Live data from Hacker News

PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

marketwatch.com

31–40 of 183 posts

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit silly, but I kinda like it. I'm generally pretty anti-koolaid, but having a shared unique term for yourself and your coworkers seems like a reasonable way to build some positive tribalism, even if it's a stretch linguistically.

I find there is something aesthetically and professionally pleasing about the plain old term "colleagues".

Colleagues is conspicuously not tribe-specific though. If you want to build an us-vs-them (which is beneficial in a lot of circumstances), you may want a label that helps separate your teams into an "us" that's distinct from the "thems".

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#32
post #23

> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalt…

What if they are laying off to make room for better developers?

You are unlikely to successfully hire better developers after getting rid of 7% of your workforce. Better developers will stay away.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#33
post #17

I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?

Scheduling, Groups, Escalation. Yea you could probably do something with IFTTT but I'd rather just pay a little bit and not deal with the hastle.

If it was "a little bit", I agree. Their business plan is a few bucks shy of $500/user/year.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#34

I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?

It's annoying to build. Their moat is they did the annoying work of finding the team that's willing to put up with building it.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#35

I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?

for a single person, sort of. for a team, with multiple people, multiple on-call schedules, schedule overrides, etc, its so much nicer.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#36
post #3

I know it's in fashion to have a cutesy name for your employees these days, but "Dutonian" is really stretching it haha.

Oh shit, here we go again. The Dutonians join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Mozillians, Stripes, Tweeps, Peeps, Veeps, Elasticians, SoundHounders, Vimeans, Rackers, Krakenites, Latticians and Plaids.

missed Yahoos :P

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#37
post #23

> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalt…

Pagerduty doesn't have a big moat, either. They've just cut loose a bunch of people who know the intimate details of how to build a product exactly like theirs, ripe for the plucking by a competitor who knows they have a business with healthy margins.

Looking forward to more competition in this space, PD is not as cheap as it should be.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shit, here we go again. The Dutonians join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Mozillians, Stripes, Tweeps, Peeps, Veeps, Elasticians, SoundHounders, Vimeans, Rackers, Krakenites, Latticians and Plaids.

Way back in the day we called our selves IBMers. I figured that the "ers" was fairly common and made sense. Kinda doesn't really sound right for names like Meta I admit, but metamates is just cringe inducing

Facebookers scanned much better, at the very least.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#39
post #24

With my VP Eng hat on, PagerDuty is a useful service With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere

A lot of people say that but then realize it's a bit more complicated if you want the resiliency of PagerDuty and are okay dealing with the maintenance and up-keep required for such a system.

Lots of open source options out there: https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e52...

And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#40

With my VP Eng hat on, PagerDuty is a useful service With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere

Consider wearing a product hat as well; is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources?

There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.

Post reply on HN