alt Hacker NewsCreators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
Comments
There is an industry wide biting the hand that feeds them going on. It would be nice for people to realise that's what's happening.
> The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
I know nothing about marketing, but why would you rely on one single source? Or interpreted differently (as a statement of fact): allow that situation to occur?
I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:
> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.
I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.
[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
Multiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts
Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
I absolutely love Tailwind CSS, big fan of Adam, too, just watching his journey over the past several years. I'm a bootstrapped solopreneur, too, doing an open core business for my dotnet job orchestrator Didact. It's so difficult running a business, I feel for him and his engineers he had to let go. Maybe they can build some sort of app to go along with Tailwind. Heck, even if they made the base library itself paid one day, I'd probably pay for it. Using Tailwind is just that good for me.
> Going to lock this one as it's spiraling a bit.
Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.
Tailwind should have bought shadcn and started pushing a better subscription model. Shadcn & vercel ate tailwind's lunch imo.
Very sad. Any OSS project that depend fully on consulting will be on high risk. Platforms like deepwiki shrinks the knowledge gap massively.
Shoutout to Adam Wathan and team. I rarely shell out any money, but Tailwind was an exception. They actually made front end development fun for me and added tons of value with their UI kit etc. Even though I rarely use it, I bought the lifetime to support their mission. Hope they can continue supporting the framework. It was the best thing to happen to front end in a long time imo.
It’s tragic that a good product, with a lot of users is not able to generate decent revenue.
75% it’s 3/4, and plural “we have let go” means 6 people was let go. Or three if that’s a royal “we”.
I bought the Refactoring UI book years ago and it taught me so much about simplicity and good design!
>But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
Wow that is just, really tragic... AI continues to just decimate this industry. Everyday I'm happy that I am, and have been since about day 3, an AI-hater.
I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.
What do we actually know?
1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".
2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!
But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
Is 75% 3/4 engineers, 30/40 or something else?
looking at their partner list, which is 5000$ a month, and theres 16 partners, thats minimun 80k$ a month. just an insight.
> our revenue is down close to 80%.
Damn
Sad to hear such from creator of tailwind
The web is too open. Sad day to read these comments.
How many of us understood the scale of the problem when music creators were ranting because the piracy was destroying their business?
We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this is a new reality we cant decide on.
That’s rough. Respects to the honesty.
Really sucks to see this happen! Been using Tailwind for past few years now.
All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source.
Enough with this BS. Stop feeding the slop.
really surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en extension, it would be a killer feature.
How does Tailwind make money?
Honestly I think that they should be putting Tailwinds Plus and consulting services first. Sucks that AI is making the web itself obsolete now.
LLMs are mostly trained on jsweb stuff. Are very good for it. The need for web developers will GREATLY decrease. Thats how it is.
I don't like tailwind. However, I don't wish that to anyone.
Despite any of my preferences, it was real work that deserved a chance. It cannot be denied that AI slurping their content contributed to less paying customers.
IMHO, this is content draught starting to appear. To an extreme, it should lead to no one having any real incentive (possible business, possible recognition, etc) to do new and original stuff.
I don't see a way of changing this. I think jobs will be fine, but content of all kinds (especially code) won't.
I feel very sad. The way AI is delivering, I suspect 90% will laid off within 2-3 years. I don't know myself what should I do in future.
Before you shame the creator over this, read the thread thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh.
Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable.
What would the solution be?
Now would be a good time for AI companies to sponsor open source
really sorry to hear this, been a big fan of tailwind. hopefully they can turn it around. good luck to adam and the team.
If I were mtsears4 - after such reply I would dig a deep hole, hide there and cry for a week.
Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.
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That sucks. I’m not a big fan of Tailwind, but at least it helps non-designers make somewhat decent user-interfaces.
It’s hard to run a software business.
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Pretending like this is some Google-level apocalypse when it's a garage band downsizing? Spare me.
I was downvoted to oblivion for posting this comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059
But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.
We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
Where's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making docs llm friendly.