There's a large contingent on hacker news that still thinks it's some kind of moral failure to fire people
You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.
as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.
if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.
That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties.
[0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!
in an inefficient market, you can still choose to transact or not, and you will only do so if you feel you will benefit.
in an efficient market, the net benefit across society will be higher, but nothing in what I said requires an efficient market.
so you are simply wrong.
But even in the general case your argument still does not make sense. When we talk of a business providing societal utility, we don't include the business owner themselves in the integral. For example your assertion lets you conclude things like a casino owner who has made a pile of money but impoverished the community has made society better.
I didn't say you could, pay closer attention or you will not be able to understand arguments or learn anything.
What I said was, "as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin."
however, your mistake does contain a germ of reinforcement to what I said: if you cannot choose to participate in a transaction, you will be less happy, i.e. allowing sellers to offer choices and buyers to make choices will increase happiness in every type of market.
before you make another mistake and go shooting off, I didnt say people will be happy, I said they will be happier, but happier is an unmitigated good.
I did not "reinforce" the exception of what you said, I pointed out an error in your framing that necessitates coming at the analysis a different way. The context of what you're responding to is a company laying people off - reducing the number of choices in the employment market. We're not talking about the dynamic of someone creating a new business and having to emphasize one or the other, but rather an existing business where the owners are choosing to change things to be closer to one end of the spectrum between the two.
And if everybody chooses to not transact, you have a market crash. So... waves at 2026/2027
If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
its plausible for companies to be worth less than their assets. While it might be the best estimate its still not necessarily the best one. aka the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. Markets measure confidence as much as they measure value.
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance.
You think option A is superior?
Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.
This sounds more like a reverse mortgage line of business, to me. Bending Spoons is betting they can eek enough revenue out of Vimeo to pay the interest on the $1.4B loan by cutting the $400M expense run rate.
The actual loan principal will be paid out (if it ever does) of the money they expect to bring in when they inevitably go to an IPO.
And at that point you have speculators carrying risk, bankers getting rich off interest, leadership raking in millions, and a once reasonably healthy business is jeopardized (subject to the performance of other Bending Spoons properties, risky management, etc). All in the name of growth that may or may not be achievable.
What I see here is "Business stays afloat, investes make money for now, customers get a continually worse service and eventually leave, and a lot of good talent is out on the streets over corporate greed". This is only a win if you're an investor, and only in the short term. So I'm not convinced this is better than option A in the long term.
it's immoral to lie to people.
very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."
at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.
The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .
And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.
Going from "you're fine" to "you're fired", when it was always going to be "you're fired".
Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
>and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
well, 15 of them or so.
The company failed. In 4 years, they managed to turn the valuation from $8.5B to $1.4B. No employee should be in any way surprised by what happens when you watch your company's valuation fall that much. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics (they only made $27m last year!) to a negligent extent.
It sucks for the people let go, but they can't be surprised.
>Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying any attention to the company's operating metrics
Dude, I just want layoffs to be signaled ahead of time. You can defend billionaires all you want and gaslight engineers for not being marketing majors. My demands are very simple.
That's not marketing or gaslighting, that's expecting people to pay minimal attention to their employer's financial performance. Minimal here being on the level of possessing object permanence.
There are proper ways to let go of people, but that's not how it's done in the US.
So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most asinine thing I've heard here yet.
I didn't have a choice in my society on what contract to take. And the power dynamic is unequal. I don't consider being suddenly laid off as "harmless" with that in mind.
Budgeting is trivial thing. Spend less than you earn. And it is not like these were minimum wage workers. They should have known to have plenty of buffers at this point. It is entirely their own fault of not reach that point.