Npm Layoffs
twitter.com
twitter.com
Should these employees expect to be treated better by a company that claims that "Compassion is our strategy"? Yes, absolutely.
Focusing on specifics of what they are asking for is the wrong approach here, it's a simple question: was this handled with "compassion"? I think between lack of acknowledgement from management, lack of understanding that vesting options can be an important part of compensation now being denied to employees, lack of help finding a job in the extensive social networks of the founding team, and laying off so soon after hiring some, all contributes to this.
I can only speak for myself but the minute I get a job, I know that I can be terminated at any moment for whatever reason. There should never be any shock. Even if you move across the world for a position, it could happen on your first day. You have to always be prepared if you’re gonna be working under someone else’s roof.
That's why I'd never move anywhere for a job that doesn't have plenty of alternate options if the first doesn't work out. That's why places like SF, Seattle, and NYC are so powerful for tech, and one-company towns like a lot of the Amazon HQ2 proposals would be are not. Good luck convincing top-tier talent to move somewhere where you're the only game in town.
True, but in many places in the world employee rights are such that this might be a significantly less bad situation. If you're a month's severance pay, perhaps your signing bonus, etc, then you might not be out of pocket by the time you get a new job. Particularly if you're working in a high demand industry.
In fact in the UK if you want to lay off more than a certain (fairly small) number of staff then you get audited to ensure that you couldn't have possibly kept them on or found them jobs elsewhere in your company. Once you make someone redundant you're also not allowed to re-hire for that position for 6 months I believe, again to ensure that you're not using layoffs inappropriately.
Note: this is all different to _firing_ someone. I understand in the US these two are often less distinct. Firing someone opens you up to a different kind of legal liability, you essentially have to be able to prove that they weren't good enough at their job, should they take you to court over being fired.
This is true for the US, but it's not necessarily true for the EU, or some other countries. As a result, expectations can be mismatched - even though reasonable research should turn up this possibility.
My experience suggests that a lot of folks in their early career are overly optimistic, or just don't want to believe the possible downsides, especially if it involves cool work. I also see different decisions taken by folks I know in other industry who are not under the spell of tech.
With remote working, especially with smaller companies that have limited admin/HR support, I wonder will the number of these incidents increase? This is possibly another way to look at this situation beyond the "startups and stock a minefield" issue which results in lots of tears.
In the Netherlands this can be one or two months depending on the employment [1]. It is meant so either party can back out. After this regular rules apply. Which are _not_ as forgiving.
[1]: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst...
Sure, but in many parts of the world they'll probably also owe you at least 2 month wages if they do that.
I'm drawing some inferences here, but she's contrasting the perceived lack of support from the company for those affected by the npm layoffs with npm's public brand on the Internet. If layoffs happened and npm did the minimum legally required, that's a fair criticism to make, IMO. npm's hiring page says:
> We are responsible adults with diverse backgrounds and interests, who take our careers and our lives seriously. We believe that the best way to iterate towards success is by taking care of ourselves, our families, our users, and one another.
> We aim for a sustainable approach to work and life, because that is the best way to maximize long-term speed, while retaining clarity of vision. Compassion is our strategy.
@seldo (npm co-founder) frequently tweets about people in the community who he perceives are not performing to his moral standard.
I don't have any details, so I'm taking all of this with a grain of salt, but if it's true, it's something of a betrayal of their brand.
There’s nothing responsible or adult about that tweet. If she wasn’t affected by the lay offs, then she’s doing a huge disservice to the people who were laid off by associating them with a Twitter train wreck.
The adult thing to do would be to realize that “compassion is our strategy” is an empty platitude and that all companies exist to make money.
Just because someone lost their job doesn't mean an ex-colleague can't post about Netflix or their interests on their social media anymore. Twitter isn't an office space they can do what they want.
I get that Twitter must feel a lot more real to people who post 30 times a day, every day for 10+ years but to that majority of people it's just a silly distraction they use to post things to their friends, not a work environment.
> so the lesson for me is that signs of success at work do not guarantee future rewards or even continued employment. i already knew this, but it's been useful to remember that i should never entirely trust a company, even if it seems like my goals and success are aligned w theirs
of course you can - that shouldn't be a surprise.
Firing someone specifically so they can't get the stock options without any notice is a dick move and I'm perfectly within my rights to criticize them for it.
EDIT: see this tweet 9h ago https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/1110766133660041216?s=2...
And here’s the story as told by another employee https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360?s=21
It is sometimes the case that for a particularly high-performing, excellent employee, a manager or senior exec might call around to a few friends and see if they have openings. And of course, provide a reference for others. But that is not true of laying off a whole division. No team is comprised of 100%, or even 25%, top performers (usually). A manager shouldn't be expected to put his professional reputation on the line for every person in his division, even if they aren't the best (but good enough to keep on), just because of a lay-off.
The question may become whether how the company is seen behaving toward its workers vs. how it actually behaves is more important. If layoffs are occurring due to financial struggles, it is very possible that purchasing such a service could force them to lay off more employees due to the unforeseen cost. $1,900 x 50 employees = $95,000, which is the salary of between one and three employees, depending on the industry and level. Should they lose their jobs to fund such a program?
If they're actually just doing it for restructuring (not just as a euphemism for financial struggles), you're right that it could be worth doing.
If it's truly a layoff and you think the person is good and the situation is just shit, we did everything we could
/edit: more info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501227
/edit-2-since-i-already-got-downvoted: Facebook used to have a 1 year cliff before the first vest, they removed it about 1 year before I left.
I'm not sure about normal, though.
What kind of mess is in the head of a person that thinks everyone owes them a helping hand?
If NPM/managers can help out, it gives them some goodwill.
I haven't seen it in the smaller companies I have worked for, but then again a 30 person layoff would be every single employee at those companies so they don't typically happen.
I find it analogous to people who work for Amazon who whined about "not knowing I had to give my signing bonus back if I left before a year" after leaving because they didn't like the job after a few months... (come on, parts of being an adult is reading the employment contract that clearly states you can't keep your signing bonus if you leave before the first year...)
Hang around a while. Tables turn.
I find myself agreeing with this more than the initial tweets even as I sit here having recently quit my last job without something lined up quite yet.
What's Npm? All that means to me is "NodeJS Package Manager", but surely there isn't an entire company associated with that, right?
Secondly, what did the severance package look like? Re-employment assistance is just one component to a severance package; if it includes several months' pay then it's still a comparatively good one even lacking this assistance.
EDIT: So apparently NodeJS Package Manager is a company?! News to me.
> npm, Inc. is the company that hosts and maintains all of the above.
[0]: https://craft.co/npm
The US Department of Labor defines a "mass layoff" as one affecting 50 or more employees, which this definitely isn't because that'd require laying off almost the entire company (which to my knowledge hasn't happened).
This is important because a lot of protections only come into force for mass layoffs. There may well not be any relevant protections for the laid off employees here; they may simply just be victims of at-will employment, and not technically laid off as deemed by the law.
... why isn't it?