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Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#131
post #115
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The difference is the people on r/antiwork by and large have menial jobs, and/or are students in that very predictable/boring pseudo-socialist phase of their life. People on HN are making like $200k/yr typing JavaScript into a computer.

That's not necessarily true. I've never made remotely close to that as I've always worked on open source projects. Right now I could really use one of those 200k/year jobs but it looks like they're disappearing. So what's next?

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't an explanation. The job market has been red hot over the past year, and the total of tech layoffs comprise a small fraction of overall job growth in the US. HN users think there is a recession because they are only focused on their particular industry, and refuse to look at what the actual economy is doing.

Employment usually peaks just before a recession, along with denial of course. The real economy is not doing well globally, inflation is a serious problem, and the impact of the rate hikes will take about 10 months to show up (so should hit this year).

I've been reading these predictions on HN for almost a year now, and so far they've been false. If people keep repeating them, eventually we'll witness a recession and they'll be right, but that doesn't make their analyses correct, it just makes them a broken clock.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#133

Listened to a great podcast about layoffs yesterday ( https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layof... ) The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive. Both with direct and indirect costs (lack of engagement from employees, etc).

> The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive.

Well... for whom though? When megacorp CEOs laid people off the stocks soared - massively enriching the C-suites executing the layoffs and the investors demanding the layoffs.

The error in your thinking is that the financials of the company and its continued success matters - when the people in charge are optimizing for THEIR OWN financials.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#134
I am in a position to hire and fire people in this market, albeit at a much smaller scale. We only hire those that we can afford to keep, even based on our most conservative financial models, because it's the right thing to do.

When companies like GitLab hire you, they lie about their principles and values. It's a polite lie that obfuscates their true goal, which is to generate profits for only a small fraction of the people to whom they are accountable, at the expense of the remainder.

This is cowardly, and morally wrong. I hope that those who were affected by this lie will find greener pastures at companies which live up to their stated goals and principles, who work in the service of what's right over what's profitable.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#135
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unlike other companies Gitlab is _still_ not profitable https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git... Fiscal Year 2022 Highlights: Total revenue of $252.7 million GAAP operating margin of (51)%; Non-GAAP operating margin of (39)% hence cutting costs before borrowing money becomes too expensive (0% interest rates are gone)

Noob question: how does one learn to read these financial statements?

You could start by going through some Accounting or Finance videos from edu sites like Khan Academy, and also spend some time looking at the financials for public companies on a site like Yahoo Finance. Annual statements are also available on EDGAR (https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch) rather than, e.g., Yahoo Finance, but maybe a bit harder to parse even though its closer to source data.

I think you only need some basics to learn how to look at a financial statement and understand information like whether or not the company is profitable, or roughly how long the company can survive if things continue the way they are, or get better, or get worse. If you want to be able to really understand and assess a business and its financial health based on these statements, I'm not sure you can just learn that. I certainly don't have the confidence that I can do that yet. My feeling is that I'd probably have to work in the industry in some capacity where I am looking at this information daily, across dozens or hundreds of companies.

At best, I can pick up on anomalies that can later be explained (e.g., I saw there was a large amount of cash added to GitLab in the past year, and later it was clear that this was largely because of their IPO, which seems obvious but nobody told me there was an IPO before reading the statements (granted, the existence of the statements tend to imply this is a publicly-traded company)). That gives me some confidence that I know what I am reading, but I haven't done much outside of Khan Academy videos and taking a university-level accounting 101 course where I learned about the accounting equation, the accounting cycle, and how to write financial statements based on the financial events for a business.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#136
post #80
post #37

Tbh I'm surprised, there is a real opportunity at least in Singapore to offer better support. Lot of companies adopting Gitlab.

Nothing to stop them hiring for that particular role if needed... also hi!

Is this the mattl I think it is? If so, hi!

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#137
post #98

Listened to a great podcast about layoffs yesterday ( https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layof... ) The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive. Both with direct and indirect costs (lack of engagement from employees, etc).

My issue with analyses like this is they argue that layoffs are a bad idea and it's just companies shooting themselves in a foot. That's what people want to hear, so it gets a lot of clicks and citations. But, this also means that all the big companies (and that's a lot of them) that just announced layoffs made a obviously bad move. Are they all stupid? I find it hard to believe. It's more plausible, that yeah, layof…

Most of them over hired like crazy during the pandemic bubble. I wouldn’t say they were stupid but collectively most of them made a massive mistake. So yeah it isn’t hard to believe for me. I don’t think the layoffs are a stupid decision but I do think the extreme over hiring as if the bubble was a new normal was. Between 2020-2022 I literally conducted over 200 interviews for my previous employer. It was like we couldn’t hire fast enough and I would always hear that we were way behind from what we wanted to hire.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#138
post #56

At this point it's beginning to look like tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, along with inserting a few words about AI in their websites and pitch decks.

beginning?! It's been pointed out for months that that this is part of a coordinated attack on workers.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#139
post #88
post #7

Good on them for offering proper severance. At my company, we got 2wks and nothing else. Not even a thoughtful letter from the CEO. Nothing. (And this was a sizable tech company in the middle of an IPO).

Any reason to protect them here vs. sharing their name?

Many severance agreements prohibit sharing details of the severance agreement.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#140
post #56

At this point it's beginning to look like tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, along with inserting a few words about AI in their websites and pitch decks.

> tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, No, they are doing this because we are in a recession and businesses are always the first to know and labor is the last to know.

It's not purely about the recession. If it was, they would halt hiring, keep talent, trim executive bonuses, and be precise about where dead weight exists. Not 5%+ layoffs of major teams and roles.

You see other industries, they're laying people off sure, but we're not talking 5%+. They're doing the above, being more precise about their spending. Like Blackrock, huge losses, and still "only" let go of 500/16000, ~3%.

You will not see tech companies balloon to the same number of employees ever again, if anything they will continue to shrink astronomically. No matter what happens to the economy, as these decisions are not because of the recession or the pandemic, both of those reasons are amplifiers not sources.

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