NPM Apologizes For the Way It Handled Recent Staff Layoffs

JavaScript library manager NPM on Wednesday apologized for its handling of a contentious round of recent layoffs. The Register reports: The company statement, which comes a week after product manager Rebecca Turner resigned in protest, is co-signed by chief executive officer Bryan Bogensberger, chief product officer Isaac Schlueter and chief data officer Laurie Voss. "Recently, we let go of five people in a company restructuring," the statement says. "The way that we undertook the process, unfortunately, made the terminations more painful than they needed to be, which we deeply regret, and we are sorry." By way of explanation, the statement attributes the changes at the company to shifting the firm's source of financial sustenance from venture funding to product revenue. That requires "new levels of commitment, delivery, and accountability," the implementation of which "has been uncomfortable at times."

In response to a question posed by The Register via Twitter, the company's former CTO CJ Silverio said, "The main thing I want to note is how NPM's statement is not an apology by [Isaac's] own standards. His blog post about apologies is very clear about the three things an apology must contain, and it seems to me that all three items were missing from that statement. It said nothing substantive. It went so far as to blame NPM's users for forcing them into the move."

they run their business like a JavaScript reposito

[phantomfive]

âoeThere was recently an all-hands meeting at which employees were encouraged to ask frank questions about the company's new direction. Those who spoke up were summarily fired last week, the individual said, at the recommendation of an HR consultant.â

I expect nothing less than short-term thinking from a JavaScript company. NPM has a nice user interface for programmers but it falls down in basically every other possible way.

Common for US businesses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially big ones.

You're expectes to smile or die.
Any other human emotion spells trouble and a meeting with "HR". (What a HORRIBLE, disgusting, textbook psychopathic term!)

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

It's a clever ruse. Mao Zedong used the same trick. He encouraged people to come out and offer their advice about how China could get better. This was the "Hundred Flowers" campaign. He got all his enemies to reveal themselves this way. Six months later, he started the "Anti-Rightist" campaign, and everyone who had offered criticism of his far left government (even those who were far left themselves) were branded as right wingers. They spent the next twenty years as slaves.

Re:

[phantomfive]

It's clever if your goal is to create a company of sycophants/country who don't think for themselves.

Re:

[The Evil Atheist]

The issue isn't that they're a Javascript company. The issue is that they have an HR consultant. HR people are bad enough, but if they're just consultants and not even a part of the company, they have no interest in doing what's best. And I suspect employers who hire HR consultants are doing so to offload the blame of firing people for no good reason.

Brought to you by the land of the free-for-the-upper-class.

Re:

[loonycyborg]

This probably created perverse incentives. If HR consultant wouldn't recommend to fire anyone they would have ended up looking ineffectual. Yet making any real decision instead of firing people who are active on a meeting would require actual domain knowledge..

'Business Model'

[skogs]

The entire company has a business model change: From eating Venture Capital to actually getting paid something for a product.

One would think their 'business model' was supposed to be something about making money at some point in the first place. That is how you get intelligent people's venture capital $$. Guess this is a company with no real business plan, and the people investing money in them have started to figure that out.

Quick....throw in more buzzwords! They could be the first Javascript Artificial

Re: 'Business Model'

[astrofurter]

"intelligent people's venture capital"

If they were intelligent, the upper class twits who are VCs would be on Wall Street making real money. VCs are people with all the family money and connections to be top investment bankers, but who are too dumb to work on JP Morgan's janitorial staff.

Re:

[AvitarX]

What was Facebook's business model at early VC stages?

What about Google's?

Sometimes it makes sense to buy market share and hope the business model arrives.

VC investing is about huge returns sometimes making up for the majority of total losses. It's not normal investing.

Note: not the type I'd ever do, but they do seem to make money.

Re:

[Aighearach]

Google was always an advertising company, though.

Since when do package managers get VC funding?

[h33t l4x0r]

They should have to beg for money like Wikipedia.

Re:

[null etc.]

You forgot: "If everyone reading this just donated the cost of the tissue they use to pick their nose, this fund-raiser would be over in 3 seconds. Your donation can help ensure that JavaScript package management stays free from costly subscriptions and advertising messages that run whenever you try to install a package."

Re:

[Antique Geekmeister]

There is a minor "DotCom" in progress right now. anyone whose profile shows any change on LinkedIn or Dice or Monster is flooded by recruiters for a stack of new startups, many of them sounding exactly like business plans from 2000 for companies that failed even before the crash. They have aggressive, exponential growth plans, and they don't acknowledge the risk that their technological innovation will never work or that their inevitable competitors are larger, older, and better equipped to simply add a n

I've been in this situation

[Anonymous Coward]

First the investors decide that you need to start actually making money. Then the company has a meeting where it becomes clear that they don't know how to do that.
So I left. That's what these people should have done as well. Getting laid off from a company that doesn't have a future isn't such a bad thing, since you're going to end up in that situation soon anyway when they go out of business.

Why does the title include "apology"?

[OneOfMany07]

If the content you post says this can't be a genuine apology, then why is that in your title?

"The main thing I want to note is how NPM's statement is not an apology by [Isaac's] own standards. His blog post about apologies is very clear about the three things an apology must contain, and it seems to me that all three items were missing from that statement. It said nothing substantive. It went so far as to blame NPM's users for forcing them into the move."

Yeah, but...

[pilaftank]

npm loves you.


(or so I've been told)

WTF? This is insane

[quantaman]

Our source described a culture of suspicion and hostility that emerged under the new leadership. There was recently an all-hands meeting at which employees were encouraged to ask frank questions about the company's new direction. Those who spoke up were summarily fired last week, the individual said, at the recommendation of an HR consultant.

So they had a company meeting, found the few individuals who actually cared about the company and were proactive about making it better, and fired them.

I mean we don't know anything outside the news article, and maybe "spoke up" was a synonymy for "toxic employees who were destroying office morale" but phrasing as-is reads pretty bad.

Re:

[sjames]

This suggests that either the management is dumb as bricks OR their plan to make money is to sell the whole thing off to someone else and let THEM discover there is no path to making money. They can't do that if people who care are pointing out areas they need to improve.