Prisma laying off 28% staff
prisma.io
prisma.io
I seriously think we need to start asking these sorts of questions and defining some sorts of standards for this "responsibility" this sentence mentions. In all other contexts, responsibility has its very tangible practical grounding and means of enforcing that grounding. In announcements like these, it reads just like a random and inconsequential "I'm sorry".
For sure not seppuku. Probably nothing will happen. In big companies it is a golden parachute, but this is not a big company.
That's what I'm worried about and that's why I'm calling BS on this. The executive uses big words like "responsibility", I'd like to know what concrete measures are then hidden behind it.
Didn't Microsoft execs put on a lavish party in the eve of announcing firing thousands without notice?
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/davos2023/card/microsoft-ho...
If it does not start with a 28% reduction in all areas of compensation, and full elimination of all bonus opportunities for the current calendar and fiscal year, then no responsibility has been taken.
If it were truly taking responsibility, the CEO approving layoffs would have a 28% chance of being laid off too.
Also, who said it would be a spin-the-wheel random choice.
I'm sure the board of directors can go through a search to find another CEO, whether internal or external.
But the CEO, the leader, should have some skin in the game as well. That's what real leadership is about.
I mean metrics for measuring responsibility towards the people, especially the laid-off ones - there seems to be absolutely none of these.
Outside of anything defined in these areas a company doesn't have any responsibility towards the people, including those laid off. It's an incredibly good idea to have that clear in your mind when you accept a job.
Many of us are working for, or help lead, much smaller companies who - because they weren't so spendy - are much less likely to need to invoke large scale layoffs during the current economic turmoil (no matter how careful you are, things can still go sideways though).
Nevertheless, many of our companies have been subject to the disruption of companies like Prisma (and plenty of others: Meta, Google, Shopify, and the rest) hoovering up every developer they could get at inflated salaries just because they had plenty of money to spent and a bit of an anti-competitive streak (and I note that many of the layoffs I've read about so far have mostly included staff outside of engineering and product development, so not much has changed on the latter). This has hurt our businesses, set back projects, caused a lot of stress amongst employees who've remained, and of course cost us a huge amount in rehiring.
I can't blame anyone for accepting a role with a 30 - 50% pay increase elsewhere: everyone is under financial pressure, particularly at the moment, and everyone has aspirations for their future (nothing wrong with that). But it's not all upside, and I do wish people would be more careful in assessing possible outcomes - in particular understand what they're signing up for.
When a market changes as much as it has, as rapidly as it has, over the past 3 years - be that employment or any other market - there is always going to be some sort of regression to the mean, and some element of bullwhip effect.
First: The people being laid off are shareholders too. Prisma is offering part of their salary in equity.
Second: How would a responsible lay-off other than this look like?
Severance pay: All departing team members will receive one month of additional pay per year of service, plus the payout of any accrued PTO.
Healthcare benefits:
Prismas health benefits for US employees will remain in place through February.
International contractors who don’t have government funded medical cover available will receive an extra $1,000 severance.
Equity vesting: We are waiving the equity cliff for team members who have been with us for more than 6 months but less than 1 year.
Job search support: For all those who wish to, we will do our best to connect you with the various recruitment groups within our investor community.
Equipment: Keep all of the equipment that has been issued to you during the course of your employment with Prisma.
What is the alternative to this? Should Prisma keep the workers, which became unnecessary for reaching the company's goals?
Yes, it's most likely they over hired like every other tech company. But now are in an environment, where it's difficult to raise additional funds. Obviously, Prisma is now adapting and tries to lower the cash burn rate.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that most tech companies massively hired in 2019, 2020 and 2021. If it now becomes obvious, that they hired too many people, what should they do besides cutting?
That's why I call BS on the executive saying "I take full responsibility."
> I guess companies aren’t our friends after all?
They never were and never will be unless they decide to be friends. They may create a pleasing environment to do work in and care for good atmosphere in the workplace and press for decent interpersonal communication so that work gets done smoother, but it's all about the common goal of getting work done so they can get paid so you can get paid. This isn't friendship, it's optimization.
Until your employment contract has an explicit friendship clause of some sort, or unless you own or co-own the company, you have no guarantees you are anything more than a mercenary with some legal protections that kick in if you are let go. That's the very basis of capitalism where workers are one of the many manageable resources.
Of course there is none, so I'm always puzzled when company representatives mention 'loyalty' or implicitly suggest unpaid overtime.
aka "I admit I have done a bad decision when I over hired and I'm correcting it".
It's not a "I take full responsibility" towards the employees or customers.
Like a surgeon killing a patient “taking full responsibility”…
He still has a job, bonus, and golden parachute. Despite fucking up and hiring way more than needed and upending those lives.
Real responsibility would be leaving in disgrace, or returning his bonus and stock, or something else along those lines.
Why does the financial world’s mentality have to oscillate between cocaine and opium?
Part of being a competent leader is correctly assessing staffing needs of your org. If you suck at upsizing your staffing needs correctly, why should we trust that you don't also suck at downsizing correctly. I have little respect for leaderships that overhire then layoff. I view them as incompetent.
You spilled coffee on the table? Clean it up. That's your responsibility. It doesn't mean you need to be "punished".
In the case of layoffs, taking responsibility might mean having to face the public and the employees with the decision and having to endure the public shaming you, etc. All on behalf of the board and shareholders.
They are taking the responsibility for having overhired and are acting on this responsibility by laying off.
They are not taking responsibility in front of laid off staff in any actionable way but "you can blame me rather than human resources, PMs that cried for more engineers, investors that were looking for signs of growth via head count..." which again is a sign of taking responsibility in front of shareholders, not really employees.
This behavior should be celebrated, and so should the people who supported his growth as CEO of his company.
The alternative is to install a class of professional CEO punching bags at the helm of every early-stage company. Not doing that is exactly what defined Silicon Valley post dot-com.
he comes across as a very mature founder. im sure this layoff wasnt easy for him.
That sounds like responsibility
Eventually growth slows down, customers are upset because the product sucks and here we are.
Who is to blame? The CEO along with the board. So a change of CEO might be the only thing saving the company.
History disagrees. And the only reason the company exists in the first place is because of VC money. Don't join a startup if you don't want the risks associated with a startup.
> Who is to blame?
No one, because humans can't predict the future. Why are you so eager to see people punished? It's so easy to be critical when you're not the one actually responsible for building and running a company. This entire thread is an example of "tell me you know nothing about running a business without saying you know nothing about running a business".
I recently had to fire my landscaper, so based on this logic I should probably sell my house so that I can "take responsibility".
Really, it's not hard to remain authentic. Statements like "I feel terrible" are fine and even "we're trying to support everyone through this transition, both staff directly affected and their families, as well as the remaining staff who we realize shoulder increased burden." Without saying "we're doing everything we can" and other obvious lies.
The firing is a necessary consequence of the hiring. You can, if you want, make it harder to fire people — but if you do you will also find companies will be less willing to hire people.
I had seen and complained about this before here in HN, how when Github said they were sunsetting Atom for lack of engagement I pointed out that the lack of engagement was... by them, not a single commit in few years so of course there was no activity [2]
Edit: looking at the Github tracker now, it seems that now they use Github as the main tracking software? So there's a bunch of new issues by internal contributors with "bad description" (meaning it's probably the tip of the iceberg of an internal issue just for tracking, not the typical issue someone finds and reports), but the old ones sit there unanswered.
For example, I want to add ltree support to Prisma (which could also extend to MSSQL’s Hierarchy). I’ve shepherded this whole thing through at least 4 repos, adding the necessary pieces in order to make it work.
Their communication and follow up has been generally poor. The engineers they have on staff are capable but they either don’t see the value in larger OSS contributions or don’t have the time to manage both the internal and external roadmapping?
Idk, I just want my PRs reviewed and merged lol
I have tried my best over my short (just six years so far in swe, and a few years in a non tech role) career to be on teams where our work is basically in the top 1-3 annual initiatives. It guarantees I keep my job 99% because I work on the things that make money for the company. It’s not my company, so that’s my terms of employment I set for myself. Don’t work on things that push the envelope too far (moonshot), if things don’t work out you lose as an employee (granted if you’re at a big tech company layoffs don’t really mean much with 3+ month severance packages and cozy amounts of additional support).
If I’m on an employee vesting schedule I’m gonna make sure I win as much as I can.
In all honesty, 100 people is not a big number, you need people like accountants, lawyers, office staff and so on
I expect the bulk of those positions to be people trying to get someone else to buy the products/services they're selling.
In the end, it might really be just 10 guys doing the actual coding.
From a technological point of view I can't fathom how anyone would add this level of bloat to their project. Just write your SQL queries like a normal person.
also other features mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477321
Just because you think you can make their product in a weekend all on your own doesn't mean that to get to where they are a ton of people aren't needed.
At its core, their paid product is a thin layer over AWS and CloudFlare.
I'm not saying I don't like the product, I'm saying this doesn't make sense to me.
Interesting read if you're recently reading about a lot of "layoffs".
It's a good reminder, if we needed one, of how fragile the good times are, for anyone who is an ordinary professional working in an economy like this. I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other - like something more concrete than "sure I would recommend people from my network for jobs once we aren't in a hiring freeze."
Unionisation would help. We don't do ourselves any favours by not unionising.
Almost all job security and employment rights were won by unions and strike action. No wonder unions are a dirty word—according to corporate America.
Even when the jobs can't be saved, employment rights are helpful. The Google? Microsoft? announcement basically said, we've already fired some of the American staff, but in other countries were are merely starting the statutory consultation process. That means a longer period of pay.
Switzerland does it pretty well. Employment is at will (in that employers can fire anyone without a justification), but health insurance is mostly not tied to employment, and you get 70% of your salary for up to two years. Compare to say France, where short term contracts are very common and other shitty employment practices abounds because employers are scared to commit.
The American staff are also paid decently more than other countries. Is getting a 40% pay cut worth getting a few more months of pay before being laid off?
I didn't say we should get a 40% pay cut; that's a non-sequitur. I said we should improve working conditions.
Investors don't get free helicopter money, thus they can't pump money into startups/tech companies thus companies have to cut the dead weight. There will be more lay offs coming - because the free money economy is currently suspended.
They have burned so much cash making an average ORM. First in Scala. Then in Rust. For what benefit over just TypeScript? None.
Just impossible to debug and a total pain to contribute to for JS devs.
When this company dies so to will the ORM. No one else is going to maintain this thing.
Using the ORM means I'm tied to this mess of an abstraction, migrations and scripts that require so many workarounds and experimentation to make it worthwhile when your app is not a simple CRUD or you want performance optimizations without ending up writing your own queries yet again. The generated TS API is the only pleasant feature, but doing things the Prisma way I noticed my app is now tied to this ecosystem and its quirks and I dread it. Being unable to check generated queries' SQL beforehand is also a huge issue that is not getting solved any time soon from what I've gathered on their github.
You could also use Prisma as a SQL client and leverage their data proxy, without needing to use the ORM and execute SQL migrations and queries directly, which is what I intend to do from now on. Please do let me know if there are any other generic alternatives database-wise (for "the edge"), I miss raw [Postgre]SQL. Supabase's client is the closest I can think of and it also generates types from your db, but it's obviously not a generic solution.
Lastly, one particular thing that disgusts me (I believe it's not on Prisma but due to how the edge works) is that you cannot use a local database for development. Perhaps ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually - I need to experiment more on that.
If you pay for ngrok you get a stable hostname. That said...looks like their price has decreased somewhat dramatically for an individual license. There are other competing services like https://expose.dev/#pro
In some ways we’re all consultants
Surprisingly true!
Do you really need to make an effort to figure out why employees feel slighted for being fired without notice, and specially by an employer whose profitability is not questioned?
You made it sound like only unreasonable people would be bothered by being forced out of a job while having rent/mortgage and bills to pay.
EDIT: added missing words
Isn’t “the other way” the norm on all US companies?
What “the same industry” taught its professionals is that loyalty should not be a one-way deal when corporate dictates that every person can and should be automatically discarded at the drop of a hat, and benefitting from a demand-driven job market is shown to be the only option that employees have to safeguard their livelihood.
I’ve lost count of the number of LinkedIn posts of veterans with >10years in FANGs being summarily fired during the night and only finding out because their access was revoked. This is exactly why people proactively switch jobs. This is the consequence, not the cause. Using these cases to justify labour abuses is victim-blaming.
One of the comments there made the excellent point that the lib was still 'early access' which most mature devs wouldn't use for production. Maybe if it was 1.0.0 prod-ready, use would have skyrocketed but Prisma would never know that.
I doubt it.
It's also a bit more abstracted on the 'data' side too. They offer a web interface, Prisma Studio, that abstracts over the physical database actually being used to allow you to do CRUD on the data. I think this is pretty useful.
In my mind (no connection to the company or knowledge beyond being a user) the business to be found there is in being the aggregation and intermediation layer of databases of different services, accessible to people with and without technical skills, in a uniform way.
> Severance pay: All departing team members will receive one month of additional pay per year of service, plus the payout of any accrued PTO.
Compared to other companies. This is worst I’ve seen
This is why we gravitate towards more stable platforms like .Net for big important projects, but their current client/server stack is not very good (Blazor)
One wonders how related those are.
At a minimum, I suspect there were some GTM folks working pretty hard on the launch the last few weeks who 3 days later are out of a job…
I found it's kinda like an "asshole" behaviour, because it tricks people into illusion of a "one tool to do it all". The reality is not, far from truth.
I had to find the gaping holes myself in a way that a typical open-source project would tend to be more up-front about.
When they take responsibility they don't admit wrongdoing or remorse, they simply explain what they did and probably expect a pat on the back. CEO's and workers have different responsibilities.
If you think that people shouldn't be fired in hired at whim, that's why employment are for. If you think that you are being wronged, that's why there are worker rights.
It's easy to say that Europe or UK are socialist in a booming market. As it might turn out, maybe they have a point.
I’m indifferent tbh, leadership and investors can do what they want, but “taking full responsibility” is not the same as “feeling bad about firing colleagues”
I suspect I'd be looking for another job if this was me.
Or conversely, why is every other company giving a minimum of 2 months of severance?
Why this word and why is everyone using it? It’s not only CEOs and HR but on LinkedIn I see many people referring to themselves as “impacted” and open to word, etc.
Is there a word for this type of memetic term suddenly being used everywhere as a substitute for previous words? Wasn’t “downsized” the word like 20 years ago?
Being made redundant means the position itself is no longer required, so you’re let go because your job isn’t there any more. Depending on the law in your country or jurisdiction this will also mean you can’t hire for that position again for some time.
There are more legal protections for the latter and businesses can’t just fire hundreds or thousands of people at once and claim it’s not a redundancy process.
Beyond all that thought, ‘impacted’ is just a euphemism for ‘laid off’ or ‘made redundant’.
Enterprises adopted the euphemism then forgot there are any other cost or overhead reducing approaches to improve efficiency other than "efficiencies".
Managerialism is value-generation destroying.
It clearly says "we are going to reduce the team size, which will impact 28% of the people".
It's not just saying "We are restructuring and 28% of people will be impacted", it clearly says that they will lose their job.
People answer you off the mark (according to you) because your question is nonsense to begin with.
> This decision will impact 28% of the Prisma team, and those affected have already been notified via personal and work email.
Do you see the English word “impact”? The word “impacted” comes from this. This has been used over and over in this context by many companies and people. So my question was why has this word suddenly come into vogue for this type of event? Why not layoff or w/e was always used?
Do you have an answer to that?
I'm excited to see what contributions the tech industry's workers wind up making to the union movement. That's a whole lot of big, juicy, pissed-off brains, and a whole lotta matches.
Stability is bliss. So many tools would be better if at some point they had just stopped glomming on.
Even for remote staff, there are many more human ways of informing someone they are out of a job than shooting an email. Am I the only one who feels that way? Is it actually better to get an email an process the blow in async? Genuinely curious as I didn’t see this comment yet.
I’m at Google and had reports get laid off. I don’t just have their personal contact information or whatever and neither does my team. No opportunity to easily say goodbye or thank them for their hard work or offer references or whatever. Just poof. A name on a dashboard.
Unlike most people’s “passive” strategy of posting a resume on LinkedIn or sending resumes to job postings then hoping that someone takes notice of you, you’ll develop an “active” strategy of finding openings before they’re ever posted publicly. It takes more work and planning, which is why you should start now while you’re employed.
When money was cheap, you basically had to outgrow your competitors and take on as much as possible or get beat.
That rapidly reversed with inflation and now the game is efficiency
I can see the argument for this triggering an eventual change, but having _both_ the chock of a CEO change _and_ 28% of the company being layed off at the same time seems unwise.
The point is to make some sort of communication that you’re taking on board the consequences of your action, consequences that go well beyond trite platitudes of how difficult the process has been and how next time will be different.
Prisma's migration system actually partially copied Skeema's design, while giving credit in a rather odd fashion which really rubbed me the wrong way. From Prisma Migrate's architecture doc: "The workflow of working with temporary databases and introspecting it to determine differences between schemas seems to be pretty common, this is for example what skeema does." [5]
While I doubt I was the first person to ever use that technique, I absolutely didn't copy it from anywhere, and I'm not aware of any other older schema change systems that work this way. It was certainly never "pretty common" prior to Skeema or even outside of Skeema. Pretty disappointing when a VC-backed company uses a bootstrapped open source project as free R&D and doesn't even give credit in a respectful manner!
[1] https://github.com/skeema/skeema
[2] https://github.com/djrobstep/migra
[3] https://github.com/k0kubun/sqldef
[4] https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...
[5] https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/blob/6be410e/migrat...
But bloody hell, VC backing and that many employees? I happened to recently give Prisma a whirl, and even for my simple toy project, the holes in the client functionality do not feel consistent with my understanding of what that many people can do, even taking to account a large percentage of non-eng roles.
The JS ecosystem seems particularly tolerant of VC funded for-profit efforts (try saying that five times fast) holding this sort of prominence. Who remembers all the drama at npm before Microsoft bought it? The whole thing puts me into a deeply cynical, judgemental headspace. The JS ecosystem feels way more enamoured with branding, celebrity, and money, than what I am personally used to. I’m no old-timer either by any measure. There’s certainly more effort put into marketing to developers, and there’s much less of a sense of collaborative goodwill because everyone wants their piece. Either money, or this new higher standard of tech micro-celebrity.
Say what you want about the massive shortcomings of the previous generation/s of tech culture but at least we had a pretty good run of not letting this happen.
I’m too tired and worn out to have this sort of boom and bust cycle so directly implicate tooling that can have so many points of interaction with something I’m building.
- CEO of every tech company
We will disclose the bare minimum amount that we can get away with, plus things that would end up biting us in the ass if we didn’t.
"We will work harder"
"Challenges were encountered"
"Building a Stronger Company"
"Amazing/incredible journey"
"No way reflect"
"Local laws"
E.g. if Microsoft decided to sunset its incredible GitHub journey, it would probably find itself with too many web developers. If it got out of Xboxes, too many embedded. If it went full remote, too many office managers and IT.
Occam's Razor says: or the companies just want to rehire new people at lower pay.
And what you say simply isn't true anyway - I even studied EE, but all my professional experience is on the web, I would have a long ramp up to be productive on an embedded team. I probably shouldn't even be hired for a grad position on such a team, a fresh graduate would have better memory of domain-specific stuff.
What Occam's razor actually says is that in the face of multiple possible explanations, the simpler one is the more likely one. Your suggested explanation seems a more complicated conspiracy than simply not needing/being able to afford people to me.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to recruit replacement developers? Between the cost for recruiters, the amount of time spent on interviews, and ramp-up time for new hires, you'd need to lower wages by a significant amount (eg. 30%) for you to be able to get payback in a reasonable amount of time. Not to mention, if you're a startup, the loss of institutional knowledge will greatly hamper your ability to execute.
Given that redundancy is a more complicated legal process it’s unlikely you’d use it for this purpose.
This was widely considered to be fire and rehire, although the government position was that it was “just fire”. So companies are willing to skirt the intention of the law.
The size of company doesn't matter to the point anyway - I used Microsoft as a well-known example so I could say 'imagine if they stopped doing GitHub' et al. I can't do that if I pick some random small start-up that I'm familiar with. (Maybe I could have said 'if Notion went all-in on AI' or something? But I wouldn't have had multiple examples.)
If you don't like that then consider pushing for unions, government regulations or join an employee co-op. However many people don't like that option because they prefer to not risk the massive compensation packages that big tech gives them.
I'm reminded of the Street Fighter quote:
"For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday."
A lot of these layoffs will be net negatives for the companies.
Further in Google’s case they have plenty of money to pay these people until headcount naturally shrinks, but they don’t have anything useful enough for them to do that waiting and avoiding a large severance package is cheaper.
it sounds like greed, not incompetence.
I just do not believe in a worldview where almost all CEOs of large tech companies are incompetent. Whatever the explanation for layoffs is, incompetence ain't it.
More than once inferior products and services get investor money and good ones fail to receive any funding.
You'd think they'd mention that once in their Website?