Layoff spreadsheets: Coinbase and Robinhood use Coda

A template for finding your next hire or job

After a layoff, the easiest way to bring together new job seekers and desperate recruiters is with a spreadsheet. A generous soul will often create a Google spreadsheet that terminated employees can add their names to, saving recruiters the endless #opentowork scroll through LinkedIn. But there may be a better way.

Companies like Coinbase and Robin Hood now have “alumni websites” on the doc Coda app to help people find other opportunities after mass layoffs.

• Kenny Mendes – finance, people and operations manager at Coda – said sometimes these sites are created organically by those who have been laid off or by remaining workers. Other times, as in the case of Coinbase, the sites are created by the company itself to help laid-off employees get back on their feet.
• Google Sheets is still the favorite for quickly creating a list and sharing it. His dominance is apparent over Layoffs.fyi, which compiles lists of company layoffs and laid-off employees. Coda was used twice and Airtable once.
• But Mendes thinks creating crowdsourced layoff lists in Coda dramatically improves the experience for all parties. “You’re able to go through it in a really organized way,” he said.

Spreadsheets can quickly become chaotic when thousands of people have edit access. Mendes said he noticed a proliferation of rosters during the 2020 wave of layoffs, but it was difficult for recruiters to sort through them.

• “It would crash, it wouldn’t load, someone would come in and sort it again,” Mendes said. “As a result, I knew hiring managers and recruiters weren’t touching it. They were snooping, but they weren’t reaching out.
• Mendes decided to create a talent roster template in Coda and reached out to Jonathan Liebtag when Airbnb announced his layoffs in 2020. They posted a List “AirAlumni” together and organized people by specialty and location.
• He did the same when Uber had its layoffs and ended up hiring SiNing Chan, a content designer who was on the ex-Uber roster and is now a solutions architect at Coda.

Earlier this year, Chan created an update job listing template in Coda. “I created this document as a way to pay for it after benefiting from a similar listing I encountered when I was unexpectedly laid off in 2020,” she wrote in the description.

• Coinbase found and used the model on its own, but Chan helped Robinhood and better.com get their lists running. A former Better.com employee had been overwhelmed trying to manage the list on her own, so Chan stepped in to help.
• “It’s so cool when tools can be used for good and to help people,” Chan said. Knowledge sharing tools, while designed for practical uses in the workplace, are often used to connect people to needed resources.

The layoffs and ensuing job search are “sucky,” as Chan put it. She was unexpectedly fired twice. Adding your name to a more convenient spreadsheet tool hurts layoffs no less. But Chan hopes that when people are ready to move on to the next opportunity, they’ll find Coda’s model useful. “I just tell people to hang in there and give them tools to keep them going,” she said.

—Lizzy Lawrence, Journalist (E-mail | Twitter)

Trust your developers

For many companies, getting developer buy-in for tools to improve code security is something most leaders value. With critical threats such as software supply chain attacks and rampant software bug exploits, there is a growing urgency to improve the security of open source and proprietary code.

But a bottom-up approach also makes sense from a developer perspective. In many organizations, “developers are frustrated that application security is forced upon them,” said Janet Worthington, senior analyst at Forrester.

Having a free self-service option for a code security tool is great because developers like to experiment with different tools and pick the ones that suit their needs, Worthington told Protocol.

The developers “don’t want to talk to a sales rep,” she said. “They just want to be able to try it.”

Read the full story.

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM FROM SOUL MACHINES

They created Digital People. Now they have made the celebrities available as Digital Twins: Soul Machines Co-Founder and CEO Greg Cross and Co-Founder Mark Sagar, Ph.D., FRSNZ Lead Their Auckland and San Francisco-Based Teams to Build AI-Enabled Digital People to populate the Internet, first, and soon the metaverse.

Learn more about Soul Machines

Workers still hate coming to the office

Full-time work in the office is less popular than ever, according to a new investigation from Slack’s Future Forum research arm. Only 20% of knowledge workers told Future Forum that they wanted to work in the office full-time, lower than at any other time in the past two years.

• Most workers want to spend more than half the week working remotely, with 55% saying they want to work less than three days a week in the office.
• One in three respondents said they currently work full-time in an office. These workers reported “significantly worse” employee experience scores than remote or hybrid workers, Future Forum found.
• 70% of workers who dislike their employer’s flexible working policies said they would be willing to change jobs in the next year.

— Allison Levitsky, journalist (E-mail | Twitter)

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM FROM SOUL MACHINES

They created Digital People. Now they have made the celebrities available as Digital Twins: Soul Machines is at the forefront of AGI research with its unique digital brain, based on the latest research in neuroscience and developmental psychology.

Learn more about Soul Machines