{"id":37309,"date":"2022-10-12T16:32:23","date_gmt":"2022-10-12T20:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=37309"},"modified":"2022-11-01T16:51:48","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T20:51:48","slug":"sketch-layoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/12\/sketch-layoffs\/","title":{"rendered":"Sketch Layoffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pieter Omvlee and Emanuel Sá<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Today is a very tough day for everyone at Sketch. In response to challenging market conditions and with a desire to keep our product-first strategy, we’ve taken the difficult decision to reduce our team by just over 80 people. This will mostly impact Operations and Marketing, who have done great work in the recent weeks and months. Our Product team remains well-equipped, with a core team continuing to drive things forward.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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That’s about one-third of their headcount, from my understanding. I sure am rooting for Sketch — it’s a such a great product.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Christian Tietze<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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This doesn’t mean your or my app will perform worse and that somethings wrong with the Mac; Sketch’s layoffs are just an indicator of how Bohemian Coding, the company behind Sketch, performs, and how they anticipate to make ends meet. (Taking care of almost 300 employees is a tough job I imagine!)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t even necessarily think it means that Sketch the product is performing poorly. Lots of people still use it and like it, and it has a sustainable business model. That it can’t sustain a staff of 280 employees doesn’t mean it can’t have a bright future. For comparison, The Omni Group<\/a> currently lists a staff of 19. They develop more apps and support more platforms, with 1\/10th the number of (post-layoff) people. I’m guessing that Serif<\/a>, which also supports more apps and platforms, is closer in size to Omni. If Bohemian Coding hadn’t taken VC, they likely would never have hired so many people in the first place.<\/p>\n

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Instead of despairing from the news, let’s help our fellow devs to find a new role.<\/p>\n

Some amazing ex-Sketch folks who are for hire now, that I’ve found thus far[…]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Matt Birchler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I like the speed of Sketch and that it can both create cloud docs and local docs, both of which are useful to me depending on the situation.<\/p>

However, Figma is exponentially more powerful and has a more vibrant community around it that makes it even better. And as Nathan says, the fact you must be 100% committed to Macs in your organization (at least in product and design) for Sketch to be at all practical, and most orgs just aren’t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n