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

121–130 of 163 posts

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

#121

Post by paulryanrogers »

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…

Interesting. I too was at Kenna, hired a few months before the acquisition was over. Don't remember hearing promises of interviewing. As far as I could tell, my role was leveled based on salary. Since I was an IC and promised shares would covert to cash, it all seemed OK to me. Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention?

Regardless, a dream offer landed before my shares vested, so I made the hard choice to leave empty handed. There did appear to be a lot of turnover before and after the acquisition. Though during M&A that's to be expected IME, so experiences may vary.

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

#122

Post by hughesjj »

geodel wrote: post #90
marcosdumay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can spending a day or two creating enough things to track the "end to end" numbers and debug problems the hard way when they appear. Modern APM is completely out of proportion, and most people that use it do absolutely not get enough benefit for paying for those systems. My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes that survive as a meme on the high-management minds and don't survive tou…

> My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes... Bang on! Its part of same buzzword bullshittery of Kubernetes/ Cloud native / Micro services / observability and so on. Create an out of proportion tech stack that no one would understand and then one needs these APMs to monitor "p99 latencies" because who the fuck knows now on how incoming http request will get processed.

..k8s is buzzword bullshittery?

Look, there's a bunch of bullshit hype, but I think you're being overly reactionary.

Plenty of devs will never touch a profiler (as complex as a cloud based APM simple as jfr), that doesn't mean they don't have use.

Plenty of buzzwords conflated hype and misunderstanding with useful technology

'nosql'-> yeah don't try to do olap on nosql but document databases or kvs are still super useful. It's basically a hashmap with some index what's not to like (also using 'nosql' as a term to differentiate between relational databases and ...non relational is already a misnomer)

'big data'-> stupid hype at the beginning and yeah you can have a functioning product without it but try leading a business without any data to make a decision

'cloud'-> colocated data centers and timesharing have been useful things for decades but man do I love having an API to formalize it rather than calling up the onsite data tech and having a phonecall to do anything (that or a multi day email chain)

'microservices'-> yeah it's intractible if you atomize your app, but splitting application boundaries and defining contracts makes it a lot easier to horizontally scale, and it's cheaper in the end of you do it right. Also functions as a service are great for glue code and infra IMHO.

The longer I get in my career the more I see that wading through the bullshit is needed to know wtf I'm talking about. It's similar to science communications, where the actual researchers will figure out something cool and useful but situational and contextual, and then the zeitgeist completely distorts the findings beyond any measure of recognition

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

#123

Post by sastaha »

The past year and a half has revealed that a lot of programmers have the same "sense of entitlement" as laid-off Ohio steelworkers or West Virginia Coal miners.

I'm not saying you shouldn't complain about your employer. But the notion that companies are ethically obligated to hold onto workers who aren't necessary, I thought we were way passed that.

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

#124

Post by morgango »

leetrout wrote: post #8
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…

> 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…

Yea, I think more often it is the second point more than the first one. You would be surprised how often makes leaders into liars. Honestly, I would bet that the VP probably had assurances from his leadership that what he was telling you was true.

Sorry to hear that happened, that sucks.

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

#126

Post by orochimaaru »

marcosdumay wrote: post #56
orochimaaru wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to get application performance monitoring (APM) tools using FOSS because of the complexity of writing libraries. You could ideally work most things with FOSS. Use opentelemtry extensions to a time dries DB of your choice. Use elk or opensearch for logs, osquery for Linux, native cloud monitoring tools that come out of the box, etc. Problem is it takes a lot of setup and maintenance. It can bite you back in…

Or you can spending a day or two creating enough things to track the "end to end" numbers and debug problems the hard way when they appear. Modern APM is completely out of proportion, and most people that use it do absolutely not get enough benefit for paying for those systems. My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes that survive as a meme on the high-management minds and don't survive tou…

Java has an excellent one open source APM - https://glowroot.org/.

Python and other tools - not so much.

I wouldn't say Gartner created hype. Glowroot has been invaluable to us. Of course we run a massive footprint of 0.5m - 0.75m JVMs.

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

#127

Post by tedivm »

kjs3 wrote: post #75
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…

So the Kenna execs lied to you about the Cisco merger and what it means. OK. FWIW, I've never be bought by Cisco, but my best friend has been at 3 startups bought by Cisco. He never enjoyed working for Cisco, but always said Cisco was very clear about their process, and it basically worked the same way each time, except when execs at his startup threw monkey wretches into things. YMMV.

They weren't clear about anything with me- I had to really push to even know information about what the new insurance would look like. It was a very stressful situation, and while I do blame the horrible leadership at Kenna for a lot of it I can definitely say that Cisco did not help matters at all.

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

#128

Post by eigenvalue »

postexitus wrote: post #95
eigenvalue wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and Splunk is likely the most overpriced offering across all vendors, both in terms of absolute cost and in in terms of how overpriced it is relative to how good it is. So easy to see how it would be on the chopping block.

doubts in datadog

Yes, datadog and newrelic are both crazy expensive. Seems like the space could really use a disruptive competitor with a totally different business model and approach. I think a lot of customers would be OK with higher latency if it could cost 90% less. Would also be cool if you could somehow use your spare on-prem compute to shoulder some of the load to bring the cost to serve down.

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

#129

Post by hughesjj »

_ea1k wrote: post #50
cyberlurker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk to enough MBAs and you realize most of them are following the same playbook. They all say and do the same things and no one cares as long as things aren’t disastrous. But it is the safer option and probably results in less innovation. So the 7% cuts will continue until someone boldly breaks the mold and standardizes 8% and brands it “the rule of 8s” and preaches it at overpriced executive retreats.

"Better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally" - IMO, this often leads for people making decisions that are defensible by comparison to "industry norms".

Big "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" energy

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

#130

Post by tedivm »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #121
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…

Interesting. I too was at Kenna, hired a few months before the acquisition was over. Don't remember hearing promises of interviewing. As far as I could tell, my role was leveled based on salary. Since I was an IC and promised shares would covert to cash, it all seemed OK to me. Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention? Regardless, a dream offer landed before my shares vested, so I made the hard choice to leave…

I didn't say they were going to interview people, just that I was told that each person would be reviewed separately and given custom offers based on their actual background. Then after being strung along for a month on that lie, I was told that they were going to level based on title instead without looking at the individuals background. As a result Cisco vastly under leveled me in their offer (I was able to get another job at the appropriate level pretty trivially, so it's not like I'm over judging my qualifications here).
Post reply on HN