse of the word "laid off" and "fired", continues to prevail. I suspect, their doing it on purpose, to get more click throughs.

I think some news sources never use the term "laid off." I imagine the thinking is what happened was "fired without cause" and that is independent of what the company would like it to be called.

Their technology is a sham, the company literally does nothing but busy-work for investors. How did they not fire everyone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com