While this sentiment and gesture is appreciable, this is also a potential example of rackless irresponsible hiring. When you hire people, you better damn make sure there would have something to do for them in foreseeable future as much as possible. Otherwise, go hire contractors. There is always some risks involved for employees however you don't want to bring in ton of people just to execute on one specific strategy with no backup plan if that strategy failed. Hiring should be sustainable in the sense that company should be making enough money to support all that extra hiring. If project A failed, we can start working on project B and so on. If that is not the case, candidates should be informed at the interview that if the project that they would be working on fails then they would be out of job.
FYI you're probably getting downvoted because of gratuitous negativity, an ungenerous reading of the situation, and unsubstantiated moral claims. It's pretty hard to read the future and the CEO in question fully admits he fucked up.
But don't forget, when you write a piece about one of the hardest times in growing your business, for the benefits of a community of people who could really benefit to learn from those who have been through it, when it's possibly the hardest thing you could ever write but you do it anyway because it's important, nevertheless, someone on HN will shit on you for doing it.
It's one thing to be "negative"/"shit on it" and quite another to be direct and objective. I feel there is a new fashion in our industry where "I screwed up" emails are becoming quite common. In fact it is being expected from every leader who made mistake like Japanese want CEOs to publicly cry. The problem with this whole new fashion is that these tears/"I screwed up" emails are often empty and/or has no objective value other than asking for forgiveness. These emails are starting to almost look like template without any actual retrospection about real root causes and what someone else should do differently in future. In 42floors post, that's exactly the problem: there is absolutely no retrospection about what he could have done differently or what others should do differently. It's just plain and simple "I screwed up/it was the hardest thing/it hurts my heart" template. It's almost as if these leaders are suggesting that it was just bad luck, here's my tears and now let's move on. While all these regret and emotions are commendable, I fail to see single thing that CEO has mentioned as his learning on what he could have done differently. From his post my interpretation was that they hired whole bunch of guys to execute on single strategy, without long term feasibility and without disclosing the risk that failure of that one strategy would mean loss of jobs. Now that's something they could have done differently.
1. When you hire, what's the likelihood that you'll want to pay for the skillset 1-2 years from now (= the startup's runway), and does the budget support it?
(Corollary: experiments are planned. A 3 month experiment that results in mass firings is either flawed, not actually an experiment, or sociopathic.)
2. Communicate #1 during the hiring process.
3. As an employee, ask about the above.
I hope that everyone went in with eyes wide open with respect to the above questions. If that was the case, this shouldn't have been so bad. If it wasn't... I'm curious what the board meetings were like.
