217 is an astonishing number of employees to operate what appears to be a moderately-complex Wordpress install.
I also don't understand this "Radha Nath, 30, a product designer at the company, said she is paid $16,000 less than she was at her last employer. The union will fight to bring wages across the company to the industry standard, she said." So she wasn't forced to work there...she voluntarily accepted less pay when she started. It's not like they duped her on what her pay would be right?
Isn't that true of every person working somewhere who then votes to unionize?
Which, in my opinion is an interesting take. Many people take pay cuts to work at start ups and it would be irresponsible to think that a 10 or even 200 person company could pay like FAANG. Salaries aren’t static across the industry.
Saying someone accepted a job at a miserly rate doesn't make the rate acceptable. We don't think paying immigrants a fraction of the minimum wage is acceptable, we don't (any more) think that expecting years of unpaid internships is acceptable, and we don't think that the jobs the factory workers first started to unionize against, with terrible wages and unsafe conditions were acceptable, despite all those people "voluntarily" accepting the jobs.
Having a job isn't just "voluntary" for most people. The pressure to have one in order to survive, plus the difficulties, costs and risks associated with switching, gives the employer power over the employees.
I always thought Change.org was mostly known for being a nexus of naiveté and impotence so it's surprising to see enough people willing to pay into it to sustain that kind of headcount.
The multimillion dollar aspect seems to be due to a number of factors, but a large part seems to be the absolutely-scammy "chip-in" request, where they ask petition-signers for money, clearly designed to make them feel like they are donating to the cause, but instead it's simply a promise to display the petition more prominently within the change.org website.
I think it's basically a scam.
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-actual-reason-you-ge...
This isn't my experience. Yes, if you're using a Change.org petition to lobby POTUS, that's dumb. But for local politicos? University administrators? In other words, people sensitive to being publicly embarrassed? I've seen it work.
In our world of capitalism, the only justification a product needs is that it sells. And sometimes things that don't work or don't work well are superior products, because then customers keep coming back for more to get their desired results.
Like $15m ARR and a $300m valuation isn’t “a website.”
Seems like it's a Ruby/React stack on AWS. Looks like they're trying to grow internationally (hiring "campaigners" in Japan).
I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to the cascade of overhiring that happens to startups all the time.
For example, when Instagram was purchased by Facebook they only had 13 employees and now they have something like 500.
The sweet spot for a startup is if you can look at that big mess of features and find something actually do-able by a small team that can still meet the needs of some portion of your target market.
When you've achieved that, you can then start filling in the rest of the features that will fill the needs of the rest of your market. This is where the headcount can grow significantly, because even small line items in the feature set could involve a big project, yet still be justified because you have enough potential or actual revenue to justify the team growth. Once you're in this phase, the communication overhead of adding people and teams also forces the creation of meta-teams to support the rest of the teams...and there you have it, you now have a lot of people.
In most markets, the average customer is a minority of customers. There is a lot of variety in each niche's demand. Maturity is having market coverage of those niches. Whether that coverage needs to be done by a single company is another question.
- manages get promoted
- CEOs justify increasing their salaries and bonuses
- allows taking away valuable employees from [potential] competitors
- when the headcount is big enough, companies acquire serious political weight
- often a branch or even an entire company can be used as training/proving ground to select the best employees to work on more valuable projects
They are not all engineers. I’ll bet most are account managers looking after big advertising spenders.
Anyways, I'd agree that gainful is ideal, but I think most humans prefer to be employed and occupied over having nothing to do.
I wouldn't necessarily pull out "armchair experts" type comments for someone expressing curiosity / wondering what they're all up to.