Ancestry lays off 6% of staff
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Still seems like there is a shortage of developers here and most people should find new work pretty easily, but it is always a little unsettling to have a bunch of layoffs in quick sequence.
Off topic, but indeed they did. Lots of people leaving, too. Things are not going to end well there.
If anyone’s looking :)
So I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was engineers being let go a lot of the time. Especially at non software shops where marketing is bringing in money and the engineers are a cost.
They forget the agile cycle moves from maintenance back to development again.
Makes more sense just to offer devs more holiday and less pay.
SLC has been a great underground tech market for a long time, but word is getting out. California companies can't get away from the intractable chaos out there fast enough, and SLC is just an hour's flight away. New companies are pouring in much faster than we can handle 'em.
If you're a good tech worker in SLC, first, get in touch with me because I like meeting cool people, and second, if you've been affected by these layoffs, chin up, go to the next building over, and there's a realistic chance you'll have a better job in a matter of days.
Really handy for foreign companies expanding.
Send a founder and hire a local VP who can translate to American customers and Employees. Plus close to SV.
I'm surprised Utah isn't in the council of American States in Europe. Or otherwise looking for inward investment.
So what is stopping you?
Maybe they're holding out for something larger, like 300%,
A 50% salary increase alone definitely wouldn't interest me at this point. What I'm working on and who I'm working with matter a lot more to me.
It also depends on how long you've been at your current employer. Conventional wisdom is that once you're somewhere ~2 years, you're automatically leaving 10-15% on the table, because most companies are very stingy with raises. In an overheated market like SLC, that estimate is probably quite low.
Here's an anecdote: recruiters are so desperate that one of them spammed myself and several associates for a specific role, and this particular solicitation contained an apology that the base was "only" 135k. I know that's "just out of school" rate in SF/LA, but in most of the country, that's considered pretty darn good. And this recruiter is here pre-emptively apologizing to every stranger she spams for the "low" rate.
I got a lot more anecdotes, most of which are substantially better than that, but that's a quick simple one indicative of the kind of market we're in right now.
At a recent-but-former employer, we routinely hired in new people at +40% more than their peers who'd been there for >3 years, simply because the market wouldn't accept anything less and HR was hyperskeptical of any raise >2%.
My advice to anyone unhappy with their current compensation or employer is to go out and ask for the most ridiculous number you can think of. You may be surprised.
So you had to fire a bunch of people for no fault of their own. I get it, that's business sometimes when the times aren't good. But just say it. I do believe our CEO is genuinely a good person and did not feel good about doing it, so maybe there's a component of protecting one's own emotions in there as well by speaking around it.
How's that?
Genuine question, because I know very little about this stuff.
I think you are severely underestimating how much time this takes. I've seen people go down this rabbit hole. It can literally consume your entire lifetime. Most people seem to underestimate how many ancestors they have - and that's not even including those that are so far back that there are no records.
I also routinely get spammed by people who want to connect with me because they have some extended family tree subscription and can see people they are like 1-3% related to.
It hasn’t worked of course, I haven’t logged back in since they told me I was 99,8% Scandinavian. Shattering the family myth is that we had that one gypsy great grandmother.
In addition, there's almost no "records found, tree built, work complete." It's always pulling additional "leaves" as more records are digitized.
I presume most people are not returning though.
A relative of mine researched our family tree. After 2-3 years she presented it to everyone. Most people weren't really interested for more than 10 minutes, but tried to respect the effort she'd put in to it.
Now we all have less/no future need for an ancestry service.
There are enough people who do it for a hobby and/or religious purposes that it seems like a pretty viable subscription model.
Often novices can't read the writing, and when the records are in another country/region it's easier to pay someone. Also, many records can only be searched this way, the public don't have access.
I tend to subscribe for a few months and then try it again year or two later to see if there's any new gaps I can fill in. There's often new information added periodically, either from a new set of data they've digitized, or user-added content from a distant relative that happened to have some unique information about a common ancestor.
Reminds me a bit of how generals are always fighting the previous war.
Your phone. Your keyboard/mouse/monitor. Your TV. All talk to one computing device.
How little of this type of thing exists in any searchable format other than driving to a library and finding somebody who knows how microfiche works is very frustrating.
For example the global debt crisis Dalio talks about.