[alanctgardner2]

Can anyone from the Bay Area comment on the frequency of these mass firings among small companies? I'd never heard of it until recently, but I've seen a couple now - at least this one seems to make sense, since there's a change in direction. I've seen others which were wholesale re-orgs seemingly for the hell of it.

[michaelochurch]

Not from the Bay Area.

I would much rather a startup do an announced layoff than the more common thing, which is to write phony PIPs and make it look like performance-based firings. A layoff, even when it's the right thing, is an admission of a business problem and a signal that the company won't be hiring for a while. But evil startups use "silent layoffs" to save their image ("we've never had a layoff") at the expense of those let go.

I do wonder what kind of backstory there was if they were afraid of people trashing the office. Usually people are pretty civilized when they are laid off-- especially if there's a severance, which would be jeopardized by bad behavior (if you vandalize the office, you get zero because the "severance" is charges not being pressed). Being laid off sucks, but it's not worth retaliating.

Constant re-orgs in small companies, for what it's worth, don't seem to be a new thing either.

[danso]

In terms of having HR supervise the office firings...perhaps it had something to do with the fact that SF was a satellite office and may have had younger/less-tenured employees, and that the engineers being fired were pretty much the whole team. It's a different mentality if you get fired and there's no one else at the office to pick up your slack, and, if you're like the stereotypical engineer in SF with plenty of other job opportunities.

Get a pack of such people with "little to lose" and otherwise reasonable people may be unreasonable in these circumstances.

[follower]

> I do wonder what kind of backstory there was if they were afraid of people trashing the office.

It doesn't say nice things about the company if they thought laying off a whole office via a conference call was a good idea to start with.

[hack_edu]

The entire SF office for Beatport was hardly 18 months old. I've been told it was built as a small satellite office strictly to get SF-quality talent for specific promotional projects, since they couldn't get enough in Denver.

Thank goodness I declined that offer!