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Elastic lays off 7% of employees

elastic.co

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Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#201

Post by bunderbunder »

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.

It’s not like countries that decided against kleptocracy are drowning in unemployment. On the contrary, they often enjoy a happier population, a better standard of living, or both.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#202

Post by tonyedgecombe »

georgel wrote: post #20
wolvoleo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also big companies spend tons and tons of time and money on useless busy work. I work in IT and when we needed something new we'd just implement or build it. Now we have long certification processes for anything new, checking if it complies with hundreds of pages of policies. A lifecycle management program which we constantly have to keep updated. Governance teams that are constantly looking over our shoulders. All s…

This has been the case forever in corporate environments, even before AI. I worked for 3 years on an app that in startup land should have taken a couple months at best.

The interesting thing is how different outwardly similar businesses can be. I remember doing back to back contracts for two similar sized pharmaceutical companies. One of them had an IT group ten times the size of the other. You can guess which project overran.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#203

Post by bunderbunder »

brianwawok wrote: post #104
skeeter2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were realigning your SaaS company to ignore your technology short-comings and technical debt, and isntead focus on selling as much "AI-enabled " while the rush still looks like gold, this would be a great strategy & announcement.

Tech debt is much less important than many developers think it is. More sales over chasing tech debt almost every time.

I’ve seen many products die sudden, violent deaths due to unmanaged technical debt. If you have customers who care about quality and reliability, you simply cannot set up a false dichotomy between selling product and managing technical debt.

That said, I would also concede that over the past decade or two the clean code movement has made a damn strong effort of poisoning the term by trying to characterize technically inconsequential aesthetic concerns as technical debt.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#204

Post by tonyedgecombe »

r-w wrote: post #116
bigyikes wrote: post #15

Why even bother with such a small layoff? Is there a reason to not just dial up your attrition for a while?

I think that might be even worse for the mental health of the folks on the ground.

The anticipation is worse than the event itself.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#205

Post by infecto »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #198
infecto wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised. Don’t think about it as firing but also being overly cautious. If you run a division in the EU you are overly thoughtful for every single HC you add. You don’t take risks because that HC at minimum is going to cost a year of severance. It’s a balancing act, maybe less new jobs but you get less layoffs.

Presumably you aren’t paying 52 weeks of severance to someone you hired three months ago.

That’s right but depending on country there may be other legal requirements necessary so the costs tend to add up quickly and on average when you peak behind the curtains at an EU company you see it’s often easier to retain low performing members than it is to go through legal expenses and the notice period. You tend to be more thoughtful if you want to add HC on that region and avoid restructuring the company.

Maybe it works out on average but there are distinct pros and cons. On the net you get less job creation, less innovation and on the flip employees have more protection from being fired.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#207

Post by dzonga »

puszczyk wrote: post #2

Makes me sad to read it as an ex-Elastic employee. AI is used to justify the redundancies, and the company still expects to grow in this fiscal year. In the SEC filling the specifically mention more “head count” in “go-to-market” roles [1]. > a reduction of approximately 7% of our workforce > Advances in AI, automation, and technology are reshaping how work gets done, and we're changing with them. (…) That's what thi…

>more “head count” in “go-to-market” roles

Software engineers tend to put their heads in the sand, once a company/product reaches a certain maturity - it's the time for it to be milked. You need less product people - hence why most companies end up outsourcing to India etc, "A.I" is just outsourcing to "agents".

Now Salespeople - they can keep selling - and as long as they're willing buyers.

this is all part of the Product Maturity lifecycle.

One day the product stops being an attractive cash cow - then it gets sold to PE & finally dies or remains a zombie.

as an engineer - your job is to know where in the product lifecycle the company|product you're currently working on is.

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#208

Post by jknoepfler »

joe_mamba wrote: post #177
jknoepfler wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soci…

Are you seriously suggesting that the reason it is cheaper to shift factory labor from the United States to Mexico or Vietnam is because Mexican/Vietnamese factories don't need to hire diversity consultants? I have to have misunderstood what you're arguing, because that's transparently ridiculous.

Basic labor regulation around hiring/firing has nothing to do with diversity. It has everything to do with basic labor regulation around hiring/firing. Sure, regulation is expensive. There's no special reason the United States can't foot that bill and every other Western European economy can.

What on earth do diversity consultants have to do with prohibiting opportunistic layoffs to maximize short-term profits?

Re: Elastic lays off 7% of employees

#210

Post by jollyllama »

bigyikes wrote: post #15

Why even bother with such a small layoff? Is there a reason to not just dial up your attrition for a while?

7%? Small? 10 years ago, 5% was significant, and that was in a fairly mature sector.

Granted, in that context, you'd be laying off 5% every two-ish years until industry trends changed direction.

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