imagine seeing a site like bandcamp and having your goal being to take it over and kick people out. literally so psychopathic yet it's thought of as 'smart business' in our society
Capitalism is why we can't have nice things.
Nice things are over designed and built, adequate things are most profitable.
Man, techworkers are really into getting laid off huh?
Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?
Funding is drying up due to high interest rates. That’s why these kinda of layoffs happen more frequently right now.
Also, everyone’s doing it so it’s harder for an individual company to be vilified for it. They get to blame it on “market forces”
Funding drying up is real, but if you see an established profit making company doing it, just remember that whenever they do layoffs, share prices rise. The execs get big bonuses for share prices, so sacrificing employees for those bonuses is worth it to them because they are parasites on society.
The whole stock market system is parasitic.
The current system is because it has incentives for short term profiteering over steady long term profits.
There could be tax reforms to more tax capital gains for stocks held for short periods of time and discounts for stocks sold after longer periods.
This wouldn't be a magic fix but a good first step.
Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn't experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.
It's obscene that we haven't banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn't be legal to sell somebody else's property that they've loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.
That still won't change the economy from exploiting workers to give value to people who've done no work at all.
It's fraudulent as fuck. Hedge funds who are also market makers (oh, sure, they claim to be 'separate' yet repeatedly get fined for their behaviour, all while not admitting fault of course). Definitely no conflict of interest there. That's before we even get into 'dark pools': https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dark-pool.asp
When a majority of trades for many companies are conducted with zero oversight, that allows bad actors to manipulate the markets. It's madness to me that this parallel system is allowed to exist. I just picked AAPL at random, 43% of trades were made 'off-exchange' yesterday. ~22m shares traded with zero price action or regulation.
But but but there's not zero oversight, they're self-regulated which always works! 🤡
For a stock to go up, the company has to make more profit.
To make more profit, they need to pay their workers less than the value of the goods or services produced.
Therefore, the stock price is a measure of how well a company can exploit its workers.
because of the eternal growth principle of capitalism. Objectively there is a point that a company cannot grow anymore. For example there cannot be infinite bands that will constantly enter bandcamp to increase their numbers. At that point the company holders find different paths, like temporarily increasing numbers by reducing the number of employees. In periods of recession and uncertainty this has a domino effect.
Around COVID tech gained a lot of popularity and especially stuff like AI/ML became the new trend, so tech companies starting hiring insane amounts of people. In the past year though companies have started realizing "oh shit, we hired way too many people" and started laying off employees (usually the most expensive/highest paid, or the most "useless" i.e. non-tech positions).
It's not really all that bad for juniors especially because now they get a big boost in their opportunities for work, especially ones that worked at the big companies that overhired a ton like Meta, because they can say "I worked for Facebook/Google/JP Morgan" or whatever the hell on there resume, which will make you EXTREMELY attractive to employers and have your application stand out almost anywhere.
At least for software development, you're kind of expected to be hopping jobs a lot because that's the only way you're really going to get more benefits and higher pay (unless you get really lucky and find a company that actually cares about retaining current employees! or you become self-employed which is probably even harder). There's practically an infinite number of jobs, many good ones, in the sphere because of how valuable tech is in the modern world, so you don't have to worry about not being able to find a position when you get some experience. That's why many companies will hire people who barely can even program, so long as they can write "hello world" in JS...
Of course there are other reasons, like outsourcing work, or the company just wanting more profit short-term, or feeling like they don't "need" as many employees since the tools for the job and the number&quality of applicants have gotten better...
this is incredibly inaccurate. we just hired for a single position and got well over 250 applicants. a junior dev friend of mine says he and none of his friends can find work. with all the layoffs tech jobs are just very scarce right now.
Fully agree. I work at a big tech company, and we've had experienced software engineers really struggle to find work, even in tech hubs like London, Barcelona, NYC, etc. We've also had apprentices leave after 4+ years without a return offer, only to find unemployment awaiting them.
Depends on where you are applying, what I said won't apply in every single municipality of course.
Prospect hire: “I worked for Facebook”
Recruiter: “So did the other 400 applicants, we don't care. How much humiliation and misery wages are you capable of taking before having a medical crisis? That's the only metric we care about.”
Now that "everyone" works from home, a lot of companies figure it cost a lot less to hire Indians to do that than Americans.
Did work from home start 30+ years ago? Because that is when companies started offshoring jobs on mass.
This isn't accurate. Outsourcing tech jobs has been a thing since the 90s. It rarely works at scale which is why it never stuck around. It's just as risky today as it was back then.
Wrong timezone, wrong first language, and a corporate culture of fake-it-till-you-make-it-and-keep-faking-it-even-after-everything-failed makes that way harder than it seems at a glance. I've worked with a lot of great Indian developers, but those great Indian developers weren't working at Satyam and the like.
I mean, to me the middle-ground is obvious. Don't outsource to India. Just outsource to Pittsburgh. Still cheaper than hiring Silicon Valley people, only 3 hours time-shift, and Yinzers speak something pretty close to English.
Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?
It's cyclical and very well understood at this point.
A business will hire a bunch of people to meet demand and then lay them off to make the company's earnings look better the following quarter.
At this point, I have no sympathy for anyone targeted by these layoffs if they work for a company that has been known to do them. Real 'leopards ate my face', vibes.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with their efforts to unionize /s
Fuck Epic games. And TBH, fuck the assholes at Bandcamp who accepted the offer.
Epic sold it, did anybody here open the article? Its the line under the title...
I love my job and can’t picture myself in another career but it does suck after being told that this field was the most stable career
Who told you that? AFAIK that was definitely never true about computer tech jobs.
Can vouch, everyone told me growing up that computer jobs were a safe and stable choice because "everyone needs computers."
That may be true with IT departments but maybe not as necessarily for developers
I agree, but when most of my "elders" growing up believed computers to be this magical voodoo money printer box that just happens to go on facebook, It's not suprising they believed any job relating to a computer was safe and stable.
It’s true to an extent. It largely depends on what exactly you do with the compiuters. Devs are the easiest to layoff because there are a ton of them and a lot of fresh graduates are programmers. If you’re in a more specialized field in tech, you have pretty good job security.
Do not question the elders of the internet.
IT support by staff like sysadmins can hardly be replaced in the near future.
I don't see AI being able to setup a whole environment itself.
Creative jobs on the other hand...
Developers are often the ones setting up the environments now via things like Terraform. IT is still needed for on-prem work though.
That's what cloud services are for.
And who sets up those?
If sysadmin jobs are killed for on premise at companies at the very least they will be needed for datacenter work.
Songtradr’s statement also confirmed that its purchase of Bandcamp had been completed, but it did not confirm if it would voluntarily recognize Bandcamp’s union that employees won earlier this year, despite pressure from employees and the Bandcamp community.
RIP Bandcamp
I really hope not ... one of the very few music stores that are not in the business of screwing customers or artists, or both
That is unfortunate, bandcamp is the main place that my fans get my music from.
lol, why'd they buy them then?
I imagine it's because they wanted more music for Fortnite events. Probably wanted that Rocket League soundtrack clout
What are you talking about?
Epic isn’t the one laying people off, the owner of band camp is
I'm hypothesizing as to why epic bought it to begin with
Epic sold it, read the article. Its literally the subtitle
If you would have read the more than the subtitle, you would know that it was indeed Epic who did this.
Additionally they should have read the comment I was responding to
They had more money than sense. Now they have no more money and Bandcamp wasn't ever profitable.
Wasn't this pretty recent? Did they buy the company just to lay people off??
Buying and "streamlining" is a pretty common practice, yeah. Epic Songtradr bought them for the tech and userbase, not for their employees.
The layoffs are related to the sale of Bandcamp to Songtradr.
I remember hearing that Harmonix was also acquired by Epic Games and there was a lot of speculation of a collaboration to reboot Rock Band using the Bandcamp library.
One of the lead developers at Harmonix was asked about this on Reddit and they only replied with an emphatic "No."
Seeing this now brings the bigger picture into focus.
Epic is literally the worst... worse than EA back in their prime of toxicity.
It's not Epic doing this, but Songtradr, which is the company that purchased Bandcamp from Epic.
Almost the worst. That still belongs to Embracer, but Epic isn't far off. But Epic can't be attributed for this fail since they had sold Bandcamp off already.
One of the worst tech labor years ever continues with the news that roughly half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off.
Epic Games bought the indie music platform back in 2022 for an undisclosed amount before selling it barely a year later.
Late last month, Epic Games laid off 16 percent of its workforce, or 830 employees, due to what CEO Tim Sweeney described as overspending.
Epic also revealed that it would sell the Bandcamp business to California-based music licensing company Songtradr.
Employees who did not receive offers from Songtradr were notified today and will be eligible for severance.
In an email to The Verge, Songtradr confirmed that 50 percent of Bandcamp employees have been extended offers to join Songtradr and reaffirmed from a previous statement the company’s commitment to keeping the Bandcamp experience the same.
The original article contains 212 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
And here I am, just about ready to publish my new EP. Any alternatives to Bandcamp out there?
imagine seeing a site like bandcamp and having your goal being to take it over and kick people out. literally so psychopathic yet it's thought of as 'smart business' in our society
Capitalism is why we can't have nice things.
Nice things are over designed and built, adequate things are most profitable.
fuck capitalism
*he said from his $1000 iphone.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat
wow. owned.
Look at this guy over here with adequate things, what are they too good for our normal level of trash?
*typed on an iphone
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat
Ah right I forgot, socialism is when no phone
Capitalism! Exploited by greedy leeches in a society indoctrinated to do nothing about it!
its called enshitification, bleed it dry and throw it away, cuz its more profitable to just make a new one.
enshitification has nothing to do with it. This is just plain definition of capitalism.
Enshitification is the new buzzword people love to use in any example of companies being horrible regardless of if it’s correct or not.
i know right? It is very funny because somebody jumps in in an attitude "let me tell you what it is" and they just spit a buzzword wrongly used
Probably a good time to go and download copies of everything I have on there..
I don't think I have the room for everything I bought on there... shit.
That's always a good idea.
There's a plug-in that automates the process: Batchcamp for chrome and I can't remember the Firefox one atm.
There's a Batchcamp for Firefox.
Also Bandcamp Streamer, Bandcamp Enhancement Suite and Bandcamp Collector.
Man, techworkers are really into getting laid off huh?
Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?
Funding is drying up due to high interest rates. That’s why these kinda of layoffs happen more frequently right now.
Also, everyone’s doing it so it’s harder for an individual company to be vilified for it. They get to blame it on “market forces”
Funding drying up is real, but if you see an established profit making company doing it, just remember that whenever they do layoffs, share prices rise. The execs get big bonuses for share prices, so sacrificing employees for those bonuses is worth it to them because they are parasites on society.
The whole stock market system is parasitic.
The current system is because it has incentives for short term profiteering over steady long term profits.
There could be tax reforms to more tax capital gains for stocks held for short periods of time and discounts for stocks sold after longer periods.
This wouldn't be a magic fix but a good first step.
Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn't experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.
It's obscene that we haven't banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn't be legal to sell somebody else's property that they've loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.
That still won't change the economy from exploiting workers to give value to people who've done no work at all.
It's fraudulent as fuck. Hedge funds who are also market makers (oh, sure, they claim to be 'separate' yet repeatedly get fined for their behaviour, all while not admitting fault of course). Definitely no conflict of interest there. That's before we even get into 'dark pools': https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dark-pool.asp
When a majority of trades for many companies are conducted with zero oversight, that allows bad actors to manipulate the markets. It's madness to me that this parallel system is allowed to exist. I just picked AAPL at random, 43% of trades were made 'off-exchange' yesterday. ~22m shares traded with zero price action or regulation.
https://chartexchange.com/symbol/nasdaq-aapl/exchange-volume/
But but but there's not zero oversight, they're self-regulated which always works! 🤡
For a stock to go up, the company has to make more profit.
To make more profit, they need to pay their workers less than the value of the goods or services produced.
Therefore, the stock price is a measure of how well a company can exploit its workers.
because of the eternal growth principle of capitalism. Objectively there is a point that a company cannot grow anymore. For example there cannot be infinite bands that will constantly enter bandcamp to increase their numbers. At that point the company holders find different paths, like temporarily increasing numbers by reducing the number of employees. In periods of recession and uncertainty this has a domino effect.
Around COVID tech gained a lot of popularity and especially stuff like AI/ML became the new trend, so tech companies starting hiring insane amounts of people. In the past year though companies have started realizing "oh shit, we hired way too many people" and started laying off employees (usually the most expensive/highest paid, or the most "useless" i.e. non-tech positions).
It's not really all that bad for juniors especially because now they get a big boost in their opportunities for work, especially ones that worked at the big companies that overhired a ton like Meta, because they can say "I worked for Facebook/Google/JP Morgan" or whatever the hell on there resume, which will make you EXTREMELY attractive to employers and have your application stand out almost anywhere.
At least for software development, you're kind of expected to be hopping jobs a lot because that's the only way you're really going to get more benefits and higher pay (unless you get really lucky and find a company that actually cares about retaining current employees! or you become self-employed which is probably even harder). There's practically an infinite number of jobs, many good ones, in the sphere because of how valuable tech is in the modern world, so you don't have to worry about not being able to find a position when you get some experience. That's why many companies will hire people who barely can even program, so long as they can write "hello world" in JS...
Of course there are other reasons, like outsourcing work, or the company just wanting more profit short-term, or feeling like they don't "need" as many employees since the tools for the job and the number&quality of applicants have gotten better...
this is incredibly inaccurate. we just hired for a single position and got well over 250 applicants. a junior dev friend of mine says he and none of his friends can find work. with all the layoffs tech jobs are just very scarce right now.
Fully agree. I work at a big tech company, and we've had experienced software engineers really struggle to find work, even in tech hubs like London, Barcelona, NYC, etc. We've also had apprentices leave after 4+ years without a return offer, only to find unemployment awaiting them.
Depends on where you are applying, what I said won't apply in every single municipality of course.
Prospect hire: “I worked for Facebook”
Recruiter: “So did the other 400 applicants, we don't care. How much humiliation and misery wages are you capable of taking before having a medical crisis? That's the only metric we care about.”
Now that "everyone" works from home, a lot of companies figure it cost a lot less to hire Indians to do that than Americans.
Did work from home start 30+ years ago? Because that is when companies started offshoring jobs on mass.
This isn't accurate. Outsourcing tech jobs has been a thing since the 90s. It rarely works at scale which is why it never stuck around. It's just as risky today as it was back then.
Wrong timezone, wrong first language, and a corporate culture of fake-it-till-you-make-it-and-keep-faking-it-even-after-everything-failed makes that way harder than it seems at a glance. I've worked with a lot of great Indian developers, but those great Indian developers weren't working at Satyam and the like.
I mean, to me the middle-ground is obvious. Don't outsource to India. Just outsource to Pittsburgh. Still cheaper than hiring Silicon Valley people, only 3 hours time-shift, and Yinzers speak something pretty close to English.
It's cyclical and very well understood at this point.
A business will hire a bunch of people to meet demand and then lay them off to make the company's earnings look better the following quarter.
At this point, I have no sympathy for anyone targeted by these layoffs if they work for a company that has been known to do them. Real 'leopards ate my face', vibes.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with their efforts to unionize /s
Fuck Epic games. And TBH, fuck the assholes at Bandcamp who accepted the offer.
Epic sold it, did anybody here open the article? Its the line under the title...
I love my job and can’t picture myself in another career but it does suck after being told that this field was the most stable career
Who told you that? AFAIK that was definitely never true about computer tech jobs.
Can vouch, everyone told me growing up that computer jobs were a safe and stable choice because "everyone needs computers."
That may be true with IT departments but maybe not as necessarily for developers
I agree, but when most of my "elders" growing up believed computers to be this magical voodoo money printer box that just happens to go on facebook, It's not suprising they believed any job relating to a computer was safe and stable.
It’s true to an extent. It largely depends on what exactly you do with the compiuters. Devs are the easiest to layoff because there are a ton of them and a lot of fresh graduates are programmers. If you’re in a more specialized field in tech, you have pretty good job security.
Do not question the elders of the internet.
IT support by staff like sysadmins can hardly be replaced in the near future.
I don't see AI being able to setup a whole environment itself.
Creative jobs on the other hand...
Developers are often the ones setting up the environments now via things like Terraform. IT is still needed for on-prem work though.
That's what cloud services are for.
And who sets up those? If sysadmin jobs are killed for on premise at companies at the very least they will be needed for datacenter work.
It's definitely a good choice. And there will always be jobs. But job security is pretty minimal.
I think it's true for the career rather than the job, because it's not hard to find another job that is still paid way better than the average career.
RIP Bandcamp
I really hope not ... one of the very few music stores that are not in the business of screwing customers or artists, or both
That is unfortunate, bandcamp is the main place that my fans get my music from.
lol, why'd they buy them then?
I imagine it's because they wanted more music for Fortnite events. Probably wanted that Rocket League soundtrack clout
What are you talking about?
Epic isn’t the one laying people off, the owner of band camp is
I'm hypothesizing as to why epic bought it to begin with
Epic sold it, read the article. Its literally the subtitle
If you would have read the more than the subtitle, you would know that it was indeed Epic who did this.
Additionally they should have read the comment I was responding to
They had more money than sense. Now they have no more money and Bandcamp wasn't ever profitable.
Wasn't this pretty recent? Did they buy the company just to lay people off??
Buying and "streamlining" is a pretty common practice, yeah.
EpicSongtradr bought them for the tech and userbase, not for their employees.The layoffs are related to the sale of Bandcamp to Songtradr.
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/bandcamps-layoffs-songtradr-1235758123/
I'd forgotten who was selling to who, thanks.
That's often how it works. Duplicate middle management particularly is usually less needed after a merger.
If another company buys another company, they ALWAYS get rid of a large portion of the workforce.
Mergers fuck things up, they don't make them better: https://youtu.be/Dq09UQ40lUY?si=YwS4BAytLKu7a2lL
One of the shit things about mergers is sometimes you get transferred to another division with a culture that doesn't gel with you at all.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Dq09UQ40lUY?si=YwS4BAytLKu7a2lL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I remember hearing that Harmonix was also acquired by Epic Games and there was a lot of speculation of a collaboration to reboot Rock Band using the Bandcamp library.
One of the lead developers at Harmonix was asked about this on Reddit and they only replied with an emphatic "No."
Seeing this now brings the bigger picture into focus.
Epic is literally the worst... worse than EA back in their prime of toxicity.
It's not Epic doing this, but Songtradr, which is the company that purchased Bandcamp from Epic.
Almost the worst. That still belongs to Embracer, but Epic isn't far off. But Epic can't be attributed for this fail since they had sold Bandcamp off already.
Read the article subtitle
Well rip. I really enjoyed indie music in flac.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the worst tech labor years ever continues with the news that roughly half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off.
Epic Games bought the indie music platform back in 2022 for an undisclosed amount before selling it barely a year later.
Late last month, Epic Games laid off 16 percent of its workforce, or 830 employees, due to what CEO Tim Sweeney described as overspending.
Epic also revealed that it would sell the Bandcamp business to California-based music licensing company Songtradr.
Employees who did not receive offers from Songtradr were notified today and will be eligible for severance.
In an email to The Verge, Songtradr confirmed that 50 percent of Bandcamp employees have been extended offers to join Songtradr and reaffirmed from a previous statement the company’s commitment to keeping the Bandcamp experience the same.
The original article contains 212 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
And here I am, just about ready to publish my new EP. Any alternatives to Bandcamp out there?