> Revenue Officer to Exit Is that an exec taking responsibility? Respect, I guess.
The difference between that and a scapegoat is not abundantly clear.
I mean, I don't think it's fair to call a CRO a scapegoat... it's literally their job.
PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
41–50 of 183 posts
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#42I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?
While not difficult to build a basic version, at-scale incident alert & escalation systems are a mix of all the things that engineers hate building for (timezones, calendars, telephones, human-injected overrides, contact management, and 3rd party notification / acknowledgement tracking) all wrapped into a system that's being watched and scrutinized by everyone from compliance, legal and eng all the way to the CEO when they're at their most emotional during and after an incident.
IME for most companies it only takes a homegrown system failing once during a major outage for the budget to open up.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#43> 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…
Would be interesting to study if there is a correlation between layoffs and remote work and employee churn. It's easier to layoff people if you don't have a connection with them.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#44With 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.
This is the main reason I feel stuck with PagerDuty. I have used it a lot over very many years with deployments both small and large, and no part of it has ever failed me in that time.
I get that they must work very hard on building that perception because it's easily shattered, but still. It's hard to ignore how reliable it has been.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#45I know it's in fashion to have a cutesy name for your employees these days, but "Dutonian" is really stretching it haha.
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'm similarly anti-koolaid and I agree. It seems pretty harmless (it's just a shared noun, it's not saying we're a family etc etc) and it's kind of easier than just randomly selecting one of friends/colleagues/associates/comrades etc.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#46With 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.
Not really. The dramatic increase in price has gone to pay for features that are above and beyond the core offering. The problem is that the additional offerings aren't worth the dramatic price, especially for those with grand fathered pricing.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#47> 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. Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.
It's a business not a charity. Did the company not pay them for their work already?
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#48I think I respect that at least one of the executives whose responsibility it was to NOT let this happen is being exited out. Google and others have babbled on about executives taking full responsibility for the layoffs, but I don't see any of the key SVPs or VPs taking hits on failing in their leadership. Also I understand they say to pursue other opportunities, but I think the reason for the CRO departure feels tra…
I think that is because it still unclear if executives actually failed in their responsibilities to shareholders and the bottom line . I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different. Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now?
> I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different.
on the other hand, the alternative to "over hiring" is jobless people. At least they were job providers for some time.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#49> 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. Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.
It's a business not a charity. Did the company not pay them for their work already?
I'm with you, so long as this "work family" and other crap ends.
Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A co-worker at as past job once said:
"We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."