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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

#121

Post by deltree7 »

_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…

Google had an average tenure of 2.5 years for 25 years (before the current layoffs).

So, it's bullshit reason given by an entitled generation. Basically they want High Salary, High Benefits, Psychological Safety, Activism Time using company resources, Always support progressive causes.

None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures (ROI, ROE) or have managed a profitable division in their life.

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

#122

Post by palijer »

CSDude wrote: post #75
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?

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

Small chance you worked anywhere near it, but just wanted to say the logging in OpsGenie is amazing - I kinda love working on anything that requires me to dive into the OpsGenie logs because they are so verbose and well done.

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

#123

Post by makestuff »

mullingitover wrote: post #37
_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…

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.

big cloud providers will probably throw this in for free or really cheap.

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

#124

Post by trynewideas »

Sept. 2022: https://archive.ph/WsLD7

> PagerDuty's Results Sparkle Amid Gloom in Enterprise Software

> For its fiscal second quarter, ended July 31, PagerDuty (ticker: PD) reported revenue of $90.3 million, up 33.6% from a year ago. That is ahead of both the company’s guidance range of $87 million to $89 million, and the Wall Street consensus call of $88 million.

> On an adjusted basis, the company lost 4 cents a share in the quarter, while management had forecast a loss of 8 to 9 cents a share. The consensus view on the Street was that the loss would be 8 cents. Under generally accepted accounting practices, the company lost 44 cents a share.

> For the January 2023 fiscal year, the company now sees revenue of $365 million to $370 million, with a loss of 10 to 12 cents a share. It earlier forecast revenue of $364 million to $369 million, with a loss of 17 to 21 cents a share.

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

#125

Post by rco8786 »

mullingitover wrote: post #37
_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…

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.

I would love a PD competitor. I've considered building one in the past, I'm mostly just afraid of the oncall/reliability load.

It's expensive and hard to use. Lot of opportunity to someone to come in on the "pagerduty but simple" train and start taking market share away.

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

#126

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

You call a company of fictitious entity, but What entity is not fictitious? A company is just an organized collection of humans, sometimes outnumbering the employees. Is a group of employees a fictitious entity? Is a union a fictitious entity? A family or a marriage?

I don't see anything fictitious about it.

If your point is that a company is not a human, of course it isn't. Nothing but a human is a human.

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

#127

Post by capableweb »

deltree7 wrote: post #121
_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…

Google had an average tenure of 2.5 years for 25 years (before the current layoffs). So, it's bullshit reason given by an entitled generation. Basically they want High Salary, High Benefits, Psychological Safety, Activism Time using company resources, Always support progressive causes. None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures (ROI, ROE) or have managed a profitable division in their…

> None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures

Maybe they rightly don't care about those things when they see what blindly optimizing for ROI and other "capitalistic values" does to the rest of the society they live in.

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

#128

Post by ivalm »

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

Start with distribution for employee

Good: P(good)=p Bad: P(bad)=(1-p)

Have a bad employee detector

P(detected as bad|bad)=q1

P(detected as good|bad)=1-q1

P(detected as good|good)=q2

P(detected as bad|good)=1-q2

Fraction of employees detected as good:

pq2+(1-p)(1-q1)

Fraction of employees detected as bad (and therefore fired)

p(1-q2)+(1-p)q1

Suppose you pay a discount on ability to hire new good employees as d (so probability to hire a new good employee is dp instead of p)

So you benefit as long as

p(1-q2)/((1-p)q1)Or

(1-q2)/q1 Plugging in p=.8, d=.5, q1=q2=q (knowing good and bad is equally hard)

(1-q)/q Break even is then

q = 1/1.167=.857

So if you start with 80/20 distribution and after a while improve your discrimination to 86/14 then firing benefits you even if you are hiring from a 40/60 pool.

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

#129

Post by kylecordes »

mullingitover wrote: post #37
_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…

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.

Challenge is that the biggest, best customers are most inclined to get something that is part of a big product suite. So you can start a competitor, but likely stuck with with low end of the market where there is the least chance of actually eeking out a living, until you get big enough for a big company to come knocking.

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

#130

Post by equalsione »

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?

I think this is a joke comment, but I've seen variations of this made in earnest over the past few months.

It's clear by now that these layoffs aren't targeting low performers. They're not targeting any individual. They are an accounting exercise with selection based on meeting a formula. The suggestion in some quarters is that there's a kind of collective hysteria driving the layoffs amongst tech companies. Incorrect. The one thing all these companies have in common is that they all have the same pool of institutional shareholder.

The layoffs are not about saving money, they are about being seen to save money.

The institutional shareholders have demanded this be done, and the boards have complied. The big layoffs - Google, Amazon, MS, etc - are largely pointless and don't make any meaningful savings. And let's not do the "thinning of the herd" bullshit, please.

Why have the institutional investors demanded this? 1) because they've become accustomed to make obscene amounts of money and want to continue making obscene amounts of money even when things are slowing down, and they (wrongly) believe laying people off is the way to do this 2) because they can. They hold the real power.

Apple have largely avoided doing layoffs because his 40% paycut has soothed the baying suits, and Tim Cook is in a powerful position anyway. Most other CEOs, not so much...

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