I work nearby their Atlanta office, and about a six months ago I received numerous phone calls and emails from an internal recruiter about a Go developer job in that office. Speaking of fad flame-outs, his pitch kept trying to link Yik Yak to Pokemon Go (i.e. "one out of every eight yaks is about Pokemon!"). Uhh, okay?
I never responded... because I heard that they had shot themselves in the foot with recent app changes, and were dying. Obviously, now I'm glad that I made the right call.
I've seen this happen numerous times in my career, though. I just don't understand the sort of denial that keeps companies in "hire mode", even when their internal metrics must make it obvious that things have turned south.
I worked at a company in sf that went from bumping internal referral bonuses / pitching the employees to push eng friends to apply to layoffs in the span of a month. Including an h1b engineer that had been lured away from another company 3 weeks previously. It is, btw, completely legal to lure people away from jobs knowing there's a good chance you'll have to lay them off in the very near future. CEOs are happy to fuck employees over and we should never forget it.
By their very nature, VC backed companies are likely to get more unpleasant surprises than "normal" companies due to their need for regular large injections of capital from willing investors. Everything can look great until a round of investment falls through or is delayed and suddenly things can become unpleasant very rapidly.
that is definitely not true as a general rule for vc backed companies. this might be applicable to companies that have no business model/non-revenue-generating. but even then, any decent founder can do the basic arithmetic needed to figure out burn and runway
This will be a problem as long as “VC” is synonymous “no business model”, which has been the case since at least the late-90s when you started to see huge valuations based on the number of users without any serious attempt to factor in the probable per-user revenue.
The only thing which seems likely to change that would be more of a cost for failure, since it's otherwise too easy to gamble everything on the small probability of a huge win versus a more attainable decent return, and it makes it harder for well-managed companies since they're competing with the gamblers for users and staff.
> CEOs are happy to fuck employees over and we should never forget it.
Completely unnecessary. Your initial point is a good anecdote, but globalizing it to all CEOs is completely unfair. Also, I reject the "us vs them" mentality of labor vs management. That sort of sentiment causes more trouble than it's worth.
It's cute you "reject" it, but the people who fire and the people who are fired do not play for the same team. Or if you prefer, the people who get 10-40% of a company and the people who get 0.2%.
I never responded... because I heard that they had shot themselves in the foot with recent app changes, and were dying. Obviously, now I'm glad that I made the right call.
I've seen this happen numerous times in my career, though. I just don't understand the sort of denial that keeps companies in "hire mode", even when their internal metrics must make it obvious that things have turned south.