Kotlin is actually booming in backend, especially in financial services/fintech. Most are converted Java programmers ofc but many are also new to the JVM coming from Ruby/Python/etc.
I had never used Kotlin before but picked it up day 1 of the job easily and was committing and pushing PRs immediately. There’s always a few gotchas with any language but Kotlin to me was basically JS/Python meets Java. Pretty trivial to get going - always some nuances to learn but contributing was trivial.
I have no idea about Elixir but it doesn’t look as conventional.
Kotlin in is very similar to Java. There are tons of Java devs. And tons of Kotlin devs who program for Android. There has to be an order of magnitude of magnitude (at least) more Kotlin devs than Elixer.
We do LEAN and “agile” where I am now, and if you can’t explain how your work makes it saves money you’ll be gotten up to speed on that quickly. Our business folks are very sharp and focused, and tech tries to match that, in a good way.
This honestly seems like an example of how to handle layoffs well. After the repeated messes of Better, the non-layoff layoffs at Meta, and a bunch of smaller examples over the last year and a half, it's actually nice to see them handled well.
They always suck, but being transparent, ripping the band-aid off, and giving the people laid off as much support as possible is the way to go. They're also far enough from the holidays that people can still job search, but close enough that most people in tech could eat a few weeks of savings to take an extended holiday. Don't know if that was deliberate, but it seems well timed
Yea, if you look at the benefits for those laid-off, it's pretty supportive (at least from my American experience). They are paying at least 2 months severance, you keep your hardware, you get 6 months healthcare, and they weren't dicks about doing this. I would say this is better than most recent layoff announcements and the fact that they even state that they will re-hire anyone later on as a priority shows that they aren't trying to blame "low performers" or something, it's just some colleagues that they can't keep on right now due to business reasons.
Now, maybe their business reasons are dues to their own ineptness or bad luck or whatever, but they handled this pretty well.
I say this all because we tend, on HN and other places, to focus on the shitty aspects of every bad news story, and rarely speak up when something goes right that is still shitty, like this.
Especially companies which claim to have solid runway blaming "the macro environment" is perplexing.
But then, venture capital backed companies generally (arguably by design) are not profitable, so their ability to weather storms is likely weakened and maybe the boards get squirrely when faced with the threat of bad weather.
Promising but pre-profit VC-backed companies don't want to raise in the next 2-3 years since there is a huge risk of down-rounds. Everyone is trying to squeeze their runways out over that time period.
Unfortunately, if your customers are mostly other tech companies, they are doing the same thing.
It seems like a bunch of healthy companies are putting on the brakes hard enough to collectively cause the recession they are trying to avoid.
> Meanwhile unemployment is still at an all time low.
That is incredibly circular logic. So companies shouldn't be doing layoffs because unemployment is low?
Are you arguing that the macro environment isn't bad? A G7 country is in a mexican standoff with its bond market and pension funds to avoid a systemic collapse in the next 3 days. How much worse is the macro situation supposed to get before businesses should worry?
The economy _is_ to blame if your business strategy is to burn VC money at a faster and faster rate, which is the goal of most billion dollar growth stage startups. I know HN likes to rip on these types of businesses, but that is literally the strategy. You can not like it, but blaming it on incompetence is foolish.
When the economy turns you have to adjust that strategy, which is what they are doing now.
I’d be curious what the numbers look like in the next quarter, also I recall that the US has some absurd definition of unemployed that conveniently undercounts the unemployed.
That said I think the real story now is that the previous recessions haven’t really impacted the big tech companies, but this time it is so we’re seeing the first mass layoffs that this generation of developers has likely ever encountered. Couple that with the “tech” companies that are essentially just advertising companies that write software (obviously FB and G, but many of the startups aren’t too different) discovering that attention based advertising isn’t as stable a revenue stream as was thought, and you get a _lot_ more “safe” jobs disappearing.
The percentage you see flying around doesn’t include people who aren’t actively looking for jobs u-3.if you include them it goes to 4.4 go to bls.gov and find alternative measures of labor underutilization. Its not undercounting just different levels/definitions of unemployment qualifications
The "the government is lying about unemployment" narrative is foolish. The number presented in most media headlines is just one number that the government publishes. Right alongside U-3 they publish numbers using definitions that include more people. It'd be a pretty stupid conspiracy to lie and publish the "true" numbers right next to your lie.
Both U-3 and U-6 are near historical lows. Even if you don't believe that U-3 is meaningful, you can compare the U-6 numbers now against other times in history and see that unemployment is indeed low right now.
I mean the feds goal is to raise unemployment at this point (to slow down inflation) so in that sense this the fear of a recession is in fact creating a recession?
Is this something openly known or just some kind of guess from you? Jez, if we've reached the point where the US goverment forces unemployment (with all the suffering it implies to ordinary people) in order to protect the overall economy (the elites and goverment itself)....if that's not something to make everyone to lose any remains of faith on the system then I don't know what it is.
It's a good racket if you can pull it off. Start some kind of "disruptive" company, raise a shitload of money off being 6 foot 4, hire 1,000 people to "disrupt" shit (they don't even have a banking charter!), cash out tens of millions of dollars at the Series D, write a tearful mea culpa when it all falls apart, buy the estate in Hillsborough and the Bentley Continental and try it again in five years.
I met with the founders sometime in the second half of 2017, I think before they had launched. I was looking for an eng leadership job and the just wanted / needed ICs. So it didn’t go anywhere.
But I came away with a strong sense that they would be quite successful. They just had this confidence and clarity of vision, that also didn’t seem like bullshit. And past experience building a company in the financial services space.
One funny thing I remember was Pedro (I think) saying their tech stack was Elixer, “maybe that’s crazy”. And interesting to see they have since started moving away from it. Seems they had some doubts about it from the start.
Of course, it was a flippant remark, but it's more that there are some people who have the right "polish" (looks/Stanford/wit/connections/etc) and they can raise hundreds of millions of dollars for their companies regardless of whether it's a smart investment.
AFAIK, typical banks don't provide virtual cards you can spin up on a click to give to your employees for expenses, right? My company uses Brex and the few times I've had to use the card, it was really convenient.
I'm not a user, but from the marketing, it seems like a product that's "nice to have", not a "must have". Normal banking and corporate cards can pretty much do all of what they do, albeit with a slightly worse user-experience.
Businesses like this are skating on thin ice. People are willing to pay a premium for design and user-experience when the times are good. But when they're not, these "nice-to-haves" are first on the chopping block.
Readit News
lay-offs 2 years ago
Switched tech stacks 11 months ago to among other things be able to hire more devs
Acquired Pry for $90 million 6 months ago
Were tossing out long standing customers 4 months ago
and now they're having lay-offs again.
Quite the ride...
That's like trying to pivot from finding unicorn to finding pegasus.
I have no idea about Elixir but it doesn’t look as conventional.
https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-ko...
Note that Brex founders are Brazilian and the Elixir author is Brazilian.
They always suck, but being transparent, ripping the band-aid off, and giving the people laid off as much support as possible is the way to go. They're also far enough from the holidays that people can still job search, but close enough that most people in tech could eat a few weeks of savings to take an extended holiday. Don't know if that was deliberate, but it seems well timed
Now, maybe their business reasons are dues to their own ineptness or bad luck or whatever, but they handled this pretty well.
I say this all because we tend, on HN and other places, to focus on the shitty aspects of every bad news story, and rarely speak up when something goes right that is still shitty, like this.
Will the shareholders be keen to see so much of their money go to ex-employees for not much gain in PR or morale of existing employees?
Meanwhile unemployment is still at an all time low.
But then, venture capital backed companies generally (arguably by design) are not profitable, so their ability to weather storms is likely weakened and maybe the boards get squirrely when faced with the threat of bad weather.
Unfortunately, if your customers are mostly other tech companies, they are doing the same thing.
It seems like a bunch of healthy companies are putting on the brakes hard enough to collectively cause the recession they are trying to avoid.
I've heard this before but I don't get it. Why are they not profitable "by design"?
Edit: not sure if it was the reason this is downvoted but this was an honest question
That is incredibly circular logic. So companies shouldn't be doing layoffs because unemployment is low?
Are you arguing that the macro environment isn't bad? A G7 country is in a mexican standoff with its bond market and pension funds to avoid a systemic collapse in the next 3 days. How much worse is the macro situation supposed to get before businesses should worry?
Deleted Comment
When the economy turns you have to adjust that strategy, which is what they are doing now.
That said I think the real story now is that the previous recessions haven’t really impacted the big tech companies, but this time it is so we’re seeing the first mass layoffs that this generation of developers has likely ever encountered. Couple that with the “tech” companies that are essentially just advertising companies that write software (obviously FB and G, but many of the startups aren’t too different) discovering that attention based advertising isn’t as stable a revenue stream as was thought, and you get a _lot_ more “safe” jobs disappearing.
Both U-3 and U-6 are near historical lows. Even if you don't believe that U-3 is meaningful, you can compare the U-6 numbers now against other times in history and see that unemployment is indeed low right now.
When the equity market is hot, issue more shares
When the consumer market is hot, sell more product
It has nothing to do with employees unless you are trying to bribe a politician with “jobs” you’ll bring to their area
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I came away with a strong sense that they would be quite successful. They just had this confidence and clarity of vision, that also didn’t seem like bullshit. And past experience building a company in the financial services space.
One funny thing I remember was Pedro (I think) saying their tech stack was Elixer, “maybe that’s crazy”. And interesting to see they have since started moving away from it. Seems they had some doubts about it from the start.
I’ve heard it all, from dating, promotions, sports, and now fundraising. You still have to have all of the skills at it for anything good to happen.
yikes. is ramp eating their lunch or is the market just not that favourable?
Normal banks with tellers named Maud are likely the ones eating their lunch.
Businesses like this are skating on thin ice. People are willing to pay a premium for design and user-experience when the times are good. But when they're not, these "nice-to-haves" are first on the chopping block.