Comment by gregoryl

It is so hard to fathom that a leader trusted with millions of dollars of other people's money can be so disengaged from recruiting as to not see a hard wall of cash crunch, months if not years ahead.

You can't assume fundraising will always go swimmingly. You have to always be in survival mode, and if that means not hiring aggressively, then you put on the breaks until the money comes in .

Either as a leader you are clueless about your business cash needs, you are clueless about risk management, or you are clueless about the market, all of which make you not a suitable leader for a long-term company.

>I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.

Oh, to be young and idealistic again! So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?

> I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.

I'm off the mindset that employment should be voluntary: both by the employer and the employee. It makes employers reluctant to hire if they know they can't get rid of people again.

(I'm a socialist at heart and think it'd be pretty nice for the government to take care of people who lost their jobs. Just tax the companies a little more!)

There is nothing to solve - you are in the game of capitalism (the American Edition) and the job is to maximise shareholder value. They are paid big bucks because they only work for that without empathy/cruelty or such emotions. The only way to solve is to change the game but that's next to impossible because most powerful players like it that way and will turn on anyone trying to change their fattening ways.

The best part is that the pawns keep getting sacrificed and do nothing to change it; not only that, they refuse to support anyone trying to change the game to make their lives better. It's amazing.

I've worked at a couple consultancies who played themselves by investing too heavily in one or two customers.

Once a single customer is 1/3 of your revenue they can start extracting considerations from you that may not be what your employees thought they signed up for. It's a good way to end up being a body shop. I don't have a philosophical problem with body shops per se, it's just that I don't want to work for one, so I pick places that should know better, but sometimes don't.

It can also be problematic if 2 customers account for 45% of your revenue and they both get the same idea, which can happen particularly when the market shifts. You have no way to call their bluff and move enough people to other projects to make it stick.

>The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job)

You know what I absolutely hate about this take? It ignores my shared experience I've had with others (IE, its not just me). I've worked in this industry a long time. So I've inevitably worked for places that ran into financial trouble. In multiple of those cases, it could have been prevented if upper management actually listened to what those of us developing the product had to say about shifting customer behaviors and expectations, that what we were seeing was different from what they were trying to sell and have us develop. It always ended in disaster.

They refused to listen, but never paid the price for that failure, my colleagues did and in one instance, I was on the receiving end of a layoff along with others as well.

That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't know what's been going on for ~6 months or so that is relevant.

Mullenweg lost his mind and attacked a competitor to Wordpress hosting (WP Engine) and kept doubling down and only served to demonstrate how much of an unhinged asshole he was.

Along the way he pissed off the Wordpress community - the worry was that if anyone else pissed him off (which could include he'd accuse them of using the Wordpress name or even "WP", even if it was descriptive (which is entirely permitted use of a trademarked name) and run up a bunch of legal expenses for them.

Angry-at-the-world blog post after blog post doubling down over and over. Taunting people as he banned them from the Wordpress slack, that sort of stuff. Then he blocked WP Engine from accessing the Wordpress.org plugin and theme registries which meant a huge number of sites couldn't update plugins or themes.

Then he announced Automattic was going to cut back engineering hours to (if I remember right) one full time staffer. One person to keep up with security updates and bugfixes of a very complicated piece of software used by a lot of organization.

Incredibly childish and thoroughly demonstrated to the world that he was unsuited for leading a company and being the sole person almost completely in charge of a piece of software used by a 20-30% of the websites in the world.

This was absolutely foreseeable, especially when he cut back Automattic's engineering to 40hr/week.

I advised a client a few weeks into the drama to at least keep in the back of their minds that they might have to migrate at some point as "the CEO of the company is off his rocker, they probably will start to struggle with security updates, and the company may go out of business."