Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#541

Post by projectazorian » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:28 PM UTC

triyambakam wrote: post #444

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a bigco that followed this approach. I think the alleged fungibility of programmers is surface-level. Sure - ~any decent programmer can jump into ~any codebase and do your JIRA tickets. But there's a more holistic ownership you miss out on that's going to be the difference between a system aging gracefully and a system becoming a giant hunk of butchered junk that's been one-small-jira-ticket-ed to death o…

> Programmers were expected to stay either 1 year or 10 years, and you'd be compensated according to which bucket you were falling into How did this work? You got a raise after 10 years?

Scaling the size of refresh grants based on time in service is another effective strategy, and often less expensive to the company.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#542

Post by hashmap » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

PoignardAzur wrote: post #535

hashmap wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how this has gone over everyone's heads here, because what's happening is extremely obvious. If you're a big FAANG-like company, you've seen workers make big gains in wages over the past year, and turnover rates have been increasing significantly during the great resignation. This isn't enough to sink you, but you don't like it, because it does eat into your margins a little. Of course you're still makin…

I don't really see it. Gitlab isn't a Google-style megacorporation; its CEO is co-founder, and it still has a reputation for having fairly horizontal management. The idea that its execs just decided to lay off a bunch of people for no reason just to wage some plausibly deniable class warfare doesn't really make sense to me.

I dunno, maybe look at more than one company doing layoffs and think about whether the group as a whole is in dire fiscal straits, whether they're continuing to hire through the layoffs, and who the winners and losers will be through the whole ordeal. Those details are elsewhere on the thread and are easily googleable if you have a real interest.

If you have a hard time believing capitalists wouldn't literally do capitalism when they see a chance for it, I don't know what I can tell you really.

"I don't really see it" is a pretty... well it's something, that's for sure.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#543

Post by disqard » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

gmt2027 wrote: post #254

jayd16 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs are about projected profits not past profits.

So the plane has been flying over valleys at record altitude and we see a couple of mountains ahead that we will easily clear. Despite being absolutely no where near crashing, let's throw a couple of crew overboard so that we can continue to climb to new heights and keep the hype engines of our overvaluation going?

Maybe you missed the memo, but corporations are supposed to grow exponentially, for all eternity -- never mind the Laws of Thermodynamics (or any other sanity check, for that matter).

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#544

Post by projectazorian » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:39 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #502

whatever1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these…

> If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. If the company was laying off the deadwood and the quiet quitters, the top performers know who they are, and are not concerned about being laid off themselves. Top performers don't particularly care to work with deadwood and quiet quitters, either.

It's rare that "deadwood" and "quiet quitters" do literally zero work. Even if you feel that your job is secure, you might not appreciate having their work dumped into your lap, especially since there's a good chance that it's not critical-path work. And you might not want to be in an environment where morale is low and trust in leadership just took a major hit.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#545

Post by thwayunion » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

mavelikara wrote: post #516

thwayunion wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. My own pet theory about this round of layoffs is as follows. The tech companies spent 2021 massively over-estimating the value of boot camp folks and new grads. They spent 2022 learning a tough lesson. I saw this first hand. So much lost time mentoring low-quality hires. Now they will spend 2023 massively underestimating the value of their senior folks (10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertis…

> Doing this at a FAANG would require pulling in 20+ full timers for a year before shipping our first line of code. Why are these large companies so slow? Are the 10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc. helping or hurting this?

> Why are these large companies so slow?

A combination of risk aversion, regulatory burden, and process. The corporate machine can't afford to trust the judgement of individual contributors or even their managers or even their directors or sometimes even their VPs.

Credit where it's due: some of that is because of real risks that large corps do need to worry about but scrappy startups don't need to worry about.

A lot of it though -- especially the burdens that come from standardized processes and distributed responsibility -- boils down to a combination of (1) the cost of treating employees like cogs and (2) some amount of empire building.

> Are the 10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc. helping or hurting this?

It can go either way, but the question is kind of ill-formed. The decisions that slow stuff down happen at the VP+ level. If you're being slowed down by an IC, it's usually not the IC's fault (you'd rather not even have to interact with them in the first place, but someone VP+ demanded that you must).

That said, generally the valuable people with tons of experience are the ones building/fixing stuff. The "process implementation cogs" are typically more commodity-like labor.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#546

Post by whatever1 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

mavelikara wrote: post #516

thwayunion wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. My own pet theory about this round of layoffs is as follows. The tech companies spent 2021 massively over-estimating the value of boot camp folks and new grads. They spent 2022 learning a tough lesson. I saw this first hand. So much lost time mentoring low-quality hires. Now they will spend 2023 massively underestimating the value of their senior folks (10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertis…

> Doing this at a FAANG would require pulling in 20+ full timers for a year before shipping our first line of code. Why are these large companies so slow? Are the 10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc. helping or hurting this?

Because for FAANG to invest resources in a program, they need to make sure that it will return hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t forget that every year they need to show to the shareholders that they grow with double digits, and for FAANG this means billions of dollars in extra revenue.

So a lot of time is spent evaluating a program in stead of just doing the program.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#547

Post by biftek » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:43 PM UTC

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #92

arbuge wrote: post #56

At this point it's beginning to look like tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, along with inserting a few words about AI in their websites and pitch decks.

> tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, No, they are doing this because we are in a recession and businesses are always the first to know and labor is the last to know.

We aren't in a recession

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#548

Post by thwayunion » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:44 PM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #546

mavelikara wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing this at a FAANG would require pulling in 20+ full timers for a year before shipping our first line of code. Why are these large companies so slow? Are the 10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc. helping or hurting this?

Because for FAANG to invest resources in a program, they need to make sure that it will return hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t forget that every year they need to show to the shareholders that they grow with double digits, and for FAANG this means billions of dollars in extra revenue. So a lot of time is spent evaluating a program in stead of just doing the program.

This as well. Things that make for fantastic lifestyle businesses -- a few people doing mid-seven revenue with minimal compute expenses -- just isn't worth it for a FAANG spending an order of magnitude more than that per hour just on one guy's compensation package.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#549

Post by jldugger » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

SantalBlush wrote: post #467

jldugger wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everywhere you look, the economic indicators are solid. Sure, if you cherry pick the indicators. There's a pretty big one you're tiptoeing around: the Fed Funds Rate has gone from 0.25 in 2022 to 4.75. > I do not have insight into Gitlab's customers, or the current state of Gitlab's business. Well, that is to your detriment, both as a persuader and decision maker. Gitlab is publicly traded, and their fiscal year en…

>Sure, if you cherry pick the indicators. There's a pretty big one you're tiptoeing around: the Fed Funds Rate has gone from 0.25 in 2022 to 4.75 Talk about cherry picking indicators—the federal funds rate isn't even an indicator. If you sincerely want to look at the data without cherry picking, please look at the top 10 US macro indicators [0]. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/02021...

Okay, you wanna look at SOFR instead? It shows the same thing but is an actual measure of economic activity instead of policy goals:

> The Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) is a broad measure of the cost of borrowing cash overnight collateralized by Treasury securities.

[1]: https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/sofr

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#550

Post by jlmorton » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #539

jlmorton wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear about what the macroeconomic environment is, because it has a specific meaning. I'll quote from another definition here, so I'm not merely offering my own interpretation: > A macro environment refers to the set of conditions that exist in the economy as a whole, rather than in a particular sector or region. In general, the macro environment includes trends in the gross domestic product (GDP), inflation…

> Instead, Gitlab explicitly blamed economy-wide conditions for these layoffs, and that is what I take issue with. The economy is doing well. And a macro-environment doesn't refer to just the economy. Per wikipedia: "The macro-environment refers to all forces that are part of the larger society and affect the micro-environment. It includes concepts such as demography, economy, natural forces, technology, politics, an…

> the macro "view" is that people aren't spending like they used to on technology.

Okay, so if I understand your point correctly, it's that Gitlab may have blamed the macroeconomic environment, but it should be fairly obvious to the casual reader that what is meant is that after the orgy of spending in 2021, tech spending is now broadly declining, and they can't ignore that. If sales are down, costs need to come down. So let's examine if that's true for Gitlab specifically, through their most recent quarterly data [1]:

> Quarterly revenue of $113.0 million, up 69% year-over-year

Gitlab's Q3 results showed higher revenue than any other quarter, and it wasn't close. It's many multiples higher than changes in wage indexes. Gitlab's 2022 revenue was nearly double their 2021 revenue, when technology spending was meant to be freely-flowing, and their second half revenue was higher than their first half. Gitlab is singing an entirely different tune to investors, and touting their rapid revenue growth.

There is no sign of any slowdown in Gitlab's revenue. It's higher than it has ever been, by a lot. Admittedly, Gitlab has not released Q4 2022 results, so there's been a few months since this release, but things have been improving over the course of the past several months, not deteriorating.

My complaint is not that Gitlab is conducting a layoff. If Gitlab over-hired, then fine. Course correct. If Gitlab wants to exit low-performers as part of a single broader cut, rather than manage them out, fine, do that. But don't blame the macroeconomic environment, especially when you're telling investors that the company is experiencing extremely high growth and improving margins, because it's disingenuous.