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Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

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Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#41
post #16

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly. The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next. It sucked, but it was pretty humane. Bu…

[flagged]

Sometimes, people develop relationships of all different kinds with the people they work with. Terminating someone's access at 4am instead so they don't get a chance to say goodbye to those people and those attachments is, well, I wouldn't say inhumane, but it's disrespectful to those connections that have been formed.

Giving people the chance to say goodbye and commit their in-progress work and save their personalized shell scripts to their personal devices, not to mention personal effects at their desk; little niceties like that, were lacking in layoffs elsewhere.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not loved my work’s strategy of announcing a layoff in the coming months.

Why? At least at a personal level, assuming it wasn't already obvious to you, it seems as if it could serve as a kick in the pants to start looking around. A statement that it's going to happen doesn't change the reality. From a company perspective, it possibly makes less sense because you might prefer the oblivious folks to stay oblivious. But, personally, I'd prefer clear signals especially if it's not already blin…

It's the opposite of a clear signal and it's not like "looking around" necessarily means more stability in sector-wide downturns. The cynic in me suspects the idea is to scare people into working harder.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#43
post #11

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

Terraform is open source. What are people paying for?

Terraform Core is open source and free. TFE and Terraform Cloud (aside from the capped free version) are not.

Terraform still needs bit of help when you want to run production grade:

state-locking (dynamodb) state-storing (s3) workspace/template management CI/CD functions (atlantis) secret management (vault)

and TFE gives you these right out of the box in a neatly packaged way. Of course, you can come up with different tools to meet those reqs (parenthesized above)

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#44
I used to work for Pivotal before its acquisition by VMWare and one of the ops person told me that the town halls became a lot less interesting once the company went public and employees are usually the last ones to know with respect to insider-trading rules and policies. While I think the layoffs could have been better but I don't see Hashicorp flagrantly violating their own principles, as claimed by Gergely. Also - hope that employees affected by layoffs find another place soon.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#46

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

I hadn’t seen these and had been looking at Terraform Cloud for something recently… and as an existing Terraform user who has had to debug and examine things… that pricing is basically a perverse incentive waiting to happen. I’ve seen a number of terraform modules that try to use many small elements for things like AWS IAM permissions or Kubernetes configMaps, it helps document their individual purpose, it makes the…

Of the thousands of providers that exist for Terraform (where the implementation details you discuss would exist) only a half dozen are maintained by HashiCorp. Usually in some form of partnership with the vendor in question (e.g., AWS).

There’s no pricing based incentive structure for the type of sprawl you’re worried about. Not to say the trend you observed won’t continue. Just that if it does it’ll likely be due to composability or maintenance needs of the specific providers rather than juicing pricing.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn’t seen these and had been looking at Terraform Cloud for something recently… and as an existing Terraform user who has had to debug and examine things… that pricing is basically a perverse incentive waiting to happen. I’ve seen a number of terraform modules that try to use many small elements for things like AWS IAM permissions or Kubernetes configMaps, it helps document their individual purpose, it makes the…

Of the thousands of providers that exist for Terraform (where the implementation details you discuss would exist) only a half dozen are maintained by HashiCorp. Usually in some form of partnership with the vendor in question (e.g., AWS). There’s no pricing based incentive structure for the type of sprawl you’re worried about. Not to say the trend you observed won’t continue. Just that if it does it’ll likely be due t…

The sprawl of providers contains a lot of stale forks and copies, and on top of that its not easy to say “let’s just use John Smiths provider to setup the root credentials of our new K8S cluster because Hashicorp aren’t fixing issues we care about.

I use a few third party providers and the quality difference is wildly variable, the update cadence is sporadic and unreliable on average, and not wanting to build scripts and tools is why maintaining my own terraform providers forked fro hashicorp isn’t really viable time wise either.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#48
post #16

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly. The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next. It sucked, but it was pretty humane. Bu…

It read like a righteous indignation piece, without the benefit of being right, just to jump on the "aren't companies terrible?" bandwagon.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#49
post #25
post #16

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly. The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next. It sucked, but it was pretty humane. Bu…

Also laid off by Shopify. Agree that leaking was not the right call but I would have to vigorously disagree about the “well done” lay-off bit. Issues I observed included: * A complete lack of resourcing for the operational teams conducting the layoffs (talent, legal, etc) * People receiving demands to sign their severance agreements within a few days. * Severance agreements that were outright illegal in the regions o…

Unless there’s a security concern they should just let the employee keep the machine. The company I work for that did layoffs this year did that. It’s just easier for everyone involved and I imagine makes the layoff slightly less shitty for the employee.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#50
post #29

terraform destroy --target employees

If you want to do it immediately you should add “-auto-approve” to skip the confirmation. Employees should be singular as it’d be the type of resource. Each employee would have their own resource entry. It’d be something like employees[id] repeated for each employee. Otherwise you’d be terminating everybody by targeting the entire collection.

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