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

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

#71

Post by cooperadymas »

ativzzz wrote: post #53
sokoloff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you're a business paying software engineer salaries, that 500 / user is basically pennies compared to paying someone to maintain a homegrown system

That's what everyone keeps telling you until you're locked into 30+ services equaling an additional 20% of each employee's salary, plus the time to educate on and maintain those services.

And then they don't even communicate with one another.

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

#72

Post by ye-olde-sysrq »

fourseventy wrote: post #47
jscheel wrote: post #13

> 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 keep seeing this sentiment everywhere. I think it's just two continental plates continuing to rub together:

1. Employment is purely transactional. Time is exchanged for money and money-equivalents. Full stop.

2. Your work is an act of self-expression. You derive meaning from your work, take pride in it, and feel a sense of ownership and responsibility in it. The work and its output bears the indelible mark of the mind and hands that crafted it. To try to separate the self from the fruit its hands bore is not only futile, but an act of alienation of human nature.

(I don't know if I'm a Marxist yet, but everything he wrote about alienation makes a lot of sense to me.)

(And I'm not saying 1 and 2 are the only 2 positions to take - I'm just saying they're the two opposing distilled ideas that are butting heads.)

Combine these with the fact that (in the US):

- you have ~no protections against being dismissed.

- there is a tremendous power imbalance between the company (which is a fictitious entity composed of many sub-units, and can just be dissolved or restructured etc) and the employee (which is O(1) human organisms and prone to starvation)

- employment isn't just the simple money and money-equivalents outlined in 1). It's access to affordable, competent healthcare. If I go without health insurance, I do not simply exchange some amortized payment plan for paying per-service. I incur a huge amount of risk if anything major happens to me or my family.

- etc

it's just a recipe for disaster and nobody being happy. We're left in this quagmire of everyone wanting to eat their cake and have it too.

Personally, I think we should create a strong social safety net at the government/societal level (guaranteed income/guaranteed basics, healthcare, education, etc) and then make employment the sellsword's dream that companies seem to want it to be (they seem to enjoy being able to fire at-will more than they enjoy employees acting like family, afaict).

Japan seems to have tried out the other extreme (where the company becomes a quasi-government and acts like your paternal-feudal lord) and is now having some problems with it.

Just my analysis and 2c though.

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

#73

Post by mythhouse »

paxys wrote: post #54
throwawaymaths wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they weren't able to hire these "better developers" in the first place what is going to change now?

[dead]

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

#74

Post by drewcoo »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #7

I 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…

If no other execs are axed for cuts, it's not likely that this exec was either. It's a pleasant narrative for everyone involved, though.

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

#75

Post by CSDude »

phpisthebest wrote: post #55
mullingitover wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We need a competitor. I find PagerDuty to be over priced for what they are, and Atlassian is doing their best to destroy all of their services including OpsGenie which was very good until Atlassian bought them Those are the big 2 in the space, who else is there?

Ex-Opsgenie here. Sorry it turned out to be that way but I’m saddened by the state as well.

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

#76

Post by Apocryphon »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #48
s1artibartfast wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not necessarily true, those people could have gone to work for smaller companies and startups. Those companies also would not have had their resources stretched in a wage bidding war against FAANG and unicorns. Maybe there'd be more companies and more roles to apply for.

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

#77

Post by wintogreen74 »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #57
pwinnski wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on how bad the people you laid off are. Look at it this way, if 20% of programmers are bad, and you lay off the bottom 10%, and rehire let's say at a disadvantage (50% bad), you now have a 75% bad workforce instead of an 80% bad workforce. This assumes you can identify bad workers (for some metric of bad which may or may not be ethical or sensible)

it's way easier to tell if someone is bad after you hire them vs. before though.

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

#79

Post by next_xibalba »

prettyStandard wrote: post #66
beambot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did PagerDuty ever say "Work family" or is this just a strawman?

Sorry... "People First" https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/pagerdutys-people-first-appro...

Nothing in that article seems to indicate a perpetual guarantee of employment.

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

#80

Post by Apocryphon »

scifibestfi wrote: post #11
WJW wrote: 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.

wtf is a "Peep" or a "Veep", you can't just co-op preexisting slang like that!
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