Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> You should read Tobi's post about what happened. That's not how it was.

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.

I write my own posts, not PR. Don’t be so jaded.

He's saying that the Tobi's post was PR, not yours

You're talking to Tobi.

Oh... whoops!

Yeah the point of this entire thread is that your (not unique to you, but you are certainly one of the CEOs that are easiest to vilify when discussing this phenomenon) incentives are so skewed that a given employee should be very cautious about joining your company.

You made a bet on e-commerce penetration. The reason it was so easy for you to make that bet is because if you were correct, you’d be even more fabulously wealthy. If you were wrong (like you were), you could simply lay off the employees you hired and tuck the severance package into one quarter of extraordinary charges.

The employee view of that is that if you were right, they’d be somewhat wealthy and if you were wrong (which you were) their lives would be completely upended.

That’s all. It’s just an attempt to remind people that even CEOs who have good intentions (and author layoff memos in a cerebral tone without the help of PR) can still cause absolute havoc in their lives because of the asymmetry of the power dynamic.

I agree an employee should be cautious for the exact risks you outlined but I don't know if I'd say this is a function of any power dynamic. Employees should be saving such that they have 3 months of expenses saved away for this exact scenario. Between that, unemployment benefits, and any severance most people should be able to find a new job without "havoc" on their lives.

Well, if it’s not a power dynamic thing then why is Tobi still CEO when it was his mistake and not the employees that he hired?

If you only take issue with the PR commentary it is very telling for the validity of the rest of the argument.

It's not personal, but you're the CEO. You're going to put the best possible spin on anything you or the company does.

That's your job, and everyone expects it.

It's like buying a car. I expect the dealer to tell me everything positive about buying the car and nothing negative, because, hey, he's a salesperson.

Even if you were being 100% factual and hiding nothing, nobody will actually believe that. It just comes with the territory.

It isn't not-PR just because you wrote it. It's PR because it's disseminating information to the public for the purpose of image management.

The information is that the company thought it could grow more during the pandemic by hiring new people, and "bet" growth would stick around and those people could stay on in the long term. Is that wrong? Well, that's business. (I have absolutely no doubt, of course, that the "bet"-nature of the employment was carefully communicated during hiring.)

The PR is that this business decision is presented as a story of Shopify's brave history of taking on daring bets, its decision to take on another, its defeat at the hands of unflinching (completely external) factors, its kind treatment of employees that there is no option but to let go in these difficult times, and the new, refocused, decisive organization that will be reborn (after some people who joined 6 months ago get laid off).

It's not all bad. 16 weeks severance seems generous to me, letting people keep their chairs is kind of random but nice, the job referral stuff is a nice gesture, etc. I know all the nice things you did! The P was R'd!

It's just, at the end of the day, it's an obviously-business decision that's being told as something else. People got fucked over by a confluence of factors after the higher-ups decided to take a risk. There's no story here. There's no arc of Shopify History. The job of PR, regardless of the letters after the name of whoever writes it, is to make it seem like there is one when bad stuff happens.

> disseminating information to the public for the purpose of image management.

This is pretty much the definition of anyone ever making any kind of public statement. Choosing ones words carefully with the knowledge that what they're saying will affect others perception of themselves and the situation at hand. I don't think anywhere in Tobi's post was it implying this _wasn't_ a business decision, I figured that went without saying. Shopify's a business, hiring decisions are an enormous consideration for businesses. Were you under the impression Shopify was a charity?

> I know all the nice things you did! The P was R'd!

As much as this is the way you cynically expect others might interpret Tobi's post, I think anyone with experience working in or running a business will have no problem understanding that businesses are not people and that messages from a CEO are not meant to be treated as blogposts or emotional diary entries.

I agree that Shopify is a business. My point is exactly that a business decision made for the profitability and stock price of the company is presented as an emotional story.

> that messages from a CEO are not meant to be treated as blogposts or emotional diary entries.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Do you not believe the original post is written to elicit an emotional reaction? How do you interpret it?

> Those lines of code started a company and sent it on a fascinating journey full of wonder, toil, success, failure, ambition, and above all else comradery. Being on a journey, surrounded by great teammates, doing difficult things is what it's all about.

> Our customers are merchants, entrepreneurs, and small businesses owners - the bedrock of our economy and precisely those that are typically hit hardest during recessions. Most are already feeling it. We again have a clear objective in these challenging macro economic times, and we will use everything we’ve got to help them succeed and come out stronger. That’s our core mission.

etc. It reads far more emotional and blogposty than the typical dispassionate corporate layoff announcement ("Corp corp is reducing 10% of our workforce today. This change will allow us to be more agile and do more synergy.") The whole point of this comment chain is that despite the tone and better writing, it's essentially the same message.

If, OTOH, your point is "well obviously it's the same message but you should know that", well of course I know that. That's why I wrote my comment. I just find it sort of frustrating, and the author's response tone-deaf to the issue with it. It's a layoff announcement. Drop the beginning and end about the incredible journey and Shopify's crucial mission. The middle is mostly good.

Hi Tobi,

Whether you wrote it or not (and fair that my post may have implied you didn't - my fault), any note/post/message that you publish on the Shopify website is still public relations comms, coming from the CEO of a prominent public company.

I'm not jaded, but I'm also not naive. ;-)

You can write your own PR.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com