Product Hunt cleans house with layoffs impacting 60% of staff
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Good thing he's operating in the wild west. This admission would land him in court in my country. Absolute scum of the earth.
A business, particularly one that isn't some state-subsidized, leeching megacorp, doesn't have an obligation (nor should it) to operate as a make-work office. Its most fundamental purpose is to benefit itself. There's nothing morally wrong with this. I'm sure you've hired people in the past for temporary work and then stopped hiring them when you don't need it. To call the guy the scum of the earth is absurd and smugly hypocritical. He did what he felt necessary for his company and was rather fair in helping the laid-off staff transition.
Dynamic economies work with these kinds of rights for companies. Countries that forbid it also tend to suffer stagnant employment numbers in which business are very careful about hiring in the first place. I'd prefer the former, it certainly helps younger people find jobs more easily than we see in some of the 50% youth unemployment countries where "workers are always protected". I'd suggest getting off your high horse.
Is bothering people who care about efficiency more important than the basic rights of those that dont?
Put yourself into the other shoes: You want to start a business, you have limited resources, you want to hire people who can help you in exchange for compensation and these people want that compensation, but the laws where you live make it nearly impossible to fire anyone you hire. What will you do? Be realistic, looking at your actual finances and human self.interest as objectively as you can.
Businesses are the private organizational expression of private people (or groups) using their personal resources to try to earn something more, improve their economic well-being. Saddling them with the ideological notion of being make-work resources just because they started something of their own that required employees for fixed aims is absurd.
It also promotes informality and labor black markets, in which people who prefer actually getting a job and money for living expenses to "enjoying worker protection" in the abstract but having it basically impossible to get hired legally in practice. So they accept being hired under the table. Now that they're working informally, as if they were illegal immigrants, they're even more open to abuse than they would have been if they could just get hired and fired easily, but at least formally, and under at least basic rules of minimum wage and labor law.
A simple analogy would be you hiring a gardener to trim your hedges and mow your lawn and then being forced to offer him work any time he asks for it from then on. I doubt you'd accept this. In fact, I doubt you'd even hire gardeners ever again.
I am in the other shoes, and have been for decades, like my parents were before me. I never hire people with the expectation of firing them. If your having to fire a lot of people through the course of doing business you're hiring the wrong people and need to revise your hiring practices. This is your failure not societies.
>"A simple analogy would be you hiring a gardener to trim your hedges and mow your lawn and then being forced to offer him work any time he asks for it from then on. I doubt you'd accept this. In fact, I doubt you'd even hire gardeners ever again."
This is a horrible analogy. Nobody hires their gardener as an employee. It's the perfect example of the opposite. Given the difficult to fire people hypothetical environment you propose companies would be well served to hire their labor as contractors. This is very common. And a gardener is the perfect example.
A fair analogy would be a pilot who invests years of their life and lots of money to be trained in a certain profession. There should be protections for people like that.
Strikes me as harsh given that we know essentially nothing about the company's plans. The laid off employees were given severance and the CEO offered to personally intro people to hiring companies. The CEO stated it was to increase speed and focus (i read as reducing meetings/overhead).
I understand people are upset with layoffs taking place, but how do you think a company should behave when they realize they are wasting time and money?
> Traffic has never been higher and we’re in a great place, financially. It was for strategic reasons.”
Call me old fashioned, but no amount of execs introing me to companies that are hiring forgives them for realizing they don't give a shit about me and my job because they'd rather make more money. They should have thought about that before hiring in the first place. Severance isn't a reward, it's the absolute bare minimum.
No, companies don't give a shit about you, it's egotistical to believe you're that important that you deserve ongoing charity paychecks just because they hired you at some point in the past. Employment is purely, by definition, a transactional relationship. You sell labor. They buy labor. It's why you are free to leave as soon as it makes sense, and it's why they can do the same.
That's not the case here, where the company has explicitly, publicly stated that this is not for financial reasons. At least when a company is looking at it's financials and realizes it isn't in good shape, it has some justification. That's not the case here: they're explicitly saying they're just greedy.
> Employment is purely, by definition, a transactional relationship. You sell labor. They buy labor. It's why you are free to leave as soon as it makes sense, and it's why they can do the same.
This is strictly false. Businesses go into a relationship with an employee with the knowledge that they simply cannot fire someone without cause. Businesses have elastic labor needs: less labor means less output means less revenue, but it also means less expense. The cost of living for an individual is very inelastic: the threshold for shelter, caloric intake, and other human expenses cannot simply shrink, or at least not on a short timeline.
When you weigh "we might not make as much money as we could because the people we hired aren't as strategically useful to us anymore" against "here's a bunch of people holding up their end of the bargain who still have bills to pay" I cannot understand how you COULDN'T stand behind my moral framework. Morality is about people, not profits.
If the demand sticks, the business grows. Everyone wins, customers, shareholders, employees, society.
If the demand disappears, there is going to be a lot of slack in the system, employees that have nothing to do or are doing busywork on deadend projects which will never have customers or use cases.
A good practical example of this is that a lot of tech companies saw this after COVID. In some sectors of tech, demand turned out to be sticky, in others, it wasn't. Management in 2020 couldn't see the future and know what would work out and what wouldn't. Many hired out and now need to cut back, especially with rates so high and capital so expensive.
More often than not, it's much more complicated than "incompetent management". No one has a crystal globe.
If product hunt is doing so great, what is the strategy change behind these layoffs?
I don't know where you live, but virtually every place I can think of with strong labor protection policies have them for the benefit of those with jobs at the expense of those without jobs who would like to get one. Harder to fire equals harder to hire with few exceptions.
No.
I reject the 70s-80s re-interpretation of corporations as “vehicles for maximizing shareholder value.” This is a modern neoliberal take, and is rewriting history.
From Oxfords:
1. "a person's regular occupation, profession, or trade"
2. "the practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce."
The only obligation is that if they need to hire a similar role in the next 1 year, they'll have to re-hire the former employees if still available.
> “It wasn’t for financial or company performance reasons,” he said. “Traffic has never been higher and we’re in a great place, financially. It was for strategic reasons.”
such as my personal bank account, continuing to emulate big tech like Twitter in my hopes to be considered like them, and finding other ‘deep cuts’ to be arbitrary: why 10% or rounds of 20% when you can do 60%
from what I can tell, a lot of people hire for the sake of hiring, like a local politician might boast about jobs for the sake of jobs, and people kind of have that ingrained mentality, like they can be a part of that “a job creator” and hope to court people that appreciate that, like old growth capital firms that need to see headcount as rationale for more capital
\s