• _number8_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Probably a good time to go and download copies of everything I have on there…

  • Fat Tony@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Man, techworkers are really into getting laid off huh?

    Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?

    • Pechente@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Funding is drying up due to high interest rates. That’s why these kinda of layoffs happen more frequently right now.

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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”

        • echo64@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • Bleeping Lobster@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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/

              • db2@sopuli.xyz
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                1 year ago

                But but but there’s not zero oversight, they’re self-regulated which always works! 🤡

            • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              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.

    • gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • force@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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…

      • fosho@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • force@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Depends on where you are applying, what I said won’t apply in every single municipality of course.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.”

    • g8phcon2@teacup.social
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      1 year ago

      Now that “everyone” works from home, a lot of companies figure it cost a lot less to hire Indians to do that than Americans.

      • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Did work from home start 30+ years ago? Because that is when companies started offshoring jobs on mass.

      • jmanes@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Pxtl@lemmy.caOP
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • superguy@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Nix@merv.news
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    1 year ago

    I’m sure this has nothing to do with their efforts to unionize /s

  • PunnyName@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Fuck Epic games. And TBH, fuck the assholes at Bandcamp who accepted the offer.

  • WalkableProgrammer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • Terevos@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Who told you that? AFAIK that was definitely never true about computer tech jobs.

      • spudwart@spudwart.com
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        1 year ago

        Can vouch, everyone told me growing up that computer jobs were a safe and stable choice because “everyone needs computers.”

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          That may be true with IT departments but maybe not as necessarily for developers

          • joemo@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Are these actually developers getting laid off? I recall seeing similar posts like this last year and it turns out they just laid off middle management and sales positions, and kept the actual devs

            • edric@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              The Linkedin layoffs today were mostly engineering people, although a chunk of them were middle management. Not sure though if they were operations people (IT running the systems) or devs.

          • spudwart@spudwart.com
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • edric@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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…

              • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                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.

            • jmanes@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Developers are often the ones setting up the environments now via things like Terraform. IT is still needed for on-prem work though.

        • Terevos@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          It’s definitely a good choice. And there will always be jobs. But job security is pretty minimal.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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

    • ilmagico@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I really hope not … one of the very few music stores that are not in the business of screwing customers or artists, or both

  • havokdj@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That is unfortunate, bandcamp is the main place that my fans get my music from.

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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      I imagine it’s because they wanted more music for Fortnite events. Probably wanted that Rocket League soundtrack clout

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They had more money than sense. Now they have no more money and Bandcamp wasn’t ever profitable.

  • skozzii@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Epic is literally the worst… worse than EA back in their prime of toxicity.

    • Pxtl@lemmy.caOP
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      It’s not Epic doing this, but Songtradr, which is the company that purchased Bandcamp from Epic.

    • naticus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    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!

  • Maerman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And here I am, just about ready to publish my new EP. Any alternatives to Bandcamp out there?