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Ask HN: If I Close My Data Centers, What About the People/Jobs Lost?

• xupybd 8y ago
  Can you last long term if you don’t move? If there are huge savings to be made others in the same space might jump on the opportunity. It’s a horrible thing to have to let people go but the alternative may be far worse.
• tucaz 8y ago
  I will assume that at the current state you are able to pay both the datacenter costs and people costs since it seems that is what you are currently doing. With that assumption in mind, if you do migrate and realize that you now don’t need 80% of the people you needed before, it could mean one of two things: - you are now able to pocket whatever savings you were able get from the migration and either save it or invest in something to potentially keep that money in the economy, just in a different way - you now have 80% of your people free to do whatever other things you didn’t do because they had to maintain datacenters. That is huge in terms of efficiency gains and allows you to redirect that money to increase the value provided by your company either by repurposing the current workforce or getting rid of them and bringing people you could previously not bring on board due to existing costs Either way I believe that everybody is better off After the changes. Efficiency gains such as the one you are describing is what makes it possible for economies to grow and keep moving forward. Can you imagine if you had to handle cows, pigs and farms to have a BLT? It’s very good that such things are outsourced because that allows for improvement that would otherwise not be possible.
  • subway 8y ago
    Odds are high that the anticipated cost savings sits largely on the folks they intend to sack, rather than on any power/real estate/bandwidth/hardware savings.
    • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
      Actually the cost savings hinge on the massive cost savings from moving to a commercial cloud, laying off workforce would save more, but would prefer to save a bunch by moving to cloud and keep the workforce for other things.
      • patrickg_zill 8y ago
        How much actual benchmarking have you been able to complete for your applications? Have you already virtualized your own server and applications in the DC you have?
      • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        Moving to the cloud doesn't save money for an established business which knows their datacenter needs. Cloud providers pay for the same hardware, staff to manage that hardware, and then add a layer of profit on top. Going to the cloud only makes sense if you believe you can fire people. And realistically, you need most of those people to maintain and configure your cloud service. It's hard to imagine someone Fortune 50 scale gaining any cost efficiency from going to a cloud service, is this a temporary pricing promotion you're looking to take advantage of or have you done all your homework on the savings? How confident are you on what your cloud expenses will look like?
        • brogrammernot 8y ago
          I have to assume the massive savings are from a top tier deal to secure a f50 as a client. You know once they move they aren’t going to move again. Google, AWS, Azure would all love a f50 client and I don’t think they’d care too much about breaking even on the costs of the service or even losing some money because of the amount of social capital they earn from the “partnership”.
• suff 8y ago
  They need cloud certifications. They should see this as a fabulous opportunity to get paid to do cloud training, hands-on work. If you become a cloud architect or a cloud security expert, whether it is at your company or somewhere else, there will always be great opportunity. If they refuse to learn to serve a changing market, that is where they will run into problems. You can only ride a single skill for so long. If you stayed in the horse-shoe business after about 1904, life was not great.
  • dankohn1 8y ago
    I'd recommend CNCF's training for Kubernetes: https://www.cncf.io/certification/training/ https://www.cncf.io/certification/training/ We offer a free edX course and then a paid one that prepares you for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. Disclosure: I am executive director of the CNCF and helped create these courses. P.S. No job will be around forever. You are not doing you or them any favors by trying to maintain them in inefficient roles. But you can invest the resources to bring them with you to the new world.
• jhowell 8y ago
  If your business has competitors, and they move to the cloud, conceivably they will be able to lower prices, and/or provide more service/features because of cloud scale. In most instances, the less your competitors charge, the more customers flock to your competitors. It is not personal, but economic in my opinion.
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    Our business is an old, traditional business that happens to have lots of data centers for legacy reasons. Even though we spend $BBB on data centers, they're not the core of the business and a very small part of overall revenue. Realistically, even if we didn't move from data centers we would be good as long as the core non-tech business functioned.
    • alpb 8y ago
      Are you sure you’re spending triple-digit Billions in dollars for datacenters? Or are you just trolling?
    • jhowell 8y ago
      As an economic principal what you suggest is not the best use of inventor assets and compounds when you factor in employee efficiency/return per employee. If you invested your hard earned money into this business you would want cost efficiencies and high productivity. Company executives have a fiduciary responsibility to do so in the US. If you're running a business and are not seeking cost efficiency but instead are more interested in employee satisfaction, likely you should be in HR and let the CEO handle day to day operations and the bottom line, so you can contribute to the company by driving employee retention, satisfaction or some metric that reflects positively on the bottom line. It's OK to the a CEO. It's OK to be in HR. It's not OK to be a CEO in HR. It's not OK to be a HR as CEO.
      • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
        Point well taken. But as many have mentioned in this thread, it is very hard to hire good people and the people I have already have deep knowledge of the systems and business and are good at what they do. Just from that efficiency perspective it makes sense to retrain per fiduciary responsibility. The fact that I can keep lots and lots of people working instead of terminating is an awesome bonus that I feel great about.
• jonex 8y ago
  While automation is removing some jobs, we are far from a fully automated society. I obviously don't know about the specific job markets where your data centers are, but in general, the ones having the hardest time finding a job aren't the ones with years of work experience in running data centers. They might have to retrain and if they live in a small town they might have to move/commute to find something new however. This can be hard enough for some people that they won't be happy about it. In the end, I think it's hard to argue that we should keep being inefficient just to save jobs. History haven't been nice to that kind of companies.
• tyingq 8y ago
  Retrain them in AWS, devops, or something that has similar need, versus hiring from outside.
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    Best way to retrain without having to pay AWS a huge fee for all the certs?
    • alonmower 8y ago
      Negotiate a discount for the certs as part of the large contract you’ll be signing with AWS
    • jdubs 8y ago
      Paying for certs will pale in comparison to paying for inefficient infrastructure costs.
    • segmondy 8y ago
      The certs are cheap $150 each. If you have that many you can create your own internal exam
• friedman23 8y ago
  I really think the worst thing you could do is continue to run the business in an inefficient manner. Improving technology and as a result efficiency is the reason we have advanced so much as a species. However, you don't need to be callous in your pursuit of efficiency. You should try to give these people an opportunity to update their skills and get a new position. You might not be in a position to do that however.
  • notananthem 8y ago
    This
• buahahaha 8y ago
  Just retrain them. They're going to have tangential skills to the new platform. Get your network team to learn all about VPCs and networks and security groups and peering and VPNs, train them to be your in-house experts to deal with changes and expansions and to help trouble-shoot issues. Chances are you're still going to have systems, your systems engineers can be repurposed to better tie in your monitoring tools, your security tools, etc. You're going to need authentication and identity management, and probably have internal people handling it. If they're motivated to keep their jobs, all it should cost you is a $5-20K/head in training. That's peanuts compared to the turmoil of everyone thinking they're going to lose their jobs, or the costs of hiring new people w/ pre-existing cloud skills. It is cheaper than the stop-gap of paying outside consultants till you can bring in the interior staff. Also, these people _know_ your existing systems. They know your business logic, they know what needs to be up and they know what can't break on Thanksgiving weekend. That is valuable knowledge that is a hidden cost in rehiring the work force. You're going to find new challenges in the new system. If your employees are willing to transition, then transition them. It is your best bet. If you have a subset of employees that can't/refuse to transition, put them on performance improvement plans. No rumor mill - if you're on a PiP you need to shape up or get out; if you're not on a PiP keep doing well, your job is safe.
  • marktangotango 8y ago
    This claim of massive savings is ludicrous for an f50 in the first place. It’s doubtful their cost is primarily maintaining and admining fleets of x64 servers, which is what the “cloud” is optimized for. These companies generally have massive costs from legacy mainframe, iseries, mvs etc systems. The ops creds are suspect to say the least.
    • citrablue 8y ago
      Your comment would be more palatable if you gave the OP benefit of the doubt. It seems reasonable to assume that someone who is in the position to affect such change, and is willing to ask HN for advice, likely has actual cost savings estimates. Perhaps saying something like, "Are you sure the cost savings are really there, and you won't face unexpected hidden costs in the future? I have experience with X,Y,Z, and we found that while the cloud is optimized for x64 deployment, we had hidden costs A, B, C, crop up after 9 months." As it is, it's only added noise and made you look bad.
• gus_massa 8y ago
  How many are them? (10? 100?) Are some of them close to retirement age?
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    Thousands, many close to retirement age. Think a company like UPS/Fedex that isn't at its core a tech company but with tech datacenters for logistics and billions in revenue.
    • TAForObvReasons 8y ago
      If serious, consider offering an early retirement package and see who bites.
    • russtrpkovski 8y ago
      Thousands? I really find that hard to believe.
      • tannhaeuser 8y ago
        Indeed. TBH the post reads like advertising for the alleged savings of going "cloud" vs on-premise.
      • russtrpkovski 8y ago
        Im not sure why I was down-voted. Even if you close data centers and move to the cloud, you still need personnel to manage the infrastructure.
• hotdog97 8y ago
  So this was "flagged", which is HN terminology for "eww we don't like this, it's controversial", which of course is total horse shit for most things that are both popular and flagged.
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    I’m unclear why it was flagged. It’s a legitimate question and problem I’m facing. I totally recognize these improvements are better overall, which is why I’m doing it, just wondering a bit about the people side of it.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      I'll say that I don't think it's very likely that the CIO / CTO of an "old traditional" F50 would be coming to HN for advice on a migration of data centers to cloud. You would be talking to one of the big professional services consultancies.
      • codingdave 8y ago
        I understand why you find it unlikely. I share the sentiment, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt -- if this is a leader of a traditional company, managing tech may not be in their wheelhouse. They may be perfectly capable of carrying this change forward without help, but are first engaging in a respectable attempt to research the perspective of tech folk, to help guide their upcoming decisions. If so, we should be commending them for reaching out to learn more before making decisions that will impact so many people.
        • deleted 8y ago
          [deleted]
      • kaybe 8y ago
        Might not hurt to do both.
      • gaius 8y ago
• supahfly_remix 8y ago
  Are you sure the savings will be real? I've read that real savings results from using the cloud for bursts while keeping the base load on-prem. (Never done this personally so can't speak from experience.) Once you let those people to you will be losing their knowledge in this area. Not sure if it matters.
• menthooth 8y ago
  Automation doesn't reduce the workforce. Capitalists wanting to pay less for labor reduces the workforce. You could retrain them. You could make them work fewer hours without reducing wages if the same surplus value can be produced with fewer labor hours. But, if, as it seems, your goal is to reduce labor costs, then there is no way to do that without costing wage earners their livelihoods. At that point hand wringing about people losing their jobs is pretty meaningless. They're probably better off leaving and looking at other options than they are staying and having their wages cut, but either way they're getting screwed.
• southern_cross 8y ago
  Since you're thinking towards the future, think also to the time when you will probably have to move an awful lot of your stuff back in-house, which might be much sooner than you'd expect. Plenty of companies which outsourced in a big way some years back have already been through a similar cycle. A former Fortune 500 employer of mine went through the outsourcing boomerang. Now I understand that they have big plans to move everything to the cloud within the next two years. Knowing their systems like I do, and knowing that the CEO who is driving this is fairly noobish (note that I said CEO rather than CIO), I don't think this plan is going to work out too well for them. But given that since I left they've had to file bankruptcy, and in doing so involuntarily dropped to about half of what they were before (employees, assets, etc.), I guess this is just par for the course for them now.
• downrightmike 8y ago
  Good luck being at someone else's mercy when the problems that are being held together by duct tape come to a head.
  • omeid2 8y ago
    At the same time, I rather negotiate with a service provider than employees who have implemented their position into the system.
• sdfin 8y ago
  Your competency is eventually going to do the same and save money and have advantages over you if you don't take advantage of the awesome cost savings. Then you may cease being competitive and would have to close the data centers anyway. As others said, you could retrain them.
• gboudrias 8y ago
  I've never managed more people than myself, BUT don't underestimate how difficult it is to find people in IT. It's really, really hard, and even harder to find people willing to stay longer than 2 years. Loyal tech workers are invaluable right now. But then again I'm not the one who has to make that choice.
• lmeyerov 8y ago
  Embracing automation and moving to cloud systems means layoffs for a dying/stagnating company and an opportunity engine for an innovating one. Our startup does GPU visual graph analytics for boosting visibility, and we see a world of a difference in velocity etc when we engage with a company that has cloud data lakes etc than one that doesn't. And, that includes F50s and federal agencies: super normal! Technology employees should embrace new tools; that's part of the job that ensures compounding effects over time.
• gjkood 8y ago
  You obviously have a good heart for asking the question! I have a feeling that whatever decisions you finally take would take into consideration the wellbeing of your employees. I would assume that the folks who are doing the legacy stuff have the necessary aptitude to pick up the skills that are needed to automate for the future. Can their existing data center skills be translated into learning about AWS/Azure, VMs, Containerization and the necessary scripting and DSLs around those toolsets? Obviously there will be reductions in headcount but give them the option to retool for the future. Even if they are not all retained but if you retrain them then they will still have options elsewhere with relevant skillsets. You are finally running a business after all where revenue and profit are the drivers. Good luck and I would say that your employees are luckier than those who consider them as mere resources and not people with lives and loved ones to take care of.
• segmondy 8y ago
  Just do it. Most old school sysadmins want to write their Perl and sh scripts not terraform and cloud formation scripts. I got my devs to embrace GCP, AWS, ansible, terraform, docker, k8s, devops and SRE before most of the admins. Most of them left to go safe companies where they can stick to their old ways.
  • gaius 8y ago
    I got my devs to embrace GCP, AWS, ansible, terraform, docker, k8s, devops and SRE before most of the admins. Yes, devs are often enthusiastic because they think they can ditch those boring old operations people who always stop them having fun. Next thing they know they're on call 24/7 and don't get to write application code anymore, just operations stuff... The truth is the need for ops people doesn't evaporate when you go cloud, be wary of anyone who says it does. This is the same dynamic that played out with MongoDB.
    • dev_dull 8y ago
      The new reality is that the barriers are gone. Ops must dev, dev must ops. Who can get away with a job that just requires them to open a Java IDE? Those jobs are just as extinct as a pure ops role.
      • gaius 8y ago
        With MongoDB the devs said "we don't need a DBA anymore". But what they failed to understand was that the DBA was not the person who knew all the database command syntax, but rather the person who was responsible for the data - its availability, security, and so on. And getting rid of that person didn't get rid of the reason the job existed. I dare say that came as a bit of a shock. Well, serves them right for stabbing a fellow Worker in the back! And it is playing out exactly the same way in Cloud. All the responsibilities still exist, apart from the most basic ones such as "sweep the floor of the datacentre". Now who's going to take them?
    • mmt 8y ago
      > Yes, devs are often enthusiastic because they think they can ditch those boring old operations people who always stop them having fun. I think it's more subtle than that. (Also, I think the parent was trolling, but you knew that). It's that there's a certain class of programmers (and/or managers with exclusively programming backgrounds) that truly believe all (technology) problems can be solved with software. If one assumes that belief, then the hostility to someone who believes differently is arguably inevitable. It also explains why, to some, "Devops" is code for "wannabe dev" or some other coding-first role. >Next thing they know they're on call 24/7 and don't get to write application code anymore, just operations stuff... >The truth is the need for ops people doesn't evaporate when you go cloud That explains the dozens of seemingly-identical job postings from tech startups for "Devops" engineers with both experience in the above latest tools and operational experience. Fortunately, they only ask for 1-3 years, which is realistic. > This is the same dynamic that played out with MongoDB. Ultimately, though, did it matter? If we sometimes got fail whales instead of 140 characters, we still didn't get flying cars. Alternatively, for whatever reason (freely flowing VC? low interest rates?), there's too little incentive for low cost or high reliability ops right now.
• codingdave 8y ago
  If you are in a position to make decisions for that many people, is it a safe assumption that you have a fairly robust knowledge of how to enact organizational change? Because based on my limited knowledge, major change like this has processes to be worked through which will help answers some key questions -- what is the current and future state, who will gain/lose, what will your communication plan and transition plan be, etc. You have much more knowledge to give those answers than we do. What to tell employees, and who can/not be saved from losing their job depends on those answers. I will say that open communication, with complete answers of what people should expect, will help the change to happen without losing the trust of those who do get to stick around. You will have some harsh truths to share. If I worked for you, I would want to hear them as soon as there are enough answers to not leave me in limbo on how it affects me, personally. Not sooner, not later.
  • cjalmeida 8y ago
    I would second this comment and add that proper change management is needed to ensure a smooth transition. As soon as the word is out, if you don’t have a plan and/or don’t communicate in the right way, your people will start sending out resumes and that can wreck havoc in your business. As you might expect, replacing top notch techies is quite hard. So managing the transition and making sure those that won’t be kept are better off is not only a good heartened approach but important to the success of the project. Management consultants usually get a bed rep but that’s something they’re pretty good at. If you’re an F50, you have the budget to hire a top one.
• georgebarnett 8y ago
  I have some experience in this area. My thoughts: Retraining can be done as part of the project, but you need to figure out what the project and sub projects looks like first. Then you an know roughly how you’ll move people around at various phases. It takes time to build new systems and time to train. Line those up and you can take advantage of them. Be careful with costs. They will blow out if you aren’t mindful. It’s going to be messy for a LONG time, which causes a huge amount of pain in the org. Be ready for this. Moving to cloud brings a whole new set of problems you haven’t thought of yet. For example, cleanup becomes more critical (old resources cost money, but can’t be “seen” because they’re not physical and just a hidden line item somewhere). There’s more. My email is in my profile if you wish to reach out.
  • nasmorn 8y ago
    Cleanup is even a problem in smallish startups with some dozens off devs. I cannot imagine the amount of security groups a F50 must have after some years
• late2part 8y ago
  What type of commercial providers are you saving money by moving to?
• synesso 8y ago
  This happened to my friend in his 50s. He was a storage specialist working for a bank. Since they outsourced to IBM a few years ago he's been stacking shelves in a supermarket.
  • markbnj 8y ago
    If you let yourself get that specialized then you're always going to be one or two innovations away from a layoff. I kind of feel that anyone who inhabits a niche like that for a long time is going to be in danger of becoming a victim of their own comfort seeking. Our industry is not kind to those who don't continually challenge themselves and learn new things. As a counter example to your friend's situation, I'll be turning 58 this november, and I'm an SRE/devops engineer working on kubernetes-based infrastructure in google cloud. Five or six years ago I was a back end .NET guy, a few years before that I was doing ASP web apps. Before that C++ and COM/DCOM stuff, and before that Orbix/CORBA, and before that... you get the picture. The old saw is that nothing stays the same, so if you're not moving with the world you can be sure it's moving past you.
• apapli 8y ago
  I imagine it is going to take you a LONG time to do this. Some apps will migrate easily, others not so much. If you want to look after your people build a program of work in place that helps you realise immediate benefit while giving you the change to reskill people as you migrate to newer tech.
• poster123 8y ago
  Jobs in the private sector do not come with lifetime guarantees. If you have new jobs you could train them to do, great. Otherwise, give the people you will lay off notice and severance, and let them figure out what to do.
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    To any companies wondering why their employees jump ship at the drop of a hat, or why there's just no loyalty anymore, this attitude is it.
    • Spivak 8y ago
      Sure, but it's a cycle that is easy to fall into and hard to break now that we're here. Distrust begets distrust.
      • s73v3r_ 8y ago
        Then those with the power, the employers, can work to earn that trust.
        • mmt 8y ago
          This can't be over-emphasized, that, especially with no union, the power dynamic is immensely unbalanced. Even just the information assymetry is huge, since, despite recent innovations like Glassdoor, workers know very little about even each other's circumstances. The parent's comment use of the word "cycle" implies, by association with phrases like "cycle of violence", that there might be some equality or that both parties may be victims to some degree. In the face of such assymmetry, such a claim would be extraordinary, requiring a strong argument, more than just an implication.
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    No. As an engineer myself, this is exactly what I'm working to avoid. I know we could terminate, but these people have built careers and have deep knowledge of the systems and business, I'm not letting them go without at least giving them the choice to retrain.
• ezequiel-garzon 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what does F50 refer to here? Google doesn’t help, nor does https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F50 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F50 .
  • tills13 8y ago
    Fortune 50, I assume.
  • dankohn1 8y ago
    It refers to the 50 biggest companies in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500
• Mc91 8y ago
  You should do the move. Sysadmin is now a niche discipline, people work in devops now. The tech economy is good and their skills are getting more obsolete. Just start slowly migrating things, and train them in devops skills. Then, even if you have a reduction in a year, they will have a year worth of modern skills in EC2 devops and the like. It's going to happen, so better it happens now than in the future.
• ultrasaurus 8y ago
  Kudos for keeping your sights on helping your team! I'm a big fan of holding on to a group of people that understands your business (I'd rather retrain a technology than instill passion and domain experience). Not 100% relevant (and not my better writing) but here are some of the things I've seen companies do in terms of moving people around from NOCs that might give you some ideas https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/future-of-noc/ https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/future-of-noc/ If you'd like a soundingboard to brainstorm with feel free to ping me at dave@euri.ca
• kylec 8y ago
  Since it sounds like you're going to save a bunch of money, I suggest letting them go and using that money to provide very generous severance packages (months of salary at least). Then they can choose to retrain themselves, take some time off, whatever. It works for Netflix.
• sjg007 8y ago
  I would build your own cloud. You have customers. Don’t give them away.
• panic 8y ago
  Maybe this is unrealistic somehow, but what about paying the difference in cost directly to the affected employees?
• joewee 8y ago
  There are a lot of benefits to migrating to the cloud, in my experience, cost isn’t one of them. Unless of course you are mucking around with accounting tricks by cutting employees and moving that cost to services or cost of goods sold, I’m not a expert in this, but it works and will save you money because you can control these expenses more easily and because of how payroll vs services are accounted for. You should aim to keep 50% of your workforce. 25% won’t want to change 10-25% won’t be able to. I would invest in training on automation and multicloud / hybrid cloud management. I recently worked on a large scale migration and you will definitely discover that the cloud wont work for a lot of your high performance computing, or it will be cost prohibitive. You also need to take into consideration intellectual property, does the company really want all of its IP on another conglomerates infrastructure? But most importantly you need to avoid lock-in to one provider at all cost, training your trusted resources who understand the business requirements on hybrid cloud or multi cloud implementation will really enable cost savings because you will have leverage during price negotiations. If you get locked into one provider you are going to get royally screwed on long term cost, seen it happen.
• boulos 8y ago
  Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud (and I assume/hope someone at Google is competing for your business). Some of those folks happily do updated things, but others (like people that rack servers) won’t have an obvious new role in a cloud focused world. My (now) colleague at Nic Harteau gave a talk at our Leaders’ Circle event talking about precisely this in Spotify’s move to Cloud: how could he keep the infrastructure team as they moved to cloud? As it turned out, most of them happily adjusted what they were doing because the mission was the same: serve the product teams / groups that need infrastructure from them. Sure, now you don’t configure a physical firewall, but there are still firewalls in cloud. In a sense, they’re even more important! I believe Nic said only one person from the group left. The engineer was focused on building their own SDN stack on-prem. That job, and other “things the provider completely handles” do go away. But that person likely would have been massively useful in helping guide how Spotify should use Google Cloud’s own SDN setup. There are lots of ways to architect how services interact in clouds, and a lot of it comes down to funny networking. So I’d say more than you might think, but please don’t mislead them.
• gsich 8y ago
  Why not automate your stuff at your current datacenter?
• mathattack 8y ago
  First path is to retrain them. Getting more cost efficient can coincide with overall corporate growth. Some people prefer to remain in their specialty or struggle to make the leap. In that case if they have tech skills, someone will take them. It may require a move, but they will land. It's one thing if you're firing people in the dark days of a deep recession. (Folks let go in 2001 had to leave California) It's another thing if you're letting people go into a market of 4% unemployment. If they can't get jobs with similar pay, then you were overpaying them.
• stretchwithme 8y ago
  Tech jobs exist because of automation and they eventually go away because automation. But every dollar saved in salary is available to spend on hiring people to do other jobs. It works out in the long run, but that doesn't make it easy on those who have to transition. I think it would be useful if employers eliminating jobs could have sort of a reverse auction where other employers offer comparable jobs in exchange for a portion of the savings. And the workers could either take their severance or accept one of those offers with no interruption in their benefits or work.
• zer00eyz 8y ago
  Cloud/Comerical <> automation. I have been burned in the past by "commercial", thankfully I wasn't the guy who had to go to the board hat in hand and say "this isn't in our control"... Every comercial provider is going to do everything in their power to "lock you in" they are going to put up features that are "better enough" that you migrate to them and then they own you. Automate, reduce your workforce as needed (it will be less than your plan) and then look at the commercial provider as a second step, look at them in relation to a real DR plan. You might not like what you see for day to day operations but having them on stand by in the even of an emergency could make you a hero and present a massive cost savings already.
• lightedman 8y ago
  Anyone utterly serious about security would never put their infrastructure in someone else's hands. So, the real question, how serious are you when it comes to security?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• exikyut 8y ago
  Saying first what I want you to see the most: please add a throwaway email to your bio profile (and maybe add a new comment with it so more see it). I guarantee people will want to say hi privately - not [just] vendors but random people who have on-the-ground advice. -- Hopefully you still see this even though it's been a few hours. Glad I went through the thread: there was quite a bit of extra narrative and detail in your comment replies. > Our business is an old, traditional business that happens to have lots of data centers for legacy reasons. Even though we spend $BBB on data centers, they're not the core of the business and a very small part of overall revenue. Realistically, even if we didn't move from data centers we would be good as long as the core non-tech business functioned. > Thousands [of engineers], many close to retirement age. Think a company like UPS/Fedex that isn't at its core a tech company but with tech datacenters for logistics and billions in revenue. > [T]he cost savings hinge on the massive cost savings from moving to a commercial cloud, laying off workforce would save more, but would prefer to save a bunch by moving to cloud and keep the workforce for other things. -- Ok, here's my take. I wonder what your [job] position is, heh. Maybe someone with a CTO's ear, or maybe you're an unusually empathetic CTO. In any case you're clearly at the point where you've had the internal discussions, the trigger has been assembled and is ready to pull, and you and/or the team (committee?) has probably already been groomed by all the gigantic providers' sales teams, which of course pull out all the stops in your case. If I understand these things correctly, if you haven't yet had an amazing lunch or two on one or more vendors' dimes, you will :) (or at least the high-level people will, would be nice if you get included). Sales is important. But always remember, particularly for large potential accounts like yours, the sales numbers will always be what the high-level execs want them to be, and the sales teams will be spinning the story the execs want to hear. The on-the-ground experience is always going to be rough. You've probably experienced similar transitions, and that's what's informing your skepticism some of your team won't have jobs. Nice you're giving your people some thought. On the one hand, it doesn't really matter who you sign up with, as vendor ceases to matter somewhat short of the $B mark. On the other hand, try to mitigate the risk of discovering that a vendor can't provide a given feature at some eleventh hour, or you may end up in a confused tangle of AWS and GCE deployments (because the other major vendor will of course have the missing feature, and the fragmentation will begin). How I'd achieve this: every time you go "ok, so this is our implementation blueprint", start the rounds of internal technical enumeration over again. Spend time with the engineers to understand pain points. Talk to as many people on the ground as possible, especially the forgotten people in the corners. One-on-ones, or small groups of people who are known to gel well with each other (no impedance mismatches, work well together), could be good for extricating annoying gotchas. This could look like devs aimlessly paging through source code and saying what they think (this could catch tiny things well), or it might be more structured with general architectural discussion. Do NOT have the cloud provider vendors do this work (of talking to your existing team); I wouldn't be surprised if they offer to do it, but if they do, all their feedback ultimately goes to the sales guys (via an internal engineer digestion process), and not directly to you. Well, the analysis team will probably generate a high-level report that contains all the information they've discovered (this is probably legally mandated for full disclosure about what they now know), but all the on-the-ground details about inefficiencies, vendor-specific pain points and so forth will only be derived by vendor-internal engineering debriefs, and you'll naturally never get any of this particularly valuable information - unfortunately this approach is within the vendors' business focus, as inefficiency means more compute resources used ($), and pain points mean more vendor-infrastructure maintenance ($). You could respin this statement to say that the vendor who makes the most attractive offer is the one who knows their system is the worst fit for your system, but I don't know :) Instead, if you don't have the internal resources (or freshness/objectivity) to put together a bird's-eye view, get an outside consultancy to help, directing them to investigate your current architecture top-to-bottom-and-back-to-top-again, and advise on ways the system can be rearchitected for efficiency and optimization within modern cloud infrastructure. (They'd then be the ones doing the one-on-ones and so forth I mentioned above.) Another thing that may be extremely useful would be to take the "we're moving to the cloud traction" and carefully smudge out (some of) the dividing line between "we're overhauling everything to migrate it and make it work most efficiently within $vendor" and "we're rearchitecting major components so they work more efficiently overall" so the line between these two sentiments is blurred, and both things wind up happening in lockstep. Obviously the two ideas are intrinsically distinct and this can only be taken so far - "rewrite everything from scratch to get it running in the cloud" wouldn't pass any accounting costing or time-boxing :) - but you can probably push this far enough to extract some usefulness from it (eg, you probably have an idea how long upper level will be willing to wait for this transition to finish - 2 years? 1 year? 6 months? - and you might be able to squeeze some interesting and useful tidy-up operations into that window). Blurring the lines between these two things will play to your existing devs' strengths, as rewriting/restructuring is easier on the brain than the "replace engine in flight" of picking up all the existing state, punting it into to the cloud ad-hoc, and running after all the resulting fires that get created and scrambling to get it all working perfectly. It won't be a perfect transition if you're really a $BBB operation, and restructuring will be the easiest way to cohesively get the existing devs into a flexible frame of mind and ready to deal with whatever curveballs get thrown their way. This is one way you could efficiently achieve keeping a lot of your existing team. Plus, restructuring means everything can slowly be built up onto the new system; picking everything up at once and expecting it to land on its feet probably won't go very well. Depending on how things go, if you bring in new techs to assist with understanding modern best practice/hitting the ground running, I cannot recommend enough pitting them against your current team when doing onboarding/interviewing, as they'd be an EXCELLENT catalyst for judging candidates' character. These are a couple of lateral ways the current workforce could be creatively employed during this time. I reckon careful management would see everyone kept on until retirement. The current team knows all the systems inside out. Letting them go would make everything a thousand times worse. Also, another reason I thought it would be cool to put an email is because your post makes for a perhaps-unwitting but nonetheless effective and interesting recruitment drive; I'm aware of very few (okay, zero) high-level people at equally high-level companies who really care about their employees. In my case this is because I don't have any connections, but the same probably applies to many others. I don't know why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16283252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16283252 stood out to me a few months ago, but your post resonates similarly. Probably because it incorporates a similar human response too. (Note that I have no association with the potential companies listed and have never talked to any of the users in that thread, I just thought it was interesting)
• notatoad 8y ago
  Your people shouldn't be doing manual config regardless of if you're on-prem or cloud. If they are, you're going to have a tough transition to cloud, and you're still going to need a lot more of those people than you think you will.
• noobermin 8y ago
  Hate to do this, but be mindful people bearish on the benefits of moving in the first place will be downvoted crazily, potentially by people who have an economic incentive to convince you this is a good idea.
• rshlo 8y ago
  Hire for attitude, Train for skills - If you've good dedicated people that you can trust, I'm sure they can be trained for other positions. Good people are always hard to come by, and they will be even more loyal if they will see that the company doesn't ditch them.
• eksemplar 8y ago
  We’re in the process of moving our infrastructure to Azure. Being the public sector we take things relatively slow, but we’ve already fully embraced Azure ad as well as office 365, one drive for business, planner and all those other things. The next step is our servers, they are already virtual and hosted in our own cloud, but moving our database cluster to a commercial cloud is still a big step politically. Anyway, you retrain your employees. You may need fewer in the long run, but finding people who are actually professional at stuff like setting up on-premise security inside Azure hasn’t been easy for us. We’ve had 3 very highly regarded consultant agencies to help us, and they quite honestly didn’t know anything but tech-book Azure. More than once we’ve had to send consultants home because it became obvious they knew less about this stuff than our people. Azure has also opened up for a range of automation through services, but that’s not really automatic either. We’ve had to retrain our people in powershell, and now we’re running a lot of stuff through the orchestra service. So right now, we’ve actually not needed fewer people, just better trained ones. I image you could replace Azure with Aws or any such service and it be the same story.
  • int_19h 8y ago
    If you don't mind me asking - why Azure specifically?
    • brianwawok 8y ago
      I would guess they are a Microsoft Shop. Azure seems to have a compelling platform for Microsoft Shops. I don't see the allure for a Linux shop. Sure you can run Linux on Azure, just like you can run Windows on AWS... but I don't think either is optimal.
    • theyinwhy 8y ago
      Microsoft throws the moneys at you and "owns" places. They marched into our company as if they owned the place. They have all the selling power and all the money to "convince" you. And yes, contracts are time limited so the big squeeze will be coming eventually.
    • eksemplar 8y ago
• kriss9 8y ago
  You're taking the marketing approach as opposed to coming up with real solutions -- think critically about the business need, investigate the cost savings and make a transition plan for those who actually add value to the organization. 1) Consider if your organization has a future strategic value for having the org capability in house (is this datacenter simply a necessary evil or does your organization deploy new technologies to new locations for any part of its business)? If so, you may be outsourcing a core part of your organization's capability (consider it). If not (e.g. these are all simply HR and other general business systems [ or services which do not depend on anything physical], you should proceed to evaluating costs 2) By the thought that you would outsource the majority of jobs means that you probably shouldn't have had the employees in the first place (in the Fortune 50 I know, we mostly used contractors with a quarter dozen employees). Hence I would evaluate if there are other business units which might benefit from their skill (power related, analyst related et al) and offer training per the previous notes. A good decision to be a part of and my hope is that your answers here inspire the right questions (to allow for the right transition plan for your organization and company as a whole).
• jwildeboer 8y ago
  My rule of thumb: invest 30% of the cost savings into training your people on skills you need now but also with a view to future plans. Invest in preparing your people for new ways like DevOps, microservices. With their experience and knowledge they can save you even more looking forward. And even if you don’t need them all, by training them you give them a better chance when finding new jobs. A small investment can go a long way. Also helps your companies reputation when people don’t simply get removed.
• jedberg 8y ago
  When Netflix moved from the datacenter to the cloud, there were a whole bunch of really good people with skills we didn't need anymore -- sysadmins, DBAs, datacenter techs, etc. Netflix went to them and said, "do you want to learn some new skills that apply to our new cloud based infra?" Some said no, and were given big severance checks and glowing recommendations. Others said yes, and were retrained. And some were retrained but it didn't work out, it turned out they weren't interested in the new work, or just weren't needed, and so they too were given big severance checks and glowing recommendations, and went to look for new jobs using both their old and new skills. It's nice that you're worried about them, but the best thing you can do for them is offer them the chance to learn new skills, either through new jobs or paying for them to learn new skills.
  • brianwawok 8y ago
    This seems best - offer them the choice. Don't go "learn to code cloud formation in 30 days or lose your job with no severance".
• mesozoic 8y ago
  Progress
• lsc 8y ago
  so, uh, I'm not weighing in on the job stuff... but I suggest you check your numbers on how hosting in the public cloud is cheaper than your own data centers. I mean, sure, automating things is great, and running your own hardware cloud-style is great for a lot of workloads... but that doesn't have a lot to do with the decision to rent rather than own your servers. Cloud providers charge a lot compared to owning your own hardware, unless your load is extremely bursty. The bandwidth prices are particularly eregrious. They are like what you would pay for bandwidth 10+ years ago. I personally ran a small VPS company and managed to turn a (small) profit while selling compute for rather less than amazon, even though I had to rent space and power from a fancy pants datacenter by the rack. I was essentially paying retail, and I only had 20-30Kw of capacity, max, and even at that scale, owning was cheaper than renting. I can only imagine that at F50 scale, the economics tilt even further towards own, as you can much better amortize the labor than I could (and it's not like the datacenter loses money, either. Renting datacenter space is like renting commercial realestate. When your lease is up, the renewal rate goes up to whatever competing space costs + what it costs you to move. Owning is so much better in that respect.)
  • empath75 8y ago
    Amazon etc negotiate prices for large accounts so the price you pay will not be the same price that a Netflix pays.
    • lsc 8y ago
      Sure, and it's possible OP really is saving money by renting their hardware instead of owning. I don't know the details of their needs or of their costs or what cloud provider they are moving to or what deal they cut with that provider. I'm just saying, there's currently a huge push to rent your essential services from service providers such as amazon, and from what I've seen, it's pretty easy to "move to the cloud" and then find that your total cost goes up pretty dramatically vs. owning hardware. I mean, yea, "cloud" does make sense sometimes. But... it is sold as being cheaper, and quite often it is not. Even if the rates look good up front, you've got the same problem that you have when leasing commercial realestate from professionals; they are professionals, which means that when it comes time to renew the lease, the rate will go up to match what renting something similar would cost from a competitor, plus slightly less than whatever they think it will cost you to move. If you can't switch cloud providers and your cloud provider knows it, you can count on your negotiated rates going up next contract renewal.
• Havoc 8y ago
  If you don't do the move someone else will eventually given the monetary incentive. This isn't something that can be stopped. Better that it happens under the watch of someone that clearly cares
• arminiusreturns 8y ago
  > theyre doing stuff like manual config, and future state is everythign automated as much as possible in the cloud and shutter the data centers Ok, who let the C'level out of his cage? Quick, convene a meeting about meetings and distract him with new synergistic products that mesh the work output of the teams into a new daily reporting product with shiny graphs for him to make informed decisions about, preferably by proposing an "cloud only" data scientist. But seriously. This comment alone shows this person doesn't have a clue wtf they are talking about. If your guys were so focused on manual config that was a management problem, and isn't an inherent fact about the current state of data centers. So you decided to move data centers, you just moved the jobs somewhere else, to the new provider (Let me guess, amazon, microsoft, or google...) Say it with me: "There is no such thing as "the cloud"."; Say it again: "There is no such thing as "the cloud"." Your shit still runs on servers, that at the end of the day someone manages the systems of. So they manage the systems at a lower level that is transparent to you as the modern datacenter is able to hotload blocks, devices, vm's, containers, etc across a swath of machines, clusters, etc. At the end of the day, you made a business decision that decided managing your own on prem wasn't for you. For some companies, that can be the right strategic move, but as the salty ol bofh who has seen it happen, it's not all puppy dogs and rainbows and there are many pros and many cons to such a move... with "the boss" usually completely underestimating the cons. Next up: the boss asks how to ease the transition of the low level programmers because he's hiring a new wave of nodejs/meanstack devs because "there's so many of them he can pay them less than the greybeards" and "they are young and know all the cool new devops agile cloud cycle methodologies" and "c++ is dying". Whatever f50 this is I'd longshort the fuck out of it. I bet it's in a downslide for other reasons and IT is the easy dept to squeeze politically while ignoring the root causal issues that are probably management related. tldr; Data centers aren't going anywhere, your shit still runs on servers, people still design build and rack boxen, design, fine tune, and diagnose networks, munge and wrangle data, etc, etc, and the skills they have are still in high demand the world over. Disagree? Tell me how many data centers as a percentage that have fully automated robotized racking?
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    You really have this completely wrong. I am a systems/network engineer and am newer to the business side. Asking here to get some upsight into the people side. Thank you for pointing out that things run on servers, that was news to me.
• j45 8y ago
  The implementation of hybrid cloud support is the key thing to consider pursuing both from a strategic and technical perspective. I have provided complex hosting for large corporations for more years than I like to remember and it is the only thing of lasting and permanent value for a few reasons: Having a completely migratable cloud setup, between any cloud provider, or back to your own environment (OpenStack, etc), is the single most important long term investment to consider for your stack. Your situation sounds very advantageous in having the expertise ready to containerize machines, and dockerize applications that may not be. This too, is a very marketable skill for people who may be leaving. Historically, connectivity has driven location of data. Popularity has oscillated between on-premise vs client-server setups (cloud). Currently, the cloud is in vogue, for many great reasons. The pendulum though seems to have historically swung both ways. While network speed will continue to increase, and computing power will continue to increase, other factors may play into why a corporation wishes to keep it's data in-house, be it political, security, industry practices, or a sudden wish to change directions due to a failure too many of a cloud provider. The cloud providers do a very good job of making it easy to get sucked into their world. It would be interesting if you followed up here with the decision you made and why. Not enough thought seems to be out in the open about these types of decisions, let alone at your decisions.
• empath75 8y ago
  You’re not going to be able to just flip a switch and do that migration instantly. You have time to retrain people and some people will adapt better than others.
• jroseattle 8y ago
  Your employees need skills that are useful and in demand. They need those going forward, whether you close your data centers or not. I'd suggest you be upfront with them. Use this as a pro-active way to show you want them around, but it's not business-as-usual. The good ones will see this as an opportunity for the long term, while others may view this as a time to move on. To reinforce plans, show them what skills you need after the move. This will give a north star to motivate those who want career mobility.
• srah763 8y ago
  You can reach out privately to other companies and leaders you know if they may have a position for them. HR can also help find positions for people, that’s part of their job. What you can’t do make a decision that’s good for a very small number of people at the expense of everyone else in the company if you’re a leader.
• true_tuna 8y ago
  This sounds like a very exciting time, the work is changing, the very economics of the business are changing. Remember to lead throughout this transition. Communicate well, frame the transition in a positive way and take care of people. Do not allow your exuberance at the potential cost savings blind you to the pitfalls in a project of this magnitude. The transition will be harder than you think, take longer and cost more. That being said, it’s probably worth doing. Along the way you must remember that your employees are a super important part of your business so treat them accordingly. Offer training. The automation work is more gratifying and valuable anyway. You’ll be offering them a step forward. Some will take it, some will move on. Even those who move on may find that the change catapults them forward as well. I trained a colleague in cloud automation in two months. Admittedly he is very capable and committed, but you’ll find that in some of your people too. He’s now worth more than anyone I could have hired. You have the opportunity to elevate your existing employees significantly. Embrace that opportunity. PM me if you’d like to see the training materials I’ve put together.
  • throwawayacct4q 8y ago
    I would love to see those training materials! I don't see any contact info, but maybe you could shoot me an email to the email in my profile?