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Elastic lays off 7% of employees

elastic.co

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Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#171

Post by tancop »

mrcwinn wrote: post #68
sandeepkd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not want to sound like as if I am taking their side but the reality is that all these decisions are mandated by some subset of investors in one way or another. These executives are replaceable, and they would be replaced if they do not toe the line. In other words these executives happen to choose a easy and beneficial path rather than standing up for the long term right thing for the company.

That’s not how it works. Investors don’t mandate operational decisions. That’s for… operators. What they do ask for, in exchange for their investment, are things like revenue growth or certain margins. You can crap on those investors. The answer then is to never take their money. But without money, the job probably wasn’t created in the first place. So the result is the same. By the way, ever work alongside a really…

most investors want maximum short term profit. execs have to do what they say because of fiduciary duty and shareholder votes to fire them. the only way to prevent it is use debt financing exclusively or make every investor sign a contract that limits the companies duty to "dont do things that will actively lose money". thats hard when a lot of vcs strategy is extract as much as possible and let it fall.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#172

Post by 23david »

limagnolia wrote: post #131
echelon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They switched from open source when big tech stole their goodies. It was too late to stop it.

Big tech didn't steal anything. Elastic used open source software as the foundation of their product (specifically, Apache Lucene), and released their product as open source. The license allowed Elastic to do so, and likewise, the license Elastic used allowed "big tech" to use Elastics product. If it wasn't for open source, Elastic wouldn't exist. Then, Elastic whined about Amazon using Elastic under the open source…

Don’t be a shill for big tech over elastic in this fight. AWS was using elastic’s trademark and aggressive advertising to push their managed elasticsearch. They left elastic with no economically logical choice. MongoDB and countless others also made similar choices.

AWS was super greedy and honestly I’m glad elastic even survived their aggressive tactics.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#173

Post by joe_mamba »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #117
PowerElectronix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people wonder why there are zero companies in europe competing with american ones in the tech sector...

Tell that to ASML.

ASML is over 30 years old. It also has a massive IP and financial moat that's impossible to replicate by start-ups competitors seeking to disrupt it. Labor laws don't matter at this point as that's not the limiting factor, it's IP and capital.

But SW can be much more easily disrupted, and if you can move faster and stay leaner than your EU competitors due to laxer laws, then you will win. SW success is often about time to market, not IP, since a lot of companies and countries can build a Airbnb, a Booking.com, a Spotify, etc there's no rocket science, they dominated because they were first to market but they can also be easily disrupted by other SW companies if they drop the ball and piss off their userbase as the cost of building SW is much cheaper than building an EU machine.

Also, there's a reason people can only name ASML as EU's shining examples but nothing else.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#174

Post by yamillove »

lovich wrote: post #107
cramer4next wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_repeal_the_Affordab... > On November 2, 2017, a bill later known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was introduced by Representative Kevin Brady of Texas. Included in the bill was the move to change the tax penalty for not having health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act to zero.[62][63] Economists said this would lower interest in obtaining health insurance coverage.[64]…

Well, the government cannot compel you to buy a product for your own protection. What’s next? Forcing you to use protection during intimate activities?

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#175

Post by joe_mamba »

vanrysss wrote: post #51
torben-friis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know HN is mostly against regulation, but I'm very glad my country restricts mass firings, and particular stricter rules apply for companies that turn a profit. If you're generating benefits, there should be very few reasons you need to let go people massively.

I have a cousin in Belgium who was laid off following some restructuring and her severance was 52 weeks. Not out of the goodness of the company's hearts, but mandated by law since they gave no notice and she had accrued seniority. US labor laws are a joke in comparison.

>since they gave no notice

WHy wouldn't they do that? What type of notice ado you mean in this case?

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#176

Post by grey-area »

Grombobulous wrote: post #36
sandeepkd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not want to sound like as if I am taking their side but the reality is that all these decisions are mandated by some subset of investors in one way or another. These executives are replaceable, and they would be replaced if they do not toe the line. In other words these executives happen to choose a easy and beneficial path rather than standing up for the long term right thing for the company.

The thing is, a profitable company that sees an obvious efficiency staring it in the face is still going to take that efficiency. I don’t think a lot of us employees will be happy to admit that AI is turning out to be a legitimate productivity aid that is allowing individuals to accomplish more work per person. We’d rather sit here and stew about companies “blaming AI for layoffs” but I imagine that is only sometimes…

> The thing is, a profitable company that sees an obvious efficiency staring it in the face is still going to take that efficiency.

Judging by this CEO’s vapid post stuffed with meaningless LLMisms, and the condition of this company, the efficiency savings don’t seem to be there and are at best illusory.

Good luck to any companies who think they’re improving operations by jamming generative AI (or worse unreliable ‘agents’ based on the purported intelligence of GAI) into all sorts of processes where they don’t belong.

We’ll see over the next few years whether the 10x efficiencies are real or a mirage.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#177

Post by joe_mamba »

jknoepfler wrote: post #77
danans wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how the social contract between employees/employers gets rebuilt. The only social contract that is guaranteed is the one written into law. That's why we have government, but the problem is that the government is (for a while now) captive to / bought by large corporations, not responsive to employees/workers/voters. Whatever principled social contract you may have thought large corporations upheld was s…

Yeah. There is no such thing, especially and in particular with publicly traded companies. The only meaningful way to change behavior is regulation. Beyond that, "social contracts" benefit the powerful and have a tendency to turn a blind eye to the worst off. Does the "social contract" require me to be a white, college educated male to secure worker protections? If you need a clear example of this, consider the relat…

Social contracts only work in high trust societies that are also ethnically and culturally homogenous so the only grumble citizens have is fighting over class and not race.

But if you have a very diverse society that operates on tribalism, then you need a strong rule of law with strong checks and bounds to weed out tribalism, but this doesn't come for free as policing and lawyering the behavior of all members of society to check if they aren't discriminating each other over immutable characteristics, is gonna costs the government and companies operating in this environment a lot of money, so you're gonna have higher operating costs. Which is why it's so much cheaper for US companies to hire in places like central europe where your payroll expense are mostly ICs and you don't need auxiliary armies of diversity consultants like in the US.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#178

Post by callmeal »

matchbok3 wrote: post #140
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a delusion that US is rich because of capitalism. It is an insult to the people that founded the country and people that developed science/tech/finance etc. in it. And ofc the space, natural resources and isolation from wars. Saying US is rich because capitalism is about as accurate as saying it is rich because it is christian

Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system? Same with the geography and isolation. You are talking about entirely different things. Makes no sense whatsoever. You could make your same argument about any economic system. The natural resources are inputs, not the outcome.

>Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system?

Yes. See Norway for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#179

Post by callmeal »

yamillove wrote: post #70
vanrysss wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a cousin in Belgium who was laid off following some restructuring and her severance was 52 weeks. Not out of the goodness of the company's hearts, but mandated by law since they gave no notice and she had accrued seniority. US labor laws are a joke in comparison.

Now compare your cousin’s yearly salary in Belgium with the average salary of a US employee doing the same job.

>Now compare your cousin’s yearly salary in Belgium with the average salary of a US employee doing the same job.

Take home is about the same after including health insurance and all the myriad taxes that US employees are subject to.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#180

Post by callmeal »

matchbok3 wrote: post #141
bunderbunder wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich. Like, a while back my employer had 10% layoffs, and their most profitable year ever, in the same year. There’s a real reason why that happened, ans the reason is that the C suite seriously fucked up on managing the company’s finances. In a san…

Would you rather they never hire those people? Because that is one option.

>Would you rather they never hire those people? Because that is one option.

Yup, and that way those people should be hired by companies who are in it for the long term and not looking just at the next quarter (and using hiring as a way to deny employees to competitors).

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