Layoffs at Canadian tech startups

Different managers/directors/VPs have their own portfolios, their own budgets, their own roadmaps and KPIs. This leads to duplication, inefficiencies, and more.. But tech companies make so much money that in most cases this is accepted as cost of doing business - up to a point.

Also in some places, if you don't hire for your headcount, it becomes harder to get it back later when you truly need it..

There is a ton of organizational dysfunction like that in very larger companies (thousands of employees or more), even in the "best" companies that HN likes to fawn over.

I did read that back when it was posted. I hope you recognize PR when you see it?

Sorry if it came across like I was saying that companies are being evil or bad or vain about how they're hiring. Quite the opposite, and more dangerously, I think companies see nothing wrong with the boom-then-bust approach to hiring, and that it's going to happen more.

And so my point here is that employees need to re-think how they look at job security in high-growth companies, and assume that they might be getting hired as part of a "bet" and not as part of a long-term strategy where the company has allocated the money to keep you around, like a lot of people assume when they take a full-time job (vs. a contract).

Plenty of larger tech companies that did layoffs, Shopify included, were never in any real financial trouble. They just made bets that didn't pay off, and so they corrected and moved on.

There’s the rub. The parent’s suggestion was that, probably, the new hires weren’t told anything along the lines of “Hey, this is a crazy gamble and it might not work out. Sign here to play.”

Yes, it’s implied in “startups”. But companies as large as shopify aren’t generally hiring people from the startup scene anymore. People are (were?) leaving good, stable jobs to go there. Only they know what their expectations were.

Its not like shopify is even that good of a job for developers, they pay well below FAANG. Checking levels, Senior SWEs are only getting like 15k/year in grants which means you are taking on the start up risk without the potential 10x or 100x payoff.

One of my orgs had layoffs. Similar story.

Now we are hiring like mad again.

Truth is that they just jumped like spooked horses and laid off piles of people to keep investors happy for the quarter. That’s all you are to these people.

So many of them went heavy on "comfort wear", thinking that somehow everyone will still be working from home and that going out will be an exception, not the norm. Many even expanded or created entirely new "home" lines that included selling towels, comforters, candle holders, etc.

Now they're all finding out that people want normal, going-out clothes again, and their current catalogs just don't line up with the demand.

The "new normal" was touted around way too aggressively. At least here in my reality, it's mostly gone back to the old normal with vestiges of the "new" remaining.

The opinion is that, if that was the plan (which Tobi's layoff post seems to confirm), that it's a crass way to operate. People uprooted their lives to work there. They quit old jobs, maybe moved cities or countries. Of course layoffs happen and companies make mistakes, but deliberately setting up a strategy with a high possibility of failure ("a bet") and then hiring people knowing that they'll be laid off if things outside their control don't go right in the near future--that's sort of crass.

Obviously no exec was twirling their mustache and saying "find me Jim, we'll fire him first because I hate him". It was just a plan set up, seemingly, without regard for the outsized risk it placed on new employees relative to the possibility of the business itself failing. New employees that would disproportionately be affected by a layoff, by nature of being new employees.

Why do those make it worse? Lower investment rates means less money to lose, R&D is often trimmed first, and investment should go to lower risk in this kind of environment. And costs shouldn't be much higher than USA.

I think the problem is actually the opposite. People say the US is willing to take risks which is why their tech and startup scene is so good. Among the complaints about all other countries trying to work out how to become the "next silicon valley", near the top is almost universally "risk adverse". I think that's backwards though, investments in Canada and other such places in tech startup are very high risk and speculative, because people are just closing their eyes and praying that these fanciful predictions about being the next silicon valley are true and they hit it big, rather than being based on any real evidence or logic.

True it's often governments engaging in this reckless risky spending, which seems to make it appear to be "low risk" to other investors. That doesn't make it so though.

But it still floats on the inflated stock values like a majority of the big tech companies.

Indeed, I certainly remember the days when Montreal was said to be the next "AI superpower".

How much of that was driven by the media predicting after Trump's election in 2016 that hordes of tech companies and employees would flee north of the border? (And how much of that reporting, in turn, was driven by smug Trudeau government bureaucrats who actually believed what they told sympathetic/gullible reporters?)

Lot of indiscriminate hiring happened to puff up the leak. Companies were flushed with money. But that was a failing strategy. Companies can continue to go down that path, it will have further diminishing returns

Like it or not, there's people willing to take those positions. No where near as many as Canadian companies would like, but they are there.

All in all I see plenty of tech talent, it's just that, internationally, tech talent doesn't see Denmark as an obvious choice to which to relocate. Nine times out of 10, that's the U.S.

In one case they were bought, so now they were part of a 75k+ employee behemoth. But still, with only some irony, called themselves "scrappy".

In another they're still privately owned, but are over 7 years old, with close to 500 employees, and allegedly #1 in their space. I feel they like to hide behind this "startup" idea because it relieves them of putting on the big-boy pants and accepting that the expense of moving fast being the #1 priority is actually something they're having a hard time paying.

Which, frankly, at this point might very well include every company founded since Facebook and including FB. Maybe every tech company post-dot com bubble is spiritually a startup.

This is _precisely_ how I've seen it (mis)used; a (IMO very creepy) need to hang on to those wonder-years that got you there. It's also when you typically see the "visionary" type leaders start heading out and doing it over again.

AFAICT they think it means using kanban boards and having standup meetings.

Another thought leader, Steve Blank, writes that "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model" (https://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-prin...).

A lot of the "startup type" characteristics of a company can possibly be correlated with one of the above categories. If you don't fall in either category, it would be weird to display those characteristics.