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Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

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

#131

Post by Apocryphon »

sastaha wrote: post #123

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.

That entitlement was always there, it was just papered over by a boom driven by ZIRP. Now that market conditions are less favorable, perhaps that entitlement might actually be channeled towards unionization activity.

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

#133

Post by andygeorge »

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…

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/876/233/4c9...

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

anotherhue wrote: post #37
konradb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

To make it clear, monitoring p99 latency is very often a good thing.

You just don't need a fully featured APM package to do that. People have been doing that for decades, for example by running a script on their server logs.

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

#136

Post by Dopameaner »

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…

I was at Cisco bought company, what a disaster it became 5 years later. Politics after politics, made me wonder why they even bought it.

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

#137

Post by marcosdumay »

orochimaaru wrote: post #126
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…

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.

> Of course we run a massive footprint of 0.5m - 0.75m JVMs

Yep, those APM packages are for places like yours. Not for most of the uncountable other places they recommend it.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

tedivm wrote: post #12
greggsy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a Cisco thing - it’s M&A in general. The sellers need to maintain the appearance of growth before the sale, and the buyers want to rationalise costs. Once they have the IP, or have successfully eliminated the competition through acquisition, those in the old company are really just numbers in an hr system.

When I was at Malwarebytes (I left in 2014) I helped with two acquisitions. In both cases we took care of all of the people in the new company and rolled them into Malwarebytes. M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by steveBK123 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #135
geodel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To make it clear, monitoring p99 latency is very often a good thing. You just don't need a fully featured APM package to do that. People have been doing that for decades, for example by running a script on their server logs.

> "for example by running a script on their server logs" Exactly! There's lots of stuff you can do before you write a $1M check to one of these APM SaaS.

Timestamp each hop. Do your percentiles on a trailing X day window each morning. Alert on worrying moves in the p99/95/whatever.

Make sure you don't run out of disk/memory/database by like.. alerting when they get to 80/90/whatever %. Amazing footgun to not monitor this simple thing.

Have a process that serves as a reasonable proxy for "busy-ness" / bottlenecks. ie - gateways, Monitor the % CPU over X minute windows. If the CPU stays saturated for N minutes, something is bottlenecking.

Here's another secret - you want to also monitor for the opposite. Have processes that are "workers" of some sort that should always have load during business hours as there is always data flowing through? Monitor that their CPU doesn't fall BELOW some threshold (it means something fell over and they aren't doing work).

None of this has to alert within milliseconds. Simply having it, and it alerting within a few minutes is better than not having it. Some of these things like latency trends can be run nightly, whatever.

That's an interns work for a week or a seniors afternoon.

This is easy on s5s (servers). I'm sure you can do this in k8s or whatever too.

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

#140

Post by NotSammyHagar »

JeremyNT wrote: post #106
tedivm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse , just describing the reality . In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically , a…

But how? I can’t know if I’m buying xyz software if 3rd level manager Janet acted ethically, or not. There are many other people involved. Companies always claim to be ethical, in some way that might even be true.
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