Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#21

Post by mindwok » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

I find this attitude entitled. They have never made a profit, and are trying to find a pricing model that allows them to exist as a company while still providing value, which is extremely challenging with an open core model. If you believe the value is not there, then do not pay for the services and continue to use the free versions.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#22

Post by candiddevmike » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:28 AM UTC

mindwok wrote: post #21

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

I find this attitude entitled. They have never made a profit, and are trying to find a pricing model that allows them to exist as a company while still providing value, which is extremely challenging with an open core model. If you believe the value is not there, then do not pay for the services and continue to use the free versions.

Play open core games, win open core prizes. Companies think open core is like a shareware/trial model. It's not. Instead, you have to spend almost the same amount of resources as you put into the open core offering into the enterprise version to move the needle.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#23

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

duncan-donuts wrote: post #20

mabbo wrote: post #16

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly. The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next. It sucked, but it was pretty humane. Bu…

The company I work for had layoffs recently and we were notified nearly 3 weeks in advance. I think they meant well but it was awful. Maybe there’s some science behind the transparency or something but it was pretty terrible to me. I would prefer that the day we’re told layoffs will happen that they do the layoffs.

I don't necessarily disagree. On the other hand, I have been in situations (both affected and not) where pretty much everyone with even the most minimal degree of self-awareness knew a hammer was coming in the relatively near future whether anyone had said anything or not.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#24

Post by techdragon » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:31 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

I hadn’t seen these and had been looking at Terraform Cloud for something recently… and as an existing Terraform user who has had to debug and examine things… that pricing is basically a perverse incentive waiting to happen.

I’ve seen a number of terraform modules that try to use many small elements for things like AWS IAM permissions or Kubernetes configMaps, it helps document their individual purpose, it makes the output a bit cleaner sometimes, and until these pricing changes was basically just a style choice… now however it’s going to cost people more… I’d estimate at least a hundred (probably more) unnecessary resources are spread throughout the various custom modules and terraform registry modules in the last terraform repo I looked at… which adds up fast.

So moving forward I’d expect to see a slow trend towards features/fixes that function with more resources rather than less… Terraform has become somewhat legendary for its glacial pace of progress (go to GitHub, sort all the issues by thumbs up, have a read, see what gets closed what gets re-requested, what gets ignored with multiple pull requests) … this pricing change doesn’t fill me with confidence in the projects long term future… and neither does laying off staff at a company that already appears to be struggling to support its existing products while simultaneously trying to grow several new ones.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#25

Post by d4mi3n » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:31 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #16

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly. The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next. It sucked, but it was pretty humane. Bu…

Also laid off by Shopify. Agree that leaking was not the right call but I would have to vigorously disagree about the “well done” lay-off bit.

Issues I observed included:

* A complete lack of resourcing for the operational teams conducting the layoffs (talent, legal, etc)

* People receiving demands to sign their severance agreements within a few days.

* Severance agreements that were outright illegal in the regions of the employees there were laying off

* Severance agreements with wildly incorrect numbers

* Severance agreements that Shopify refused to honor after signing (to the point that it’s triggered a class action in Ontario)

* Poorly coordinated equipment return. Many of us have not received return boxes for our laptops over a month after the layoff. Some have received 3 or more boxes despite having no additional equipment.

* Questionably times layoff of all personnel in Berlin shortly before a works council was established. This has also resulted in an investigation by the local authorities.

Now I’ve been through my share of layoffs—they always suck and it’s reasonable to expect large ones will have problems. But this mantra that Shopify has done a good job of the May 2023 layoff or the previous layoff last year is a fallacy being pushed by an executive board at Shopify that has become increasing unaccountable for poor decisions and exercised even worse leadership.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#26

Post by thedougd » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:33 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

Something is off with their product management. Terraform Cloud misses all the use cases, the performance, the features, and a sane pricing structure that competitors like Scalr and Spacelift understand. I gave them two years but had to move away.

There's a huge prize for the company who delivers on how to build change management (windows, approvals, etc) into the IaC workflow.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#27

Post by mr90210 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:35 AM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #4

I’m sorry to everyone impacted. Losing your job hurts in a way that’s hard to describe and harder to recover from. Good luck, and remember this isn’t your worth.

It’s hard indeed but after what happened in other companies, I’d expect everyone in tech to be mindful about the layoff possibility. It’s been months of serial layoffs.

Personally, I wouldn’t feel surprised if I were to get laid off tomorrow.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#28

Post by freedomben » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #11

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

Terraform is open source. What are people paying for?

Support is a big part of what you get. Red Hat uses a similar model. You also get some niceties like state management/locking in the cloud.

I'd be paying but it's too expensive for what you get. Cost prohibitive for a small shop.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#29

Post by koolba » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

discordance wrote: post #10

terraform destroy --target employees

If you want to do it immediately you should add “-auto-approve” to skip the confirmation.

Employees should be singular as it’d be the type of resource. Each employee would have their own resource entry.

It’d be something like employees[id] repeated for each employee. Otherwise you’d be terminating everybody by targeting the entire collection.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#30

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:50 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #18

mabbo wrote: post #16

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly. The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next. It sucked, but it was pretty humane. Bu…

I have not loved my work’s strategy of announcing a layoff in the coming months.

Why? At least at a personal level, assuming it wasn't already obvious to you, it seems as if it could serve as a kick in the pants to start looking around. A statement that it's going to happen doesn't change the reality.

From a company perspective, it possibly makes less sense because you might prefer the oblivious folks to stay oblivious. But, personally, I'd prefer clear signals especially if it's not already blindingly obvious.