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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

#101

Post by s1artibartfast »

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.

I didn't want to get into the pros and cons of over-hiring. but there are definitely some of each. Big con is people don't like getting laid off, and some would not have joined, taken other jobs had they known. A pro is that it really cranked up salaries for most people hired during a labor shortage, including those who aren't laid off.

That said, I think it is all beside my main question: Are shareholders unhappy with executive leadership. If I were an executive, I would be making the case (privately) that my over-hiring and subsequent layoffs were in fact GOOD for the company.

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

#102

Post by PuppyTailWags »

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)

This also assumes that PagerDuty's hiring process is so shitty that 1 in 5 of their hires suck. In that case there's no guarantee they'll hire better talent, lol

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

#103

Post by agilob »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #30
_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…

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

That's illegal in some countries and PG operates in the UK too. I've seen a tech writer being made redundant, then the same company was looking for a tech writer 7 months later. Fired guy won big money for unfair redundancy.

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

#104

Post by beambot »

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...

People First is still wildly different from "we are family". The former implies treating people with respect as humans versus entries in a spreadsheet, whereas the latter implies nothing can ever separate your bond. I see nothing wrong with people first on their about page. What part do you take issue with?

(Dutonians is cheeky, but a reasonable standin for stodgy 'PagerDuty Employees')

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

#105

Post by tengbretson »

mullingitover wrote: post #87
phpisthebest wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And with Datadog's reputation, it's almost a guarantee it will be even more overpriced than Pagerduty.

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

#106

Post by outworlder »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #30
_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…

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

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

If they are firing people for performance reasons during their normal performance review cycle, it's not really a layoff.

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

#107

Post by Phlarp »

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)

If you subscribe to this logic then doesn't it follow that you're trying to rehire only 50% "bad" programmers from a pool that is (again by your definition) newly comprised of individuals a previous company recently identified as 100% "bad"?

This not only assumes that you can identify bad workers, but that you can also identify some percent of "good workers that other companies identified as bad workers".

Shameless profit taking by executives and shareholders seems a lot more likely. Google and Microsoft providing PR cover for smaller companies to do it under the radar.

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

#108

Post by luckylion »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #72
fourseventy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

"I switch jobs every 2 years for a raise" vs "my employer laid me off, this should be illegal".

You get the good with the bad. It's easier to get hired if it's easy to get fired.

I'd buy your point about power imbalance if it was about blue collar workers. But not for IT, where jobs are plentiful and compensation is through the roof.

Why not start a coop with likeminded folks and give yourselves the protection from being laid off?

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

#109

Post by Phlarp »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #102
throwawaymaths wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This also assumes that PagerDuty's hiring process is so shitty that 1 in 5 of their hires suck. In that case there's no guarantee they'll hire better talent, lol

On the one hand PagerDuty's hiring process is shitty, but on the other hand the rest of the industry's process for identifying which heads to reduce is worse?

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

#110

Post by mullingitover »

tengbretson wrote: post #105
mullingitover wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And with Datadog's reputation, it's almost a guarantee it will be even more overpriced than Pagerduty.

Datadog isn't cheap, but trying to replicate their complete functionality in house, with their uptime, would require a dedicated team and infrastructure that would be even less affordable.
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