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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

#161

Post by jmartens »

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…

I don't know, sales have been great at PD and the exec leaving is the head of sales.

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

#162

Post by jmartens »

danpalmer wrote: post #6

> Revenue Officer to Exit Is that an exec taking responsibility? Respect, I guess.

They've had great sales, and the stock was even upgraded by a major analyst last week because they show a track record of being resilient and still being able to grow. So unless they suddenly had a bad quarter (which ends next week), the CRO seems to have done a great job.

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

#163

Post by jmartens »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #9

I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?

I'm guessing you aren't a software engineer on a team that shares oncall responsibility, in an org with other engineering teams and dozens of mircoservices.

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

#164

Post by throwawaymaths »

Phlarp wrote: post #107
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)

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 p…

What's bad for one company is not necessarily bad for another company. For example I would think very hard before hiring any senior from FAANG (layoffs or otherwise) at a startup, especially in the pre-100 employees stage. Might even be worse during the rapid growth phase.

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

jmartens wrote: post #163
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #9

I never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?

I'm guessing you aren't a software engineer on a team that shares oncall responsibility, in an org with other engineering teams and dozens of mircoservices.

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by kodah »

baby-yoda wrote: post #146
kodah wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said it yourself. They're not profitable and they lack cash flow. If they hired under those circumstances without telling employees what kind of risk they were taking, that is unethical. I don't need to know who got laid off or how long they were there to know that. Before I give empathy to rich CEOs and execs, they can explain themselves transparently. This never happens though.

So you're suggesting a company can't hire employees unless they have positive income/cash flow? Like, a legal requirement? How do you even suggest a company tells employees of "the risk they are taking"? No job is guaranteed, risk is inherit no matter the company. They've been public since 2019, anyone can look at their financials and decide for themselves. If someone was hired in 2019 and laid off today, was that "u…

This is a pretty terrible take, but you don't really seem like someone that can be reasoned to see the human side of an equation. Good luck!

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

#167

Post by bensie »

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?

Check out Ready Five - https://www.readyfive.io. We originally built it because we weren't happy with the big 2 either.

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

#169

Post by eecc »

alexpotato wrote: post #150
eecc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectable business people don’t yell. Your Director wasn’t one

You should spend more time around respectable hedge fund/finance folks.

Ah no, please spare me. Also recruiters, what a lot! I was once invited to their lair and I couldn’t help notice the leaderboards, the brass bell to be rung when deals were closed, and the smell of Axe deodorant. Quote literally the set of Boiler Room, except on the posh n-th floor of Amsterdam business district

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

#170

Post by lawrjone »

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.

Did I read this wrong or were the layoffs exclusively for GTM and G&A?

So no R&D, which is who would know the intimate details?

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