The Tech industry is very cyclical. In two years Stripe, and other companies that handled redundancies badly, will be asking themselves why they struggle to recruit top talent.
They did an all-hands the day of the layoffs with everyone being let go. They walked through why they'd hired so quickly, the new information (both macro-economic and within Stripe) that caused them to reconsider, and where that led. They emphasized that this was their decision: they set the course for hiring at the rate at in the places that Stripe did over the prior ~18 months; they were the ones who decided on the layoffs.
Shit happens. They made a bet based on the information that they had at the time (in this case that COVID moving commerce hugely online would be a permanent shift, when it wasn't (or at least not as large.)) They mis-predicted the future and then had to respond.
I understand why they made the bet they did (and mostly agree.) I understand why they then decided to do layoffs (and mostly agree.)
They didn't blame anyone else or try to sidestep the difficult conversations.
They founders took responsibility and cut their salary so you could stay? They said they took responsibility took the credit for tough choices and fired you. Now you have 16 weeks / 4 months to get another position when no one is hiring and interviews take 2 months on average before the offer is pulled.
Depending on employees age, length of employment 16 weeks can be an extremely low amount and the courts could get a higher settlement.
1. I don’t know what their salary is but I think it’s like a dollar.
2. They talked through their decision making process in hiring at the rate Stripe did, then what changed that made them do layoffs. They were very direct that this was their choices and they owned them.
I don’t need them to weirdly punish themselves. They made a bet. They were wrong about the future. That’s fine.
Unfortunately this is almost never true because of the endless supply for desperate, gullible or just arrogant people who are ready to work for top tech companies.
Dunno about exact numbers but there were some HN commenters when the layoffs started 2022 writing about "cutting fat" and "low performers" who thinks layoffs happens to others and not them I guess and that their bosses know who the lowperformers are.
People repeating that stuff are true believers. The reality is that the politics of companies is complex.
I can think of people I know is big tech companies who were nearly fired. One guy ended up serving out a purgatory sentence as a CE because his boss got whacked. A year later, he’s an SVP when a friend of the old boss took over.
Ditto the opposite. A friend in a bank collects low performers purposefully to protect his core teams. He dutifully offers some cannon fodder up when the company demands tribute to the volcano gods.
There are genuine low performers, however, based on my personal experience, they generally only constitute 25% of the people laid off for low performance. If management has overinflated expectations of your project, you will be a "low performer". If you happen to do badly on a project with high visibility to senior management, you will be perceived to be a low performer too, even if your delivery on other projects was brilliant. If your last project failed, often because of external factors, you will be deemed to be a low performer.
My favorite ranking dysfunction is that people who do the bear share of work or the hardest work also cause the most problems (bugs, rereleases etc), making them look bad if the judge have no clue how much they have done or how hard the task were.
I have observed this from the hiring side. Often the approach is to drop standards. This can result in problems for existing staff, who have to pick up the pieces. As a result they are also more likely to leave.
