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People moving on to new jobs is not a bad thing — and not only when they have been laid off. That’s why it’s uplifting to see employers encourage this process and even praise new entities that are being formed, such as Kyutai. — Anna
Back to academia
Do you hate revolving doors? You don’t have to; you’ll come around eventually! But dad jokes aside, I understand why figurative revolving doors can be vilified: When regulators join the industry they were supposed to regulate, or a related lobby, it raises all sorts of ethical questions on how well they did their jobs in the first place.
Revolving doors, though, can have a less ominous meaning.
Colloquially, the term sometimes simply refers to people moving back and forth between the public and private sectors. But a “revolving-door workplace” can also qualify an organization “that people tend to enter and leave very quickly,” according to Google’s English dictionary’s definition provided by Oxford Languages. (I’ll try my best to ignore that their example was a newsroom.)
In the startup world, though, tenure is not really a thing, and being a revolving-door workplace is part of the game. In that context, knowing that people can move on to other jobs on all sides of the problem they have been tackling can be a good thing. As the saying goes, it’s a form of career security when tech jobs don’t offer job security.
Because of this culture, it’s not just startups and their employees who see this job mobility with good eyes. Case in point: Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun recently tweeted that “there is absolutely *nothing* *wrong* with scientists from industry labs moving to academia or non-profits after several years.”
LeCun was making these comments in light of seeing several members of the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team at Meta leaving for nonprofits and universities, including AI2, Caltech, NYU and Kyutai, a new nonprofit AI research lab based in Paris whose founding members he described as “top notch.”
Of course, we can assume LeCun might not feel entirely the same if talent hadn’t also joined his team recently. But his point still stands: “The fact that you can work at FAIR and get a tenured faculty position in academia after a few years is a feature, not a bug.”
If understanding that job mobility is part of leading a healthy organization, it is even more important when business isn’t going so well. That’s even more true when layoffs seem here to stay: Being able to extend a helping hand to laid-off employees at their organization or outside of it should be a high priority for founders.
Facing layoffs together
At the height of the OpenAI turmoil, other companies were quick to offer jobs to those who might be affected. But they have an obvious interest in this; there’s an AI talent poaching war happening, and knowing that qualified people may be out of a job is an opportunity for others. But it was still uplifting to see blanket offers and visa help being extended; it gave a sense that tech is an ecosystem, not just a set of fiercely competing or simply disconnected teams.
Unfortunately, December is also the layoff season. As my colleague Haje noted, “It has nothing to do with the holidays, and everything to do with the end of Q4 figures looming.” But as he also pointed out, there are still best practices to follow when you are about to let people out of their job at “what should be a time of joy and relaxation.”
Obviously, the main thing is to offer as generous severance packages as you can. But you may also want to consider providing them with mental health support or training. And last but not least, you should try to help them find new jobs.
This is also where competitors can come in, and I spotted a message this week on LinkedIn that I thought was a good example of how to do this tastefully. It’s from David Tuite, CEO of Roadie, a startup that offers a SaaS version of Backstage, the open platform for building developer portals that Spotify open sourced in 2020. Here’s what he wrote:
We’ve woken up to some tough news for Spotify employees this morning. Daniel Ek has just announced that Spotify is letting go of 1,500 people — approx. 17% of the company.
Roadie has worked closely with Spotify’s largest open-source project for the past 3 years. We are financially strong and actively hiring. If you’ve worked with #Backstage and been affected by layoffs, or don’t want to stick around for the next round, please reach out to discuss a seamless transition to Roadie. We want to help as many affected people as possible.
Book a one-on-one chat with me using the link in the comments.
Tuite’s post comes in the aftermath of Spotify’s latest layoffs; considering their breadth, it is fair to assume that at least some people working on Backstage are affected.
While the fact that Backstage was driving some level of monetization could help create a bit of a buffer, it could be seen as less core to Spotify’s activities than other divisions. Especially in light of Daniel Ek’s memo noting that the company had “too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact.”
I can also confirm this anecdotally: A former Roadie employee who had joined Spotify one month ago to promote Backstage wrote that he was affected by the layoffs; we’ll be curious to see if he does what we at TechCrunch+ internally dub as a “boomerang.”
Even if not, there might also be opportunities for him and others elsewhere in the Backstage ecosystem; for instance, a Red Hat employee also chimed in in response to Tuite’s post. That’s the kind of response to layoffs that I am hoping to see more of as the year comes to an end — and not just from open source communities.