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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

#221

Post by oofta-boofta »

PLenz wrote: post #44

We're well into the cargo cult layoffs. CEOs need to look good to their bosses and your job is a sacrafice they are willing to make. I'm sure there are some who will make their decisions based on real data and analysis - but they'll make thier decisions independently of other firms actions. Seeing all this clustered behavior suggests little analysis is really being done here.

Especially given the strong economic numbers that just came out, yeah I don't buy the "bad macro climate" argument anymore. It's really plain as day: these CEOs make some cuts of 5-15%, their stock price goes up. This is a pattern we'll likely continue to see through this year.

Honestly, the tech industry was due for some churn from an employer perspective, and all this talent circulating is going to up the competition for company's products.

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

#222

Post by darkwater »

avree wrote: post #214
darkwater wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that a covid-related hiring spree should have affected a company like Confluent. Yeah there were probably many product companies that got more money due to Covid that wanted a managed Kafka solution, but Covid also took down other kind of companies who might have been Confluent's customers. I think it has more to do with cheap money not being cheap anymore.

The money was cheap because of COVID. https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/

Covid made it dirty cheap but money was cheap before as well, or at least cheaper than it is now [1]. Anyway what I meant was that Confluent is not the kind of company that hired more because it thought that Covid changes in business where going to last forever (a la Shopify or Meta).

[1] https://www.fxempire.com/macro/united-states/interest-rate

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

#223

Post by 1270018080 »

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…

No.

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

#224

Post by bagacrap »

triceratops wrote: post #98
renewiltord wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is important to fire people who push regressions to production. Accountability is important!

Maybe? Depends on the severity of the regression, how much it cost, whether there was negligence or carelessness involved etc. And arguably you'd first fire the person who set up a process that allows regressions to be pushed to prod so easily. Underperformance is not a single mistake. It's a pattern of behaviors that compound.

A CEO looking at the economic climate of 2020-2021 and thinking they needed to hire to support the growth in demand for their products is not being negligent, they simply lacked the crystal ball that would have told them the Fed was going to slam the brakes on the economy last year. Even the Fed said they wouldn't be doing that. In light of what's happened, companies need to get leaner to survive.

Now if these CEOs don't manage to turn the ship around in the next couple years it probably is in fact time to look for a replacement.

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

#225

Post by willcipriano »

andsoitis wrote: post #167
willcipriano wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if the board are optimizing for themselves as well?

Then the board is breaking their fiduciary duty and the shareholders will sue them into oblivion.

How would you prove it? "We thought that these stock buybacks we put on the company credit card were for the good of the shareholders long term, it's a coinsidance that it happened to increase our compensation as well, sorry it didn't work out as we thought."

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

#226

Post by CydeWeys »

hattmall wrote: post #196
CydeWeys wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not familiar with all of those but if the ones I am none are revolutionary. They are mostly just a large company using their vast resources to capture market share. Gmail, Android and Chrome aren't revolutionary in the least bit. They are just Google taking over existing segments to sell ads more effectively. Same for maps, perhaps street view was at the least innovative.

That sounds like some pretty high standards then. What within the area of tech would you classify as revolutionary then? I'm guessing DARPA: The Internet, IBM/Microsoft: the PC, Apple: the iPhone. Anything else?

I'm talking about the next category of innovation down, whatever you want to call it if you feel "revolutionary" needs to be reserved for generation-defining technologies. Because with your current definition, the vast majority of even large tech companies will never have a product that meets it.

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

#227

Post by mylons »

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?

have plenty of cash reserves. cash in a bank account, and low expenses are the way to weather these moments.

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

#228

Post by CydeWeys »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #180
CydeWeys wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It grew them by orders of magnitude and in some cases saved them from failure outright.

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

#229

Post by piva00 »

avree wrote: post #214
darkwater wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that a covid-related hiring spree should have affected a company like Confluent. Yeah there were probably many product companies that got more money due to Covid that wanted a managed Kafka solution, but Covid also took down other kind of companies who might have been Confluent's customers. I think it has more to do with cheap money not being cheap anymore.

The money was cheap because of COVID. https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/

Money has been cheap since the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, it wasn't just COVID, it's been that way for more than a decade.

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

#230

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

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 really get the feeling that many companies are just blindly doing whatever other companies do.

You're not on your own with that idea. It's the blind leading the blind.

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