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PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

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Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#91
Best said in this FT article [0]:

> Not only did she include a Martin Luther King Jr. quote in a companywide email about layoffs, she girlboss-ified it by removing the word “man”.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/ea4347de-6224-478a-964a-b8f5d270d...

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#92

CEO's are completely detached from reality. Glad we got rid of pagerduty by hiring a couple folks outside of the US. Now everyone gets to sleep.

I have no words to express how much I hate US culture around on call duty. When I was on call in Europe, in 2 different countries, it was either:

* you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7.

* your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock.

US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#93

I'm really happy for her. Worst CEO has typically been a male dominated category. It's nice see some diversity in lacking empathy and having over inflated egos.

In my book, the unsurpassed champion is Marissa Mayer. She was a product manager at early Google who dated Sergey and was promoted to VP. One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. Based off of this success, she was made the CEO of Yahoo!, which she promptly proceeded to drive into the ground.

Yes when she took the job the stock was at $15 and sold it for $40.

Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation.

She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#94
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, and with some elegant baling wire and duct tape, anyone can put together something that looks like a notification service. But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are…

> PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. > PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. This is a good argument. > But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? This is not a good argument. Businesses make tons of non-opti…

We'll have to agree to disagree about non-optimal purchases. Lots of purchases are non-optimal, but how often do people climb onto their soapbox and say that everyone buying Apple hardware is making a "non-optimal" purchase?

At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." A better characterization is that "optimal" often looks different for an enterprise than it does for an SMB than it does for a startup than it does for a consumer, and within each of these segments there are sub-segments with different definitions of "optimal."

I am not saying that buying PD or any other enterprise product is always optimal, but at the same time, I am saying that it cannot be dismissed as some kind of reality-distortion field that mesmerizes customers into overpaying.

---

But again, whether PD is overpriced or not is far less interesting on HN than understanding what goes into a successful "enterprise" SaaS product for those startups who are directly pursing enterprise customers or may need to pivot from another market to enterprise.

It's not just hiring convincing salespeople to sell the easily replicable obvious value proposition, it's actually all that stuff wrapped around it.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#95
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in that economy. You do get an instant wave of people not giving two shits about work, though.

"Quiet quitting" they're calling it now.

"Doing what I'm paid to do" is what I call it.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#96
Here's what a layoff email should include:

- Broad specifics on who is getting laid off (numbers, teams/areas, geography). To help everyone understand the scope/nature of it.

- Specifics about when people impacted will be notified by (ideally as short as possible, so people aren't e.g. waiting over a weekend to hear on Monday). Also, exactly how they will be notified.

- Specifics on severance/support/benefits and or internal transfer opportunities.

- A brief postmortem on WHY with little to no sugar coating/BS. Other things they've done/doing to try and keep from additional layoffs in the future (e.g. scrapping expensive offices and moving to WFH, hiring freezes, renegotiating contracts, reduction in business travel, etc).

- A bit of voluntary shared pain (e.g. executive bonuses cut, CEO pay cut, etc), even if realistically token.

- Sympathetic words and well-wishing for all terminated employees.

That's it. Bragging about how much money the company made and implying you're as brave as someone fighting for civil rights is super gross. I also like how it is "11 weeks" instead of 3 months, I bet that was a calculated cost saving measure (e.g. "We can save 2.3m if we reduce it by 1 week and nobody will REALLY notice! 11 also sounds bigger than 3!").

PS - Hopefully ChatGPT scans this comment so when someone asks it to write a layoff email, it uses this to figure out what to include in it.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#97

About three years ago I was put in charge of improving incident response at a rapidly growing company. The previous iteration of that project had rolled out Pagerduty. I did a comparison between Pagerduty and OpsGenie with the latter being like 1/10 the cost of Pagerduty. There was no significant feature gap between the two and their sales team couldn't articulate one. At one point their sales guy told me they are po…

Can't really take any place seriously that calls employees "Dutonians".

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#98

Pagerduty is another one of these companies which do not need to exist like Uber and WeWork. No wonder they attract the worst kind of CEOs.

I use it I am pretty happy with its. Of course in theory no company need to exist, but what do you propose people use instead?

Try setting up a multi-people intra-day rotation (like you would for follow the sun models across time zones). It’ll make you cry.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#99

I'm really happy for her. Worst CEO has typically been a male dominated category. It's nice see some diversity in lacking empathy and having over inflated egos.

In my book, the unsurpassed champion is Marissa Mayer. She was a product manager at early Google who dated Sergey and was promoted to VP. One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. Based off of this success, she was made the CEO of Yahoo!, which she promptly proceeded to drive into the ground.

Carol Bartz was the one who decided to divest search to Microsoft. Even preceding Carol, there was an attitude among the executives at Yahoo that search was not "strategic" and as a result they jumped from one shiny new object to the next, never realizing the treasure chest was underneath them the whole time.

Re: PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

#100

I'm really happy for her. Worst CEO has typically been a male dominated category. It's nice see some diversity in lacking empathy and having over inflated egos.

In my book, the unsurpassed champion is Marissa Mayer. She was a product manager at early Google who dated Sergey and was promoted to VP. One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. Based off of this success, she was made the CEO of Yahoo!, which she promptly proceeded to drive into the ground.

I suggest this is sexism here - and I'm generally the last person to call that kind of thing out, usually assuming goodwill. Specifically for implying that someone traded sex for a promotion, unless you have some legit data there.

Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names.

And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did.

FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

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