Last week, Adam Wathan of Tailwind announced that he fired 75% of his team.
Actually, that’s not true. He announced that…
75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday
He’s the head of the company, but you wouldn’t know that from this comment. Gotta love that passive voice!
Why did he fire three quarters of his company? AI.
…because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business…
Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don’t make that situation even worse…
Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%. Right now there’s just no correlation between making Tailwind easier to use and making development of the framework more sustainable.
There’s a few noteworthy things about this story.
The first is that Adam has spent about the last decade talking about how much CSS sucks and how broken it is. His entire product—Tailwind—exists to devalue the skills and expertise of CSS professionals.
It has played a huge role in the decline in pay and career opportunities for CSS experts, as more and more companies lean on backend devs to do frontend work and “just use Tailwind.”
A new technology coming out—one that he himself uses and enjoys—and devaluing his life’s work is less tragic and more poetic.
I feel bad for the employees who lost their jobs, but not too bad. They were making $275k/year! (See this job post and this one). That’s… a lot, while CSS pros now struggle to find work that covers rent and food.
But then Adam got a lifeline.
Fascist-sympathizer and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch swooped in to sponsor Tailwind.
Vercel will be officially sponsoring tailwindcss.com. That’s a given. We as a community and industry owe @adamwathan and team a lot. Tailwind is foundational web infrastructure at this point (it fixed CSS 😉). I’ve also reached out to Adam to explore how we can make this a longer-term commitment.
That same day, Google AI threw a ton of money at them, too.
I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders.
No word on all those employees that were fired, though.
Tailwind was always a shitty company run by a shitty person with shitty fanboys.
But now it’s also shitty company run funded by fascist money.
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