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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

I know this isn't new or unique to Stripe, but the language used in these announcements to distance leadership from their choices is always so slimy. "We're not 'firing' or 'terminating' anyone; some people are just 'impacted' by our announcement that we have to 'say goodbye'." It makes repeated mentions of those who are "leaving" (the subject is the former employee) and avoids active verbs where the founders are the subjects. Not "we're terminating", "we're laying off", etc. Even the first statement taking responsibility covers the "decisions leading up to [this step]", rather than the step/mass layoff itself.

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No offence, but they're not putting anybody in the electric chair. They're letting people go with pay until almost March - if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, and maybe they weren't wrong to give you up.

A dynamic job market includes hiring and firings. At most they have to apologize for some disruption, and they more than made up for that with the severance packages.

And about the language - "fire" has a connotation of it being your fault. Being terminated or let go suggests a business decision first, and your performance second. They used the right word.

4 months is relatively generous but...

> if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you,

This statement feels _wrong_. We are all subject to macro trends that we don't have control over. They impact our lives. Even the well off tech people but especially people in other industries.

Good luck finding a job in this economy now. It's tough for everyone, even the most skilled. Many companies have outright hiring freezes. I just read that Amazon now has a hiring freeze for all corporate jobs, previously this only impacted retail, stores etc

What economy are you in? I still see plenty of job postings on the East coast.

Anyway, if you were looking for a break from Stripe’s culture you’re not gonna be happy at AMZN.

I work on cloud computing services (PaaS / BaaS) and infrastructure. All the big employers in this space have hiring freezes.

I used to get 20 recruiting emails from Amazon a month. Now they have a complete corporate hiring freeze. The saying here in Seattle goes that if you can't find a job you could always try one of the many Amazon roles because they were always hiring. Not so anymore.

EDIT: if parent comment is referring to Amazon job postings, the all up corporate hiring freeze was just announced this morning!

You are talking about a niche. There is more jobs than employees can fill. Companies are begging to find qualified employees.

I second that.

Sure, but what about the psychological impact / feelings of people when reading all the news of hiring freezes?

For example engineers that were laid off at Stripe in Seattle ordinarily have a good chance of getting a job at Amazon, but now Amazon isn't hiring. That combination certainly causes folks to feel uneasy.

Additionally, cities like Seattle are expensive and not all companies pay equally well. If you bought a house on a single income but suddenly cannot find a new job paying enough to pay your bills, then that's a problem too. Previously there were lots of jobs of similar pay to go around. In the current economy that is no longer the case. Suddenly you will need to make some tough choices. Yes we can argue that nobody should have put themselves into such a position in the first place, but buying a house is incredibly difficult in markets like Seattle and San Francisco, and so I don't blame people who are now in this predicament.

>but now Amazon isn't hiring

Amazon is not the only company. There are literally millions of companies out there. They can stop being so delicate and suck it up and work somewhere else than FAANG.

>If you bought a house on a single income but suddenly cannot find a new job paying enough to pay your bills

Have you seen the tv show called x-files? Trust No One. Don't make big financial decisions by depending on someone else. Save enough to save yourself from that kind of trouble and find a job. It doesn't need to be Amazon. Suck it up and survive.

I blame people who cry after making $200k+ and not saving. I blame them for making weird financial decisions and thinking their social status depends on their job titles at certain companies. Life is fast and everchanging. You must trust no one and be self sufficient.

Someone from Amazon emailed me a few hours ago

My email has gone from big recruitment finders-fee offers in spring to a drip of single 'seasoned candidate available' contacts in summer to '3 hand picked senior CVs enclosed' this week

It's possibly going to be hard yards for many people over next few months -- but lots of successful companies were born in such periods

I hope it works out for OP and everyone else impacted -- maybe one will build the next Stripe

People are hiring everywhere, and for like 1/3rd of the jobs you can work from home. It may get nasty in the next few months, but not today.

For most people in the job market today the unemployment rate is literally the lowest it's been in their entire lifetime.

A good strategy is to lower your compensation expectations significantly. You might get paid 40% or 50% of previous pay, but you still have solid ground under your feet and for once you might get an interesting project you always wanted to do, using some tech you never had time to try. Add it's not slavery, you can change jobs again when market improves.

As someone who trains a _lot_ of junior engineers and data scientists, it’s harder than 2021 but for an experienced engineer it’s frankly not that hard to find work right now.

Unemployment is near all time lows. The number of employed people is near all time high, and many have quit the job market (due to Covid). We are quite far from the scenario you are describing.

Finding your dream job? Maybe not. Finding a job in this market? It should be cakes.

I think what they mean is that morally, people need to take care of themselves. After four months, a past employer shouldn't still be on the hook for taking care of a person.

The past employer has new employees and that money needs to go to them.

If they're cutting staff at that quantity it's almost certainly to save money, and the money saved from laying off employees shouldn't be going towards funding new hires.

Right. A SWE I-IV might be easily able to step into another job, even another job with a similar comp level. But lots of folks, even tech folks, cant do it as quickly.

Director of QA? Might be tough and you'll likely turn down 10 manager of QA roles that want you to do hands on work along the way.

UX Research? You have a specific skill set that might be very useful at a large company but a lot of companies will want you to do more or handle more than you did previously.

Thats two examples but there are countless others. Plus a lot of folks go to Stripe as their first FANG+_job. They might not be able to step into another FANG+ role and could have to take a massive pay cut in their next roll.

> Thats two examples but there are countless others. Plus a lot of folks go to Stripe as their first FANG+_job. They might not be able to step into another FANG+ role and could have to take a massive pay cut in their next roll.

Oh, the woes of dropping from 98th income percentile to 95th...

I know you are joking but dropping from 250K to 125K is a significant life change and while you would still be fine in most of the US it could be really damaging for many families.

Steering a bit into /r/antiwork territory, I agree. We are forced to work. We did not choose to work. The choice is to work or live under a bridge/get woken up by cops and thrown in jail. When employers take away our ability to work, they are directly assaulting our ability to survive.

Wild animals don't have this problem. If you're a deer you literally run around all day eating plants and fucking. Sure, the animal kingdom has a whole host of other concerns, but my point is that we've replaced all those with a system and we don't have any choice but to live within the boundaries of that system.

It's not legal to live a deer's lifestyle as a human.

In our system's status quo, companies are allowed and encouraged to speculatively over-hire. There is no consequence for doing so. They figure that having a few too many employees is an easily correctable problem, so it's safer to just hire aggressively and hope it pans out. If not, oh well, the business isn't the one paying the price.

I think it would be a good idea for businesses to be required to pay average pay out severances to laid off employees, and that requirement should extend beyond this "generous" 4 months. I also think about hourly employees where severance is a foreign concept.

Maybe then they'd run their businesses more conservatively instead of making moonshot gambles with human lives. Maybe it's not the best policy for "the economy" or "innovation" or "competitive business" but we have more than enough resources to provide for the humans of this world, we just choose not to allocate them fairly.

You might enjoy: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolit...

> Wild animals don't have this problem. If you're a deer you literally run around all day eating plants and fucking. Sure, the animal kingdom has a whole host of other concerns, but my point is that we've replaced all those with a system and we don't have any choice but to live within the boundaries of that system. It's not legal to live a deer's lifestyle as a human.

I have a heard of 15 or so deer on my property. I spend a lot of time watching them, they seem to spend most of their time chewing their cud and watching for things that want to eat them but they seem pretty well adapted to it. They have a pretty good life overall. However, the deer don't have a choice either, but if they were given the choice to live as a typical human I doubt they'd take it. :) But then again, most people wouldn't choose to live as deer either.

Is Stripe not also subject to macro trends?

Stripe have macro-level funding and profits; you can't compare an enormous company to an individual.

Fair point. It's a bad situation for everybody. Digging for blame probably leads to lockdowns and printing money in the Corona days, and later to eco-legislation being passed in Europe right before Russia started WW3. Plus, of course, Russia for starting WW3. Ah, and China for using real estate as savings accounts, and burning a fair 50% of its international goodwill by squashing civil rights in Hong Kong.

Stripe CEOs are just trying to do right by their company and most of their employees. But yes, times are tough for everybody, and I probably shouldn't have minimized that.

If a well position and well oiled company is in fear of losing business and firing people how come you expect to find jobs let alone stable jobs.

You give your 4-5 years to a company and the company dumps you at the first sight of hardship.

I think Stripe made a bad choice when firing people. They should have decreased salaries, percentage wise more at the management level and try to keep their workers. I wouldn't want to work such company ever.

I won’t pretend I know what the ideal solution is, but lowering salaries across the board doesn’t seem like a great choice. If someone is a high performing employee and then sees a cut to their paycheck, that’s an incentive for them to leave, and that’s also extra bad for the company because of course better performing employees will be more capable of finding another job. With layoffs, companies remove their “worst” employees instead, which theoretically improves productivity, assuming of course the rest of the company doesn’t think they’ll get laid off too.

Last statement is actually the gist of what I wanted to mean. The moment you make a mass layoff that sends a message to all employees.

Please be mindful of measly 3% decrease in your salary, you wouldn't even see the difference.

The more open the management is to their employees the more they become loyal. It's all about honestly sharing burden.

You can always layoff not performing employees, a company has all the right to do so. We are talking about a mass layoff.

Reducing salaries opens a whole new can of worms with legal and immigration involved. Basically, if you hire someone on a visa, it is going to be a hassle to reduce their salaries - and the knock on effects could include restarting the immigration process. It might end up costing more than the dollars saved, and employees will likely leave anyway.

Hypothetically speaking, assume you are to be laid off. Would you rather be laid off now with pay until March, or laid off in March with no notice and no further pay? They're being pretty generous here, relatively speaking.

> You give your 4-5 years to a company and the company dumps you at the first sight of hardship.

You got paid every month for those 4-5 years right? That's the settlement of what the company owes you for the time you gave them.

I've had this point of view for a long time. Every payday, you and your employer are even. If you feel that you are giving your employer more than they are giving you, you need to negotiate a raise, or start looking elsewhere for a better deal.

People tend to get emotionally attached to their workplaces and changing it is difficult sometimes. We know business is business. If companies act this way, they should also expect zero employee loyalty.

What you mean to say is "this is why there is zero employee loyalty". Employee loyalty is a concept from an era where it was commonplace, but it always had to be earned. So, here we are.

Does that mean you quit without notice and feel zero guilt about it, or are you a one-sided corporate simp?

To me the world is a better place when an employment relationship is not purely contractual, on both sides, and I'm glad I live in a country that supports that.

Its okay to quit without notice... It's polite to give 2 weeks, but I wouldn't consider anyone a bad person for not doing so.

> To me the world is a better place when an employment relationship is not purely contractual, on both sides...

Do you think that should not be the case? And people should be obligated to stay after putting in their resignation?

I think we should recognise that while these ways of acting (in both directions) are legal, they can still be antisocial and rude (which of course doesn't mean they're not occasionally warranted). While a company's only legal obligation may be to pay their employees, that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't socially call them out if they're too sharp-elbowed.

Except none of us are robots, or interchangeable parts of a machine. Being human is not a weakness.

Stripe made a bad choice _hiring_ people, early this year. They were very explicit about this in the email. They overextended and didn't foresee the economy contracting the way it did - and now they have to correct.

Cutting salaries for everybody has a number of disadvantages, chief of which is that it will encourage the best of people to leave. Firing can be done strategically, targeting the most recent hires and the underperformers.

I do feel like I have to remind that the first duty of the management is to the company - not because the company is "Mother and Father", in an old communist wooden language, but because the company needs to survive in order to pay all salaries, and hopefully expand enough so it can hire again even more people (assumingly in a more sustainable way this time).

this reply escalated quickly

> they're not putting anybody in the electric chair.

I think you're reacting to hyperbole that is simply not present in the post to which you've responded. I have not compared this situation to any sort of life and death situation. I agree that Stripe's treatment of the people they've laid off is better than some other companies. I have merely commented on the language used in this and similar announcements.

> Being terminated or let go suggests a business decision first, and your performance second. They used the right word.

... except they never say in the active voice, "We're laying off ..." or "We're terminating ...". They repeatedly choose phrasing that make the former employees the subject. And "let go" is itself a euphemism invented for this purpose. "_they're_ going; we just let them"

The language is often impersonal, there is absolutely no humanity in it: you're terminating "resources" as if they were like disposable items you can get rid of at any moment.

Layoffs don't have to be like that. Business doesn't have to be like that, you can still be human and recognize you're getting rid of people with families.

> They're letting people go

Letting someone go implies they want to go, and just let them. In this case, the people obviously want to stay and continue working, so you don't let them go, you fire them.

There doesn't appear to be any attempt to distance themselves. He basically said: "We hired too many people. The decision to hire them was ours. It was a mistake. We have to let them go. We are at least going to cover salaries/healthcare for a decent amount of time."

There is probably too much business jargon, but that's how people actually talk in many companies (certainly in Stripe there is overuse of jargon). It's not a deliberate attempt to do anything, it's just the language of the world they are in. The email is to the staff, not to you.

"Let them go" is itself a euphemism, in that if it is taken literally, it presumes "they" _would_ go if "let". The active party making an intentional choice describes their actions in a way that places agency with everyone else.

> The email is to the staff, not to you.

No, it's on the 'newsroom' section of their public website. Though it is _addressed_ to staff (or former staff) it is _for_ a dual audience.

Yep, it is. Lot's of jargon. But it's the jargon used every day, by everyone up and down an org, in an attempt to be polite. It's not an attempt to use new language in a way as to absolve themselves of responsibility. Give them a break, they probably (rightly) have their egos and lives wrapped up in this business and feel kind of stupid right now. Just because they are successful it doesn't mean they are robots.

It's really not, they just knew it would be leaked and are getting ahead of it. They aren't fools.

This isn't about "jargon" being used to "be polite". "Jargon" is specialized terminology which may not be understood outside of a group or context. "We took an existing encoder-decoder transformer model from huggingface and slapped a token-level classifier head on it" is lot of jargon. By contrast, everyone understands what "let go" means.

The reason for choosing to say "let go" vs "terminated" isn't to "be polite". More broadly, in this and similar announcements, we see framing, of active vs passive parties, to spin responsibility, agency and involvement. The tone of the whole thing is "because of the broader economic environment, this business outcome was so inevitable and our hands were so forced we will barely acknowledge that it was a decision." And as a stark contrast, they describe all of the things they're giving "impacted" former employees in the active voice: "We'll pay", "We'll accelerate", "We'll cover", "We'll be supporting" etc.

I think they actually seem to be doing a pretty good job supporting the staff they terminated. I just think if they actually want to take responsibility for their actions, both bad and good, they should talk in a way that acknowledges when they're the principal actors.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2017/06/01/using-the-bu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon#Specifics

This is a cynical take. If you assume for a minute they are half decent guys, it reads differently - they accept responsibility and give some context.

I'm sure Stipe would be happy to have them stay, but, since Stripe will be unable to continue paying them for their time, I would guess they will mostly choose to go.

"We have to let them go" is absoultely distancing and dodging responsibility. "We have decided to lay them off" would be the responsible thing to say.

Quote: "John and I are fully responsible".

Analyzing the semantics of a phrase and then stating it implies "person A is saying/doing X", when right there person A is explicitly saying/doing Not X, is nonsensical.

My favorite color is blue. I like coffee => "his favorite color is brown!".

You're quoting from a section of the text where they are explicit in their responsibility to disprove that they use distancing language in a different section of the text.

They don't need to repeat it every paragraph just to satisfy the cynics. It's a single piece of writing. They owned it.

The reason they aren't 'firing' or 'terminating' anyone is that they are seeking to avoid the appearance (rightly or wrongly) that the people being impacted are at fault. The company is changing direction and that new direction needs fewer people - one should not imagine that those who were impacted were bad at what they were doing (or even that they would be bad at working on the new direction). Instead, we are meant to understand that they made their best effort at how many people they needed and who at the company would best fill those slots. The fact that one person kept a job and another lost theirs has more to do with local realities as Stripe, a particular company, than the marketability or skills of the people impacted.

Being fired has a different meaning from being laid off. Fired implies performance. Lay off implies company restructure.

And this is the public language. Imagine the beautiful language they use inside.

My company got recently through some layoffs as well and well, ... it almost seemed from the speech they gave that the people fired were a burden. "Accelerate", "transform" and all that. Softening the blow as if you were dealing with a fucking bunch of idiots that don't know what's happening around them. It gets really surreal.

You can give them all the money you want, and that's really noble of some companies to do so, but please don't bullshit!

During the first larger round of layoffs that happened in the "original" Opera Software, the Head of HR stood in front of the employees and managed to say something like "We are not 'downsizing', we are just 'right-sizing'".

"Firing" would just be the wrong word, since it normally implies that the employee wasn't doing something right. It's a layoff. They're not saying anyone (other than them) did anything wrong.

Exactly

This reminds me of George Carlin's Euphemisms bit: https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc

It echoes the shift from "Personnel" to "Human Resources " to "Talent Acquisitions."

Yup wimpy language is the reason why we don't have flying cars and much more interesting companies still.

They are simply recycling their biomass

Feel free to write "fired" on your resume if that's what you want, I guess.

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