Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 163 posts

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#31

Post by alephnerd »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #16

It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same pl…

Generally, 7% includes most of the cost center divisions (recruiting, HR, BDRs/Demand Gen, Marketing) plus a smattering of low performers in Eng+PM. Speaking from experience in M&A.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#32

Post by steveBK123 »

jeffbee wrote: post #26
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

I work at an observability service and have a personal stake in the outcome so you can disregard my opinion I guess. But it seems to me that observability is there to enable you to get along with fewer people. The more stats and logs and profiles you have the fewer human operators you need.

The savings only really works at scale though right. I've worked in plenty of engineering departments with 200 engineers and essentially 5 operators. You need bare minimum 3 of them for holidays/timezones and key man risk reasons.

So you can maybe help a 200 person org save 0.5-1% of their lower paid staff? Is your bill + engineering integration costs going to be less than $200-400k/year?

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#33

Post by bbayles »

tedivm wrote: post #6

Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. I was at Kenna Security when Cisco bought them (I was only there for a month too, so Kenna hired me knowing the purchase was going to happen). They lied through their teeth about the process. They promised every resume would be reviewed for leveling, but then gave o…

For a contrary perspective, this wasn't my experience with being acquired by Cisco. I had my issues with the process, but I felt well-treated throughout and was never lied to.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#34

Post by nine_zeros »

jeffbee wrote: post #26
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

I work at an observability service and have a personal stake in the outcome so you can disregard my opinion I guess. But it seems to me that observability is there to enable you to get along with fewer people. The more stats and logs and profiles you have the fewer human operators you need.

My personal opinion is that using a SaaS observability service just makes life 10x more easier.

That said, the costs are too high. And in a rising interest rate, declining revenues environment, a lot of services that were previously instrumented are getting de-instrumented or deprecated.

As an example, all the monolith->microservices drama that happened in the past few years is now becoming a questionable engineering direction. Fewer services automatically leads to lesser cloud usage and lesser observability usage.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#35

Post by steveBK123 »

alephnerd wrote: post #23
steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

> what do people think of the "observability" space from here? Splunk and other observability companies (Datadog has been hiring like crazy on the security side) have been pivoting into becoming a SIEM 2.0 for a couple years now. Infra budgets now include Security spend, so an entire generation of Infra companies in segments such as Observability/Application Management (Datadog), Data Platform (Databricks, Snowflake)…

Right I figured Splunks defensive play was to market themselves as infosec which every CTO needs to buy in order to tick a box.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#36

Post by chii »

tedivm wrote: post #24
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people; they don't have ethics and morals. All that matters is the balance sheet, the stock price, and the executive bonus. You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jel…

That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

> an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#37

Post by anotherhue »

konradb wrote: post #28
shmatt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not challenging peoples capabilities doesn't scale well. Did you ever hire someone with 0 interviews, just because they work for another good company? Then why do that after M&A? Its not unusual for the force cuts to be done via interviews at the new company

> Then why do that after M&A? Presumably if you trust the organisation enough to pay for the whole thing, you would have a measure of trust in their ability to hire?

Depends what you’re really paying for. If it’s about the IP, the market access, or a particular individual (seen this myself) then the rest of the org might be dead weight.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#38

Post by michaelt »

tedivm wrote: post #24
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people; they don't have ethics and morals. All that matters is the balance sheet, the stock price, and the executive bonus. You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jel…

That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

You're absolutely right; shame on whoever made the decisions! In this case, it was certainly within their power to make a better choice, and they should have done.

However, if you want tech jobs to have a higher and guaranteed severance, national legislation might be more effective.

After all, many acquisitions and layoffs are at companies that are in dire financial straits, which limits discretionary spending.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#39

Post by chii »

argiopetech wrote: post #25
leetrout wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The VP of Eng at Kenna promised me that to my face The real lesson to learn here is twofold: - People recruiting / hiring are incentivized to say whatever is needed to close the deal. With the exception of a bold faced lie (I don't think this was that). - People at the company being acquired are more often than not going to lose most of their power. Including the C-suite. No one is safe and as an employee/victim yo…

Three fold: - People forget and circumstances change. Signed documents don't.

Exactly. Get all promises in writing (ala, a contract of sorts). The company certainly would when they get a promise out of you.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#40

Post by nxm »

ThrowAway1922A wrote: post #11
saos wrote: post #3

Company gets acquired. Company lays off employee. Typical.

And for some reason we as employees continue to let companies abuse us, despite having the option to fight back. I am so bitter and jaded when it comes to this entire system.

Fight back by starting your own company then
Post reply on HN