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PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

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Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#111
post #13

> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.

It's a business not a charity. Did the company not pay them for their work already?

Here are a few notes from their latest financial statement:

- Revenue was $94.2 million, an increase of 31.3% year over year.

- Delivered a third quarter dollar-based net retention rate of 123% as of October 31, 2022, compared to 124% in the year ago period.

- Achieved non-GAAP profitability a quarter ahead of previous guidance, expanding non-GAAP operating margin to 3% for the three months ended October 31, 2022, an improvement of 1,000 basis points over the year ago period.

My point isn't to say that employees are owed something. You are right, business is not charity. The problem is the lack of any consistent social contract. You can spend all of your time and energy executing at 110% and still be shown the door. At the end of the day, you are labor, not capital. And capital reigns supreme today. As a public company, PD has to make its shareholders happy at all costs. I'm not casting judgement on that, but no real assurance of loyalty in employment combined with no good social safety net (at least here in the USA) is a dangerous and often stressful mix. Add out-of-control inflation, increasing housing costs, and a tightening labor market to that to really ramp up the pressure on folks.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#112
post #62
post #13

> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.

I wonder, once the hokey stick days are over, what _are_ the growth expectations by the top executives?

Many quarters of flailing to find the next thing, that this time, will really restart the growth engine. New markets, changing sales channel strategy, product pivots, reorgs.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#113

I think I respect that at least one of the executives whose responsibility it was to NOT let this happen is being exited out. Google and others have babbled on about executives taking full responsibility for the layoffs, but I don't see any of the key SVPs or VPs taking hits on failing in their leadership. Also I understand they say to pursue other opportunities, but I think the reason for the CRO departure feels tra…

I think that is because it still unclear if executives actually failed in their responsibilities to shareholders and the bottom line . I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different. Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now?

> Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now?

Not with prior actions, but they are with current margins. Which is why you see both layoffs and other cost-cutting measures that get less press.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A co-worker at as past job once said: "We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."

> That doesn't work with Open Source. If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.

But in that case the open-source part is irrelevant. You are paying for the operations/hosting, not more generic dev-support.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pagerduty doesn't have a big moat, either. They've just cut loose a bunch of people who know the intimate details of how to build a product exactly like theirs, ripe for the plucking by a competitor who knows they have a business with healthy margins. Looking forward to more competition in this space, PD is not as cheap as it should be.

We need a competitor. I find PagerDuty to be over priced for what they are, and Atlassian is doing their best to destroy all of their services including OpsGenie which was very good until Atlassian bought them Those are the big 2 in the space, who else is there?

Have you seen Firehydrant [1]? Not affiliated with them, but met the founders here in NYC and they seemed like great people.

[1] https://firehydrant.com

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#116
post #23

> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalt…

As a company PagerDuty is negative in both Income and Cash Flow. Do you suggest they maintain velocity in the death spiral until ground contact?

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#117
post #96
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen plenty of companies that hand roll their own ops/alerting system, and sure that is a fine strategy if you can put enough resources into it, but that is mostly never the case. Do you host it separately from the rest of your infra? Does it have multi-DC failovers? Does it have a dedicated SRE/on-call team? Do you load test it? Do you test that it can send texts to one of your developers who has bad coverage…

i think these really depends on the requirements of the company. there will always be a long tail of scenarios to support, that doesn't mean every company needs support in all those scenarios. some things can be good enough

All of what I mentioned (except maybe international user support) is table stakes for an alerting system regardless of whether the company size is 1 or 100,000. A system that works 99% of the time is useless because it is only really needed for the other 1%.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shit, here we go again. The Dutonians join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Mozillians, Stripes, Tweeps, Peeps, Veeps, Elasticians, SoundHounders, Vimeans, Rackers, Krakenites, Latticians and Plaids.

I work for a company called "Fetch" and I call us "Fetchens"

A whole company of people dedicated to "Making Fetch Happen"?

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with Datadog's reputation, it's almost a guarantee it will be even more overpriced than Pagerduty.

Datadog isn't cheap, but trying to replicate their complete functionality in house, with their uptime, would require a dedicated team and infrastructure that would be even less affordable.

Yeah, it's not cheap but there are a lot of places who don't manage their datadog bill at all because they either don't understand the pricing models like metric tag cardinality, or they use logs/APM/rum for something they should be using metrics for, or using metrics for something that should be logging etc etc.

Re: PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those "better developers" were suddenly laid off by even bigger corps? I've noticed a trickle down effect in our very-small hiring queue. I can't help but imagine mid-sized companies are getting access to devs that only wanted to work for FAANG before.

Except by the original train of thought "everyone is laying off bad developers" so if you accept this (IMO flawed) premise you're going to be in a worse position after you get through this gigantic process.

unless you have identified a company whose bad developers are better than your bad developers. And if you have developed a process to identify that I think it's time to pivot.
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