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Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

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Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#391

Post by ddmichael »

There is no excuse. One way or the other it's really bad management. You may not realize it but 7% is a massive piece of the pie. Why did you hire those people Gitlab in the first place?

The macroeconomic environment isn't tough, my equity stock and shares could have been better but are doing just fine. And if it were tough, it would justify layoffs of 1%, not 7%. Covid, the Russian war and energy crisis have been going on for years now but they didn't stop you from hiring Gitlab. Your irresponsible hiring patterns show mediocrity, corporate chaos.

Exploiting the situation to rollback hiring mistakes is not justified. Nor experimenting with peoples' lives.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#392

Post by mynameisvlad »

xyzelement wrote: post #203
anon20230209 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime.

Or, equivalently, "people like that are paid a lot and are engrossed in their careers." When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?

Money doesn’t magically make burnout go away.

In fact, it will make it worse, because you’ll keep telling yourself to hold on for the money while your mental health exponentially deteriorates.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#393

Post by postexitus »

pokstad wrote: post #376
postexitus wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is yes, in all cases, he doesn't need to state in explicitly. So what? Layoffs are being done to save costs or to signal doing so to shareholders. It is not a "let's be meritocratic and only cut the lowest performers" exercise. The overarching question is, with our insistence on remote working etc, how will we ever justify hiring from high CoL areas again?

There’s a lot of value in those high CoL areas. A lot of concentrated knowledge and skill is in the Bay Area.

If that value justifies the cost, there should not be a problem. Some of that value may move to low CoL areas and offer comparable value for much lower cost - then things will start to become complicated - this is totally based on the assumption that that value is only available in high CoL areas.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#394

Post by dewey »

pokstad wrote: post #376
postexitus wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is yes, in all cases, he doesn't need to state in explicitly. So what? Layoffs are being done to save costs or to signal doing so to shareholders. It is not a "let's be meritocratic and only cut the lowest performers" exercise. The overarching question is, with our insistence on remote working etc, how will we ever justify hiring from high CoL areas again?

There’s a lot of value in those high CoL areas. A lot of concentrated knowledge and skill is in the Bay Area.

There's also a lot of "concentrated knowledge and skill" in other places of the world.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#395

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mjburgess wrote: post #263
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly- Facebook laid off 7% of their staff and then followed it up with a $40 billion stock buy back FB laid off about 14% of their staff.

The stock buy-back really exposes the game though... for $20bn they could retained their employees for another Whilst there's good arguments to be made about workforce planning during recessions, and how you need to not have "slack employees" doing nothing... there are similar arguments to be made about stock buy-backs (ie., that having 40bn in reserves is a massive economic cushion). That they choose to weaken their…

Both the layoffs and the buybacks are sacrifices to the Gods of Wall Street, to earn the right to invest in the metaverse ;)

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#396

Post by pokstad »

postexitus wrote: post #393
pokstad wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of value in those high CoL areas. A lot of concentrated knowledge and skill is in the Bay Area.

If that value justifies the cost, there should not be a problem. Some of that value may move to low CoL areas and offer comparable value for much lower cost - then things will start to become complicated - this is totally based on the assumption that that value is only available in high CoL areas.

The problem is when you hire those high CoL areas, extract value by training others, and then discard them. This will make high CoL workers more hesitant to join a globalized employer.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#397

Post by moomoo11 »

isodev wrote: post #183
trentnix wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite simple: If you don't follow the herd, you risk being blamed if you fail. But if you follow the herd and do what everyone else is doing, even if the herd runs off of a cliff, nobody points any fingers. You'd think somewhere, in at least one of these larger tech companies, there would be a leader boldly proclaiming "this is our time to increase our investments and beat our competitors!" But it turns out ther…

It makes me sad. These are actual human beings losing their jobs. I guess they don't include “human cost” or “how much pain we inflicted” as a column in financial reports.

Do you feel bad for the minimum wage and non w2 people whose jobs you automate away being in tech?

I’m a highly paid tech employee and idk it’s different feeling bad for someone who lost their $10/hr job vs someone making 400k tc

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#398

Post by dgb23 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #264
jlmorton wrote: post #190

> The current macroeconomic environment is tough No, it isn't, and it's embarrassing at this point to continue insisting this. The macroeconomic environment is good, particularly in the United States. Business investment is growing at 3% a quarter (annualized), which is better than the average over the past decade. Employment is growing rapidly. Inflation has been tame over the past six months. And wages are growing…

This feels like another semantic argument, this time over what "macroeconomic environment is tough" means. You are correct in everything you say in your first paragraph. That said, it's fair to say that "sharply rising interest rates" are also part of the macroeconomic environment. You can say that it was silly for all these tech companies and investors to think the free money spigot would go on for so long, but the…

> Yet literally every big tech company I can think of has had similar levels of layoffs. If these were Gitlab-specific problems you wouldn't expect the slowdowns and layoffs to hit everyone.

Many might just take the opportunity because "everyone else" is doing it.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#399

Post by [deleted] »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #189
waboremo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.…

Well, I am glad top see so many people deluded and thinking we are not in a recession. The only reason it doe snot look like a recession yet is because inflation is still higher then the Fed Rate. This is why the Industrials are not layoff as many people yet. > You will not see tech companies balloon to the same number of employees ever again I remember people sating this in 1999. > both of those reasons are amplifie…

[deleted]

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#400

Post by anktor »

greedo wrote: post #347
bentlegen wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing you didn’t read the article because Avatar made in over 2 billion dollars, exceeding even their expectations, becoming the 6th highest grossing film of all time. Or maybe it bombed, beats me.

Avatar grossed roughly $3.8B worldwide Avatar 2 has grossed roughly $2B worldwide. None of these figures matter a damn. Gross figures aren't profit. And you need to adjust for inflation. Avatar 2 doesn't even show up in the top 25 all time when you adjust for inflation. If the prod cost for Ava2 is $250 as reported, and marketing is roughly the same, then you're down to $1.5B before all the theaters take their cut. I…

How is "not even top 25 of all time" an argument. What kind of metric is that, why is that a requirement. A top 100 of all time would be a flop now?
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