Startup valued at $7B gets flack as CEO lays off hundreds over Zoom | Hacker News Reader

Startup valued at $7B gets flack as CEO lays off hundreds over Zoom

sfgate.com

45 pointsbryan023 comments

I dunno, maybe I've been around the business too long and been jaded. Aside from the opening, this is how I'd prefer to be let go.

I notice CEOs like to talk about themselves as if anyone cares, in this case about his crying and having to do it twice. That part can go.

But otherwise, just be forward and direct, which I think he was. And I'm not sure the whiny 'oh fuck you dude' is warranted. The market is blazing right now, and you have 3 months of benefits. Anyone who sees this as a problem probably quite frankly was on the chopping block already.

I dislike the crying part as well, but I think I can see the reason Ceo's talk about themselves like that, they are paid to act a certain way and attract as much flack as possible to themselves rather then the company.

If you want to work from home on Zoom, be prepared to be fired from home on zoom.

After 2 years of COVID and the movement and fight for work from home, I guess its time people accept that remote work means, remote firing.

Every time a story like this comes up, the method of bad news delivery gets critiqued.

Being laid off is bad news. It’s going to sting no matter what. Every method has its drawbacks and advantages.

Personally, hearing the news “over zoom” sounds much less bad than having to go into an office for the day just to get fired.

The Onion just can't catch a break, can it? Reading this article is like reading a transcript from a lost episode of Silicon Valley.

These past few years have been great for the autism community. I'm glad all of these CEOs are coming forward and letting everyone know that it's OK to struggle with self-awareness and emotional processing. Sometimes you fire up a zoom call with 700 people and do something perplexing and embarrassing, but it could happen to anyone.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, what made it brutal was that only people who were fired were in the call.

Which seems incredibly stupid.

Like why not have the call with everyone, then immediately follow up with who's fired (so people don't sit around questioning if they're gone)

Well, he did say everyone on this call is part of the unlucky group and is fired effective immediately.

I think it's better than having the call with everyone (even though the whole situation still sucks, and the timing is terrible)

They really couldn't wait 1 month? It's pretty tough to find a job between now and Jan 1st

I assume that guy cares more about Q4 than people.

Sign of a quick decline.

this is correct. it’s a sign a company is in trouble

I sometimes wonder if part of the CEO job in high valued companies is being the pinpoint person to blame whenever there are hard decisions the shareholders has to agreed upon.

Like, you're basically paid to suck it up.

Laid off got 4 weeks of severance and 3 months of paid health insurance coverage.

I would much rather get a company wide call, then a private message, than a patronizing group firing.

Usually the issue is a long delay between saying people will be laid off, and laying them off, but in this case the delay could have been minimal.

The use of the word unlucky also made it extra insulting.

They're not unlucky, his company made bad moves. Even if the market changed, it was on his company to build in resiliency.

This move can reasonably be viewed as creating resiliency for the remaining employees (which the article suggests is 91% of the company).

I'm guessing the morale hit from going viral for this is probably going to undo any hoped good...

And for the record, the way I saw this was a TikTok of an employee recording the call before he even said the word fired, so I assume most people already knew what was up.

But based on the placement of (imo justified) profanity, it wasn't known that the call was exclusive to the fired.

So in a way they probably felt like they had just been fired by receiving a poisoned zoom link, not even the call that it lead to, if that makes sense.

If you’re gonna do this, hard to see many ways to make it less painful.

They have really different messaging for the people they are keeping I imagine, they have to convince them to do the work of all the people they laid off for no additional pay so they can't really talk about how they are failing as a business, as people will figure out too quickly that they won't get rewarded for that effort.

"The company also hired 7,000 people during the pandemic"

Does anyone know why a digital mortgage lender would need to hire 7000 people?

Former CTO of a mortgage LOS here.

The mortgage industry is an offshoot of the real estate industry, and has a similar attitude … everything can scale with more bodies. The digital and loan part isn’t the bottleneck, the “dealing with applicants” and “shuffling documentation” gets more workers since automating the back end does little to relieve the manual and exception processes anchored between the humans on the front end.

Even with solutions like Handl.ai, the "shuffling documentation" portion is still a bottleneck?

No affiliation to Handl, btw.

Sales, compliance, risk and underwriting, appraisal? Not sure, but I imagine these roles would be internal and some may need to be in local markets.

During the Zoom call, he should have shown the "Better" logo and broken the ice with,

"It could be worse!"

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