“Despite I was fired, I would still say, it is a good company,” said a former employee of Bitmain.

Of late, there are rumors circulating Bitmain, saying that the mining giant is laying off more than half of their workforce. Most people believe that the company has apparently been hit hard by the bear market and plans to lay off staff in order to cut cost. Bitmain has also been criticized by crypto communities for being heartless and dictatorial to their staffs.

However, an anonymous user disclosed on Zhihu (a Quora-like knowledge sharing platform in China) that her friend has just been fired by Bitmain, but insisted that Bitmain is a quite humane company.

The original post on Zhihu demonstrated the Bitmain is not dictatorial from four dimensions including the salary, employee benefits, working hours and redundancy.

The former employee said that Bitmain provided him a higher salary compared with similar offers. He also mentioned that the employee benefit was pretty good: every staff could get a new MacBook Pro on the first day to work, and the personal working space is capacious and comfortable. There was no stinginess with meal allowance either.

The user also indicated that compared to other startups, the working hours is not that long. To the layoff compensation, Bitmain gave the fired employees N+1.5 monthly salary, where N stands for the years of work. Most of his colleagues were satisfied with the compensation and did not feel the company was heartless.

Nevertheless, the “mass layoff” also reflects that the mining giant is experiencing a hard time at this stage. The mining unicorn made over $1.1 billion net profit in 2017 due to the crypto craze. The two CEOs, Jihan Wu, and Micree Zhan have both elbowed into the Hurun China Rich List with 16.5 billion and 29.5 billion yuan in wealth respectively.

However, when the massive wealth and success came too easily, people may get complacency and finally realized that they may not as omnipotent as they think. The crypto market crash in 2018 leads to an overall drop in demand. Some sources also indicated the great declining in profit is largely due to the misjudgment in their business.