Fab Lays Off More Than 100 Employees in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Fab Lays Off More Than 100 Employees in Europe

allthingsd.com

14 pointsantr14 comments

> Nearly 70 of the employees are being laid off immediately, while the remainder have been asked to stay on for a few months through a transition period. Another 36 employees are being asked to relocate to New York from Berlin.

Does anyone know what the visa situation looks like for them?

Relocating 36 employees to the US can't be easy. There aren't any more H1B's this year and L1A's (and the equivalent green cards) can only be given to executives and managers. EB-2 maybe? Or L1B?

I can't see how it's not a SOL situation, honestly. Question is how long this transition period is, I guess.

Presumably L1Bs

Tough to do an inter-agency transfer (L1) if it's because you closed your international location, but they do have a distribution facility in Eindhoven and an IT center in Pune. (And probably more elsewhere, but I just looked at the 'careers' page.)

It's amusing/ironic to look through their press kit. Especially "Happy 1 Year Birthday Fab Europe -3.5M Members And 30% of Fab’s Global Sales-February 21, 2013.pdf", which is all about the growth of the Berlin office.

That said, you don't need a lot of people after the Brennschluss. Amazon laid off 300+ people in IT after the big initial push. Builders are less important than processors after a company has established a new capability. You'll often create a redundant hierarchy to Get S* Done that will become an obstacle to later growth.

There may also be a bit of German labor law involved as well. Closing the location entirely may let them dodge termination considerations.

I'm not intimately familiar with the situation nor their org structure(though I recently spoke with one of their directors in NY, and it was a pleasant experience -- it may bias my comment), so this is just speculation: I am guessing a large portion of these layoffs are of temp, hourly employees. My first reaction to the title was more of a "uh oh," but now I am thinking it's more of "they closed their positions with their temps, and they are relocating their permanent employees to NY." Is that so bad? Did it come as such a surprise to their temps? I could be wrong, however....

It's probably mostly temps and/or natural turnover (people that leave and simply don't get replaced), because it's very hard (and very expensive) to lay off people in most EU countries unless the company is in imminent danger of bankruptcy.

I doubt a single person will actually be fired in this particular context.

Am I the only one who thought this article would be about a fab, rather than some online retailer?

Possibly. You clearly haven't been drinking enough startup Koolaid.

It was ambiguous, with the name of the company being the first word of the sentence ;).

It's interesting that in the same article they also mention they are hiring for new positions. I can't imagine how this feels for both departing employees, and the ones who remain. I don't know much about the situation, but I am interested in how flash sales staffing requirements differ so much from standard catalog-based eCommerce hiring needs.

I think there a few specific differences for them:

-Flash sales rarely have any inventory, and usually low enough quantities that they just sell through 100% of their buy and close the sale -Inventory-based store models require significant planning months in advance to source the right amount of each product, color, size, etc. They also then have to deal with the extra (you can't just leave products with one size all over your site b/c people will be frustrated) -Typically flash models need more focus on buying/sourcing (ie finding the cool new products to sell) and store models need more focus on planning (ie figuring out how much/when to buy, then managing inventory).

I'm not sure what their EU team was focused on, but from Jason's comments, it sounds like there was a lot of redundancy in buying/sourcing, which would need less resources as they pivot to a store model.

In terms of their open positions, it seems like a a company growing as fast as they have would want to keep the door open for hiring any position they might need - their open positions look like a broad range of resume collectors...

Would they have been able to retrain existing employees to fit those new positions?

This is what I would have assumed, too.

I used to really enjoy this service, back when they offered solid deals and introduced me to new products at the same time.

Then the deals went away and the once or twice a week emails because 7+. Also the fulfillment process there was painfully slow, though I suppose them switching to their own inventory will at least solve that issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com