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Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

elastic.co

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Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#61

Post by nirmalc »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #20

A couple years ago, I was evaluating moving our ES clusters to the cloud. I got quotes from both Elastic and AWS. How much more Elastic wanted than AWS, didn't make sense, not even factoring support and hosting. It was like almost twice as much. Morally, I get why I should have gone with Elastic. Too bad businesses aren't about morals.

If your use case is faster search - ES cloud is way more efficient/performs better than AWS. They manage their cloud stack pretty well. I hate those `amazon.internal` stack trace in thread stack ( when you try to troubleshoot something in prod) as you have no access to code to see what it even does.

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#62

Post by dbattaglia »

nemo44x wrote: post #36
goodroot wrote: post #14

Lots of great people there. Condolences to those impacted. It's disappointing. Elastic had it. Unforced errors abound.

Yeah it’s amazing how much potential that company had and then blew it with a series of questionable business decisions. They had a ton of really quality talent too but much of it has moved on the last few years. Pretty much everything MongoDB did right, Elastic did the opposite and failed. Instead of being the best place to run Elasticsearch, one of the most popular open source projects ever, they blew all that bran…

As someone that worked at Elastic for 4.5 years on the Elastic Cloud team and really loved it there for the majority of that time, I saddens me to admit it but this is spot on. Despite all their best efforts, everyone I've ever spoken to just wants to run the "ELK stack" and doesn't care about their confusing solutions strategy.

One thing about Elastic is that their roots are in on-prem / self-managed software and selling support to enterprise customers. This led to our cloud strategy being based around ECE (Elastic Cloud Enterprise), with the idea we would eventually fully unify this on-prem version of our Cloud product with our actual SaaS, and just run ECE "at scale". During that time we got stuck in the slower Elasticsearch "quarterly minor + monthly patch" release cycle (SaaS did have a shorter one but it was also troubled) and spent countless engineering effort troubleshooting enterprise customer's own infrastructure (imagine stuff like "ohhh, I see, you V-Motioned a server hosting ZooKeeper containers, and you're running on spinning disks" after 2 weeks+ of back and forth). We couldn't easily add table-stakes features to our SaaS because we needed it to run on-prem too, even though ECE is very limited in the types of supporting infrastructure we could add (basically just ZooKeeper and Elasticsearch). I think they are trying to move past this strategy and onto a SaaS-only K8s based approach but I fear too much time was squandered. I hope I'm proven wrong.

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#64

Post by gk1 »

goodroot wrote: post #14

Lots of great people there. Condolences to those impacted. It's disappointing. Elastic had it. Unforced errors abound.

Considering the widespread layoffs even at superb places like Stripe, I'd guess this has more to do with overhiring during "the good times" than with product-related decisions.

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#65

Post by nemo44x »

dbattaglia wrote: post #62
nemo44x wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s amazing how much potential that company had and then blew it with a series of questionable business decisions. They had a ton of really quality talent too but much of it has moved on the last few years. Pretty much everything MongoDB did right, Elastic did the opposite and failed. Instead of being the best place to run Elasticsearch, one of the most popular open source projects ever, they blew all that bran…

As someone that worked at Elastic for 4.5 years on the Elastic Cloud team and really loved it there for the majority of that time, I saddens me to admit it but this is spot on. Despite all their best efforts, everyone I've ever spoken to just wants to run the "ELK stack" and doesn't care about their confusing solutions strategy. One thing about Elastic is that their roots are in on-prem / self-managed software and se…

Thanks for the info - it just sounds like a completely bizarre approach. Like, why even make it the same (SaaS and OSS versions)? If you're going to do SaaS ELK then why not just do that and add whatever features you need to be better than DataDog or w/e? Make the SaaS ELK better than a version anyone could even imagine self managing.

It's especially weird to me because if I was a casual user then I wouldn't even know Elastic had anything to do with Elasticsearch. You certainly wouldn't know it from their webpage. I literally see this at the top:

"Accelerate results that matter, across any cloud. Easily deploy anywhere, and extend the value of Elastic with cloud-native features."

What does this even mean? How is the marketing department not 100% of these layoffs, lol?! why is a so-called SaaS company talking to me about deploying to any cloud and what even is "Elastic" and just what problem is it solving?

This is so bad it's hilarious.

You have to scroll for awhile to even see the word "Elasticsearch" and I don't see anything about ELK anywhere.

What pathetic execution. You were smart to leave that place!

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#67

Post by uglyrumours »

Other things I have heard: 1) the claim is that lower levels of management "were not told". I suspect that is not completely true, since many people's projects had new people parachuting in the last week or two. 2) Survivors are wondering if the selection process was "random". 3) Survivors are wondering if there will be another layoff in January.

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#68

Post by uglyrumours »

version_five wrote: post #16
TylerE wrote: post #2

This seems really tone deaf: “ As hard as this is for all of us, our future is bright. I look forward to working with you to propel Elastic into that future as we make Elastic a generational brand”, especially since he earlier says those being laid off may not even know that for up to 24 hours.

I've had this happen somewhere I worked: "ceo: well be laying off a big portion of the company, you'll find out who tomorrow". I don't know the right way to do this, but I know this is the wrong way. What possible good does this achieve?

Another precious tidbit: congratulatory emails for wins and renewals were received on Nov 29. They should have just combined them - "Congratulations on that incredible 6 figure win! OBTW you're FIRED.' LOLOLOL

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#69

Post by gaws »

miduil wrote: post #5

If you scroll down to the very bottom there is a big "we are hiring" icon. I wish everyone who was laid off all the best. I wonder if Amazon with it's elastic fork will try to acquire some of the talent.

> If you scroll down to the very bottom there is a big "we are hiring" icon.

Layoff expensive workers to hire cheaper ones.

Re: Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

#70

Post by gaws »

renewiltord wrote: post #27
rrix2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, it would be so nice if our industry hadn't over-hired for the last five years on the promise of everlasting ZIRP and trickle-down funding from adtech giants. alas, here we are.

Why would that be nice? Having over-hired and still doing just fine means that for the period that companies were over-provisioned they were disbursing profits to labour (workers) rather than capital (shareholders).

> Having over-hired and still doing just fine means that for the period that companies were over-provisioned they were disbursing profits to labour (workers) rather than capital (shareholders).

Shareholders caught wind of that and are taking corrective action.

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