from Hacker News

Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

by justforfunhere on 4/16/20, 8:32 AM with 558 comments

Times are bleak.

  • by anonymousci on 4/16/20, 9:19 AM

    CircleCI.

    Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance.

    Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style.

    Would not recommend joining...

  • by aivatra on 4/16/20, 8:22 PM

    FIRST FACTORY (company link: https://firstfactory.com/)

    Hello fellow HN readers. Here's the short version of the story:

    So I was working at X SF startup company (with a subsidiary office in Costa Rica) and decided to give it a try at First Factory, an outsourcing shop based in NY and Costa Rica, they handed me a contract (March 5th, 2020) to start working with them effective March 30th, 2020.

    So I quit my job and was ready to jump on board. Then on March 25th, 2020 I get a call (the lady pretty much laughably telling me all this) stating that they were in financial trouble and couldn't onboard me at all, and the contract was voided.

    I know this happens, but you get a feeling of how shocked I was hearing this. I couldn't believe my ears. And now I'm unemployed pretty much. I've applied to a few positions through "Who's Hiring" at HN tough, let's see how it goes -_-

  • by sciurus on 4/16/20, 9:35 AM

  • by danesparza on 4/16/20, 10:37 AM

    God this brings back memories of fuckedcompany.com

    Right after September 11th, that site got very popular among engineers like me -- seeing (on a daily basis) which company bloodbath was next.

    It was kind of fun, until it was our company.

  • by dandanio on 4/16/20, 12:54 PM

  • by sambroner on 4/16/20, 9:35 AM

    Seems like many companies within the startup world. Layoffs.fyi says more than 250 companies and more than 24,000 people.

    Their tracker, https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/, has reasonably well corroborated data, although it's surely incomplete.

  • by kmlx on 4/16/20, 10:00 AM

    a quote i remembered from twitter: "This is the best time to get rid of employees".

    a startup based in London just fired 10% of their workforce. all were given two options: government's furlough scheme where the state pays 80% of the salary, or outright dismissal. interestingly, half chose to quit.

  • by lukax on 4/16/20, 9:27 AM

    In some companies it feels like they are firing the people that they could not easily get rid of otherwise - cutting of the bottom 25% of staff (based on low performance reviews or personal grudges).

  • by jyriand on 4/16/20, 10:49 AM

    Estonian startup Starship Technologies(robot delivery service) has laid off lot of people. How many is unclear. As I understand they try to stay afloat by using their robots for pizza deliveries now.

    https://news.err.ee/1070009/starship-technologies-makes-redu...

  • by reubensutton on 4/16/20, 9:05 AM

    I’ve been checking layoffs.fyi every day and it is incredibly bleak

  • by protonmail on 4/16/20, 12:06 PM

    ProtonMail is hiring. A lot: https://careers.protonmail.com/

  • by ngngngng on 4/16/20, 8:05 PM

    Several Utah startups have had layoffs due to COVID, not sure about the numbers for most of these though.

    Rainfocus

    Domo: 10% of workforce

    Vivint Smart Home

    HireVue

    Divvy employees have been told that layoffs are inevitable.

    No whispers yet of layoffs at the two Ycombinator startups in the state (Weave and Podium)

  • by dsfargeg on 4/16/20, 11:07 AM

    Babylon Health furloughed 140 people. I think they're using this as an excuse to re-structure their organisation. The tagline is that they are furloughing 5% of staff.

    They've used it as an opportunity to make 30% of their mobile engineers redundant, as well as push many senior engineers on higher salaries towards the exit

  • by AheadOfTime295 on 4/16/20, 9:54 AM

    Stats of last week layoffs at Lightbend (Akka, Scala) right after 25MM funding round

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854494

  • by onychomys on 4/16/20, 10:41 AM

    Hospitals are having a surprisingly tough time of things. I work for a very famous hospital in a small town in the American midwest, and we've (our IT department, that is) laid off all our contractors and the rest of us have mandatory furloughs coming up too. They're doing everything they can to not let us go, but some of us will probably end up getting sacked. And this is maybe the richest and most well-connected hospital in the entire world! Turns out that when you cancel all elective procedures (not only non-essential surgeries, but things like allergy testing and pediatric audiology work etc.), you can very quickly go from a billion dollars in the black (last year) to an estimated billion dollars in the red (this year). Just brutal.

  • by dznodes on 4/16/20, 7:30 PM

    Is there a website that shows which companies take government bailouts but still do layoffs.

  • by roadbeats on 4/16/20, 10:28 AM

    Can we say that the layoffs are mostly happening in US ? I can't see that trend in Europe, correct me if I'm wrong.

  • by gjmacd on 4/16/20, 7:57 PM

    Not naming the company, but I know of a startup that's got a round of $10M (not much but enough) who just applied for relief because their burn rate is $200K+ a month. They have no customers, have been in the red for 2 years and have been slowly building their product out -- like most early funded startups -- they are building potential without revenue (yet).

    Their theory is, get some free money and treat it like 6 months of salary to help and take it as a "gift".

    When I cited that they "weren't directly affected by this and could keep going until this COVID thing ended and it wouldn't matter to them." The person I know who's involved at the exec level said, "It's free money, when you get a free bag of money, you don't turn away on that..."

    I wanted to throw up.

  • by zingar on 4/17/20, 6:11 AM

    Prodigy Finance laid off or furloughed 30% of staff in Cape Town, London and New York. an investor pulled out of the next round AFTER signing a terms sheet and completing due diligence. The company had been hiring for growth, setting up a new management structure etc even on the same day as the layoffs. Management appears to be above board and genuinely upset over this (and cuts are at all levels, execs took pay cuts), the investors are scum in my eyes.

  • by ruairidhwm on 4/17/20, 8:46 AM

    I just got laid off from a small startup because of COVID. Incredibly bleak given that they were a great company but nobody saw a situation where pretty much our entire market disappeared overnight with low chances of it returning in the near future.

    It isn't much fun but that's the way of these things. Got to stay positive and will be checking the HN "Who's Hiring" threads.

  • by simonkafan on 4/16/20, 10:19 AM

    Bird, just in case you haven't seen (heard) it: https://youtu.be/wxTYKCOnRe4

  • by Raed667 on 4/16/20, 10:28 AM

    Astek Group* (a french consulting firm) laid off around 5% of its sophia-antipolis office (~15 out of 300), which put them in conflict with the government that has put funds to help people maintain 84% of their salaries if they work part-time (furlough?).

  • by lighthouse1 on 4/16/20, 10:16 AM

    Pusher let go of a lot of staff in it's "product focus" - https://blog.pusher.com/narrowing-our-product-focus/

  • by john0990 on 4/16/20, 1:39 PM

    Arcus FI (https://www.arcusfi.com/) a fintech just laid off our NYC office and a bunch of people in our office of Mexico City without offer any severance (they owned me commissions). Furthermore, the last 6 months around 15 people quit because the founders’s behaviour (no professionalism, no strategy and pathologic liars about the money raised, with the customers, the investors and the employees). One co-worker told me they threated one employee from Mexico to break his leg if he leaves. Really bad company.

  • by disposable38291 on 4/16/20, 9:08 AM

    Dixa sacked 31 people (25% of staff). They closed a $36M series B in February.

  • by Suzehr on 4/20/20, 5:13 PM

    We are hiring guys, I hope it's ok to post here. We are looking for Frontend developer at the moment Mid- Senior level. Company is stech.com if you want to check it out. Link to where you submit your application if looking for a job is https://www.stech.com/careers my email is Suze@stech.com

    the role is full remote at the moment, but otherwise when this covid situation is over, it is based in an office near Liverpool street station.

  • by elric on 4/16/20, 10:13 AM

    It's not all bad. We've just wrapped up our first two completely remote hires. A full time project manager and a part time HR assistant. It's been an interesting experience for a small-but-growing (30ppl) company, especially because we had a very strong focus on physical presence before.

    Remote interviews were an interesting challenge. Remote paperwork went somewhat smoother than expected. Introducing the new hires to the rest of the team is something we need to get better at.

  • by inglor on 4/16/20, 9:32 AM

    From an anonymous employee I know: SimilarWeb fired 10% of their workforce - mostly sales engineers and sales people they recently hired and cancelled their holiday bonuses.

  • by kosmotaur on 4/16/20, 10:09 AM

    Equal Experts UK replaced me with a cheaper offshore contractor

  • by Slam7min on 4/16/20, 1:57 PM

    I work for a large city government (10K employees), most of our non-first responders were just furloughed ranging from full-layoff (1K), 10% pay (1.5K), 80% pay (3K), 95% pay (100), and 100% (5.5K). I fall into the 80% category.

    It works out great for me because I now qualify for state & federal unemployment benefits that will allow me to net more than I'm actually making at least through 7/31 while working only 4 days a week.

  • by kokizzu on 4/16/20, 10:49 AM

  • by mr_gibbins on 4/16/20, 9:26 AM

    I wish there was some kind of list for the UK. Our news services are shockingly bad.

  • by d99kris on 4/16/20, 11:21 AM

    https://www.thelayoff.com/ can give some hints, but it's a lot of speculations and rumors.

  • by MaxwellM on 4/16/20, 11:00 AM

    Checkout this airtable tracker https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/

  • by hateevileagles on 4/18/20, 12:00 AM

    EagleView (https://www.eagleview.com/) Last week. Laid off 85. Guess they wanted the $125M they won in IP lawsuit (they think they own roof photogrammetry) to go to exec bonuses rather than keeping the team employed. Let me know if you need a good Computer Vision engineer.

  • by yourBestBet on 4/18/20, 5:39 AM

    Epam Systems

    (Mexico) They have been firing people systematically in the last months. They don't have any new projects and they keep hiring more people just to fire them a few months later.

    Top management sends global emails saying they want to keep all the employees, but locally they are firing people.

    Ironically, to this day, no local managers have been fired.

    on the good side: full law compensation is offered.

  • by annon923 on 4/17/20, 9:52 PM

    Laserfiche (Long Beach, CA) Several people, at random it seems, over the past four weeks. No severance or medical. Management can't seem to decide on what direction to go and thinks start with fresh hires post COVID.

  • by MangoCoffee on 4/16/20, 10:56 AM

    Is it me or the traditional software vendor like Microsoft or Oracle is going to come out stronger than ever after the pandemic is over? all the layoffs seem to be in the none critical and nice to have category.

  • by ff317 on 4/16/20, 7:44 PM

    This post needs some positivity!

    The Wikimedia Foundation is still hiring many of the same positions we were before all of this. You can see the currently-open positions at: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/

    They've been an outstanding employer during these difficult times, as announced publicly on our blog: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/03/06/wikimedia-fo...

    Come help us bring free knowledge to the world!

  • by anonycowgirl on 4/16/20, 8:24 PM

    Wiivv Wearables (Vancouver) has furloughed half their staff.

    They have encouraged us to find new employment because there is no guarantee they will hire us back. I believe this to avoid paying us severance.

  • by ragest69 on 4/16/20, 10:36 PM

    Not naming the company, but I know of a startup that's got a round of $10M (not much but enough) who just applied for relief because their burn rate is $200K+ a month.

  • by ancestraldev on 4/16/20, 10:38 PM

    MDLIVE, a company in the Telemedicine space.

    https://www.mdlive.com

    They started today and will continue tomorrow.

  • by luikore on 4/20/20, 9:02 AM

    Aminoapps fired all employees and is handing the app to an outsourcing company to scavenge the remaining user values.

  • by elymar on 4/16/20, 2:38 PM

    Universities across the US (mine included) are furloughing employees.

  • by gigatexal on 4/16/20, 10:15 AM

    No severance?!

    I, as an expat, am absolutely grateful and have changed my tune on the “European welfare state” trope to “this just makes sense”. I got let go from a Berlin based fintech and got 3 months pay plus a small severance. They did this likely because funding fell apart during the pandemic but it could have also been to cull people that they didn’t need but they did do right by us.

  • by throwaway9002 on 4/16/20, 10:14 AM

    Playtech in London isn't firing but cut all employee salaries by 10% across the board.

    The CEO just awarded himself a 30mil bonus: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/playtech-plan-to-pay-boss...

  • by tobych on 4/16/20, 9:36 AM

    Can someone please change the title of this - just as with other similar posts - to use "laid-off" instead of "fired"? Regardless of how loose some may be with language, there's a clear distinction between these terms.

    For example, my home state's Employment Security Department: https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/laid-off-or-fired

    Given that there are non-US readers here, maybe there's another pair of phrases that Hacker News could use as standard in this situation. I know in the UK, "made redundant" is used instead of "laid-off".

  • by Austin_Conlon on 4/16/20, 9:51 AM

    Ask HN: Who is looking to be fired?

  • by fulldecent2 on 4/16/20, 4:42 PM

    Pacific Medical Training is hiring. And now is a time where more people are available for remote work, and that's what we want.

    - Medical author / reviewer - Front-end designer + sales copy expert - Phone sales

    Hiring worldwide. Send resumes, portfolios and salary expectations.