PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

When I saw the title here I thought maybe that tweet was satirizing her email, but, the tweet clearly predates it.

Amazing.

“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose your own.”

― Harry S. Truman

Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc.

I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.

But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss."

PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on.

That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core.

I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition.

If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.