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OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

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Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#101

Post by citizenpaul »

marcinzm wrote: post #78
citizenpaul wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not worked in the ad space so I'm certainly ignorant of the day to day mechanics. How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads? Just in a different timeframe? Is the cost of an ad at 6PM really that much greater than at 10PM? IME SLA's rarely pay out enough to really make it worth pursuing. However I have gotten a couple payouts f…

>How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads? Why do you assume intelligent people who make decisions based on this haven't tracked spend by week, spend by month, regression models and the five hundred other ways to try and model this? We're talking about trillion dollar industries and you're assuming they don't do basic sanity checking…

I did start out saying I simply do not believe them. They don't have data from the time they were down, presumably. That is a big hole in the data for one instance.

>assuming they don't do basic sanity checking.

I'm sure they have a million ways to say its not my fault. I started writing a huge response about human nature and the incentive to massage stats but I think you will dismiss it. If a system is down its a great opportunity to get a blame hedge in case sales are not as good as you predicted. There is no incentive to take an honest look if a brief downtime really affected sales in a meaningful way. I doubt anyone even does look. They just say this it what it would have been in our models if the downtime did not happen.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#102

Post by citizenpaul »

alar44 wrote: post #90
citizenpaul wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not worked in the ad space so I'm certainly ignorant of the day to day mechanics. How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads? Just in a different timeframe? Is the cost of an ad at 6PM really that much greater than at 10PM? IME SLA's rarely pay out enough to really make it worth pursuing. However I have gotten a couple payouts f…

I mean there was an article yesterday about people not buying/playing GTA5 because of a 5 minute load time. Commercial web sites lose money when they are down. This is obvious to everyone.

For sure. My issue was that I think its way overestimated. They have every incentive from the sales side to pump up that number as much as possible.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#103

Post by jjav »

siva7 wrote: post #26
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #12

The job market for developers right now is tough. My last time interviewing I was 2 offers for 4 interviews. I started looking for a job a month ago and I've gotten 0 offers for probably 10 interviews. It's my first time interviewing over virtual meetings, maybe that's it, but I think it's the general job market. My last feedback was "TL;DR - The general agreement was that you can code, and likely code well. However,…

Then we must live in a different reality. All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

> All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

Struggling to find developers is often a self-inflicted problem by making the processs unattractive (nope, I'm not doing an 8 hour take-home project for free) or silly (nope, I'm not spending 6 months leetcoding).

Companies that adjust their hiring pipeline process to be an enabler of hiring tend to have an easier time hiring.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#104

Post by jjav »

KoftaBob wrote: post #9

"I know this news is surprising, especially as you heard last month that the business is on track with record quarters and increasing customer demand. However, capital markets sentiment shifted to a more balanced approach between growth and profitability, and at this time, we have decided the best course of action is to reorganize to position OneTrust for continued long-term success." Translation: we over-hired based…

> This whole "let's over hire while the VC money is flowing and mass lay off as soon as it's not" thing will make talent think twice before applying

If it did, why were people applying since the cycle has repeated many times already? The dot.com crash happened after all.

Also, VCs generally give the company money for the purpose of growing, so when the VC money is flowing you kinda have to do that.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#105

Post by onphonenow »

These guys all write the same script - heavy heart, hardest decision.

Come on. You did some projections, met with the board, discussed at exec level and decided to make this change.

Wonder if they will get any payouts on their unused "unlimited" PTO

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#106

Post by christophilus »

kristjansson wrote: post #91
christophilus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere I've worked (including for MAANG companies), software engineering was best done by a combination of three things, listed in priority order: A) thinking B) programming ... Z) meetings The meetings contained something useful maybe 1/10th of the time, lasted maybe 4x longer than they should have, and involved maybe 20x more people than they should have. Those numbers skew higher the larger the organization. M…

May we all be so fortunate to have tasks defined so specifically and selected so precisely that one can accomplish them only by thinking and programming, and find satisfaction in doing so.

Heh. I knew I’d get downvoted.

I’ve generally been on the most productive teams in my segment of the business. The biggest differentiator seems to be that my teams had devs that knew when to ask questions and what questions to ask. This is probably the most important skill a dev can learn.

The solution to ambiguous requirements is not meetings. At least, not in the usual sense. It’s knowing who and what to ask, and occasionally meeting with customers or knowledgeable stakeholders.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#107

Post by akomtu »

kristjansson wrote: post #52
indymike wrote: post #33

I'm always amazed with how big tech companies get in terms of employee count. I once wandered the engineering area of the HQ (with an employee) of a FAANG (MAANG sounds... silly) and made a tick mark on my notebook when I saw someone actually coding - or at least having code on screen. There were over 1200 people on the development team and at the time most worked out of HQ. So... when I was done walking, I had 22 ti…

Its almost like the practice of software engineering in a large organization involves (much) more than writing code?

Many of them are Software Bureocrats - their job is to keep organisational processes running with the goal of avoiding expensive mistakes. They are a lot like corporate lawyers. They don't create new stuff, but they save your organisation from descending into chaos.

Actual engineering still happens at the heart of the organisation, that heart is just shielded by the gigantic army of software bureaucrats.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#108

Post by parkingrift »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #23
parkingrift wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale up rapidly and then mass fire the bottom 10-25% of performers. This is a well known tactic.

> bottom 10-25% of performers I've been around awhile and seen plenty of layoffs, layoffs are almost never about performance at the individual level. It's nice to believe they are because in times like these thinking to yourself "I'm a least in the top half of performers" can give the illusion that you're safe. However, this thinking is ultimately harmful because when you or your friends and colleagues do get laid of…

The differentiation here is that these layoffs are not for urgent financial reasons. This is similar to the recently announced Tesla layoffs.

You don’t lay-off 10% of your work force without need, and you don’t do it at random.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#109

Post by cyanydeez »

akomtu wrote: post #107
kristjansson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost like the practice of software engineering in a large organization involves (much) more than writing code?

Many of them are Software Bureocrats - their job is to keep organisational processes running with the goal of avoiding expensive mistakes. They are a lot like corporate lawyers. They don't create new stuff, but they save your organisation from descending into chaos. Actual engineering still happens at the heart of the organisation, that heart is just shielded by the gigantic army of software bureaucrats.

More of them are akin to social workers enduring the morale never gets to expectant of rewards and the corporate sociopathy never disrupts too much
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