Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#51

Post by d4mi3n »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #49
d4mi3n wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been wondering what the economics of shipping thousands of laptops internationally shakes out to be. I suspect it may be a wash given the laptops are used and are likely depreciating assets.

Anybody ever manage equipment return programs? Are there compelling reasons to do this at scale that don’t boil down to data loss prevention.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#52

Post by cbsmith »

candiddevmike wrote: post #12
jstx1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terraform is open source. What are people paying for?

This right here HashiCorp, this is part of the problem. Layoffs are not going to solve this. I think Terraform has the same problem as Docker: HashiCorp isn't capturing the value of Terraform, and other companies are making more money off of it by seeing the real opportunity (like Docker/Docker Inc and Kubernetes). Cloud providers are reaping the benefits, and the other TACOS (Terraform Automation & Collaboration Sof…

I find it weird that anyone thinks even the people deciding to do the layoffs think they are a solution. They are a consequence of a problem.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#53

Post by happytiger »

d4mi3n wrote: post #51
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been wondering what the economics of shipping thousands of laptops internationally shakes out to be. I suspect it may be a wash given the laptops are used and are likely depreciating assets. Anybody ever manage equipment return programs? Are there compelling reasons to do this at scale that don’t boil down to data loss prevention.

The issue is that company information gets immediately sold on Craigslist or OfferUp or whatever.

In returning the equipment it actually protects the employee from compromise by creating a chain of custody for corporate data.

Sounds counterintuitive but it’s not. If the equipment needs to be destroyed — and it often is — it can be done properly.

People have no idea how easy it is to recover data from a single formatted drive.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#54

Post by xref »

happytiger wrote: post #53
d4mi3n wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been wondering what the economics of shipping thousands of laptops internationally shakes out to be. I suspect it may be a wash given the laptops are used and are likely depreciating assets. Anybody ever manage equipment return programs? Are there compelling reasons to do this at scale that don’t boil down to data loss prevention.

The issue is that company information gets immediately sold on Craigslist or OfferUp or whatever. In returning the equipment it actually protects the employee from compromise by creating a chain of custody for corporate data. Sounds counterintuitive but it’s not. If the equipment needs to be destroyed — and it often is — it can be done properly. People have no idea how easy it is to recover data from a single formatt…

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#55

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

xref wrote: post #54
happytiger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that company information gets immediately sold on Craigslist or OfferUp or whatever. In returning the equipment it actually protects the employee from compromise by creating a chain of custody for corporate data. Sounds counterintuitive but it’s not. If the equipment needs to be destroyed — and it often is — it can be done properly. People have no idea how easy it is to recover data from a single formatt…

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I’d wager to agree, I don’t play in this space much but I can’t imagine MDM being unable to handle this kind of basic use case, and also for most companies the confidential data being worth enough to be more careful than relying on MDM. Sure if you work for a compay that builds weapons for the USG you probably need to worry about hardware chain of custody. But those people are not sending their employees home with laptops anyway. In other words, if you trust your employees enough to take that device home, whatever you have on there is probably fine to be handled by MDM

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#56

Post by glenngillen »

techdragon wrote: post #47
glenngillen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sprawl of providers due to forks for whatever reason is a completely different issue to the resource sprawl you originally called out.

The point remains though: there’s no incentive system for the people who make the implementations decisions re resource granularity within providers to increase that because of this pricing change. For the most part they don’t work at HashiCorp. And even when they do, those abstractions are more often due to the underlying API they’re communicating with.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#57

Post by plugger »

xref wrote: post #54
happytiger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that company information gets immediately sold on Craigslist or OfferUp or whatever. In returning the equipment it actually protects the employee from compromise by creating a chain of custody for corporate data. Sounds counterintuitive but it’s not. If the equipment needs to be destroyed — and it often is — it can be done properly. People have no idea how easy it is to recover data from a single formatt…

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I can't speak to FileVault, but Bitlocker and TPM can be quite easily defeated through sniffing the bitlocker key as it's transmitted from the TPM chip to the CPU to decrypt the drive on boot over the LPC, I2C, or SPI bus. Unless you enable TPM+pin for preboot auth you can't easily protect the data on a Windows PC, even with FDE.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#58

Post by d4mi3n »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #55
xref wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I’d wager to agree, I don’t play in this space much but I can’t imagine MDM being unable to handle this kind of basic use case, and also for most companies the confidential data being worth enough to be more careful than relying on MDM. Sure if you work for a compay that builds weapons for the USG you probably need to worry about hardware chain of custody. But those people are not sending their employees home with la…

I'm of a similar mind. I also think the argument of this protecting the employee, while true, feels a it weak in the face of an employer deciding to leave a laptop they didn't adequately scrub with said ex-employee.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#59

Post by jillesvangurp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

> Investors heard it first, together with employees let go. The rest of staff heard nothing formal just yet. https://ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

It's their money. So, of course investors would need to be informed, consulted, and reassured.

There are a lot of legalities and practicalities around laying off people. It's one of those things that can get really expensive when it is not done properly. Telling people that they are being layed-off is pretty much the last step in that process. Companies don't actually have a lot of wiggle room here and have to plan for people lawyering up and pushing back.

I've been layed off myself by Nokia in 2012. It was a weird period for Nokia and there were many layoff rounds as the company was basically imploding. It sucks when that happens to you but I never took it personally.

I can't fault Nokia for the way they handled things and I never took it personally and look back on this as positive thing:

- They made me a nice financial offer based on years served.

- They offered plenty of support; including some startup funding. I ended up making use of that.

- Given what happened to the company afterwards, I'm not unhappy to not have been there for that wild ride.

Re: Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

#60

Post by skrebbel »

oofta-boofta wrote: post #19

You know a company behaves extremely poorly when even notorious corporate simp Gergely Orosz calls them out.

I mean he calls everybody out all the time right? And then retracts cause oops it was all half-truths and assumptions. I feel like there’s no signal here, this guy treats the truth as an inconvenient obstacle at best.
Post reply on HN