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The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through

The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences. Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ? People would prefer honesty. Just say "We need to increase our profits or reduce costs or both and hence we have to lay people off. Here is what we are providing as a severance". That's it.

ab71e5 2mo ago
Exactly. I would be insulted if I was part of this layoff, brutal honesty would be much better
- ricardobayes 2mo ago
  Not trying to be snarky, but how exactly? How would it help your mental health to be told "your work was borderline useless anyway and we needed to get rid of you to boost shareholder value. Goodbye!"
  - logifail 2mo ago
    > How would it help your mental health [...] ...to be told the truth? Quite a lot. I've been inside companies that had to right-size their teams, it's not pretty, but my goodness honesty from management is better than pretending.
  - codegeek 2mo ago
    Because that's the truth and just because you fake empathy, the person getting fired knows what their worth to the company was. Sure there are people who don't prefer to hear the truth but most employees would. In fact, I would go as far as to say that firing someone by accepting the truth is more empathetic than lying to their faces and crying crocodile tears.
  - Mezzie 2mo ago
    I prefer extremely direct communication because it signals respect to me. Attempts at empathy in cases like this read to me as insulting, like how you'd speak to a toddler. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, and now I have to pretend like I don't know you're lying. It's one more indignity of status being used against me and demanding I play a part and accept the lie, primarily for their ego. Whereas directness feels more equal to me.
jadar 2mo ago
I tend to agree. But the devil's advocate in me says that then they'd be accused of not having empathy. That sort of thing might work in Europe — but for a US company, I think you have to pay some lip service to emotions.
- codegeek 2mo ago
  "Not having empathy" may have made sense 20-30 years ago when mass layoffs weren't as common as nowadays. Nowadays, everyone knows how it works and how much they really care about the employees. Nothing is worse than someone faking empathy especially CEOs (and I am a small time founder/ceo myself even though of an extremely small company).
  - jadar 2mo ago
    Completely agree. That doesn't change the fact that people are fickle and want to have their cake even as they're eating it.
  - lotsofpulp 2mo ago
    20 to 30 years ago was 1996 to 2006. Layoffs were very common, due to outsourcing to cheaper countries. It was common knowledge in my college years of the early 2000s to not expect a long tenure at any employer, and to always be applying to new positions.
  - AshamedCaptain 2mo ago
    Even big US companies today are full of "Is this good for the company?", "Our company values" and other cringe-inducing loyalty/ethics-related propaganda, about as much as 30 years ago. So they are keeping the charade, for better or worse, even though it is as much hypocrisy today as it was 30 years ago. (Maybe 60 years ago it wasn't hypocrisy, but I lack personal evidence).
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago
  The media will spin whatever you do in whichever direction is maximally outrageous because that's what gets more clicks, eyeballs and ad bucks. So just ignore them and do what's right.
engineer_22 2mo ago
> Why these melodramatic posts ? Morale. It’s important that the remaining employees are psychologically secure. They’re trying to make sure they know the company isn’t in jeopardy and that management has them in mind. Some research supports this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228120426_Survivors_and_Victims_a_Meta-Analytical_Review_of_Fairness_and_Organizational_Commitment_after_Downsizing https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228120426_Survivors... In my /opinion/ a personal address, one on one assurances from a trusted manager, this might be more effective, but HR also needs to be careful that the messaging is consistent so this kind of post is probably seen as the best alternative
- prepend 2mo ago
  This type of BS wouldn’t make me psychologically secure. It would make me afraid because I can’t trust what leadership says.
  - engineer_22 2mo ago
    You should lead a company you are trustworthy
- rchaud 2mo ago
  So why not send this out as an email? What purpose does a public proclamation serve?
nsxwolf 2mo ago
I just got laid off after sitting through a company town hall meeting explaining why the reason we’re all being laid off (replaced with Cognizant + Anthropic colab) is totally awesome and great for the company’s future. I do not understand why I’m supposed to care.
- codegeek 2mo ago
  Because it was never about you. They have to fake empathy and provide "explanations" because they think its the "Safer" way. You already know that of course.
andsoitis 2mo ago
> People would prefer honesty. Coarsely, people prefer things that don't hurt their feelings or that don't scare them. Sometimes that's candor; sometimes it is indirectness. Complicating matters further, different people will have different preferences in the same situations.
K0balt 2mo ago
It’s because, and I say this as a person who has made these calls, some leaders do feel a genuine responsibility for the people that work for them. Perhaps too, the ones that don’t, want people to think that they do. But as a founder and CEO by far the most emotionally taxing thing I have ever had to do is cut staff for the good of the company. You want to treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were in their shoes, but it doesn’t change the realities of the operation. This case is clearly AI enabled “right sizing”, and it is inevitable for companies that aren’t seeing explosive growth. It seems like they are handing it well, better than most. Good for them.
- ltbarcly3 2mo ago
  They feel a genuine responsibility to avoid the buzzing sound in their head that results from trying to believe and make other people believe they feel a genuine responsibility for people while taking actions that are the polar opposite of anything that you do to someone you feel responsible for purely to increase your own and your investors wealth. It's fine to fire people, and the severance here is very generous. Business leaders who need to feel like they are a generous parent or 'different' are weak and lying to themselves. Finally while the severance is generous and to be applauded, all of the phrasing under the guise of caring about people was very transparently just an excuse to say over and over "we are making money and we aren't doing this because we have to" to his investors, which just rubs it in the face of the people being fired over and over. One final insult I guess.
- codegeek 2mo ago
  I am a founder/CEO myself (a very small company so I don't have experience of mass layoffs for full disclosure). However, I don't get this explanation. If you feel genuine responsibility for the people, then figure out a way to NOT fire them. Or be honest and admit that the company needs to make more money/cut costs. Trust me, no one wants to hear "we love you so much but we have to fire you and I feel so bad". It just doesn't land. Be honest, be open and be willing to provide a good severance.
  - ryandrake 2mo ago
ricardobayes 2mo ago
Appearances still matter, and IMO it will be really ugly if we all decide they don't.
zamadatix 2mo ago
There is no way to fire a lot of people in a way everyone likes, only ways which suck more than others for different people. Whether you think they are dramatic is not one of the sucks they are very concerned with as you're one if the ones who will forget this layoff in a few hours
- cogman10 2mo ago
  All at once? Sure, no good way. But there are ways to reduce headcount without causing waves. Those include things like simply not backfilling for people that leave the company or who are fired for low performance. Letting a bunch of people go all at once is a sign of poor management and poor planning. Or it's a sign that Patreon wants to go public and ATM the stock market loves layoffs.
  - zamadatix 2mo ago
    Not everyone will jump for joy at these options either. Hell, I'm not even sure there is a way to expand headcount that someone won't have issue with. The business planning is just as bad or good regardless the reaction to the announcement though.
danlitt 2mo ago
If we are going to be honest we should be completely honest. "We want to increase our profits and hence we choose to lay people off."
- KronisLV 2mo ago
  > I am the person responsible for that decision, and I take that with the utmost seriousness. I also somehow didn’t hear that the leadership is taking a pay cut either, if money is so tight.
happytoexplain 2mo ago
What if he actually cares, and this is him being honest? I know it's not usually true, but this is Jack Conte, not Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe he's one of the few CEOs who still has a human brain. I know I would feel legitimately horrible and sympathetic if I had to lay off a bunch of people.
- prepend 2mo ago
  I don’t buy that he cares. Patreon is profitable. He doesn’t have to fire anyone to continue operations. He just wants more money. If he cared about them as beautiful people, he wouldn’t fire them. It’s one thing if you’re bleeding cash and have to cut. Another when you discover a cheaper way to do things and don’t want to retrain and grow in new ways where you’d need people. Patreon CEO is full of horse apples.
  - SoftTalker 2mo ago
    Businesses don't exist in a vacuum. If you discover a cheaper way to do things, and don't do it, a competitor probably will, and you will then find yourself in the "bleeding cash" scenario (or, more likely, starving for cash).
    - happytoexplain 2mo ago
      Generally, but this is also an exaggeration we tell ourselves about the cut-throat world of business. In reality, you don't have to be number one in any given metric to be profitable.
pluc 2mo ago
Because they have to get back to work after. It's a shit leader attitude to admit you just traded humans for profits - you have to keep pretending. On the other end, employees keep pretending they are passionate about X, Y or Z and not just there for the dough. It's a delicate balance.
dodger-dog 2mo ago
Of course the public relations is all spin. Corporations do not have feelings. Individual managers may feel one way or the other. It is likely those feelings are highly rationalized by how the change affects them individually. Will they make more money? Will they take on added duties without an increase in money? Some may wax la philosophie politique at times, but we tend to do that in the abstract when things are at an arms length. At the end of the day, people made a choice between a corporation and a narrow group of stakeholders over employees and the downstream community influence of their buying power, likely a large group and certainly a different group. You could argue in the long run it is better for society for companies to make these decisions, and many times that may actually be the case. But, in this one instance, when you place it all on the scales, they were not doing it to save a company or make its products and services more competitive in the market. There was nothing "existential" about it. They wanted to go from one profit level to a higher profit level for a certain group, and that is just what they did.
keiferski 2mo ago
Because part of being a CEO is having social skills, and doing what you suggested is extremely socially inept. Explaining why layoffs needed to happen, expressing remorse about it, and giving a good severance package is what serious adults with empathy for their employees do. It's also a good way to maintain at least a neutral relationship with everyone you're laying off. Compare that to a company that coldly fires you with minimal severance, and delivers that message via some low-level lackey (not the CEO) – you, as the former employee, want nothing to do with that company ever again.
- codegeek 2mo ago
  I never said "minimal severance". I am actually saying that give them a great severance but stop with the other BS about "oh how much we love you".
jbellis 2mo ago
Apparently this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but a job isn't an output that companies produce, it's an agreement to compensate an employee in exchange for services, and just as the CEO shouldn't take it personally when one leaves to go work elsewhere, nobody needs to act like it's some kind of invidious social contract violation when the company no longer needs some of those services. In other words: resignation and termination are ordinary exercises of each's right to reallocate its resources. (I am making a normative claim, not a descriptive one; I am aware that that both CEOs and laid-off employees do in fact take it personally at times.)
- vladms 2mo ago
  I think depends on the culture/country. In the US definitely the agreements are more flexible. In Europe (and probably elsewhere) I feel that the expectation was (at least some years ago) that once you join a company the relation is stronger. Each variation has pluses and minuses, for companies and individuals.
  - SoftTalker 2mo ago
    Humans are tribal creatures, and joining a company and working with the same people every day creates bonds, a feeling of loyalty, and feelings of betrayal and unease when told they no longer belong.
Gareth321 2mo ago
> Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ? People expect it and get very angry if such posts do not appear contrite. I share your cynicism and would prefer they just say it like it is, but that doesn't work for most people.
Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
Most of the time I'm convinced its just an attempt to garner sympathy from the general public/outsiders. While obviously not true for all but the vast majority of these executives and C-levels could not name any of the people they are getting rid of in the first place. Most of the time it's an attempt to stifle negative opinions of those reading the layoff announcements. But in the modern day it's getting old because we see a new layoff every day now. Everybody knows we aren't a family, and we're doing this to get paid not for some contrived company mission. I'm convinced with most of these layoff announcements people would take it better if they literally just said we're getting rid of N people for X,Y,Z reasons and called it at that without the presumptuous bullshit.
mattbrewsbytes 2mo ago
You can have cutesy names for employees and a culture with mission statements/purpose, etc. but when it comes down to it, if you're doing layoffs no collection of words is going to appease those that are let go and no collection of words is going to appease those left behind. "Teammates" is probably less cutesy than other companies but still evokes some sort of "we're all in this together" vs. straight up employees when in fact they aren't all in it together, at least not the execs. There was an interview with Jay Leno I saw recently and he was talking about his NBC deal where he was going to be getting $30mil/year but they had to cut staff to do that so he decided to cut his own pay/raise to keep staff. That type of move by someone at the top is rare or never happens with CEOs. I think Nintendo might be the only case I can think of where I heard something like that happening. That type of move evokes an "all in it together" type of team vs. a clear delineation of CEO/executives and employees. The melodrama is performative because they have to maintain the mask/facade that they are "teammates".
worldthruword 2mo ago
> First, the people who work at Patreon are special, beautiful humans, through and through. The energy that our team has for Patreon’s mission is a force of nature. So many wonderful humans are going to lose their jobs today in an especially painful moment and market. I am the person responsible for that decision, and I take that with the utmost seriousness. Reminds me of Ozymandias speech when he says to Dr. Manhattan, that he has personally exprienced the pain of millions of New Yorkers he is about to decimate in the Nuclear attack. In both the Watchmen graphic novel and the 2009 film adaptation, Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt) claims that he deeply feels and absorbs the psychic pain and deaths of the millions of people he kills. He views this immense personal suffering as his own tragic sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.
cush 2mo ago
It sounds like you don't know Jack Conte. This isn't a melodramatic AI written tome... The guy is heartbroken
beej71 2mo ago
Agree. Also, protip: saying "right sizing" makes all your employees want to stab you in the eye.
lenkite 2mo ago
Patreon lost >90% of customers from India and a few other Asian nations since they did not implement credit card 2FA nor implement support for native payment gateways. Had to drop a dozen patreon subscriptions and found several hundreds online were complaining about the same thing. Several creators were puzzled why they had a sudden drop without any feedback. Many folks just shrugged and silently moved onto other mechanisms.

ab71e5 2mo ago

Exactly. I would be insulted if I was part of this layoff, brutal honesty would be much better

ricardobayes 2mo ago
Not trying to be snarky, but how exactly? How would it help your mental health to be told "your work was borderline useless anyway and we needed to get rid of you to boost shareholder value. Goodbye!"
- logifail 2mo ago
  > How would it help your mental health [...] ...to be told the truth? Quite a lot. I've been inside companies that had to right-size their teams, it's not pretty, but my goodness honesty from management is better than pretending.
- codegeek 2mo ago
  Because that's the truth and just because you fake empathy, the person getting fired knows what their worth to the company was. Sure there are people who don't prefer to hear the truth but most employees would. In fact, I would go as far as to say that firing someone by accepting the truth is more empathetic than lying to their faces and crying crocodile tears.
- Mezzie 2mo ago
  I prefer extremely direct communication because it signals respect to me. Attempts at empathy in cases like this read to me as insulting, like how you'd speak to a toddler. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, and now I have to pretend like I don't know you're lying. It's one more indignity of status being used against me and demanding I play a part and accept the lie, primarily for their ego. Whereas directness feels more equal to me.

jadar 2mo ago

I tend to agree. But the devil's advocate in me says that then they'd be accused of not having empathy. That sort of thing might work in Europe — but for a US company, I think you have to pay some lip service to emotions.

codegeek 2mo ago
"Not having empathy" may have made sense 20-30 years ago when mass layoffs weren't as common as nowadays. Nowadays, everyone knows how it works and how much they really care about the employees. Nothing is worse than someone faking empathy especially CEOs (and I am a small time founder/ceo myself even though of an extremely small company).
- jadar 2mo ago
  Completely agree. That doesn't change the fact that people are fickle and want to have their cake even as they're eating it.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago
  20 to 30 years ago was 1996 to 2006. Layoffs were very common, due to outsourcing to cheaper countries. It was common knowledge in my college years of the early 2000s to not expect a long tenure at any employer, and to always be applying to new positions.
- AshamedCaptain 2mo ago
  Even big US companies today are full of "Is this good for the company?", "Our company values" and other cringe-inducing loyalty/ethics-related propaganda, about as much as 30 years ago. So they are keeping the charade, for better or worse, even though it is as much hypocrisy today as it was 30 years ago. (Maybe 60 years ago it wasn't hypocrisy, but I lack personal evidence).
cucumber3732842 2mo ago
The media will spin whatever you do in whichever direction is maximally outrageous because that's what gets more clicks, eyeballs and ad bucks. So just ignore them and do what's right.

engineer_22 2mo ago

> Why these melodramatic posts ? Morale. It’s important that the remaining employees are psychologically secure. They’re trying to make sure they know the company isn’t in jeopardy and that management has them in mind. Some research supports this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228120426_Survivors_and_Victims_a_Meta-Analytical_Review_of_Fairness_and_Organizational_Commitment_after_Downsizing https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228120426_Survivors... In my /opinion/ a personal address, one on one assurances from a trusted manager, this might be more effective, but HR also needs to be careful that the messaging is consistent so this kind of post is probably seen as the best alternative

prepend 2mo ago
This type of BS wouldn’t make me psychologically secure. It would make me afraid because I can’t trust what leadership says.
- engineer_22 2mo ago
  You should lead a company you are trustworthy
rchaud 2mo ago
So why not send this out as an email? What purpose does a public proclamation serve?

nsxwolf 2mo ago

I just got laid off after sitting through a company town hall meeting explaining why the reason we’re all being laid off (replaced with Cognizant + Anthropic colab) is totally awesome and great for the company’s future. I do not understand why I’m supposed to care.

codegeek 2mo ago
Because it was never about you. They have to fake empathy and provide "explanations" because they think its the "Safer" way. You already know that of course.

andsoitis 2mo ago

> People would prefer honesty. Coarsely, people prefer things that don't hurt their feelings or that don't scare them. Sometimes that's candor; sometimes it is indirectness. Complicating matters further, different people will have different preferences in the same situations.

K0balt 2mo ago

It’s because, and I say this as a person who has made these calls, some leaders do feel a genuine responsibility for the people that work for them. Perhaps too, the ones that don’t, want people to think that they do. But as a founder and CEO by far the most emotionally taxing thing I have ever had to do is cut staff for the good of the company. You want to treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were in their shoes, but it doesn’t change the realities of the operation. This case is clearly AI enabled “right sizing”, and it is inevitable for companies that aren’t seeing explosive growth. It seems like they are handing it well, better than most. Good for them.

ltbarcly3 2mo ago
They feel a genuine responsibility to avoid the buzzing sound in their head that results from trying to believe and make other people believe they feel a genuine responsibility for people while taking actions that are the polar opposite of anything that you do to someone you feel responsible for purely to increase your own and your investors wealth. It's fine to fire people, and the severance here is very generous. Business leaders who need to feel like they are a generous parent or 'different' are weak and lying to themselves. Finally while the severance is generous and to be applauded, all of the phrasing under the guise of caring about people was very transparently just an excuse to say over and over "we are making money and we aren't doing this because we have to" to his investors, which just rubs it in the face of the people being fired over and over. One final insult I guess.
codegeek 2mo ago
I am a founder/CEO myself (a very small company so I don't have experience of mass layoffs for full disclosure). However, I don't get this explanation. If you feel genuine responsibility for the people, then figure out a way to NOT fire them. Or be honest and admit that the company needs to make more money/cut costs. Trust me, no one wants to hear "we love you so much but we have to fire you and I feel so bad". It just doesn't land. Be honest, be open and be willing to provide a good severance.
- ryandrake 2mo ago

ricardobayes 2mo ago

Appearances still matter, and IMO it will be really ugly if we all decide they don't.

zamadatix 2mo ago

There is no way to fire a lot of people in a way everyone likes, only ways which suck more than others for different people. Whether you think they are dramatic is not one of the sucks they are very concerned with as you're one if the ones who will forget this layoff in a few hours

cogman10 2mo ago
All at once? Sure, no good way. But there are ways to reduce headcount without causing waves. Those include things like simply not backfilling for people that leave the company or who are fired for low performance. Letting a bunch of people go all at once is a sign of poor management and poor planning. Or it's a sign that Patreon wants to go public and ATM the stock market loves layoffs.
- zamadatix 2mo ago
  Not everyone will jump for joy at these options either. Hell, I'm not even sure there is a way to expand headcount that someone won't have issue with. The business planning is just as bad or good regardless the reaction to the announcement though.

danlitt 2mo ago

If we are going to be honest we should be completely honest. "We want to increase our profits and hence we choose to lay people off."

KronisLV 2mo ago
> I am the person responsible for that decision, and I take that with the utmost seriousness. I also somehow didn’t hear that the leadership is taking a pay cut either, if money is so tight.

happytoexplain 2mo ago

What if he actually cares, and this is him being honest? I know it's not usually true, but this is Jack Conte, not Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe he's one of the few CEOs who still has a human brain. I know I would feel legitimately horrible and sympathetic if I had to lay off a bunch of people.

prepend 2mo ago
I don’t buy that he cares. Patreon is profitable. He doesn’t have to fire anyone to continue operations. He just wants more money. If he cared about them as beautiful people, he wouldn’t fire them. It’s one thing if you’re bleeding cash and have to cut. Another when you discover a cheaper way to do things and don’t want to retrain and grow in new ways where you’d need people. Patreon CEO is full of horse apples.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Businesses don't exist in a vacuum. If you discover a cheaper way to do things, and don't do it, a competitor probably will, and you will then find yourself in the "bleeding cash" scenario (or, more likely, starving for cash).
  - happytoexplain 2mo ago
    Generally, but this is also an exaggeration we tell ourselves about the cut-throat world of business. In reality, you don't have to be number one in any given metric to be profitable.

pluc 2mo ago

Because they have to get back to work after. It's a shit leader attitude to admit you just traded humans for profits - you have to keep pretending. On the other end, employees keep pretending they are passionate about X, Y or Z and not just there for the dough. It's a delicate balance.

dodger-dog 2mo ago

Of course the public relations is all spin. Corporations do not have feelings. Individual managers may feel one way or the other. It is likely those feelings are highly rationalized by how the change affects them individually. Will they make more money? Will they take on added duties without an increase in money? Some may wax la philosophie politique at times, but we tend to do that in the abstract when things are at an arms length. At the end of the day, people made a choice between a corporation and a narrow group of stakeholders over employees and the downstream community influence of their buying power, likely a large group and certainly a different group. You could argue in the long run it is better for society for companies to make these decisions, and many times that may actually be the case. But, in this one instance, when you place it all on the scales, they were not doing it to save a company or make its products and services more competitive in the market. There was nothing "existential" about it. They wanted to go from one profit level to a higher profit level for a certain group, and that is just what they did.

keiferski 2mo ago

Because part of being a CEO is having social skills, and doing what you suggested is extremely socially inept. Explaining why layoffs needed to happen, expressing remorse about it, and giving a good severance package is what serious adults with empathy for their employees do. It's also a good way to maintain at least a neutral relationship with everyone you're laying off. Compare that to a company that coldly fires you with minimal severance, and delivers that message via some low-level lackey (not the CEO) – you, as the former employee, want nothing to do with that company ever again.

codegeek 2mo ago
I never said "minimal severance". I am actually saying that give them a great severance but stop with the other BS about "oh how much we love you".

jbellis 2mo ago

Apparently this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but a job isn't an output that companies produce, it's an agreement to compensate an employee in exchange for services, and just as the CEO shouldn't take it personally when one leaves to go work elsewhere, nobody needs to act like it's some kind of invidious social contract violation when the company no longer needs some of those services. In other words: resignation and termination are ordinary exercises of each's right to reallocate its resources. (I am making a normative claim, not a descriptive one; I am aware that that both CEOs and laid-off employees do in fact take it personally at times.)

vladms 2mo ago
I think depends on the culture/country. In the US definitely the agreements are more flexible. In Europe (and probably elsewhere) I feel that the expectation was (at least some years ago) that once you join a company the relation is stronger. Each variation has pluses and minuses, for companies and individuals.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Humans are tribal creatures, and joining a company and working with the same people every day creates bonds, a feeling of loyalty, and feelings of betrayal and unease when told they no longer belong.

Gareth321 2mo ago

> Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ? People expect it and get very angry if such posts do not appear contrite. I share your cynicism and would prefer they just say it like it is, but that doesn't work for most people.

Jcampuzano2 2mo ago

Most of the time I'm convinced its just an attempt to garner sympathy from the general public/outsiders. While obviously not true for all but the vast majority of these executives and C-levels could not name any of the people they are getting rid of in the first place. Most of the time it's an attempt to stifle negative opinions of those reading the layoff announcements. But in the modern day it's getting old because we see a new layoff every day now. Everybody knows we aren't a family, and we're doing this to get paid not for some contrived company mission. I'm convinced with most of these layoff announcements people would take it better if they literally just said we're getting rid of N people for X,Y,Z reasons and called it at that without the presumptuous bullshit.

mattbrewsbytes 2mo ago

You can have cutesy names for employees and a culture with mission statements/purpose, etc. but when it comes down to it, if you're doing layoffs no collection of words is going to appease those that are let go and no collection of words is going to appease those left behind. "Teammates" is probably less cutesy than other companies but still evokes some sort of "we're all in this together" vs. straight up employees when in fact they aren't all in it together, at least not the execs. There was an interview with Jay Leno I saw recently and he was talking about his NBC deal where he was going to be getting $30mil/year but they had to cut staff to do that so he decided to cut his own pay/raise to keep staff. That type of move by someone at the top is rare or never happens with CEOs. I think Nintendo might be the only case I can think of where I heard something like that happening. That type of move evokes an "all in it together" type of team vs. a clear delineation of CEO/executives and employees. The melodrama is performative because they have to maintain the mask/facade that they are "teammates".

worldthruword 2mo ago

> First, the people who work at Patreon are special, beautiful humans, through and through. The energy that our team has for Patreon’s mission is a force of nature. So many wonderful humans are going to lose their jobs today in an especially painful moment and market. I am the person responsible for that decision, and I take that with the utmost seriousness. Reminds me of Ozymandias speech when he says to Dr. Manhattan, that he has personally exprienced the pain of millions of New Yorkers he is about to decimate in the Nuclear attack. In both the Watchmen graphic novel and the 2009 film adaptation, Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt) claims that he deeply feels and absorbs the psychic pain and deaths of the millions of people he kills. He views this immense personal suffering as his own tragic sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.

cush 2mo ago

It sounds like you don't know Jack Conte. This isn't a melodramatic AI written tome... The guy is heartbroken

beej71 2mo ago

Agree. Also, protip: saying "right sizing" makes all your employees want to stab you in the eye.

lenkite 2mo ago

Patreon lost >90% of customers from India and a few other Asian nations since they did not implement credit card 2FA nor implement support for native payment gateways. Had to drop a dozen patreon subscriptions and found several hundreds online were complaining about the same thing. Several creators were puzzled why they had a sudden drop without any feedback. Many folks just shrugged and silently moved onto other mechanisms.