I get what you’re saying here, but think you’re being a little too harsh. I’m not sure what else to call a reduction in force for PR purposes, I don’t imaging just saying “fired 65 people” is productive.

In this comment:

“ "For employers looking to hire senior product, engineering, design, community management, or instructional staff, we'll be sharing a list of interested staff looking for their next opportunity on social media" And good luck current students; these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for.”

Sounds like Lambda School grads are pretty junior and they’re giving people that are senior a good recommendation. I don’t think there’s much overlap between LS boot camp grads and senior people leaving LS as employees. Maybe I’m wrong?

I think the critique is for the corporate need to propagandize every act such that it paints all decisions, and by extension the leadership, in the best way possible. It's revolting anti-truth.

Marketing and propaganda are among the most disgusting inventions of human-kind.

Austin seems to take corp-speak to another level. See his response when they settled with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26948258

> "they had to settle"

I am an outsider, but clearly looks to me like they chose to not fight that battle, which was just legal thuggery. Colleges in the U.S. are a racket that make the mafia look like a bunch of amateurs. The Bankruptcy Exception for student loans is one of the most corrupt scams going on in the USA today.

>legal thuggery

Lambda lied to their students for years about loan dischargeability. They were told to stop by the regulator, so Lambda did. The regulator did nothing to penalize them.

Didn't they lie by wrongly saying the loan can't be discharged through bankruptcy? Surely that would make candidates less likely to join Lambda?

Why is it even in their interest to say that? It's not like them saying it makes it true. And if it were true, it would mean that Lambda is a bigger risk for the student who therefore may be less likely to apply.

The worth of the ISA's you sell depend on how easy it is to discharge the loan...

Wait, people can sell the contracts for their future salary? I had no idea how wild that industry had gotten.

Or do you mean Lambda was selling them to banks?

Lambda was securitizing the ISAs and selling them to investors on the backend, obviously with a discount based on risk.

Some people treat this like a bad thing, but it's really pretty basic risk-mitigation and cash-flow stabilization. This is kind of like basic factoring, or "modern" solutions like Pipe (https://www.pipe.com/).

There is an argument to be made that it disaligns Lambda and student incentives ("outcome it doesn't matter because Lambda already got paid") but long term, defaulting students would definitely decrease the sales values of the ISAs.

Part of the argument here is that calling these ISAs non-dischargable would lower the risk to the investor, which would make those ISAs worth significantly more.

> calling these ISAs non-dischargable would lower the risk to the investor, which would make those ISAs worth significantly more

I wonder how true this is. Declaring bankruptcy comes at a huge cost. It's not something people do lightly. Most people, if they have the money to pay back the loan, would probably do so. Once they're in that position (presumably with a stable job), they have little incentive to declare bankruptcy.

If they are in that position, you're right.

But that goes hand-in-hand with the aligned outcomes; it's best for Lambda if these people get good jobs afterwards, because they're more likely to pay the ISA in full.

If they don't, they're less likely, the risk is higher, and the ISA is worth less (to the investor).

The potential for bankrupcy is also a risk, which lowers the yield. Removing the risk of bankrupcy heightens it.

We could argue about the magnitute of these risks all day; I'm sure people significantly better at math than I am have done a lot of work here.

I didn't put much thought into that phrasing. Changed it to "settled" instead to better reflect reality.

I've been critical of some of their comms before [1], but this statement seems pretty good. You seem to be working hard to read it in the worst possible light.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26948912

I don’t know, man. Hearing someone refer to layoffs as “right-sizing” leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, and I don’t think that’s an unfair reaction.

They do explicitly say "lay offs" in the first sentence though, so they don't avoid the term completely.

"right sizing" is an age-old term for layoffs going back to the 70s. It's a corpomeme at this point.

I thought "right-sizing" was a fake term made up to parody the already euphemistic "downsizing". I can't believe people are actually using it.

I think it is perfect because it assigns blame at the right place in my mind- the people that had no idea what they were doing and hired too many people in the first place.

I thought it was meant to avoid embarrassment when the same organization hires new people at or near the same time?

Yep, Scott Adams was one of them, and he further extrapolated that we’ll eventually say “orgasmsized”.

Chill your hyperbolic outrage. We should be able to talk about sensitive topics like job loss intelligently and in context to the realities of building a startup. Working at a startup is inherently risky and the people who take on the risk are adults. They don't need you to defend them as if they're children

> these people will take all the jobs you're aiming for.

1. The market is pretty hot right now; 65 jobs is a drop in the bucket.

2. Do you really think someone looking for a senior engineer would have otherwise hired a brand new grad, Lambda School or otherwise?

I've never been laid off before but I think you can be empathetic of the people laid off here without treating them like emotional simpletons.

> people losing their jobs, and probably healthcare, indefinitely

Indefinitely? Damn

All of this is well taken, but IME, when you read a "perfect" statement about layoffs, it was the result of a process meant to generate exactly that. Which isn't really any more human or personable. This reads like Austen wrote it personally. Is that better or worse than an artisanally crafted statement by a team of PR people? Or worse -- no statement at all?

I'd expect that all of the clarifying questions you're looking for answers to are covered in internal Q&A's, at least that's how it has been done at every startup I've ever worked at.

To be fair, there are at least three distinct groups: 1) Employees being let go 2) Employees continuing 3) Students - current and prospective

Any statement has to balance the message across these three. For example, a statement that's "too negative" about future prospects risks spooking people in #3 - causing further damage to the business, as well as to people in #2.

They were fired, not executed.