Sven, co-founder of Gitpod, here. I've published the message that Johannes, our CEO, shared earlier today with all our colleagues. It provides more details around this decision. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run
This will be happening to a lot of series A/B staged companies who raised during the frothy times from 2020-2022 and jumped right into hypergrowth. Their VC's will be telling them they need to get to profit sharpish or start cutting staff.
This is a shame. I love Gitpod. As someone who doesn't code daily anymore, I like having an environment that I can open up easily without having to worry if my local is set up. Instead, I can just start coding.
I wasn't aware they existed. Looks like "cloud development environments". Their claimed customer list looks impressive...they show Google, Amazon, Gitlab, and a smattering of smaller customers.
If 20 employees are ~28% then Gitpod has must have had only around 70 people staff.
That is very different to the FAANG layoffs, where big tech has tens of thousands of employees where we know that a lot of those jobs were probably some BS jobs with little real impact on the company.
If you're a small business with 70 people then it's probably fair to assume that every single person had more work on their plate than time on their hands and there is also probably a lot of internal knowledge going lost now.
I think Google, Microsoft, Spotify, etc. are just laying off because they use it as a good opportunity to get rid of some nasty pandemic fat, but the Gitpod layoffs are probably more indicative of real financial struggles and viability.
The mass layoffs are despicable, and it wouldn't fly in Europe, but if you employ 100k people then I think it is fair to say that there is probably a lot of BS jobs floating around where people do nothing but sit in useless meetings all day. I mean some of them have documented it openly on TikTok. Just watch any of the "A day as X at company Y" videos and you'll see all some people do is brunch, drink matcha lattes and then sit in some relaxation pod.
Those TikTok videos are usually produced or at least approved by the marketing and recruiting arms of those companies, and don't usually match employees' real day to day experience
