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Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

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Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#61

Layoffs are largely avoidable: stay profitable, avoid expanding too fast, treat employees well, and (time vested) worker-owned co-op.

Argument can be made, the workers that are losing their jobs wouldn’t have these jobs at all if they didn’t expand, IPO out and etc.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#62
post #61

Layoffs are largely avoidable: stay profitable, avoid expanding too fast, treat employees well, and (time vested) worker-owned co-op.

Argument can be made, the workers that are losing their jobs wouldn’t have these jobs at all if they didn’t expand, IPO out and etc.

They would have a different job already and wouldn't have to go through a layoff and find a job in a time where most tech companies are in hiring freeze.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#63
post #57
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I can't speak to FileVault, but Bitlocker and TPM can be quite easily defeated through sniffing the bitlocker key as it's transmitted from the TPM chip to the CPU to decrypt the drive on boot over the LPC, I2C, or SPI bus. Unless you enable TPM+pin for preboot auth you can't easily protect the data on a Windows PC, even with FDE.

If there's a remote wipe done (one click in MDM software) then there is no key left.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#64
post #57
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I can't speak to FileVault, but Bitlocker and TPM can be quite easily defeated through sniffing the bitlocker key as it's transmitted from the TPM chip to the CPU to decrypt the drive on boot over the LPC, I2C, or SPI bus. Unless you enable TPM+pin for preboot auth you can't easily protect the data on a Windows PC, even with FDE.

Pretty much every company does preboot auth nowadays for Windows laptops. And remote wipe is also possible, as the side comment says.

Letting the former employee keep the laptop is the default, IMO. Although, frankly, I am not sure I would want to keep mine... sitting on a pile of a dozen laptops accumulated over the years.

And everyone watches porn on their on own devices anyway.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#65
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The company where I had my first "proper" job got bought by some international corporation half a year after I joined. Not long after I noticed me and my coworkers had nothing to do, just sitting in the office twiddling thumbs all day rather than visiting clients doing work.

Since I had no point of reference, with this being my first job, I asked a coworker if this was normal. He said no, all his friends with similar jobs at other companies were working like crazy.

That's when I knew this wouldn't last long. A few months later the company got sold for scraps to our largest competitor.

I learned then that it's better with a bit too much to do, rather than too little.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sprawl of providers contains a lot of stale forks and copies, and on top of that its not easy to say “let’s just use John Smiths provider to setup the root credentials of our new K8S cluster because Hashicorp aren’t fixing issues we care about. I use a few third party providers and the quality difference is wildly variable, the update cadence is sporadic and unreliable on average, and not wanting to build scripts…

Sprawl of providers due to forks for whatever reason is a completely different issue to the resource sprawl you originally called out. The point remains though: there’s no incentive system for the people who make the implementations decisions re resource granularity within providers to increase that because of this pricing change. For the most part they don’t work at HashiCorp. And even when they do, those abstractio…

I think I may have been too subtle with the point about security. Hashicorp’s providers are more trusted because they come from the tool vendor, they are using them in a commercial product and running them on their own hardware as part of terraform cloud. They are all but “implicitly” trusted since you trust Hashicorp code with secrets in order to have Terraform do its job. Yes you can architect a lot of safety layers around credentials and treat Terraform as untrusted, but it’s a sliding scale.

There is an incentive for project management on the AWS, GCE, Azure, Kubernetes, and the other Hashicorp maintained providers, to not prioritise work that reduces the number of potentially chargeable resources.

The first one I thought of was the time provider. It’s a virtual module like the null provider and all it does is put a logical delay into the dependency chain to handle edge cases… it would be all too easy to start assuming that customers use this module more in order to handle functionality that would require more code in other modules. They probably have metrics on resource and module use via terraform cloud (I don’t have the privacy policy and ToS memorised)

How strong the incentive is and if it’s ever really more than a subconscious influence on Hashicorp’s code the code that customers are more likely to use than 3rd party providers… is basically impossible to tell, but the inventive is absolutely there because Hashicorp’s pricing changes have made “number of resources in use by a terraform cloud customers” into a metric that the management will be looking at… the business development, the parts of the company that are responsible for making the money happen, will be measuring this number because it’s obviously important to them now…

And once you begin to measure something as a metric the incentive to game the metrics begins.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert but the numbers seem pretty good and only getting better. Puzzling.

HCP Operating Incomes (in thousands of dollars) - 1/31/2020: -56,217 - 1/31/2021: -84,009 - 1/31/2022: -289,314 - 1/31/2023: -297,287 This line seems to heading in a direction which is never making profit. Nearly all of the tech IPOs over the last few years share the same story. These are companies that have never been shown to make a profit, with no clear model how to. Finally these companies need to prove this is p…

The price of software and "tech" is coming down extremely quickly. This combined with as you say, the end of free money is probably a fairly deadly storm for a lot of non-profitable companies.

Open source is involved in nearly every single aspect of the tech world and continues to dominate at an accelerating pace. Now, even commercial "AI" and even Robotics products seems like like they might also be in the crosshairs of the open source movement. This has happened in no time at all.

I've actually seen "spot" from Boston Dynamics clones which aren't as polished but would get the job done and what's incredible is, they're completely open source models and designs which people can start to manufacture from.

Sometimes I wonder if software and other areas of tech aren't far from becoming like other "boring" industries where there is a surplus of skills and workers and less demand. The days of the big money might be slowing down.

Let's see where it goes, but I completely agree with your statement about free money. It was easy to feel valuable and useful when money was free. Many people could be the CEO of a multi-million dollar start up. Now what's left is only those who actually have something to offer at an affordable price point. It will sort out the men from the boys.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sprawl of providers due to forks for whatever reason is a completely different issue to the resource sprawl you originally called out. The point remains though: there’s no incentive system for the people who make the implementations decisions re resource granularity within providers to increase that because of this pricing change. For the most part they don’t work at HashiCorp. And even when they do, those abstractio…

I think I may have been too subtle with the point about security. Hashicorp’s providers are more trusted because they come from the tool vendor, they are using them in a commercial product and running them on their own hardware as part of terraform cloud. They are all but “implicitly” trusted since you trust Hashicorp code with secrets in order to have Terraform do its job. Yes you can architect a lot of safety layer…

Utility providers aside (e.g., `null_resource` which for many use cases you can replace with `terraform_data` in versions >= 1.4), I think you’ve missed the point I was making. Which is:

- HashiCorp employees directly maintain an astonishingly small number of those providers.

- For the most significant ones (e.g., AWS, Azure) they are working in some form of collaboration with the relevant vendors.

- The primary determination on what is broken out into a separate resource or not is based on the API said vendor exposes.

- For those major strategic providers I mentioned, they’ve been working to have the providers programmatically generated so it has little to no human intervention and increases the likelihood of day 1 support for any new service or features.

Incentives aside, there isn’t opportunity to affect things in the way you’re fearful of. The people with the biggest influence on the design of these things, and whether resources are consolidated or decomposed, work at AWS, Microsoft, Google, etc.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert but the numbers seem pretty good and only getting better. Puzzling.

HCP Operating Incomes (in thousands of dollars) - 1/31/2020: -56,217 - 1/31/2021: -84,009 - 1/31/2022: -289,314 - 1/31/2023: -297,287 This line seems to heading in a direction which is never making profit. Nearly all of the tech IPOs over the last few years share the same story. These are companies that have never been shown to make a profit, with no clear model how to. Finally these companies need to prove this is p…

> This line seems to heading in a direction which is never making profit

They are growing and the cash burning each year is stabilizing. Isn't that the road to eventual profit?

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#70
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Unless there’s a security concern they should just let the employee keep the machine. The company I work for that did layoffs this year did that. It’s just easier for everyone involved and I imagine makes the layoff slightly less shitty for the employee.

When Kenna was bought by Cisco I never got a box to ship my laptop back (despite asking repeatedly). Instead the Cisco team bricked all of the laptops remotely.

I had only worked there for two months, so this brand new rather expensive laptop was turned into a paperweight for no reason other than to spite as far as I can tell. I still have it in my closet in case they decide we need to return it still (despite it being two years later). Anyways, if Cisco buys a company you're working for my advice is to immediately start looking for a new job.

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