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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

#81

Post by wintogreen74 »

cooperadymas wrote: post #61
paxys wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe those "better developers" were suddenly laid off by even bigger corps? I've noticed a trickle down effect in our very-small hiring queue. I can't help but imagine mid-sized companies are getting access to devs that only wanted to work for FAANG before.

Except by the original train of thought "everyone is laying off bad developers" so if you accept this (IMO flawed) premise you're going to be in a worse position after you get through this gigantic process.

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

#82

Post by wintogreen74 »

paxys wrote: post #63
cooperadymas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those "better developers" were suddenly laid off by even bigger corps? I've noticed a trickle down effect in our very-small hiring queue. I can't help but imagine mid-sized companies are getting access to devs that only wanted to work for FAANG before.

By your logic the people laid off from other companies would also be the kind that weren't worth keeping. If everyone is firing bad developers and looking for good developers, where do all these good developers magically come from?

easy: you add "We only hire rock stars" to your job postings.

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

#83

Post by Apocryphon »

sokoloff wrote: post #31
bfeynman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

So when the tribe votes a ton of its members off the island, that us-vs-them facade really falls away.

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

#84

Post by wintogreen74 »

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...

They refer to employees as "Dutonians". Barf.

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

#85

Post by satvikpendem »

tarr11 wrote: post #40
agrippanux wrote: post #16

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.

> is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources?

I see this sentiment often, however it's one of the best ways to get profitable business ideas. I start making something, and if in the course of doing so, I find a problem that I can solve (which is not related to the primary product), I turn around and start selling my undifferentiated work as its own product.

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

#86

Post by satvikpendem »

alexpotato wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

> That doesn't work with Open Source.

If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.

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

#87

Post by mullingitover »

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?

I think Datadog is getting all the pieces in place to checkmate Pagerduty. They've been steadily building out their Service Catalog feature with fields for on call contact info for teams responsible for services. Once they have all that in place, they just need to wire something up to a dialer/SMS/push notifications, set up a scheduling tool, and they can start consuming Pagerduty's lunch.

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

#88

Post by scarface74 »

_ktx2 wrote: 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…

There is a huge difference between “short term gain” - ie the company is profitable and wants to be more profitable - and a company is losing money and needs to cut cost to remain solvent.

Pager duty is not profitable.

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

#89

Post by throwaway894345 »

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.

I was laid off like this during the pandemic. Our company had one product that we were pinning all our hopes on and my department was operating at the highest levels of success according to industry benchmarks. However, that meant that my job wasn’t the bottleneck to this product’s success, so the folks who weren’t excelling kept their jobs (for the company’s time horizon, it didn’t make sense to replace them) but my department was laid off. It sucked at the time, but it was an understandable call for the business and I landed a much better job on the flip side. Business is weird.

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

#90

Post by GauntletWizard »

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?

Grafana has an Oncall tool now. I've not tried it, but will soon - I'm generally a fan of their products.

https://grafana.com/products/oncall/

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