It's really disappointing to see the trajectory that Brex is on. I was extremely enthusiastic about their product, they had the best business banking/credit/expense tracking in the industry. I was a very happy customer, until they decided they would only chase SV startup unicorns as their customers, and terminated my account. Brex is very much a cautionary tale for other startups.
They lied (or did not clearly inform their sales people) about their AWS credit promotion a few years ago which really annoyed me when they were trying to sell us. Went back to the safe embrace of SVB but I guess that didn't really play out well. As a startup I desperately want to see more credit card companies willing to offer cards to founders without ridiculous personal guarantees, so I hope they figure it out.
I have used SVB in the past as well, for my first startup. They were solidly OK. This is still an area ripe for disruption IMO, old Brex filled the niche but for some reason we just can't do payments and banking correctly in the US. India has UPI for instance, and even foreigners can avail themselves of this facility.
As an SVB customer, how bad was it? Did you have any delays or other issues accessing your money? Did service or perks change a lot after the takeover?
They let us get our cash out within a few days IIRC, and we switched to a different bank (was right after we were acquired so kind of a different situation). I would say there's still a large gap in the market SVB filled but I am not using them for my new company yet so can't compare before/after.
I like that they shared publicly the severance package (I missed that in a company before, the severance package was only available to the ones laid off, and you wouldn't even know if you got the same as your colleagues).
And the package itself seems alright too (and sensible, for example: the laid off can keep their laptops. What would company do with almost 300 extra laptops?). Time of the lay off also not too bad (firing people in November/December is really uncool).
All in all, not TOO bad from what I can see in the public post.
Oh, and they also said how many people first, not how many percent, which suggest they think about their human resources as actual individuals.
The laptop thing is usually less about clawing back property and more about preventing the laptop, potentially with customer PII and source code and other stuff on it, ending up sold on ebay or left laying around as a personal device to be eventually lost at an airport 3 years later, and so on. They take them back, wipe them, then either resell them to a reseller or reissue them to other employees etc.
If they are managed devices (which I hope they are at a fintech company), it should be trivial to remote wipe them before removing MDM from them to enable personal use/resale etc.
As I understand it, it's a question of insurance. Either way, it's very common in larger companies to either reissue or physically destroy machines after an employee leaves.
i mean, you can get the information about getting laid off from email on the phone or another computer. then not connect it and download what you need then reinstall it
You can do everything you mentioned irrespective of whether you are allowed to keep the device or not (before it's physically collected by you former employer, which can take a few days).
Indeed, the financial services firm I contribute at is required to remotely lock and wipe laptops when offboarding for compliance purposes, and that is somewhat consistent with the other FIs I’ve seen the inside of. How effective this is depends on an org's MDM story (people, process, controls).
I've been on both sides of the layoff discussions all too many times over the years. Even at the most disorganized or chaotic places, I've never seen the severance packages be anything other than a set formula.
That formula might consider location, level, tenure, and other relevant factors, but I don't think I've ever seen a case where it was "I like Alice more than Bob, so Alice gets more..."
Those equations intersect at 4 years of tenure. Brex was founded only 7 years ago, so most affected employees would presumably make out better with 8 + 2 * N than with 4 * N.
Looking at that list 6 months of COBRA is short, really short. In this job-search environment your COBRA is going to run out well before you could find your next job.
When I was laid off from Oracle in 2012 I got 18 months of COBRA. That sounds must more reasonable.
It does depend on income because the lower prices are due to tax credits, but this early in the year these folks should have a low estimated income. I recon you had a big estimated income that year? I had a similar issue where the last few months I was paying 1500 for marketplace insurance, it’s only in the new year I’m paying less.
I see. I guess different strokes for different folks.
For me, if my job or project is doomed, and my employer knows, I will rather they tell me immediately so I can start figuring out solutions ASAP.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the holidays. The last thing I will want is to come back from a holiday in Portugal, spirits high, year plans made, but only to be told I am fired.
I think it depends on the amount of severance you receive. A layoff happening in November/December with enough severance to cover what would've been the employee's wages/salary through February or beyond is kind of ideal; that way I'd get to spend the holidays as, well, holidays. Otherwise, I'd prefer it to be after the holidays, when businesses are ramping back up into normal operations and therefore I can reasonably hope for a faster turnaround time (and thus less of my own savings drained).
This time I got laid off it was the latter (last week), and while it's still stressful, I vastly prefer it over the last time I lost my job (right after Thanksgiving, with no severance).
The amount of time you have after you are fired is the same. If you are fired later, you get paid for a month or two AND are stress free with your family during the holidays.
Of course. However, the amount of time spent thinking consciously or subconsciously on a doomed project is minimized. The amount of time spent making decisions predicated on having the same job also. I can also savage any expensive holiday plans I made.
The keyword for me is the employer should let me know ASAP when something is doomed.
Again, this stress-free holiday with family is not a problem for me. I will rather be real about the situation than have my employer hide it for a month. They could give me an extra month of severance instead :).
Edit: I might be a minority on the earlier take.
I think the other argument that would affect other people is: these things always leak through gossip. When you hear of an imminent layoff and you don’t know if you will be included, it’s the worst type of stress.
"Henrique and I are responsible for the decisions that led us here, and seeing so many talented folks go through this experience is never what you hope for as a founder."
I guess this is what happens 1.5 years later when you decide to kick all LLCs off from using your platform and they all go to use your competitors instead
Tone of this is just awful, reads like he's saying they've laid off a bunch of people who were slowing us down, and sort of ends it by saying how excited he is about the business now they've been let go...
It seems like companies are really tightening the screws further this year. When I got into this industry I figured the good times would roll for about 10 years, and then it would be about time for another career change. "Make hay while the sun is shining", as they say. I'm right around that 10th year, and I think that prediction was accurate.
Self-employed tradesman pays as much on a per-hour basis as contract dev work and doesn't have to compete with a million people in developing countries willing to work for $20/hr. The project management parts from software development aren't too different either -- it's all tasks, coordinating stakeholders, etc.
That's my angle, but there are plenty of other fields too: healthcare (nurses make as much as most SWEs and can live anywhere in the country), government, certain employee tradesmen (electrician, etc.), basically anything that requires some sort of license or training. Life is long, spending a couple years to get 10+ years of good returns is a wise investment.
I've never been to the Bay Area, so what I'm about to say may not apply, but look in any middle-class neighborhood: maybe 5% of the people are in tech -- what is everyone else doing? The above is a sampling of careers that have provided people in my neighborhood a comfortable American Dream style of life.
I want to call this out because I see this advice a lot (and it's also my backup plan).
Trade work can be a fantastic way to earn a living, but it is HARD work. It will break your body if you do it for your whole life. There is a reason plenty of people jumped to office work the first chance they got.
Don't go into the trades blind, take care of your body, or you'll be like my grandpa and need help uncurling your fingers if you fall asleep making a fist.
> but look in any middle-class neighborhood: maybe 5% of the people are in tech -- what is everyone else doing?
This comment is why I love HN. Once you sort through all the kiddos who don't know anything about anything, you get golden nuggets like this.
In my middle (almost upper-middle) class neighborhood we have a bunch of doctors and psychologists, a bunch of lawyers, a few retired professionals, a couple professors and.... me in tech.
>I've never been to the Bay Area, so what I'm about to say may not apply,
This is honestly where it is hitting. When I moved to the bay area ~10years ago I asked myself 'why are they paying me usd500k to move here when I could just work from my home country for a fraction of that'.
Meanwhile in my home country there's a tech boom. In fact my current big faang company is hiring there and closing jobs here.
Can't say I'm surprised except that it took this long for the realization that you don't need to have your staff move to the bay area and thus you don't need to pay bay area wages.
That’s the reality in the US I think, then. Still, I am not convinced those jobs can make you earn reliably more than a software developer. Maybe equally well, but more? And that’s already discounting jobs at FAANG and Brex, that much more than the rest.
I live in the Brazil, currently earning ~USD50/hour (at a US company) as a web developer. Not as a contract dev though, I prefer to be employed by a company.
Here, neither nurse nor tradesman are well paid jobs, quite the contrary.
Rich neighborhoods here have: doctors, lawyers, medium company owners, big company executives.
None of them is possible to get to that level of paying within 10 years (medicine is 8 years at least only to have a specialization). An exception might be entrepreneurs, but there is a lot of luck involved.
This chain and this comment is one of the best things I've read on here in years. It reminded me that a lot of community colleges have workforce programs that I need to look into: https://www.nvcc.edu/academics/programs/index.html
Really? I would have assumed that attorney is one of those jobs that is going to be hugely disrupted by AI. Should people new to the field bother if they aren't going to be top X% (5? 10?)?
Actual legal work, as opposed to legal-adjacent tasks, will be the last to be disrupted by AI, at least so long as AI means LLM. Law is simply too complicated to rely on something that doesn't have the ability to understand.
Doc review staff will be effectively eliminated...but they're already being eliminated by non-AI technology, so AI will just be the last straw.
It’s not even the complicated part, these are fields where people still use fax machines and wouldn’t use teleconferencing until they were dragged kicking and screaming through COVID (And even then, lots of courts were like, nah, we’ll just close court for a year, too bad for you)
Free market dynamics don’t apply. Healthcare is the same way because it’s controlled by an old guard backed up by the force of law. There is no way to disrupt because the system is rigged.
Quality is determined by a combination of network, reputation, and results, not your Alma mater. Search for a securities or criminal defense attorney, ask around, see if where they got their diploma plays into the referrals you get.
Here I am the one to bring up AI, ugh. I get a sense that, of all things, LLM's actually encroach on legal professions the most (aside from copywriters). But this is from an outside perspective. Any insights?
If blockchain didn’t replace the law, neither is a hallucinating robot in the near term. Has to pass legal muster, not techbro bar. I say this as someone deeply involved in GRC in finance where a component of my work is working on improving LLM guardrails for knowledge management.
Focus on a niche, create a funnel, be very good at that niche, scale horizontally.
EDIT: Picked attorney because you have to be licensed to practice law, creating a barrier to the equivalent of code bootcamps. My apologies if the model around the idea wasn't clear, I will do better!
The license is the key, as a barrier to entry. Medicine is very high and takes a lot of time but pretty impenetrable. Law is cheaper for the time and money. What else would have this property?
To be fair, everyone is laying off. Whatever paid peanuts or millions. Hopefully, the devs who got the bigger piece of the cake stashed some under the mattress.
At some point (not sure if this is still the case) you could choose between all salary or a mix of salary and options. The total comp in either case was ~450k for a senior dev. So we are talking Netflix-level salaries for a startup.
> Waiver of the one-year equity cliff for those who haven’t reached theirs yet.
That's nice, however I find it "unfair" that if you are offered X RSUs as part of your first year comp but they vest over 4 years then if you get laid off you lose them even if you already "worked" for them. My experience losing 40k worth of RSUs at my first job has certainly soured equity compensation in my eyes.
Given how it sounds like Brex is doing, they're likely going to need to cut again. This isn't deep enough to really solve any systemic or structural problems. It will likely work though if the product vision and execution are on point and they just need more runway/less bloat.
I have seen them do so in the past. But they need to be very targeted similar to surgery. There's some tumor in the company and you need to identify what that is and remove all of it.
> increasing in-person collaboration in our hubs, and concentrating the time zones in which we operate.
> With our focus on financial software and high-quality growth, we grew gross profit by 75%+ last year. While we're proud of those accomplishments, we still have a way to go to ensure high-velocity growth and profitability for years to come
> increasing in-person collaboration in our hubs, and concentrating the time zones in which we operate
Massive turn-around since Brex declared themselves to be remote-first and said things like "Yes, employees can relocate permanently with Brex’s transition to remote-first" https://www.brex.com/journal/remote-first-at-brex
If true, this is a good sign for the future of the company, as it means that their revenue metrics are fine.
The problem is that they are simply spending too much on activities not related to the business. For tech companies, that usually means spending too much money on "tech" that isn't actually relevant to the revenue-generating business, especially now that the section 174 changes have eliminated the preferential treatment of software R&D.
I wonder what the revenue of their customers looks like. They have to have a ton of revenue from other startups that themselves are in tenuous financial positions.
From the employee's perspective, it definitely sucks though. I went through a layoff this year and it took me a lot longer than I anticipated to get another job.
As an aside, it's funny (not ha-ha funny) watching these things sweep through in waves; they're basically fashion. For a while, we needed to "put the structure in place to be able to scale" and it was all about adding more levels of hierarchy. Now we're flattening the org chart and managers are expected to do everyone's job at once. Today everyone needs to own the product vision. Tomorrow you need to focus on execution and stop stepping on product management's toes. Be more hands-on. Now stop micromanaging. We're Agile. We can't keep changing the plan. Promote from within; the best leaders start in the trenches. We need professionals with outside perspective, so we're filling that role with some guy from Oracle.
Leveraging synergies to provide accelerated experience in rapidly changing customer marketplace to become thoughtiest of all thought leaders...blah..blah..
My response will just be one data point, so take it with a grain of salt and do your own research.
Job applications to interview rates are _way_ down, like 5% or less. Some job posts will likely feel like you sent your job application into a black hole and it will never be seen by anyone or get any response at all. I'd imagine use of "AI" job application screening services have greatly increased and HR departments are likely screening application even harder than before.
Most jobs posted are senior/staff level only, rarely do you see a non-senior posting. But still you might see an non-senior job posted here and there.
People I know did find jobs after layoffs in 2023, but rather than in weeks it was months and likely, but I'm not 100% certain, for lower pay (all people I know where in different countries, but working for US companies). Other companies have hiring freezes and some seem to (almost) not have hired at all in 2023.
One trend I've noticed is job postings by US companies in South America (Brazil for eg.), Mexico, Eastern Europe, India are _way_ up. Interpret that as you will.
Venture funds are likely scaling their investments into companies back, especially non-AI companies, so venture funded companies that were in growth month either tried their best to cut costs (no hiring, layoffs) and shift to profit/revenue mode or shut down. Publicly traded companies seem to have shifted to increasing their share prices using similar tactics.
So, currently bleak, compared to pre-covid to 2021, but might be possible to still find something with a lot of persistence. Not an ideal situation for anyone looking currently, unless you have some special connections or are skilled in AI work etc.
The CFO position is generally mandated by law in most states, though it can be filled by another officer such as the CEO (i.e., it doesn't need to be its own position).
However, it is generally considered a red flag for a large company to have these positions filled by the same individual (unless the company is a subsidiary of an even bigger company, in which case the CFO role in the subsidiary may be a pro forma position).
> The CFO position is generally mandated by law in most states, though it can be filled by another officer such as the CEO (i.e., it doesn't need to be its own position).
It's not clear to me how you would have a company of this size without a CTO or CFO. I'm interested in why your expectation is that the roles themselves would be eliminated, versus bringing in people who might perform better?
FTA:
> We’re flattening our org structure and reducing layers of management. Our goal is for leaders to operate closer to the metal, less siloed and more functionally, focused on few cross-company priorities. These changes begin with the leadership team and cascade across the org:
What a terrible culture, dunking on people management, calling it meaningless
And no, I don't want the Director of AI to explain react component rendering to me, it sounds like they are grooming a generation of super-micromanaging executives. Maybe the CTO was kicked out after he failed to complete 3 back to back leetcode hards
> it sounds like they are grooming a generation of super-micromanaging executives
My read from the linked example was the Director built a tool outside of the critical path that was a quality of life (performance) improvement. This is a prime example of code that leaders should be writing - the team isn’t blocked by them, they can put it down at any time, they maintain familiarity with the tools and codebase (both the good and the bad), and if it lands then the team is uplifted.
A leader should know how to influence his org within a 3 minute conversation to do this. The fact he stopped his Director of AI work to do this means their org is broken - or worse they have no influence over it
If a leader doesn't understand the underlying role (at least somewhat) - they can't reason about it. The best people managers I had were good at that skill and took it seriously, but also had a technical understanding of the role.
I think it's relatively common for bad people to get hired to these management roles because the skill can be harder to evaluate than straight engineering. Hire enough of this kind of person and your company dies. It's also why managers get a bad reputation generally - good managers/team leads are excellent, bad ones are neutral at best.
