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Elastic lays off 7% of employees

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Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#181

Post by lovich »

yamillove wrote: post #174
lovich wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Well, the government cannot compel you to buy a product for your own protection.

They can, hence the mandates for healthcare.

> What’s next? Forcing you to use protection during intimate activities?

If you start creating negative externalities for everyone else, then yea.

If you are arguing from a libertarian perspective of you can do whatever you want, then I would demand you get a tattoo saying “do not give me medical aid” prominently on your forehead so my taxes aren’t wasted on someone who doesn’t want to contribute to society but expects aid from society.

If you are are cool with that deal I am actually ok with you, but don’t be surprised if we drop your body into a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence the moment you go unconscious from a car accident and can’t pay for medical expenses.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#182

Post by everfrustrated »

23david wrote: post #172
limagnolia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the longest time, elastic didn't even have a cloud offering. And by the time they did it was far far too late.

In the early days AWS elastic offering was very weak. It had lots of foot guns and operational problems. We tried hard to use an more native elastic offering and would have preferred it, but it didn't exist.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#183

Post by throw234234234 »

majormajor wrote: post #147
Grombobulous wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Growth companies respond to efficiency by asking "what can we do now that we can get more done." Stagnant companies say "how can we cut costs." The math is pretty simple. If you expect that doing more will have positive ROI, you do mor…

You are thinking growth in product and opportunities. But that doesn't always require or translate to more engineering especially in the face of AI efficiency if that work to support that growth can come from AI (NOTE: I'm not saying it can; I believe some people believe and are acting like it can which is enough). For these people the new bottleneck to growth may be new market segments, adoption and integration which could mean more sales like staff - AI seems more of a boon to the non technical, AI hypers and sales pitchers IMO than it is to engineers. On a side note personally this makes the industry less desirable to work in - it devalues effort/intelligence/craftsmanship/product and values connections, marketing, status and "the hustle" a lot more.

As the supply curve of software becomes more vertical due to AI the argument that growth equals a proportional amount of engineering demand may be violated. We may see 2x growth in some companies even as the "people engineers" are cut. They could still be pursuing growth; it just that engineering costs are now lower or are less of a need to pursue that growth in general.

AI is the first technology that I've seen that has potentially hurt technology engineering demand rather than creating it; which is why the usual arguments don't always apply here.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#184

Post by trgn »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #55
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.

I'm sure that level of overhead has nothing to do with the reason Belgian incomes, standards of living, and business outcomes are worse.

vacationing/digital nomading in belgium atm, it looks erhm rich. traveling between brussels, leuven, ghent, bruges, soon antwerp... people dress well, never been anywhere with so many german luxury cars on the road, meals cost about the same as US.

I'm sure statistics this and that, but something doesn't translate, sanguine reality is different.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#185

Post by jedr »

limagnolia wrote: post #128
echelon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might've been better if AWS and GCP didn't steal your goodies and take so much meat off the bones. Fair source > Open source. Trillion dollar companies need to pay to play. Open source removes your jobs, your exit equity, and transfers it to the hyperscalers. Sucks that it happened to you guys.

Elastic isn't Open Source though, they abandoned Open Source. It seems to me like this is an example of non-Open Source whatever licensing causing job loss. Or just plain bad leadership.

(Elastic employee here) Elastic is in fact open source again.

- Was originally open source Apache license

- Switched to non-open source Elastic license in Jan 2021 [^1]

- Switched to open source AGPL license in Aug 2024 [^2]

Not to defend the license change(s).

[1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change

[2] https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#186

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jimt1234 wrote: post #81
zamadatix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't have nearly as many complaints about this mindset change if ones life (e.g. insurance) weren't still so deeply tied to who your current employer is.

I'm aware that HN frowns on "THIS", but...THIS!!! I don't know what the best solution for the current healthcare clusterfuck in the US is, but I think disassociating health insurance from employer/employment is a great first step.

I’m always amazed that the US is as entrepreneurial as it is given the healthcare situation.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#188

Post by nijave »

everfrustrated wrote: post #182
23david wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the longest time, elastic didn't even have a cloud offering. And by the time they did it was far far too late. In the early days AWS elastic offering was very weak. It had lots of foot guns and operational problems. We tried hard to use an more native elastic offering and would have preferred it, but it didn't exist.

The anti AWS rhetoric is exhausting.

The fact AWS crappy hosted ES gained any market share is more a testament to how bad ES sales practices were than anything else.

ES really missed the mark by not having a simple, self-serve sales model and instead going all in convoluted "contact a sales rep" enterprise model no one wanted to deal with.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#189

Post by meerita »

darth_avocado wrote: post #65
tracerbulletx wrote: post #22

Before the 1980s layoffs were seen as a massive failure of the company and almost never happened to tenured employees unless the company was collapsing. Before we are all made to think this is normal and unavoidable behavior.

When Elon fired 80% of the company, I remember a lot of celebration on HN. Some of it was the perceived political bias within the employees and some of it was “The app works fine what were all those employees doing? They probably deserved it.” At the time I remember talking about this becoming a norm as CEOs follow the lead and getting downvoted heavily. Its unfortunate that we are here, but also not surprising, give…

When that happened, AI wasn’t even at today’s level. Elon clearly didn’t fire those people because AI would replace them. They were laid off because the company could run pretty well without them. And that’s exactly what happened.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#190

Post by echelon »

jedr wrote: post #185
limagnolia wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic isn't Open Source though, they abandoned Open Source. It seems to me like this is an example of non-Open Source whatever licensing causing job loss. Or just plain bad leadership.

(Elastic employee here) Elastic is in fact open source again. - Was originally open source Apache license - Switched to non-open source Elastic license in Jan 2021 [^1] - Switched to open source AGPL license in Aug 2024 [^2] Not to defend the license change(s). [1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change [2] https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...

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