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Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

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Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#171

Post by claytonjy »

ramesh31 wrote: post #141
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Confluent, but I can tell you that sales (and therefore revenue) have seen significant drops in most industries. This is wholly expected in a rising rate environment. When sales drop, revenue also falls. When revenue falls, models get re-evaluated and numbers get re-calculated. Reducing expenses becomes a priority. When reducing expenses becomes a priority, SaaS contracts get evaluated very closely…

>When reducing expenses becomes a priority, SaaS contracts get evaluated very closely. Unnecessary seats are removed. Contracts are re-negotiated. Income for SaaS companies like Confluent drop rapidly, and they may continue to drop more. This has been a long time coming. Some of the numbers I have been seeing for these contracts are truly mindblowing for the value delivered. The days of gouging enterprise on these ra…

Slack is an interesting one. Suppose you're a company spending a lot on it, too much. What are your options?

Replacing slack with a comparable like Teams or Gchat is at least a step back in user-friendliness that will be grumbled about by engineers and others, and if you use a lot of integrations there might be significant switching costs.

Moving away from instant messaging as a communication pattern sounds great to me, but good luck convincing folks to change company culture that significantly.

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#172

Post by folkrav »

surement wrote: post #162
folkrav wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very idea of separating humanity from the system we live in will never sit right with me. Jobs are purely transactional on paper, sure, but in the end, we're not _just_ dealing with jobs, but people and their livelihoods. We're simply lucky enough to be in a field where saving up and building a financial security cushion is doable. In practice, accountability only seems to go up so far. I shortly did consulting f…

what about accountability to the people who took a risk investing in the company? maybe the CEO didn't predict the future however many months or years ago to get to a point where no layoffs would've been necessary, but maybe this would've been at the cost of less growth, possibly having worse consequences the idea of "humanity" is completely opaque, it's not that hard to look at the reality instead

"The reality" is jobs = people. We don't live in a vacuum. It's seriously not that hard either. Between the hundreds of thousands of regular people losing their livelihoods and some investors losing money ("don't invest what you can't afford to lose" something something), doesn't sound too complicated for me.

Humanity is not opaque unless you make it so, like this particular system does. It's just people.

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#174

Post by lesuorac »

frontman1988 wrote: post #165

DAE feel it all started with Elon laying off half the company without destroying Twitter completely? These other managers must have thought if Elon can lay off half the company , we can atleast do away with like 10% without much negative consequences? Time will tell if such hire and fire will cause unintended consquences. Software as a whole is quite resilient though, you don't need much resources to maintain code on…

I don't think any credible person predict twitter would fall over immediately. The only prediction I've seen was for April [1] and there's still 4 months and in the meantime Elon has talked about replacing himself as CEO, ad spend has cratered, and iirc Twitter wasn't profitable when it was bought nevermind with an additional 1B/yr interest payment.

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#175

Post by claytonjy »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #131
mcv wrote: post #24

I really get the feeling that many companies are just blindly doing whatever other companies do. One starts large layoffs, and suddenly everybody is doing it. At other times, when one goes on a hiring spree, they all go. One tries to reduce salaries, they all do. One pays enormous bonuses, and they all do. It's like CEOs aren't really thinking for themselves, just copying whatever the market does.

Do you actually believe that CEOs are seeing other companies doing layoffs and sending off emails to someone saying hey we need to do layoffs too? It seems much more likely to me that many companies over hired and/or have 2-4% of their staff they were planning on letting go anyway and now that so many other companies are doing layoffs it allowed them to cut other low performers without being the only company in the n…

> sending off emails to someone saying hey we need to do layoffs too?

This is absolutely happening, and if not from the C Suite then from the board and other investors.

Yes, virtually all companies have plenty of bloat that can be trimmed, but trimming it a year ago would be a negative signal to investors. Now it's a positive signal, so layoffs are happening. They will continue to happen until companies are punished for it rather than being rewarded for it.

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#176

Post by dougmwne »

throwaway24124 wrote: post #133
InTheArena wrote: post #56

Oh my sweet summer child.... As someone who lived through the .COM crash and implosion and then 2008, any company with "strong cash reserves" and "trajectory to profitability" is not making more money than they are spending. They are, to use the SV term - losing runway. This is catastrophic because it's infeasible to raise money right now to extend the runway. If the plane is not airborne (making significantly more m…

So I work for a company with "strong cash reserves" and "trajectory to profitability", and I was a child in 2008. We haven't done any layoffs yet, but it's definitely possible. Any advice for someone in my position with no recession experience?

Study up for technical interviews. Do some real interviews for practice. Update your resume. Network. Build a larger emergency fund. Check your budget and plan through how you could lower your expenses if the hammer falls. Think through alternative income you could build.

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#177

Post by frabjoused »

mcv wrote: post #24

I really get the feeling that many companies are just blindly doing whatever other companies do. One starts large layoffs, and suddenly everybody is doing it. At other times, when one goes on a hiring spree, they all go. One tries to reduce salaries, they all do. One pays enormous bonuses, and they all do. It's like CEOs aren't really thinking for themselves, just copying whatever the market does.

I would say a large part of it is that layoffs are terrible for PR, so many companies are jumping on the layoff bandwagon while it's "acceptable". Being one of 40 large companies doing mass layoffs is much better than being an isolated incident on the news curve at some other point.

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#178

Post by rmoff »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #119
macspoofing wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Was this an "open-source folks will do it for free anyhow" I doubt it. Open-sourcing anything is a lot of work. Managing open-source projects is a lot of work. There are no guarantees that that project will even get any external development traction or mindshare, and if this is still an important component to you, you'll be paying developers to build it out anyway.

It is a little odd that they pulled the announcement page. But the repo is still available so who knows. Maybe they thought it would be poorly received by other employees after the layoffs? Seems like a stretch.

The post got pulled because it was wrong, see https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/10lonsi/commen...

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#179

Post by maerF0x0 »

> The findings of two decades of profitability studies are equivocal: The majority of firms that conduct layoffs do not see improved profitability, whether measured by return on assets, return on equity, or return on sales. Layoffs are especially hard on the performance of companies with a high reliance on R&D, low capital intensity, and high growth. Market response to layoffs was also less positive than might be expected, with three-day share prices of firms conducting layoffs generally neutral. ... Layoffs undertaken only for the purpose of reducing costs tended to lead to drops in share price.

https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...

We need to circulate this information as wide and far as possible. Perhaps at least some well meaning CEOs will grow a backbone to at least challenge the board.

Re: Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff

#180

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

CydeWeys wrote: post #168
vlovich123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google hasn’t really demonstrated a good track record of revolutionary launches. Doing so requires risk and long term investment and vision. Bigger companies have more to lose with risk and thus take much “safer” risks because CEO and middle management are incentivized to do that - risky bets might cause you to be on the losing side of a bet and end up regressing from where you are now. Risky bets are also how you ca…

> Google hasn’t really demonstrated a good track record of revolutionary launches. I disagree. Search was the original product, and since then, Google has launched the following other products/technologies that I would also describe as revolutionary: Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, Ads/AdSense, YouTube (depending on who you give credit to), MapReduce, Kubernetes, TPUs, TensorFlow, and I'm sure I'm missing some. The tra…

Google didn't launch YouTube, Android, or DoubleClick; those were acquisitions.
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