Brex layoffs
brex.com
brex.com
lay-offs 2 years ago
Switched tech stacks 11 months ago to among other things be able to hire more devs
Acquired Pry for $90 million 6 months ago
Were tossing out long standing customers 4 months ago
and now they're having lay-offs again.
Quite the ride...
Saving some should be in the service of the former, and only as one of the tools in your arsenal (obviously, creating a product or service people would pay for should be the first).
https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-ko...
Note that Brex founders are Brazilian and the Elixir author is Brazilian.
I think it was Toyota that made English mandatory for their dev division. Just because of the tools and docs are on English.
That's like trying to pivot from finding unicorn to finding pegasus.
I'm currently doing a ton of C# work and it's great - my relevant professional background is basically all C++, with some Java in the very distant past.
If you're dealing with concurrency and distributed systems at medium to high scale you really want your senior people to be familiar with the language.
It’s not really that hard.
I've written my first application level thread/concurrency library for DOS in the 80s. So you can count me as experienced. In my opinion as long as one is senior developer and knows the subject language does not mean fuck all as long as it adequate and language / libraries support needed primitives. I've written distributed middleware with multithreading / concurrency in many languages including ones I did not know before starting the project.
IOW you really want senior people, full stop.
Sure, each language has different tools to solve corresponding issues, but I prefer to understand the problem I am solving to intimately knowing the tools I need to use.
Ofc, having both is perfect!
Even if you can, you then have to solve the issue of keeping a department stocked full of senior devs happy when you have limited promotion/perk/raise options and so churn will likely be relatively high even in a healthy environment.
It's a nice fantasy view of the market as an ideal world simulation but does not reflect the reality of hiring software engineers.
Both sound like major dysfunctional problems.
The tooling an docs all guide you in the right direction and usually code in the wild aims to be straightforward.
I’ve really never had trouble onboarding people to Elixir unless they had started learning it solo as a Ruby dev, then they typically have to unlearn some stuff.
Right now I'm working with a team where we're trying to introduce FP and reactive programming, and most of them have never heard of either one, or if they have, have never really used it.
[0]: https://tauri.app/
Functional programming gets really hard when you try doing stuff like state and IO monads. Elixir in contrast gives you genservers for state which is very simple by comparison as well as having dead simple IO. you don't have to make special functions marked as IO or use any type of exotic type theory.
TLDR: yes Elixir is functional but its the 80% that is easy to learn. you don't have to bother with that last 20% of functional programming rabbit hole crazy town.
source: me with 6 years of elixir experience and having built the entire backend for my startup in elixir over the last 3 years. Elixir is s a platform that fits a nice sweet spot where you need to knock something out fast and still have something reasonably maintainable (and refactorable) that also happens to be really fast(performance wise) for the level of day to day developer productivity you get.
Its all about the tradeoffs you're going after. If you absolutely need to cut down errors to a minimum and are willing to sacrifice developer speed/productivity, Haskell with IHP is certainly a compelling offer. (yes I know an experienced haskell dev will probably be jsut as productive as a experienced elixir dev but it will take much longer to train someone from another language to haskell than to elixir.)
conversely, if you want speed at all costs, rust is certainly nice.
now if we're talking Pareto efficient intersection of performance, developer productivity and maintainability, yea elixir hits that sweet spot well. I haven't encountered a language that does that better yet. Python comes close if you're willing to take a drastic hit on performance. The tooling is descent, the day to day ergonomics let me focus on solving our startup's problems rather than wrestling with the platform. It's not perfect (lord knows I wish there were more libraries).
Reason I'm asking is because I love this attitude and I think it works so long as your team will provide the support for someone to ramp up, but I seldom see these kind of job posts saying we're fine if you learn the stack.
IMO, everyone needs to learn a from of stuff for every job. Thus understanding of high-level concepts and ability to learn are paramount. If you tell me though that your primary language is XYZ and you cannot answer basic challenges with it we encounter during the interview then that's a really bad sign even if I don't care much about that actual language.
The problem was actually getting the stuff deployed or running into weird niche issues that require a couple days to fix. I was a bit out of comfort level at that point but the exaws sdk’s, confex, releases, supervisors. Made me really appreciate how much more support and just easier mode/python has been in my current job.
(I am an Elixir dev)
Its existence hardly matters on the JVM world.
Scala or Clojure, on the other side, is more radically different.
I have no idea about Elixir but it doesn’t look as conventional.
I interviewed a company a while back that was using elixir which I thought was cool, but I ended up not taking the job. Part of what worried me was realizing just how much they struggled to find interested candidates, and it seemed like they were willing to compromise to hire as a result. Perhaps I was a compromise, haha.
The CTO and other devs on the team painted a bleak picture of building the team, and elixir seemed to be the main obstacle.
The other issue they faced, though I doubt it was as much of an obstacle, was that they were working on pet insurance. That was a major deterrent for me. The compensation and working conditions were excellent though, so I suspect many people wouldn’t care and would gladly take the compensation and flexible work life – were it not for elixir.
I found it surprising but I’ve seen people work on worse things for less money using more popular languages. Perhaps more people are afraid to learn something new than it seems.
Definitely sounds like someone overspent their innovation tokens:
They always suck, but being transparent, ripping the band-aid off, and giving the people laid off as much support as possible is the way to go. They're also far enough from the holidays that people can still job search, but close enough that most people in tech could eat a few weeks of savings to take an extended holiday. Don't know if that was deliberate, but it seems well timed
Now, maybe their business reasons are dues to their own ineptness or bad luck or whatever, but they handled this pretty well.
I say this all because we tend, on HN and other places, to focus on the shitty aspects of every bad news story, and rarely speak up when something goes right that is still shitty, like this.
Will the shareholders be keen to see so much of their money go to ex-employees for not much gain in PR or morale of existing employees?
Your priorities seem very, very backwards to me.
They could sell them used, but not for much (especially after paying for prepaid shipping boxes).
That's why many people reject 'free' gifts from their employer.
Being taxed on a couple hundred dollars is roughly the cost of a dinner out. It is definitely better to accept a free computer at such a discounted valuation and turn around and sell it. In no event would you come close to losing money — the taxable value of the computer would be far lower than what you could sell it for, and your tax on the taxable value would be just a fraction of that.
Meanwhile unemployment is still at an all time low.
But then, venture capital backed companies generally (arguably by design) are not profitable, so their ability to weather storms is likely weakened and maybe the boards get squirrely when faced with the threat of bad weather.
Unfortunately, if your customers are mostly other tech companies, they are doing the same thing.
It seems like a bunch of healthy companies are putting on the brakes hard enough to collectively cause the recession they are trying to avoid.
I've heard this before but I don't get it. Why are they not profitable "by design"?
Edit: not sure if it was the reason this is downvoted but this was an honest question
Also, it happens to bring growth company valuations and a nice exit. What happens after that (ie if the entire thing was unsustainable), honey badger VC don't care.
You also don't have a choice but to play the game. If you don't, your VC funded competition will outspend and destroy you.
That said I think the real story now is that the previous recessions haven’t really impacted the big tech companies, but this time it is so we’re seeing the first mass layoffs that this generation of developers has likely ever encountered. Couple that with the “tech” companies that are essentially just advertising companies that write software (obviously FB and G, but many of the startups aren’t too different) discovering that attention based advertising isn’t as stable a revenue stream as was thought, and you get a _lot_ more “safe” jobs disappearing.
But there's also just simple lag on the unemployment numbers as companies like Facebook, etc have only just started large scale layoffs.
As a side note, I am curious how much the less fragile companies are going to be using current events to get rid of "expensive" or "unproductive" employees. Previously companies got around legal reporting requirements by simply laying off people in groups of < N people where N is a legal "laying off N people in X days must be reported" - do "current macroeconomic" effects provide a different path? I write code, not legal docs so know nothing of such things and am kind of curious how it goes
Both U-3 and U-6 are near historical lows. Even if you don't believe that U-3 is meaningful, you can compare the U-6 numbers now against other times in history and see that unemployment is indeed low right now.
That is incredibly circular logic. So companies shouldn't be doing layoffs because unemployment is low?
Are you arguing that the macro environment isn't bad? A G7 country is in a mexican standoff with its bond market and pension funds to avoid a systemic collapse in the next 3 days. How much worse is the macro situation supposed to get before businesses should worry?
When the equity market is hot, issue more shares
When the consumer market is hot, sell more product
It has nothing to do with employees unless you are trying to bribe a politician with “jobs” you’ll bring to their area
The fed is in full bore inflation fighting mode. The only tool they have for that has the known and expected result of driving up unemployment.
They currently view that as the lesser of 2 evils.
When the economy turns you have to adjust that strategy, which is what they are doing now.
But I came away with a strong sense that they would be quite successful. They just had this confidence and clarity of vision, that also didn’t seem like bullshit. And past experience building a company in the financial services space.
One funny thing I remember was Pedro (I think) saying their tech stack was Elixer, “maybe that’s crazy”. And interesting to see they have since started moving away from it. Seems they had some doubts about it from the start.
I’ve heard it all, from dating, promotions, sports, and now fundraising. You still have to have all of the skills at it for anything good to happen.
yikes. is ramp eating their lunch or is the market just not that favourable?
Normal banks with tellers named Maud are likely the ones eating their lunch.
Businesses like this are skating on thin ice. People are willing to pay a premium for design and user-experience when the times are good. But when they're not, these "nice-to-haves" are first on the chopping block.
I wonder how they could have arrived at "seven." Why not go with the max allowable of ten? This seems a bit miserly in an otherwise pretty decent package.
Facts before feelings and opinions, please.