18 ms·

Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

97 points by clone1018 4y ago

TylerE 4y ago
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.
- version_five 4y ago
  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?
  - phamilton 4y ago
    At Yahoo in 2016, layoffs were announced as "planned" in an earnings call and they happened department by department, always on Wednesdays. This was right around when Blind got popular (but before each post was just whining about TC) and so every Wednesday morning we'd all check Blind to see which teams got hit this week.
    - autotune 4y ago
      The really hilarious thing is no matter how far down Yahoo continues to sink they will always have at least my dad and those who refuse to use anything other than Yahoo Finance in the foreseeable future to keep them somewhat afloat. Edit: for the record this is not a slant against those who use Yahoo Finance. Even back when I used it in high school it was good.
      - downvoteme1 4y ago
        Yahoo finance is a good product. I use it and keep looking for replacements in case something good pops up, but it’s good for now.
        autotune 4y ago
        Made a slight edit, did not mean to imply it was a bad service in any way.
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        Yahoo Finance is like their 1 really good product.
      - spike021 4y ago
        Yahoo is still very popular in Japan, especially the Auctions site.
    - toast0 4y ago
      I left Yahoo in 2011, I remember layoffs being dysfunctional, but it seems like they really leant into it. My favorite was when they announced layoffs in November, and couldn't figure out who to lay off until after the deadline for finalizing the company holiday party, so I got to see some of my colleagues who had been laid off for a couple weeks at the party.
  - anonymous011222 4y ago
    According to the article most of the affected have been informed, but they have not informed everyone yet. I think it's a fair compromise. Nobody wants to be told they have been laid off by finding your name in a power point in the morning, just because you live in a different time zone. They have offices around the world, so it is difficult to inform everyone at the same time without calling someone in the middle of the night. At the same time those who have been informed are talking to other employees, and news spread fast. So they end up with a compromise - inform the company about the process. They are handling it better than what I experienced not long ago. After announcing the layoffs and informing the affected, they did not communicate who was affected until the week after. Colleagues who had a good network knew who were affected by talking to each other, while others were left in the dark
  - uglyrumours 4y ago
    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
bamboozled 4y ago
Would be so nice to stop seeing these articles?
- clone1018 4y ago
  It's interesting to think about how much these types of articles help lead to the panic of a recession that ends up making a recession happen.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    We’ve been in a recession for two years. People just seem to have been pretending we aren’t. Not even totally COVID or Russia’s fault either… stock prices really bubbled since 2008, with many companies trading well above a level that there is any rational justification for.
    - fundad 4y ago
      bear market is one thing recession means the economy is shrinking.
  - myth_drannon 4y ago
    Yes, it is meant to cause panic in general population but with a purpose of them putting pressure on politician s which in turn put pressure on central banks to tone down the rate increases.
- rrix2 4y ago
  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.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    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).
semiquaver 4y ago
It has stiff competition, but I’m certain that “Elastician” is the worst company demonym I’ve heard so far.
- dohdhdaa 4y ago
  May I introduce you to “Metamate”
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- adharmad 4y ago
  There is Tweep
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    This is the one. It's like creep, dweeb, and twat all in one.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  Is there a db of these somewhere? What does IBM call its staff? Oracle?
  - bigtunacan 4y ago
    Employees?
  - kthejoker2 4y ago
    IBM should call themselves Blueys Come join the Oracult Snowflake ... well let's not go there. Signed: a Brickster
  - thecosmicfrog 4y ago
    It was "IBMers" when I was there.
- trynewideas 4y ago
  "Grafanista"[1] irks me more. 1: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/07/29/inside-grafana-labs-my-first-30-days-as-a-grafanista/ https://grafana.com/blog/2022/07/29/inside-grafana-labs-my-f...
miduil 4y ago
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.
- drdo 4y ago
  You don't need to scroll down at all, at least on desktop. It's right there at the top, very prominently.
- bigtunacan 4y ago
  Given that Amazon is also laying off and the CEO recently stated that they expected additional staff reductions into next year it seems unlikely.
  - paxys 4y ago
    It's unlikely that AWS is having layoffs, considering they are the only division that actually makes money at Amazon.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      Allegedly AWS will have higher than normal URA targets for 2023. Welcome to the Thunderdome: A two-pizza team enters, a one-pizza team leaves.
      - bigtunacan 4y ago
        That's unsurprising since they have had layoffs and been upfront that there is more to come. Unlike layoffs that make the news, allowing/encouraging "natural attrition" allows companies to fly largely under the radar.
- gaws 4y ago
  > If you scroll down to the very bottom there is a big "we are hiring" icon. Layoff expensive workers to hire cheaper ones.
fear91 4y ago
Just use self hosted OpenSearch. It’ll save your company millions anually if you are large enough.
myth_drannon 4y ago
Reminds me of November/December 2008 when absolutely everybody was laying off. I have a sudden urge to open ZeroHedge.com and buy some gold bullion.
re9 4y ago
Nice touch, with empathy and such. Blogpost saying we're firing our people along the ad "We're hiring"...
- bogomipz 4y ago
  Indeed. It's up there with Andy Jassy's recent announcement about upcoming layoffs at Amazon that ends with "we should all be very optimistic about Amazon’s future. I know I am." https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/a-note-from-ceo-andy-jassy-about-role-eliminations https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/a-note-from-ce...
goodroot 4y ago
Lots of great people there. Condolences to those impacted. It's disappointing. Elastic had it. Unforced errors abound.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  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 brand equity on a series of mediocre solutions that were outcompeted.
  - sthatipamala 4y ago
    Where can I read about this? I’m not familiar with their history.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      Just look at their awful website. What do they sell? They want me to buy an Algolia competitor or something? You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. Go to Mongo - immediately shows me a value proposition of building software with MongoDB in their cloud. The exec leadership at Elastic is very low quality.
      - gedy 4y ago
        > You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, was told by a leader they are trying to not just be "the Elasticsearch company". (Due to competition from AWS OpenSearch)
        nemo44x 4y ago
        I would have left the interview right there. All they did was concede Elasticsearch to AWS, a brand worth 10’s of billions. Had they executed their Elasticsearch cloud story would have been top notch and then they could put solutions behind it as additional upgrades. Instead they have a confusing story and aren’t a leader in anything they do. Just a terribly sad outcome for a company that had everything going for them.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
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.
- sk55 4y ago
  In all fairness, there is more than just cost when choosing a provider. Elastic has had higher uptime than the AWS alternative. I had to switch off AWS Elasticsearch hosting because it kept going down.
- apicaesar 4y ago
  True, last I check the gap wasn't too big anymore, I think even comparable for certain machine configurations. One thing is that the "mainstream" ELK develops at a much faster speed than the OpenSearch fork, and a lot of the nice features in new versions are nowhere to be seen in OpenSearch.
- nirmalc 4y ago
  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.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"I didn't take this decision lightly. Since becoming CEO, I have had the opportunity to spend time with Elasticians around the globe." One bizarre side-effect of these layoff announcements is learning all the cringe-worthy names these companies have for their employees. Elasticicans? Tweeps? Stripes? I'm guessing this is a SV thing? Do these infantilizing names actually do anything to build company culture?
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  Did it start with Googlers? Or maybe Teamsters?
  - toast0 4y ago
    > Did it start with Googlers? What has Google really done that wasn't first done by the Yahoo!s at Yahoo!?
razodactyl 4y ago
There’s a “we’re hiring” banner at the end of the article… oops.
elforce002 4y ago
Well, companies are doing it to avoid a PR disaster. It's a business move. The big players took the hit from the public (fb, amazon, etc...), then we do it and the public can blame it on the current climate. Let's not forget the Feds literally saying businesses have to ramp up firings to slow down inflation on one side and the current government on the other side is trying to tell the public they are creating more jobs. The cynic in me is telling me this is all planned by big tech and government. Heck, Zuckerberg waited to fire his staff a day after the midterms were done. This is no coincidence.
404mm 4y ago
How many heads does it come up to?
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Not even eight months ago they were recruiting hard. Does no-one plan beyond the next quarter anymore?
- gk1 4y ago
  You'd make Bloomberg-level of money if you could accurately predict the economic climate eight months from now.
uglyrumours 4y ago
Here's a question: why on earth didn't Elastic offer a voluntary separation package? They probably would have gotten at least a good chunk of people to accept, reducing the need to behead 13% of the company yesterday.
uglyrumours 4y ago
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.

97 points by clone1018 4y ago

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.

version_five 4y ago
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?
- phamilton 4y ago
  At Yahoo in 2016, layoffs were announced as "planned" in an earnings call and they happened department by department, always on Wednesdays. This was right around when Blind got popular (but before each post was just whining about TC) and so every Wednesday morning we'd all check Blind to see which teams got hit this week.
  - autotune 4y ago
    The really hilarious thing is no matter how far down Yahoo continues to sink they will always have at least my dad and those who refuse to use anything other than Yahoo Finance in the foreseeable future to keep them somewhat afloat. Edit: for the record this is not a slant against those who use Yahoo Finance. Even back when I used it in high school it was good.
    - downvoteme1 4y ago
      Yahoo finance is a good product. I use it and keep looking for replacements in case something good pops up, but it’s good for now.
      - autotune 4y ago
        Made a slight edit, did not mean to imply it was a bad service in any way.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      Yahoo Finance is like their 1 really good product.
    - spike021 4y ago
      Yahoo is still very popular in Japan, especially the Auctions site.
  - toast0 4y ago
    I left Yahoo in 2011, I remember layoffs being dysfunctional, but it seems like they really leant into it. My favorite was when they announced layoffs in November, and couldn't figure out who to lay off until after the deadline for finalizing the company holiday party, so I got to see some of my colleagues who had been laid off for a couple weeks at the party.
- anonymous011222 4y ago
  According to the article most of the affected have been informed, but they have not informed everyone yet. I think it's a fair compromise. Nobody wants to be told they have been laid off by finding your name in a power point in the morning, just because you live in a different time zone. They have offices around the world, so it is difficult to inform everyone at the same time without calling someone in the middle of the night. At the same time those who have been informed are talking to other employees, and news spread fast. So they end up with a compromise - inform the company about the process. They are handling it better than what I experienced not long ago. After announcing the layoffs and informing the affected, they did not communicate who was affected until the week after. Colleagues who had a good network knew who were affected by talking to each other, while others were left in the dark
- uglyrumours 4y ago
  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

bamboozled 4y ago

Would be so nice to stop seeing these articles?

clone1018 4y ago
It's interesting to think about how much these types of articles help lead to the panic of a recession that ends up making a recession happen.
- TylerE 4y ago
  We’ve been in a recession for two years. People just seem to have been pretending we aren’t. Not even totally COVID or Russia’s fault either… stock prices really bubbled since 2008, with many companies trading well above a level that there is any rational justification for.
  - fundad 4y ago
    bear market is one thing recession means the economy is shrinking.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  Yes, it is meant to cause panic in general population but with a purpose of them putting pressure on politician s which in turn put pressure on central banks to tone down the rate increases.
rrix2 4y ago
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.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  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).

semiquaver 4y ago

It has stiff competition, but I’m certain that “Elastician” is the worst company demonym I’ve heard so far.

dohdhdaa 4y ago
May I introduce you to “Metamate”
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
adharmad 4y ago
There is Tweep
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  This is the one. It's like creep, dweeb, and twat all in one.
mherdeg 4y ago
Is there a db of these somewhere? What does IBM call its staff? Oracle?
- bigtunacan 4y ago
  Employees?
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  IBM should call themselves Blueys Come join the Oracult Snowflake ... well let's not go there. Signed: a Brickster
- thecosmicfrog 4y ago
  It was "IBMers" when I was there.
trynewideas 4y ago
"Grafanista"[1] irks me more. 1: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/07/29/inside-grafana-labs-my-first-30-days-as-a-grafanista/ https://grafana.com/blog/2022/07/29/inside-grafana-labs-my-f...

miduil 4y ago

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.

drdo 4y ago
You don't need to scroll down at all, at least on desktop. It's right there at the top, very prominently.
bigtunacan 4y ago
Given that Amazon is also laying off and the CEO recently stated that they expected additional staff reductions into next year it seems unlikely.
- paxys 4y ago
  It's unlikely that AWS is having layoffs, considering they are the only division that actually makes money at Amazon.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    Allegedly AWS will have higher than normal URA targets for 2023. Welcome to the Thunderdome: A two-pizza team enters, a one-pizza team leaves.
    - bigtunacan 4y ago
      That's unsurprising since they have had layoffs and been upfront that there is more to come. Unlike layoffs that make the news, allowing/encouraging "natural attrition" allows companies to fly largely under the radar.
gaws 4y ago
> If you scroll down to the very bottom there is a big "we are hiring" icon. Layoff expensive workers to hire cheaper ones.

fear91 4y ago

Just use self hosted OpenSearch. It’ll save your company millions anually if you are large enough.

myth_drannon 4y ago

Reminds me of November/December 2008 when absolutely everybody was laying off. I have a sudden urge to open ZeroHedge.com and buy some gold bullion.

re9 4y ago

Nice touch, with empathy and such. Blogpost saying we're firing our people along the ad "We're hiring"...

bogomipz 4y ago
Indeed. It's up there with Andy Jassy's recent announcement about upcoming layoffs at Amazon that ends with "we should all be very optimistic about Amazon’s future. I know I am." https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/a-note-from-ceo-andy-jassy-about-role-eliminations https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/a-note-from-ce...

goodroot 4y ago

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

nemo44x 4y ago
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 brand equity on a series of mediocre solutions that were outcompeted.
- sthatipamala 4y ago
  Where can I read about this? I’m not familiar with their history.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Just look at their awful website. What do they sell? They want me to buy an Algolia competitor or something? You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. Go to Mongo - immediately shows me a value proposition of building software with MongoDB in their cloud. The exec leadership at Elastic is very low quality.
    - gedy 4y ago
      > You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, was told by a leader they are trying to not just be "the Elasticsearch company". (Due to competition from AWS OpenSearch)
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        I would have left the interview right there. All they did was concede Elasticsearch to AWS, a brand worth 10’s of billions. Had they executed their Elasticsearch cloud story would have been top notch and then they could put solutions behind it as additional upgrades. Instead they have a confusing story and aren’t a leader in anything they do. Just a terribly sad outcome for a company that had everything going for them.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

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.

sk55 4y ago
In all fairness, there is more than just cost when choosing a provider. Elastic has had higher uptime than the AWS alternative. I had to switch off AWS Elasticsearch hosting because it kept going down.
apicaesar 4y ago
True, last I check the gap wasn't too big anymore, I think even comparable for certain machine configurations. One thing is that the "mainstream" ELK develops at a much faster speed than the OpenSearch fork, and a lot of the nice features in new versions are nowhere to be seen in OpenSearch.
nirmalc 4y ago
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.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"I didn't take this decision lightly. Since becoming CEO, I have had the opportunity to spend time with Elasticians around the globe." One bizarre side-effect of these layoff announcements is learning all the cringe-worthy names these companies have for their employees. Elasticicans? Tweeps? Stripes? I'm guessing this is a SV thing? Do these infantilizing names actually do anything to build company culture?

kthejoker2 4y ago
Did it start with Googlers? Or maybe Teamsters?
- toast0 4y ago
  > Did it start with Googlers? What has Google really done that wasn't first done by the Yahoo!s at Yahoo!?

razodactyl 4y ago

There’s a “we’re hiring” banner at the end of the article… oops.

elforce002 4y ago

Well, companies are doing it to avoid a PR disaster. It's a business move. The big players took the hit from the public (fb, amazon, etc...), then we do it and the public can blame it on the current climate. Let's not forget the Feds literally saying businesses have to ramp up firings to slow down inflation on one side and the current government on the other side is trying to tell the public they are creating more jobs. The cynic in me is telling me this is all planned by big tech and government. Heck, Zuckerberg waited to fire his staff a day after the midterms were done. This is no coincidence.

404mm 4y ago

How many heads does it come up to?

EdwardDiego 4y ago

Not even eight months ago they were recruiting hard. Does no-one plan beyond the next quarter anymore?

gk1 4y ago
You'd make Bloomberg-level of money if you could accurately predict the economic climate eight months from now.

uglyrumours 4y ago

Here's a question: why on earth didn't Elastic offer a voluntary separation package? They probably would have gotten at least a good chunk of people to accept, reducing the need to behead 13% of the company yesterday.

uglyrumours 4y ago

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.