So this one time, at Bandcamp, half the staff were laid off Many staff at audio marketplace Bandcamp aren't singing a happy tune after the platform laid off around 50 percent of employees before the site was offically sold to new owner Songtradr. "As of October 16 2023, Songtradr has officially acquired Bandcamp. Over the past few years the operating costs of Bandcamp have …
Also never work beyond bare minimum. Just do enough so that management is unhappy about your performance, but it is not bad enough to fire you.
Company will never remember any all-nighters or that you missed your family time to deliver that essential feature on time.
The nano second you are a surplus to the requirement, you'll be let go.
Some people do quite like knowing they’re doing a good job even if they have no recognition from the company.
Keeping management unhappy seems like a very poor long term career strategy, too.
You advice to strive to nothing higher than mediocrity explains a lot about many problems the world faces today.
> You advice to strive to nothing higher than mediocrity explains a lot about many problems the world faces today.
No, people doing their best and getting ungratefully screwed over because some exec wants the short-term profit to justify their fat bonus explains that bit.
> Some people do quite like knowing they’re doing a good job even if they have no recognition from the company.
Yes, such people do exist, and that's to be respected up to a point.
On the other hand, *your* sanctimonious attempt to co-opt and exploit that as an excuse to justify expecting *everyone* to work over-and-above for the type of bosses who'd have no qualms about screwing them over in a heartbeat shows exactly which side you're on, you odious weasel.
> Keeping management unhappy seems like a very poor long term career strategy, too.
Ah, this is the "working harder for such types might save your job" line, when it won't.
But they'll have managed to exploit you for some unrewarded extra effort before you're let go regardless, so that's okay.
The only lesson here is- if possible- to avoid working for the type of company and bosses who will only ever exploit any concept of employee loyalty for their own interests, and only ever in one direction. And that if you do, you owe those people nothing and should look after your own interests.
It was going to be "you fucking weasel", but I decided to strike the profanity and- if anything- it ended up coming across even harsher.
Your response gave you the air of an apologist for- or one of- the type of management that not only exploit this tendency towards unpaid goodwill, but use it as an excuse to put down and morally blackmail those employees who "merely" do the job they're paid for... all the time knowing that any such loyalty would count for nothing in the other direction.
If you weren't in that group, I apologise- and in hindsight the "weasel" comment's inclusion was distractingly hyperbolic regardless. But let's not forget you yourself were quick to judge Elsergiovolador as being to blame for the world's ills, when the problem lay with employers that made this a perfectly reasonable- and sensible- response in the first place.
Your response depends a lot on why management is unhappy with the performance suggested originally (where the management's unhappiness is the stated goal). It might be because management is greedy and expects more from workers than they really should be putting in, in which case your response seems valid. However, it could also be because the customers are unhappy and management doesn't like that. How often have you had a company that was clearly not doing what they should for you, the client? That can be because of people at multiple levels, not just senior management.
Intentionally having disappointing performance can harm people, and I only find it acceptable if it's a direct response to management's unreasonable requests. In short, if you're doing it in the way that makes sense to me, it isn't disappointing performance to an external observer, just to a manager that's demanding too much as it is. If that's not your case, doing that is likely to be annoying the customers, which mean the company you're working for will probably want to find someone else for a completely valid reason. Stating that as a generic solution that everyone should do is a bit extreme when you don't know how reasonable or unreasonable their management is.
This is only true if you work for a badly-managed company. That's a lot of them, but not all of them. You should strive to be mid-pack at minimum. Barely covering requirements is a good way to be the first laid off. And if you can get to a situation where you're the only person who understands something critical you can probably get to a point where even if they do lay you off they need to re-hire you at severely increased pay if they do.
This might not be as realistic an option for you IT support guys (I know that most of the posters here are in support type roles) but for developers it's not that difficult provided you're good at your job.
"Company will never remember any all-nighters or that you missed your family time to deliver that essential feature on time.
The nano second you are a surplus to the requirement, you'll be let go."
This. My eldest son's first words were "Daddy's gone" For the best part of a year I was working all hours God sent and more to get a massive project out of the door.
Three months later I was out the door.
I vowed never to work like that again & never did. I still went on to have a successful career, but on my terms.
Not wrong.
13 years ago, when my then employer was bought by the equivalent gorilla in their industry, we knew borrowed time became a theme.
Accounts gone inside a week, marketing soon after.
Us techies, who were pricier than the staff in the 'buyer' IT department, and with fantastic above standard benefits slowly ripped out. I clung on to the end because my severance would be worth waiting for...
"We are committed to keeping the existing Bandcamp services that fans and artists love, including its artist-first revenue share, Bandcamp Fridays and Bandcamp Daily," said Songtradr.
"We are looking forward to welcoming Bandcamp into our musically aligned community. We share a deep passion for all things music and will continue to serve artists, labels and the fans who make it all possible."
BandCamp Fridays will be gone within 12 months, BandCamp itself will be gone in two years. Calling it now.
Sad, sad reality. In many genres, though metal is the one I'm most familiar with, bandcamp is a cornerstone in the underground movements and local scenes.
All that corpo speak about passion for the music and serving artists is bollocks. Songtradr is just a big investment venture acquiring companies left and right. It exists to serve the shareholders. Nothing good can come of this (for the music community anyway).
Yes, I'm very bitter about this.
> All that corpo speak about passion for the music and serving artists is bollocks
*Any* corporate-speak that uses the word "passion" is bollocks. It's the obnoxious epitome of insincerely-sincere PR language and it's become an utter cliché in the past decade or two.
*Every* f****** company out there these days tells us that they're "passionate" about what they do in their twee little blurbs, like we give a toss or believe any of it.
This is almost EVERY M&A playbook.
What most people don't know is that an M&A is mostly leveraged, i.e money was borrowed to buy the target company. Very Large sums of money. This is done for many reasons that would take an entire school semester to explain. But mostly accounting trickery. All quite legal of course. But Schrodinger and his cat often figure prominently.
So cutting expense to the bone is required after the purchase.
Most M&A are NOT about expanding their market and therefore sales, but more of asset stripping and elimination of competition, thus being able to raise prices in that market, forcing the former customers to either buy at the new rates or find some alternative. And let me tell you, customer inertia is a very real thing. It's comes under "Rate of Retention" is very coldly calculated.
I could on for hours, but you get the idea.
An oh how I LMAO when people talk about supply and demand and somehow benevolent self correcting market forces. Such naivete would be charming if it wasn't so prevalent.
> In other words, staff were told to reapply for their jobs and half of them didn't make it in the Hunger Games-like contest.
"What? You don't think I know how to get myself laid off? Hell, that's what half of the Bandcamp takeover was. Employment ed. So, are we gonna get screwed soon?"
Also, nice one in wiping off the slickly-distracting PR gloss smoothing out the reality of what was actually happening and calling it out for what it was, and fuck those weasels.
Does this mean I'm *more* or *less* likely to get any acknowledgement whatsoever of my emails asking why they've removed paid-for content from my library (Deathspell Omega's discography, innit)? Bandcamp nuked a TON of stuff a while back (just before the Epic takeover), and are ghosting even representatives of decent-sized indie netlabels.
I have received a gift card from Bandcamp the balance was also credited to my account only when I want to buy with it does not work I'm always displayed "Sorry, your gift card balance can't be used at this time."
I have contacted support and have not received a response in 7 days.
I can only warn everyone not to buy a gift card from Bandcamp!
The items are all "Purchasable with gift card "
Consider these warnings to be similar to an increasingly noisy hard disk, and download your paid-for your music before it's no longer available. I always download every purchase in FLAC as I'm an old dinosaur that has a music server, but I know many that leave it all in the cloud as it's more accessible to them.
It's a pity, but I can't see it surviving in its present form for much longer.
> I always download every purchase in FLAC [..] but I know many that leave it all in the cloud as it's more accessible to them.
People *are* aware that they can have have both local and cloud-based copies anyway... right?
(Unless Bandcamp explicitly and intentionally stops you from being able to do that?)
For the amount of data required by even uncompressed audio files, storage is dirt-cheap nowadays- you can buy an external 4 TB HDD for under £100, which is a huge amount of audio. And there's no way you're going to get that much cloud storage for free, or even that cheap.
Naked capitalism sucks.
It's about time directors of a company had not just a responsibility to enrich their shareholders, but also:
* a responsibility to test their employees well
* a responsibility to treat their customers fairly
* a responsibility to protect and consider the environment
* and a responsibility to the viability of the communities they operate in
In other words, real corporate social responsibility where the execs can end up in jail if they screw it up - not just the lip service most companies pay to the concept at present.
As a regular buyer from Bandcamp - although it's tough for the folk involved - I don't really care that the editorial department that promotes new music is now down to three people, for me they could axe the whole department, I wasn't really aware they had such a department apart from the fact that someone must be choosing 'album of the day'.
I'm happy to get alerts from their computer when artists on my list release something. Otherwise, I just go there looking for something specific (first port of call as the artist will get more money than if I buy from any other retailer) or to see what's available for specific artists.
"We are committed to keeping the existing Bandcamp services that fans and artists love, including its artist-first revenue share, Bandcamp Fridays and Bandcamp Daily," said Songtradr.
^ The polite way to describe that statement is that it is complete horse poo. There is no way that the same level of good service can be maintained when half the staff have been axed. The Songtradr management are living on Fantasy Island.
"It also has a thriving business producing vinyl LPs - which for younger readers are music storage devices that play back sound when a stylus is dragged across a polymer disc as it rotates."
The age that doesn't recognize an LP is a bandpass filter, not a lowpass filter. Vinyl is trendy with the youngins these days.
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