A message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: 11% workforce cut | Hacker News Reader

A message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: 11% workforce cut

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I am mixed race, I "look" white myself, but I have an uncle for example that is "obviously black" and suffered actual anti-black racism (nothing serious, but for example police stop him in traffic whenever they see him going out with expensive car while wearing his Capoeira uniform).

When I see a statement like this (copy paste from article):

"Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens."

Makes me worry. What that phrase means? Apparent-white people (like me) got fired? Because they are white?

In the past I failed to get into the local government-owned university I wanted because I looked white. Had to get a loan and pay for private schooling.

What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?

I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged".

I don't agree with this view and I think "reverse racism" is just as racist as normal racism. I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue.

At the risk of _going there_, I think if you are optimizing a system, freeing resources that are most easily rescheduled is a globally optimal solution. Senior engineers can be slotted into nearly any task.

It has the added bonus of enabling wage suppression over the long term. Disadvantaged workers are less likely to leave an org.

The greatest minority is the individual. "Reverse racism" harms people too. Let's stop pretending it doesn't. Discrimination based on race is bad no matter the source. When can we start looking through an individual lens?

Edit: I concur with parent comment.

> I believe this is driven with good intentions.

Just like the Spanish Inquisition was driven with the good intention of saving people's eternal soul even at the expense of their temporal body being destroyed.

Most people that are white that I know (I'm half Indian - as in the country India - and half white) are actually now more racist (not like going out of way to join kkk) because of the anti-white and reverse-racism stuff that's been more and more out there. I sit on the sidelines like, what the fuck.

I am not sure why you're being downvoted, because I not only have witnessed this happening within my own family/friends (it is sad and scary), but we are now having studies show that some common forms of anti-racism training has a "backfire" effect that produces more racism. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

This is alarming not only because of the obvious reason--racism sucks and we should be trying to eliminate it as much as possible--but because the current political climate means that people are too scared to speak up and say, "Hey, can we please maybe re-think how we approach this so we don't accidentally cause harm?"

I know this from experience. I spoke up about this at my company, pointing out that the form of training we use has been shown to have a backfire effect that hurts minorities. The backlash was swift and damaging--I was accused of being a privileged white person with hurt feelings who "wasn't willing to do the work." Meanwhile I got over a dozen private messages from minorities thanking me for speaking up and stating they had identical concerns.

I will definitely not be bringing up my concerns again, and neither will anyone else in my company with half a brain. Which means my company will continue to use a form of training that is known to increase racism, which freaking sucks.

What bugs me immensely about this whole situation is that we can't really discuss it in public. I feel like if I dare express disagreement with current policies and predominant views, I could be fired. I could be publicly attacked and shamed, even for what seems to me like rational arguments along the lines of "let's take a step back and look at this problem from multiple angles".

Being attacked and labeled as a racist because you dare question these kinds of policies essentially amounts to gaslighting, and the idea that we're not allowed to express disagreement against these kinds of policies is well, censorious and oppressive.

I agree, it's creating a very unhealthy environment that is breeding resentment and worsening the issues it's trying to solve.

Frankly, I feel like it has become its own flavor of religion. Often, suggesting that a religion change a practice to a "better" one is considered just as blasphemous as rejecting religion outright. I see a very similar parallel with these trainings, including the false invitation to "share your thoughts and feelings", which is used more as a tool to identify and hush "non-believers" than to critically examine any criticisms that may be brought forward.

Harvard is amazing place. Create a IAT to find out all hidden racist at work. Create trainings to fix the issue. Then perform studies to find out that anti-racism training are failing.

Yeah it's sad, I feel like Martin Luther King Junior's dream was a pipe dream. In a better world or maybe just a better place or time, it would have happened. But what we have now is obviously diverging more and more from his dream.

The most bizarre part of this age is the rewriting of Martin Luther King into a person who thought that Black Americans should be left to sink or swim in a segregated pool, because in the only speech they know he described a future utopian dream where white kids and black kids skipped hand in hand not seeing race.

Pool metaphor: It's not enough for lifeguards not to see race when the majority kids bully minority kids as groups. It inevitably leads to the lifeguards seeing the minority kids as the source of the problem, since they're always in the middle of any fight, and when they're gone the fights are fewer.

MLK actually wanted reparations for the black community for all the work that their slave ancestors did to enrich USA - mostly the white folk.

https://youtu.be/30ui1x-eKIw

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/martin-...

It's not "reverse racism", "normal racism", etc; it's just racism. Putting a modifier on the word to make it seem "different" doesn't do the word justice. It has nothing to do with "privilege" or lack there of as it's purely discriminating based on race alone.

Saying as a blanket statement “white people are privileged” is racist af :)

Say that to West Virgina kids scraping meals off the floor because the coal mines their fathers work have been closed.

Saying billionaires are privileged is rude when you're saying it to a billionaire dying of eye cancer. I don't think that implies much about anything. White people aren't the only class that is privileged in the US, and you can be a member of other classes that more than offset being white. Like 65% of Americans are white. It offers opportunities over the median black person (or native, or hispanic etc.), not the median person, who is also white.

Depends on whether you choose the word “racism” within the context of historical and current institutionalized oppression or not.

People on the side of the oppressor often prefer to ignore that context. People on the side of the oppressed cannot.

The few puny efforts to counterbalance centuries of ongoing oppression, obvious discrimination and silent segregation that so enrage us white people with their “unfairness” are a fraction of a drop in an ocean of inequality. If anything I take them as an educational tasting of what the non privileged experience at every step, every minute of their existence.

Academia seems to have redefined racism to mean systemic/institutional racism, and the result a whole slew of confusion and counterproductive conversations.

Which is bananas to me since IMO racism and systemic racism were already pretty well defined terms.

For the record, this is my most downvoted comment on HN to date. As a privileged person I happily stand by it.

> I believe this is driven with good intentions. Some people call this "reverse racism", and "it's not really a thing since white people are privileged".

As a brown person I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

> white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

This is an equivocation. I am privileged to downvote people on HN because of my karma, while others aren't. This is not the same as saying that people who can downvote people on HN don't face trials or tribulation.

> I am vehemently opposed to the notion that white people are all privileged or don't face trials and tribulation.

Sure, but who actually claims that? The actual claim I hear often is that whiteness, as one of the many facets that makes up a person, confers privilege. I don't think many people consider privilege a boolean property which is forcibly latched to true if a person's skin tone is above a certain threshold. Instead, privilege is more like a point measure that can be increased by each property a person has that aligns them with the dominant group in their area.

You can certainly find unreasonable people online who take it to extremes, but there is always strange personalities like that. I think the actual reasonable perspective that most progressives hold is that privilege is a continuum affected by many factors. (I do think even reasonable progressives overfit to named group identity components of privilege versus individual components, but that's a somewhat different problem.)

These complaints are always so interesting because it is like they are discovering intersectionality (privilege/oppression isn't a binary yes/no thing) and treating it like this is a big new observation when the "woke" community has been steeped in this idea for 30 years. If it were the 70s then sure this would be a legitimate criticism of a lot of activism but things are way different now.

> As a brown person

A typical brown person in the US is very privileged, so the qualification doesn't add weight to the argument.

> don't face trials and tribulation.

Nobody has made this claim.

> A typical brown person in the US is very privileged, so the qualification doesn't add weight to the argument.

In what sense?

Many (most?) SV startups and larger companies are run by brown people (mostly Indians). I guess they must be the most white folks out there if whiteness is the root of all power.

White people aren't privileged, privileged people are privileged. I sure as heck didn't get any privilege by growing up poor on a reservation. Hell, I'm pretty sure some of my college applications were thrown away because of rural circumstances. So, this new, fashionable racism bugs me a bit.

Coming up from rural circumstances is far more likely to trigger positive discrimination than negative.

I always felt looked down upon by those who grew up in the Twin Cities, so I never had a positive experience.

> I strongly believe that future generations will laugh at us for coming up with such an obviously wrong way of attacking this issue.

This will definitely be true if we don't do it, because there won't be very many black people in future generations.

Affirmative Action and "diversity" are silly, but they're silly because they avoid the just but completely unworkable solution, which is massive wealth transfer to replace generations of stolen labor.

Fair enough, but how far back should we go? AD 1500? AD 500? 300 BC? The Roman Empire had a majority of white people as slaves. This argument is just silly and solves nothing.

I think it's a political statement to try to "look better" and gain some "sympathy" from the activist choir.

If this is HOW they are making firing decisions, then this is stupid. To remain viable they need to "cut the fat" regardless of who makes up the "fat". In other words beancounters should not be looking a the "race" & "gender" columns to make business/personnel decisions.

Totally opposite of my experience. I’m just describing mine for an alternative not to be combative or attempt to lessen yours.

I’m mixed and depending on many factors some think I’m white and others know I’m brown (certainly more brown than white folks). Typically, it’s only white people who believe I’m white (which is racist still even if they mean well). The weird thing is, truly racist hateful white people definitely know I’m not white. Like that’s how I really even found out I wasn’t like my white friends, as a child, literal fucking Nazis made that clear to me through violence.

So I’m on the other side of this coin seeing: “they didn’t lay off people because they weren’t white enough” not that people who were laid off had it happen because they are white.

Well, it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race (a protected class). So I'm surprised they would explicitly state that as a goal.

Guess they figure no white/asian person is going to file a suit on racial grounds.

Just as there is bias in hiring, there can be bias in firing. Effective leaders recognize this and put systems in place to minimize them. Being attentive to those dynamics is especially important in times of stressful decisionmaking, when it’s tempting to take cognitive shortcuts.

Claiming it means “only fire white people” is not accurate.

But the devil is in the details. My skip level manager had a goal something to the effect of equal or lower female attrition. A female engineer left for a better job at Facebook. Not too long after I was on a PIP and while I can't prove they were directly related it didn't exactly leave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. At minimum the bullshit of a PIP I was on would have been looked at a lot more critically if I were female since that would have made the scoreboard 0-2 instead of 1-1.

Yeah this one stood out. I suspect it’s illegal if they actually did it, but it’s likely just virtue signaling (and it’s worded so vaguely)

Not to invalidate OP's lived experiences, but they are Brazilian. Trying to extrapolate race and diversity issues in Brazil with those in the US is a bit of an apple to oranges comparison (and vice versa between the US and Brazil imo).

(Disclaimer - I have no opinions on either side in this issue).

Presumably there are also people in the US who are “white” but who also have “black” close relatives.

If it matters I’m with the OP on this. I’m Romanian, I’m “white”, my mother is, for lack of a better word, “brown-ish” (between “black” and “white”, that is), my brother has the same skin “color” as my mum. My brother has been the victim of racist remarks over the years of which I was not, I suspect because of our slightly different skin “color”.

Nevertheless, I find the essentialist policy the US has when it comes to “races” quite baffling. For example I don’t know how me and my brother would potentially be “labeled” were we to move to the States. Like I said, technically we have different skin “colors” but, after all, we’re brothers.

It's important to understand why race of all things is so foundational to systemic injustive in the US.

The original sin of the US was the Atlantic slave trade. It so happens that almost of the people swept up into that slave trade were dark skinned. And, because that slave trade was so monumentally huge in terms of how many people it brought to the US, a very large fraction of dark skinned people in the US today and all throughout history either were slaves or are primarily descended from them.

In order to morally justify the enslavement of millions of people, white slave-owners manufactured a justification that people of certain races are physically, mentally, and morally different from whites. They created a (factually false) narrative that skin tone didn't just mean skin tone but also implied all sorts of other things about the person.

That narrative is profoundly embedded in all aspects of US politics, culture, and institutions. It's been there since before the three-fifths compromise which is directly in the US Constitution. It's everywhere.

So it's not just about skin tone. It's about generations of Americans growing up in a culture that says people with a certain skin tone are less human, and then building social institutions predicated on that as fact.

Culture and institutions change very slowly (especially when many participating in them actively benefit from their current state) and it takes a lot of work to root something like this out.

My personal opinion is that this is an American problem and only Americans should discuss about this. The same way I am opposed to Russian electoral interference in 2016, in the same way I'd rather not have other non-Americans discuss about this topic UNLESS they have actual authentic experiences with these issues. It's the same way I won't comment about Antiziganism in Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Serbia, etc because I simply don't have the relevant context or authentic background to make an informed statement beyond the generic platititude of "Don't discriminate".

The thing is that what gets discussed today in the States then gets discussed tomorrow in Western Europe and the day after tomorrow further East (so, also in my country, Romania). To say nothing of the many US companies that have offices open here in Eastern Europe and whose HR policies mimick almost completely those from the US headquarters.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish you were 100% right on this, i.e. that US racial things should only be discussed by those directly involved with the same happening in the Romanian case (from where I’m from), but unfortunately that is not the case.

I can’t speak to what their particular “Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens” is, but when I try to be equitable, the point of the exercise is to be aware of potential biases, and avoid them.

It’s not about preferring black employees or hating on white employees. It’s to recognize the dynamics that race might have in your organization that have nothing to do with job performance.

To tie into your anecdote: if a company hires drivers, maybe comparing a black driver and a white driver solely on the number of times they’ve been pulled over, is not an accurate representation of their driving performance. Being aware that someone could potentially need a better performance indicator is part of what this exercise might be.

Yeah as someone who went through interview training recently at $BIGCO it felt very weird.

On one side you had the HR reps talking about how you can't discriminate on protected classes etc, but we had to approach hiring from an anti racist lense with a focus on getting certain groups.

I really don't know how both of these work together, I generally support the goals and esp support being aware of diff people and cultures, my family are all first gen immigrants lol.

When the rubber hits the road I don't see how these two mandates don't conflict.

It is affirmative-action, rebranded. The U.S. Supreme Court will likely strike down race-based admissions at higher-ed institutions in the next term, so HR and other gatekeepers will be exploring novel ways to racially balance groups per their preferences.

> What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?

It's meant to counteract the fact that people who are obviously black suffer actual anti-black racism. You have noticed this. I could understand disagreement, I can't understand the confusion.

> In the past I failed to get into the local government-owned university I wanted because I looked white.

I don't believe this. It's not how you look, it's what you put on the forms. You may be accused of lying (I imagine) if you look white, but your parents will reveal that you're not. You don't think that, all other things being equal, in America, your uncle will have the same equality of opportunity as you without positive discrimination? He's not allowed to drive a nice car while wearing a capoeira outfit. Driving a car while wearing a capoeira outfit is a right so basic I never imagined that it would be seen as suspicious behavior.

It's not uncommon to test RIF-impacted employees for gender, age, race etc against the general population.

In fact, in certain states (like CA), you often list all the ages of the people in the department, and who is and isn't impacted IN THE RIF'ed employee's SEVERANCE PACKAGE. I believe this is employment law driven.

There are so many folks from countries which did not have any colonialism which were not implicated in any sort of way in the oppression of folks of non-white skin color which are definitely affected by reverse-racism. Think all of Eastern-Europe for example. In essence this method of dealing with racism is actually antagonizing folks which did not have anything to do with the issue to begin with. It is kind of ridiculous. Why are they affected just because they have white skin? I am sure some non-whites are saying: "It's your turn to see how it is". Actually, it is not. The people implementing these sort of policies are even more ignorant than the original oppressors. They think their actions are just. Which is completely false. Who are they to pass judgement on who is responsible for past oppression.

More of a nitpick but was the USSR not considered a imperialist polity? The ubiquity of the Russian language in Central Asia seems like a strong artifact of colonialism. Even today, Russia is throwing people and resources largely from the (non-slavic) provinces and satellite states at Ukraine. Even in the United States, Eastern Europeans immigrants were quick to assert themselves in the racial hierarchy in places like Chicago.

I’m not saying this to implicate or unimplicate anyone really. It’s more to point out morally elevating one group of people over others (western vs Eastern Europeans) to make a rhetorical argument doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny because of the contradictions inherit in all people and countries.

You see racial equality as a punishment on white people for the colonialism of prior generations?

>What makes people think this sort of behaviour is good idea?

The fact that it hasn't lost them a lawsuit yet, nothing more and nothing less.

Well that is one way to boost their ESG score? Race quotas are coming it appears.

https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/assets/Board%20Diversity%20...

Because you're extrapolating a ton from a somewhat ambiguous statement. All they are saying is that they are trying to make sure their decisions don't disproportionately negatively effect marginalized communities. This doesn't mean racist towards whites or that they will exclusively fire white people.

My read (as a white guy who is minority in religion) was: "great, this company has some defenses to make sure they are being fair to everyone, especially groups of people who don't typically get a fair shake". And that's fine by me. Not that they are firing white people. But that they are making sure they're not disproportionately firing black people or women or any other group that might be marginalized in the tech industry.

When CEOs say they take full responsibility, I think they should take a material cut in equity and compensation. Otherwise it is just empty words for them to feel no consequences except a better balance sheet.

Or better yet, step down and let someone else run the show

This came up in the Patreon discussion yesterday. Twilio is giving decent severance packages (12 weeks plus week per year of service) and is accelerating vesting. Both of those impact the bottom line and should have a material impact on C-suite compensation.

That is a very proxy-ish 'taking responsibility' that might never materialise though

>Both of those impact the bottom line and should have a material impact on C-suite compensation.

Italicized emphasis mine. Time and again we've seen that this isn't the case, to the point where I won't bother holding my breathe to see if the CEO is impacted financially down the line. I'd rather start seeing CEOs highlight the fallout they themselves will receive in these layoff announcements themselves.

Then, this should be agreed before taking the CEO role.

If a company decides to reduce my compensation mid way, I will be freaking flipped.

In this case, they could reduce the CEO's salary, but then it would go into the situation whether twilio would be better with a new CEO given the current CEO's performance in the past 10y. The answer would be a huge no.

To the board and VC, "taking responsibility" means they should get a bonus for reducing headcount. Bulk up, gain marketshare, during glide phase reduce operating expenses and "spend" the gains earned during growth phase.

Money is in charge. There is no moral element to how humans currently run business.

If a company is giving 12+ weeks of severance, you’d think they could just say “12 weeks from now is your last day. If you find new work before then you’re free to leave. We’ll pay you to keep working on your projects for the next 12 weeks”

Why pay someone expensive a salary to not work if the company is facing issues with money already? Like i get the idea of severance, and would want it as an individual, but it seems like it just bleeds extra resources.

If someone were to tell me, you've got 12 weeks left on your job. And then adds, and you can leave early when you find work. I'm probably not going to be the most motivated/productive employee. In fact, I might cause more harm than good.

It's better to just rip that bandaid off and let people move on with their lives. 12 weeks severance is (hopefully) enough time that the former employee can find new work, and also that the company can start adjusting to the down sizing.

A non-productive worker is probably worse than no worker at all.

> A non-productive worker is probably worse than no worker at all.

There's no "probably" to it. Offering a fired employee the right to stay around until their time is up is a mindbogglingly stupid idea. It's a recipe for massive negativity from them & for your existing teams.

Having participated in a RIF before, the two most common questions are 1) "why me?" and 2) "why my friend and not someone else?" Keeping someone who you've clearly said has no future around & asking them to contribute to the future of a company is ... what?

And yet here in the UK, it's quite normal for senior engineers to be faced with 3 months (I've even heard of 6!) working for a company after deciding to quit and hand in their notice.

Completely bonkers if you ask me.

I actually agree. I was originally not going to include the word "probably", but I thought I would soften the message a little bit. There's likely a few outside examples, but yeah, keeping an employee on the roster after telling them they will be let go is just asking for trouble.

Do you really think you'll get quality work from someone who knows the clock is ticking & they'll be out in 12 weeks? From someone who is going to be busy looking for their next move?

And that's ignoring the chance that one of your employees isn't too happy at losing their job and decides to make your company a bit uglier in the process.

> Why pay someone expensive a salary to not work if the company is facing issues with money already? Like i get the idea of severance, and would want it as an individual, but it seems like it just bleeds extra resources.

It destroys morale. Yes, even more than the layoffs alone. Imagine working alongside people who know, in advance, their days are numbered. Motivation to accomplish work goes out the window, progress slows, and the internal culture will feel like a zombie during that transition and it will probably linger well after those people are gone as that culture infects other members who weren't let go. It's better to just rip the bandaid, take the financial hit, and attempt to salvage whatever remains of the culture.

No, this is a very bad idea. Because layoffs are involuntary, they crater morale. If you keep those people at work, it is not like they will all show up and pretend like nothing happened.

Shareholders pay attention to how well a CEO steers a company over time and their outlook on whether it is the right person to lead the company. At least, that’s the theory, and they (shareholders) have that incentive given it is their investment at stake.

What does it matter? It's their job to run the business. If they decide they want 50% less staff, its their right and responsibility to make that change. If they realized they hired too many people, or hired too many incompetent people they can let them go. It has nothing to do with their salary or comp if their workforce isn't getting the job done or meeting the bottom line of the business. You as an employee can also leave at anytime. If the company is public (or even private with a strong board) if there is no faith in the CxO team they will be changed out.

It matters because words like "take responsibility" should have meaning.

It does have meaning. The board of directors will definitely factor in this type of thing when making decisions about hiring executives.

Just because you don’t see the value in someone taking responsibility in the absence of material consequences doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to most people. You seem to have a very litigious perspective on this.

To me, this is him being clear that the decisions that led to this situation are on him, and not the employees. That’s a very clear statement, one that I would consider quite meaningful.

Yes, I understand what the words mean, thanks. The question for me is how empty the words are.

Compare that with, say, CEOs who take pay cuts during downturns: https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+takes+a+pay+cut+-price+-...

Between the two sorts of CEO, it seems pretty clear that one is more serious about taking responsibility for their mistakes.

I still don't understand. If an employee had over-hired at this scale, that employee would have been fired along with their over-hired staff. Or maybe, at least, demoted.

So what does taking responsibility here really means?

> If an employee had over-hired at this scale, that employee would have been fired along with their over-hired staff.

Only if they are part of a sick organisation.

In a healthy one, if the fault was that employees, and it’s a first offence, they’d be responsible for rectifying the issue they caused.

Im pretty sure him deciding to layoff a chunk of his employees is literally his responsibility. People are upset but it's literally his responsibility to ensure the company survives.

I think what's meant is: "this is my fault"

But it turns into “this is my fault, and the long term upside to me is probably positive and I suffer little immediate consequence while others do”

True but then what does taking responsibility means? Seems like just empty words.

I rather they just not mention anything about who is responsible for over-hiring/bad decisions than trying to act noble without any real consequences.

I think you're (not you specifically but 'people') are reading too much into a message about a business decision. Businesses are soulless machines whose only purpose is to survive and be profitable, You don't see people get as upset when a business pivots and changes purpose/direction, yet it's the same thing.

Then do it without "claiming responsibility," whatever that means. If you're responsible you should face consequences. If you're not, then don't claim responsibility.

I don't think "taking responsibility" here means moral responsibility for laying people off, I think it refers to professional responsibility for putting the company in a financial position where mass layoffs are necessary in the first place.

I agree but business is fluid and the market place is fluid. What was true yesterday isnt necessarily true today. His job is to steer the ship to make sure it continues to float and sail, if that means jettisoning empty weight then overboard it goes. There is never a good way to tell both employees and the market that you are making changes that will drastically effect both parties.

Hiring and the subsequent layoffs isn't a bad decision, it is a strategic move. If you need to scale, you need lots of folks, even if the efficiency per person is lower, your scale is larger. Once you have achieved scale, refine and tune which involves cutting workforce and increasing workload of existing workforce, maximizing output per worker.

The better balance sheet allows the rest of the remaining force going concern viability. Else they could all be out of a job. Or something on between.

Yes sometimes someone new would be beneficial, other times not. You don’t need someone new coming in and further disrupting a fragile situation.

the alternative hiring model is the reluctant hiring model, such as in some of Europe, where they hire out of last resort and would rather not give someone a leg up on experience while the going's good because firing people is fraught. Both options have pros and cons, but I prefer the more flexible model.

Counterfactual. They in fact set up their posse up to never let the ones taking full responsibility meaning the fall from ever reaching their office. And more bodyguards.

Really it's the executives taking any pay cut. Just never. Gotta keep the ratchet going. Anything else. Pay cuts are for the little people, basically.

All the gains in wages since like 1980 has gone to people with subordinates. All. Leaf node employees have gotten nothing, cuts in fact.

Because then there wouldn't be inflation rate rises depression ever. Executives couldn't pass the raises to leaf node employees on directly to the leaf node employees, they'd have to look at their own shit and say, OK I can travel a bit less.

Alpha primate thing. Never get less. Ratchet. Same goes for doctors.

The incentives here are wrong.

During the early phase of a company the goal is growth. Hire. Scale. Build. Win the land grab at all costs.

Years later when growth has slowed it becomes important to transition to operational efficiency. For many startups that means lowering headcount some just from attrition, but right now it seems layoffs is in style to accelerate the transition.

Regardless, investors pushed the CEO to grow fast. Under the current model it isn't fair to punish the CEO for executing on their mandate. I acknowledge it isn't fair to the employees either. Just offering a different perspective.

There are pluses and minuses for the affected employee. On the one hand you get hired and get experience which can help you land your next job.

A more conservative approach would leave the potential employee unemployed and inexperienced.

When I say I take full responsibility for the production issue I don’t take a pay cut either. I learn from it and do better next time.

If I’m part of a layoff, the fact that the CEO might take $10 million less in stock compensation over the next 5 years is pretty meaningless to me.

I mean if we believe googles top line result, the ceo got $14 million in total comp, of which ~150k was salary, and 7 million was direct stock. So let’s say they cut it all completely. 11% of their workforce is ~865 people. Estimating 130k for an average developer salary, so call it 160k fully loaded. Stop paying the CEO direct cash or cash equivalent completely and use it to pay salaries of people being laid off and you can save 44 jobs assuming your CEO will only work for stock options from now on. That turns this from an 11% cut to a 10.5% cut.

That might matter quite a bit to those 44 people, but the rest are still in the same place they are today, except maybe they feel a little better because the CEO doesn’t get paid for a little while, or at least until he moves on and the company hires a new ceo with real money again.

More important than symbolic flogging of the C-suite would be what the severance package looks like.

CEOs have feelings…

(disclaimer: I am seriously interested to learn and understand here)

Reading the situation objectively between Twilio and Patreon yesterday, it seems there have been a number of companies who have over-hired and now need to make a correction.

Faced with this, the companies then decide to do things like extend exercise windows, accelerate vesting, provide outsized severance packages, i.e - try to soften the blow

The predominant feedback in this thread and the other thread yesterday is about "taking responsibility" and calling for the heads of the CEO's who ultimately made the decision. This is the part I don't understand.

Is the blow not softened enough, i.e additional compensation? Should the leadership team have had a crystal ball and not hired? Was there severe mismanagement of resources? Were the wrong people laid off?

Or, is the negative feedback centered literally around the phrase "taking responsibility"?

News like this is just a lightning rod in online forums for "haters" - people who have some axe to grind and show up with views that this information is less to have informed and more to have provided a soapbox for.

This anti-racist non-sense is some of the most actually racist policies I've seen put forth in decades. If this is the singular means by which they decided who to fire - they are being explicitly discriminatory and should be sued.

I don’t think it’s possible to knee jerk harder than you have here. Obviously race is not the singular factor and it’s disingenuous to actual discussion to make a claim like that.

If race was considered at all then it’s… racist. Racist and illegal.

You can't self-monitor for racial bias without considering race. The statement suggests that they basically made an effort to check that they weren't (to exaggerate slightly) firing all of their black employees due to unconscious racial biases.

In the US, it isn't illegal to per se to consider race in hiring and firing decisions. The extent of the legal wiggle room that exists for various kinds of affirmative action is quite a complex issue of case law.

How many decades would you say?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

From their quarterly results:

8,510 employees as of June 30, 2022

7,381 employees as of September 30, 2021

3,060 employees as of March 31, 2020 (!)

With an 11% reduction it looks like they're going back to a number similar to what they had a year ago.

(I'm assuming they haven't been growing that much during the past 2.5 months.)

Holy shit.

This is also the case for a lot of companies. It's going to be a bloodbath out there.

I just wonder where all these people came from. Like we didn't suddenly double the number of developers in the world but seemingly every tech company doubled their staff in the last couple years.

I can only speak towards Twilio because that is where my experience is. It is a very international company. In recent years it has made several acquisitions of companies that were not previously based in the US. Maybe it is a broad trend across the industry for tech workers that used to work for smaller local companies coming under the umbrella of large US-based corporations?

I've seen the same; especially in B2B.

That's pretty insane.

What are 8500 people doing at Twilio?

Asking the right questions...

id like to think that roughly 8200 of them are sitting in a warehouse sending out SMS messages on banks of old Nokia 6110s. and the remaining 300 are in engineering, sales, and support trying to keep the castle from crumbling

2/2 between Patreon and Twilio for CEO's 'taking responsibility', whatever that means, while their lives don't change materially at all.

It's an alpha primate thing.

Oh look - he took full responsibility too! phew, that was close, guys!

Would you rather he wrote "it's all your fault for not working hard enough you lazy bums, get outta my face!" ?

https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=59

He didn't even have the courtesy to include a picture of himself crying.

I used to know jeffiel personally and let me tell you he is the sweetest person. He was incredibly humble when twilio became a darling in the sf-sv scene and (imo) he steered twilio to IPO effectively and quickly. Being a PoC, i'm disappointed people have felt so offended by the "anti-racist" comment in the statement, the person I know would mean that from a sincere perspective.

If a more qualified person is fired over someone else because of race, then he has not only failed the company but told other employees their talent and skills are a secondary consideration. Their pain is not lessened by the color of their skin.

I don't care whether he's sincere about preferentially firing white people on the basis of their race. His sincerity or lack thereof is not the issue.

There is no need to doubt good intentions. This is precisely the kind of issue where very bad things are done under good intentions.

He may have broken some serious Federal EEOC laws here.

I was thinking that at the very least, that'll be Exhibit A for anyone who might file a suit over this.

Why people always react with such contempt for businesses when they fire people? Employees leave their jobs all the time for selfish reasons, and nobody feels sorry for business owners who are often left with difficult problem maintaining the operations without that one person with a specific skill set. Why is it so different the other way around? Class solidarity, because there far more employees than business owners?

That's pretty callous to equate the harm done to a business when one person quits, to the harm done when scores are let go simultaneously. In the 2nd case folks can suffer, often more than a schedule setback or an HR event. Obviously.

People can quit en masse too. When they happens, everyone is talking about 'how horrible that place is'. I believe if you can quit easily, you shouldn't complain of you can be fired with the same ease.

Again, callous to equate the two. A person quitting can be a tiny fraction of the workforce for a company, but each person fired it's 100% of their job.

There's an obvious asymmetry in power and impact! Having one of X employees leave is absolutely nothing like losing your one of one job. A closer analog would be when a business stops working with a consultant who has other clients; nobody seriously sees that as a problem.

No surprise here. All you have to do is look at their financial reports to know that massive cuts are going to be made in order to survive.

You can't be burning insane amounts of cash while cash is becoming more tight. So the easiest thing to do is cut your workforce.

If you want to improve your chances of not being cut, work for a company that actually makes money.

A lot of the people focusing on certain aspects of this layoff are unfortunately taking focus off of the increasing trend in layoffs. Patreon had a similar size reduction yesterday. There are others that are not as visible.

People talk about default-alive and default-dead companies, but everyone should be looking at their personal finances in the same way. Look at your savings, your debt, and what expenses are discretionary and make sure you have enough time to find a new job in a difficult labor market.

We have experienced an unprecedented period of growth and good employment conditions in many areas of tech, and it has been funded by venture capital while operating at a loss in aggregate. That is not how a default-alive industries run, and capital is going to be getting even more expensive soon. There are going to be more layoffs, more closures, more competition for jobs, and slower growth or contraction in compensation.

>"so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs -- while a business necessity today -- were carried out through a Racist/Racially-Oppression lens."

Fixed that for you.. And oh boy would I not want to be one of this companies lawyers in the coming months and no doubt years! Yikes

I feel like this may not be the best time to open with a cutesy nickname like "Twilions"...

I am completely ignorant when it comes to Twilio other than hearing the name, but what is the added value compared to what AWS (and I imagine GCP / Azure) provide in terms of SMS / robocalls functionalities?

Note: AWS actually uses Twilio for their text message service.

https://investors.twilio.com/news/news-details/2016/Twilio-E...

Price. They do some automatic bidding on the lowest upstream connection thing that keeps things low with that, it's also got a pretty robust system for building things like IVRs and all that important stuff for keeping too many calls from flooding your lines. It's got a nice enough API with support for multiple languages which comes with pretty decent documentation. I'm not surprised they're cutting a part of their workforce at all, they're a very profit oriented company, it's what their shareholders demand.

I didn't even know that AWS/GCP/Azure had VOIP to PSTN as part of their services, I don't think they're in the same business.

They generally have higher quality than others in the telecom business in terms of uptime and delivery success. They also have a much more expansive toolset than AWS for expanding out from being a basic text message blaster to being a full on support center, a customer relation management platform, and a customer data platform. Also their web based programming interfaces for non-coders are better. Additionally, their developer APIs don’t have as much jank as AWS.

They can cut 50% and still operate as usual. This is a bloated company with hundreds of employees who coast and nobody even knows they're on the roof.

Looks like an opportunity for a very juicy labor lawsuit here.

Wow! Yesterday Patreon 17% of their staff, today Twilio 11%...

I wish there was a list. There's actually several companies that have announced layoffs over the past couple months.

There's always https://layoffs.fyi, but there's a lot of "noise" in there from small startups, I find.

Thank you.

https://layoffs.fyi/

Thank you.

This site has been helpful for tracking all the layoffs this year: https://layoffs.fyi/

Thank you.

layoffs.fyi

Thank you.

This is just the beginning.

Layoffs have been happening consistently for months now, we’re not at the beginning

In terms of number of companies announcing and the relative sizes of the layoffs, these are still early days if the economy goes where it looks like it's going. These layoffs are still shedding the excess hiring these companies did during the pandemic. They haven't started cutting into muscle yet.

As a sysadmin I always feel maybe a bit callous when I read the:

> We have four priorities for reaching profitability and leading in customer engagement: Investing in our platform reliability and trust, increasing the profitability of messaging...

TLDR: "We're keeping all the sysadmins and firing all the developers who don't turn the crank on revenue".

My whole career is about pushing the DevOps kool-aide for reliability and cohesion and velocity and blah blah blah. What are devops skills really good for for developers? Job security.

Highly doubt many devs are getting cut except the ones they planned on getting rid of anyway. This is very similar to early 2020 layoffs

> I take responsibility for those decisions, as well as the difficult decision to do this layoff.

I had to stop reading. How can a human being be this tone deaf? You know what's difficult, you great insensitive oaf? Getting laid off.

Are you stepping down, Jeff?

No?

Then stop making it about you.

To anyone who ever has to do lay-offs: this is a masterclass in what not to write.

> How can a human being be this tone deaf? You know what's difficult, you great insensitive oaf? Getting laid off.

Would you rather him say we 'are letting go our lowest performers'?

Yes. I would rather not sugarcoat reality.

This will reduce the chance of the laidoff employees of finding new jobs...

Yes.

It matters why they're being let go. Here's where, "I take full responsibility for:" is acceptable.

"... dropping you because we automated your job away." <-- acceptable.

"... dropping you because, frankly, you're not very good at your job." <-- extremely acceptable. Hell, I was even told this when I was 16 years old and working at a shitty second-rate Lowe's clone called Sutherland's (and he's right, I wasn't good at my job, I didn't give a shit about stocking shelves - I was always helping people).

"... dropping you because I fucked up on judging the market and I gotta make sure the company stays attractive to investors." <-- not acceptable, also fuck you, also, you step down and appoint someone else. YOU fucked up. Not them. That's what "full responsibility" looks like.

Responsibility isn't, "Oh I made a booboo, here's 3 months pay and some other shit..."

Love him or hate him, Dr. Jordan Peterson is correct with some of his "rules of life", one of which is, "Tell the truth, or at least don't lie." When you say, "I'm taking full responsibility for this problem," that means you incur all negative consequences - and I do fucking mean - **ALL** negative consequences. Otherwise, just say, "These cuts are not ideal; unfortunately, they have to be made because I'm beholden to certain aspects of modern capitalism."

That's what people want to hear. They don't want to hear platitudes that don't even make them feel good, but assuage the other person's conscience. If your conscience is bothering you, it's because you know what you're doing isn't right. You may still have to do it, but don't fucking be a shitbag about it. Don't spout out some lines that "sound" good at a cursory glance. Tell the truth, or at least don't lie.

This stuff just comes from templates. The templates optimize for people not freaking out. I wouldn’t read so much personal emotion into it.

"I wouldn't read so much personal emotion into it."

Tell that to the son who wanted to go to baseball camp this year and can't now, or the daughter that wanted to have violin lessons and now Daddy or Mommy can't afford that.

Your actions have consequences. Not just for you, but for others. To reduce it down to a goddamned template is not only insulting, but frankly deserves an old-fashioned jaw jacking.

It isn't true that it is the lowest performers.

Should just be honest about the mechanics and fundamentals of the situation.

"We were too optimistic in our projections and overhired, thus we need to cut headcount to meet our goals."

Anything else is just insulting to the intelligence of their employees

> To anyone who ever has to do lay-offs: this is a masterclass in what not to write.

The stock being up 10% today would like to disagree with your statement.

There are no words that will make firing 11% of your workforce humane, so, yes, bullshit corporate newspeak is 100% appropriate.

>To anyone who ever has to do lay-offs: this is a masterclass in what not to write.

Incorrect. To anyone who ever has to do lay-offs: this is a masterclass in what to write.

Let's try and keep things honest, eh?

It's not okay for race or class to take any part in any hiring/firing/layoff decision.

What about casting a part for a Dungeons & Dragons movie?

Instead of simply negating and accusing me of being dishonest, perhaps you could expand a bit and explain why you disagree with me.

From the site guidelines,

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Given what he did, what ought he have written instead?

there’s a zero percent chance people will be laid off and be happy. same with seeing people be laid off. there is no right thing to say

I know a handful of people who have been laid off. Each one was very angry about being laid off - it was unfair, the boss always had it in for me, etc.

The ones I talked to a year later would ruefully admit it was a net positive for them. They were forced to reevaluate their careers and make corrections. One, for example, said it gave him the kick in the pants to start his own business, which he'd always wanted to do. Another told me it gave him the motivation for getting clean from drugs (the reason he was laid off was showing up for work high).

Companies laying people off are not doing well, and it is a lot easier to do well in an environment that is doing well.

Being laid off is a lot less traumatic to people than getting fired, so layoffs are done to periodically let low performers go in a way that preserves their dignity, and makes it easier for them to get another job.

He could have tried to direct the reader's sympathy towards the people getting laid off, rather than himself who is not going to suffer anything because of the decision he's making. If you are doing something nasty because of "just business," the minimum standard in corporate messaging you're expected to achieve is writing an announcement that is itself just business (and not a humanizing self-administered interview like you're getting an article in a magazine or something).

All of the big corporations that you do not want to work for did not invent corporatespeak because they are uncreative or unwilling to engage with human emotions, they invented it because that is the least infuriating way to communicate that they're shutting down a division for offshoring.

> I take responsibility for those decisions, as well as the difficult decision to do this layoff.

From a strategic point of view, this sentence has near-zero positive effect on the reader and apparent non-zero negative effect. So it should probably be left out.

It really is comical hearing the major news tell everyone, "Look at this number here, everything is okay. The economy is great. Biden is doing a great job," while gas prices are creeping back up to $5/gallon and people can barely afford housing, and there are constant layoffs.

It's comical if you're the court jester, but to most of us peasants, this is horrible. Our worst fears are coming true. The system is failing, but it's too big to fail.

> people can barely afford housing

Your scheduling is off. Right now we're attacking Biden for falling housing prices. We'll have to wait until prices start rising again to attack Biden for rising housing prices.

I keep hearing about falling housing prices but rent prices have only been increasing.

For sure. Thank goodness the labor market has indicators pointing different directions (extremely low unemployment rate, more jobs than job seekers; but also more layoff headlines than usual). That way people can attack him for both the terrible lack of workers and the terrible lack of jobs.

Really? After they went up precipitously and now are returning to the previous (still unaffordable) level? Hardly a great benefit to the public. The lessening of another crushing blow I guess.

Creeping back up? Don’t see it here. https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts

It’s pretty obvious the reason gas prices went down was because of the enormous drawdown of the strategic petroleum reserve. Post-election that will stop and it will go back up.

That’s not relevant to the factuality of the claim that prices are creeping up presently, is it?

My claim is factual. Where I live gas prices are rising back closer to $5/gallon.

Not gonna comment after this, I posted more in the other thread. This is spin by you after being called on saying something misleading.

No need to spin anything. I tried being civil and compromising about it. You apparently prefer not to be after I explained that I don't live over the entire United States.

Good point. Tapping into our strategic oil reserves is helping a little bit. Of course that, in a way, is a long-term price hike (when/if we ever replenish them). It's like taking out a loan.

OP said prices were creeping up & I only shared a reputable source showing that’s not true. OP did not say “gas prices will start creeping up for <reason x>.”

Fair, but I would like to point out that not all states share the national average prices and that at least where I live on the West Coast, gas prices were previously around $4/gallon and have crept back up to around $4.60/gallon over the last month. It appears that in certain areas that may be swing states come election that prices have remained lower.

Alright, guess we can’t agree on factuality of general statements, unqualified by any location, like “gas prices are creeping back up” on this forum any longer.

Me saying gas prices are creeping back up is a factual statement based on my location. If I said it is raining because it was raining where I'm at then that is factual, even if it isn't raining where you're located. Maybe learn to accept people conceding to some degree instead of trying to get them to admit complete fault, even when they are not completely at fault. If you can do that, then great you made a valid point as did I. Else, my point is just as valid as gas prices are creeping back up here despite here not being the same as you.

Yep, if you change what you said to be qualified by a specific location it can become an accurate observation. If I say “people are at least 6 feet tall” that’s totally wrong. “All people on the basketball court I’m looking at right now are at least 6 feet tall” is a different matter entirely. That can easily be true.

You're getting downvoted because people on this forum are mostly ivory tower types in the top 10% (i.e., insulated, with lots of runway and many options).

But we're absolutely getting gaslit on the energy & food inflation. Just talk to anyone outside of the valley. Costs have gone up and people are nervous.

People are nervous. It isn't clear to me that there is much in the short-term that can be done about it. The invasion of Ukraine and bad weather (likely a result of climate change), as well as various consequences of the pandemic, are making life hard.

I think they're getting downvoted for mentioning a politician on Hacker News. From the HN Guidelines [0]:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

and

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They're being downvoted because it has almost nothing to do with the linked article, and is essentially a political rant.

> Just talk to anyone outside of the valley

You mean, in the whole world, right? The situation isn't great in Canada or Europe too.

None of that is new though. Housing, healthcare, education, childcare have been increasingly unaffordable for at least a generation now. The focus on specifically food prices and gas prices makes it seem like a recent phenomenon but outside of this 10% (are you not in that?) it has been brutal for a long time.

In (moderate) fairness to Biden himself, though, we'd almost definitely be in this same position regardless of who had won the election in 2020. We're dealing with the unwinding fallout of the Covid lockdowns - we knew this would happen even when they started, we just have to ride it out at this point.

Thank god Twilio laid off those workers so gas prices will finally come down.

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