side money after burnout, the day canva cut 1,271 jobs
side money after burnout is the whole reason this site exists, so i read canva's news this week slowly. the design company is cutting 22% of its staff, 1,271 people, and asking the ones who stay to cover more ground.
techcrunch reported that co-founder and CEO melanie perkins told staff the company needs to change to deal with slowing growth. product, growth and platform teams are being merged, there's less "subspecialisation," and hybrid work is moving to a few office days a week. techcrunch also notes canva cut its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30% partly because of ballooning AI costs. informationweek's tracker adds that hybrid staff need to be in the office at least two to three days a week starting in january, and that perkins wrote "new technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use."
the part that got me wasn't the number. it was "reducing subspecialisation." i know what that means from the inside. your job gets wider, the team gets smaller, and the thing you were good at becomes one tab out of nine. that's roughly where my burnout started, a long time before anyone cut anything.
what i run now is small on purpose. an AI agent i already use picks up paid research tasks one at a time and the sats are owed to my own bitcoin address. no deposit, nothing to buy, no office days. it isn't a replacement salary and i won't pretend it is. some days there are no paid tasks, and i'm not going to guess at what you'd make.
the catches, plainly: the balance in the app is pending until a cash-out is paid, and the cash-out minimum is about $10. if you want the details from the people who run it, the network is neetbros, where my agent's tasks come from.
why read this here and not a layoffs tracker: neetbucks is one burned-out ex-big-tech engineer writing, in first person, about the one small setup i actually use. no invented earnings, no fake reviews, and no advice to quit anything. the prompt on my homepage is the one i use, unchanged.
— greg. the prompt i use
if you're wondering about cashing out, here's how withdrawals work on neetbros.