Some of this is because of the WARN Act in California [0], which requires 60-day notice before any mass layoff. Employers can also fulfill the requirements of this mandate by letting employees go now but having their actual termination date 60+ days in advance. I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way.

Good for Patreon to go beyond the 60-day mandated period though

[0] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

WARN Act is federal law not CA Law. I highlight this because there is a belief that only CA has employment protections laws, and while CA does have more of these; other parts of the US also have employment protection laws often times not really that much different than CA

I think WARN is 60 days at the federal level and some states like CA and NY extend it to 90 days.

Both CA and Federal is 60 days, the main difference is CA requires employers with over 75 employee's federal is 100, and CA includes Part Time employees in the count Federal is Full Time workers only

> I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way.

How many times have you been laid off?!

There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis. If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!

Or just work in startups.

It's pretty easy to get laid off a lot if you work in startups. You join and know there is a ticking clock in the background. If you don't, you probably should.

Every startup thinks they are the 1 out of 10 (because why wouldn't they, you have to.)

I agree, I have never actually been fired from a collapsing company, but as an intern I have been in the meeting room when a company was folded, and I have also seen a few companies collapse after I left. I'm a realy early guy, I tend to leave when the timesheet comes, so there is probably some runway left when I leave.

I was born in the 60s and haven't been laid off yet, including during the dotcom bust, all while working for 12+ companies in my career. The bust was the worst, though, our company went through 7+ layoffs and we were decimated, and no one did any real work after a while. Fingers crossed that I can keep this trend until retirement!

Being laid off twice was a rewarding experience both financially and for my career. It forced me to step out of my comfort zone. Now, being outside my comfort zone is my comfort zone.

In the first layoff I knew the company was planning a round in the next 18 months and I'd been there 6 years. I waited around for the payout. Layoff law in Australia is more favorable to the employee, the payout was 10 months. I took a week off before starting the next job on a substantial salary increase.

The most important is not to take it personally as a failure. That can mess with self confidence and interview performance and general well being. At my HR interview they had the team there and some "transition coach" they seemed worried about us. I was actually thrilled as I planned to leave anyway.

>"There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis."

The "2022 financial crisis"? That's not even a thing. Slowing economic growth and even a recession, should we enter one later this year does not constitute a "financial crisis."

By most historical measures of recession, we're already in one. This redefining of what constitutes a recession is a recent phenomena, and has political roots, not financial ones.

>"This redefining of what constitutes a recession is a recent phenomena, and has political roots, not financial ones."

There has been no "redefining" nor is it a recent phenomenon nor does it have political roots. You are wrong on all accounts.

It doesn't have political roots. The National Bureau of Economic Research(NBER) is a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization with an aim is to promote a greater understanding of how the economy works.

The nonpartisan panel, which was established in 1978 by former Ronald Reagan adviser and NBER president Martin Feldstein, has gone out of its way to keep politics out of the process.

The committee meets in secret and doesn’t announce its gatherings in advance or even in retrospect, unless there’s a press release declaring a formal decision.

And it typically takes the panel about a year to decide on a recession call, though some decision have been made in a few months while others have taken almost twice as long. That’s almost always well after a recession has been widely recognized by Wall Street.

The committee has never reversed a call.

Rather than two negative GDP readings, the NBER is looking for a substantial decline in activity over a sustained period of time. The committee sets dates of the peaks of economic activity and troughs based on six monthly data series, including nonfarm payrolls, personal consumption spending and industrial production.

It's going to get worse. Hard to have lived through it when it's not over yet though.

Again, a recession is not at all the same thing as a financial crisis. This is the thing I was commenting on. There is no consensus that we are even in one. Recessions are always backward looking.

It's pretty spectacular though that not only have been able to declare that were in one but you are also able to comment with confidence on how bad it's going to be be.

> If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!

This depends on where you worked. Most of the developers I know were around for the dotcom bust, but only 2 have experienced a layoff. But none were working for dotcom companies.

This, I've been laid off about 6 times, only once because of my own accord (and I freely admit my fault there). I've left a company 2x that count. I started my career in 1999. What a year to start...

In 23 years you have worked at 18 companies? Has this hurt you during interviews?

Very much so. I've had to explain that some of them were just contracts, some of them cease to exist anymore, and some went through layoffs. The reality is it's more like 13 companies but yeah.

Don't sweat it. Most human resource departments take their methods from Kafka's The Trial. The more you look the better you get at it, the easier the brutal process of some employers' hiring processes become. Fire and forget. The more applications you complete, the better your chances of getting hired, and once hired, the longer you work, the further disappointment retreats in your rearview.

Yup! Exactly. It’s a numbers game. I’ll never work at a FAANG probably because of it but that’s ok. I’ve carved out a pretty cool career AND I do side projects and games so it’s fine.

I started in 2020 :) officially. I technically did side things throughout HS, but officially looked for jobs in 2020. Was pretty miserable.

Same

Yeah, 5 or 6 times. Happy to be, right now, a one-person IT department at a "small" company. My way is the way.

I was born mid 1960's-ish and have lucked out; only laid off once. But I well remember all of those crises.

Been through all of them.

Saw the writing on the wall for each of those and left before I was the one laid off.

Ah, the safety of grad school...

I joke with my friends in other industries about how often I have been laid off. For me, it's been uh...5 times? Maybe 6. I am probably forgetting them. None of them were very small but like usual characteristically overextended. One company I survived 4 full rounds of layoffs before getting axed. Another one I survived 3.

It's the nature of playing around in the high stakes startup world. As I've gotten older I've found more stable companies. But it was quite funny coming home once every few years to tell my girlfriend I was laid off again and then picking up another job a week later.

During the dot com downturn the consulting company I was at went through 2 or 3 rounds of layoffs. Then in the 2008 fallout, there was another round. If one is lucky enough to survive them, they could be witness to many but not be a recipient of any.

None, that's how I survived them ;)

I worked in an industry that's highly cyclical and had major consolidation over the last decade (HDD/SSD storage). We bought several companies and they would do layoffs roughly every 18 months or so.

Unless you're in government/health. You're going to lucky not to be laid off multiple times in your career and if you're not laid off at all in your career, consider yourself extremely lucky.

I’m not quite sure that’s true

Decency demonstrated, and hopefully recognized at large regardless of the criticisms of the business strategy and execution.

I agree. Tech companies should never really break off with former employees. Any former employee is a future potential employee that you can re-recruit when the time comes. Also, talent is difficult to find. Which makes people the center. Whatever you build, you will build it with people. So you need people. Be them new employees, be them former employees.

> Any former employee is a future potential employee that you can re-recruit when the time comes

Not only that, all former employees are de-facto "background check references" / "evagenlists" / "detractors" of your company. Forever! (well, not exactly forever... but close enough)

I can't recall a single year over the last 10 years where younger engineers, cousins, nephews or friends have asked me about the 2 companies I worked at before.

And boy, have I been candid.

Talked a very good friend of mine from joining Amazon for an offer he got making nearly 3 times much I did. All because of "decency" (or lack thereof) of a company.

Seems Amazon needs to be careful about this, too.

https://retailwire.com/discussion/there-might-soon-be-no-one...

Amazon has really developed "not giving a shit" into an art form. They even still have the cliff vesting of RSUs, which is their way of telling new hires "we don't expect you to stay for more than 2 years"

>friends have asked me

Is this supposed to be haven't?

Whoops! Yes, you're right. Thanks! Wish I could edit it now.

Would love to hear your take on Amazon.

Even more importantly, they are evangelists for other future employees.

I actually went out of my way to make it easy for my employees to quit. If they didn't want to stay, then I sincerely wished them well.

The company limited what I could do, but I did my best, and it seemed to work out.

I had some unkind feelings about Patreon when it was announced / made public that they laid off their entire security team. I still think that was a poor move and any company responsible for handling payments ought to have an in-house security team.

That said - I've held off on any criticisms around their strategy/execution for the moment (aside from that) since it's unclear what happened. I'm wondering if Patreon is getting hit with lots of people backing off support of artists after a big jump due to the pandemic.

Given inflation and a lot of feelings of uncertainty around the economy, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that their revenue went way down in a hurry this year.

I back four artists on Patreon, down from five a year ago. In all 4 cases I'm either too busy to get full "value" out of sponsoring (e.g., I don't have time to read the updates or listen to all the demos), or there's not really any benefit other than funneling money to support the artist in hopes they'll continue working as an artist.

Each month I look at the bill from Patreon and wonder "do I really need to keep spending this money?" So far I've elected to - but I haven't been hit super hard by inflation or a layoff like many folks...

They didn't lay off their entire security team. What one person among the laid off ones thought to be 'security team' may not overlap with what their company had been doing since a long time. In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).

> In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).

You're right!

That said, by the time a company is large enough that 17% of it is more than 17 people the kind of startup organization you have wisely and correctly nodded to will have ceased to exist.

So while you are right in that such scenarios have, do, and will continue to happen there's perhaps cause to wonder if that's really the best way to characterize replacing a security organization with specialists with a bunch of engineers who are likely quarter-time security at best. It's akin to firing all your engineers because the sales people can do a little bit of coding each.

> That said, by the time a company is large enough that 17% of it is more than 17 people the kind of startup organization you have wisely and correctly nodded to will have ceased to exist.

Not really. A lot of stuff having moved to services, a lot of stuff being handled in 'no code' manner have simplified organizations a lot these days. Today you can just offload a lot of things to SaaS vendors that can automatically handle those stuff. Instead of having to have entire teams dealing with it like how it was in the earlier decades. You just need a host of capable people to deal with those services on your side, by wearing various hats. So the 'startup format' seems to have become extended to larger organizations.

Agreed, its not ideal but there are things a company can do to put their money where there mouth is in this situation. This seems to be the new playback for doing it right. I appreciate that.

This is exactly how to handle a layoff: do it 3-6 months earlier than required and give the laid off employees that money as severance. Waving the equity cliff too is very generous and good of them.

Everyone should note the companies that do brutal layoffs with little/no severance. It's a major red flag because it shows incompetence and/or a lack of ethics.

I don't like a lot of their business decisions (I know much of this is driven by credit card/payment processors) but this is the most respectable mass layoff I've ever seen from a company, and should be lauded.

Isn’t 3 months a pretty standard severance compensation?

If not, I've had a lot of incredibly decent employers in the past. They all seem to do two or three months. I know of layoffs where people have gotten significantly more, though.