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PagerDuty to Lay Off 7% of Staff; Revenue Officer to Exit
- ultrasaurus 4y agoMore info: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operational-resilience-to-achieve-our-long-term-vision-and-goals/ https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operatio...
- WJW 4y agoI know it's in fashion to have a cutesy name for your employees these days, but "Dutonian" is really stretching it haha.
- claytonjy 4y agoIt is a bit silly, but I kinda like it. I'm generally pretty anti-koolaid, but having a shared unique term for yourself and your coworkers seems like a reasonable way to build some positive tribalism, even if it's a stretch linguistically.
- bfeynman 4y agoI find there is something aesthetically and professionally pleasing about the plain old term "colleagues".
- sokoloff 4y agoColleagues is conspicuously not tribe-specific though. If you want to build an us-vs-them (which is beneficial in a lot of circumstances), you may want a label that helps separate your teams into an "us" that's distinct from the "thems".
- Apocryphon 4y agoSo when the tribe votes a ton of its members off the island, that us-vs-them facade really falls away.
- ye-olde-sysrq 4y agoI'm similarly anti-koolaid and I agree. It seems pretty harmless (it's just a shared noun, it's not saying we're a family etc etc) and it's kind of easier than just randomly selecting one of friends/colleagues/associates/comrades etc.
- axcaswd 4y agoI've been here for 3 years and I still don't know where "dutonian" came from. At this point I'm too afraid to ask.
- lanstein 4y agoOriana I think
- wlonkly 4y agoIt predates me (6 years), I don't know the origin either, except for coming from "Duty". At least we're not Pageys. There can be only one. The real curse of PagerDuty, though, is calling everything "-duty". Parental leave is BabyDuty, the training department is LearningDuty, the LGBTQ ERG is RainbowDuty, you get the idea. Hat-tip to our veterans ERG for not going with DutyDuty, although I hope it was in the running at least. (I mean I also kind of love it, but you know, it's a lot.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- captainkrtek 4y agoSounds like an element on the periodic table, next to deuterium
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI prefer "Duters" or Duterionos"
- rubatuga 4y agoDoodies
- theideaofcoffee 4y agoThe must not be into the whole brevity thing. But I guess I have to echo what others are saying, it's eye-roll-worthy some of the demonyms these companies come up with. So lame.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scifibestfi 4y agoOh shit, here we go again. The Dutonians join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Mozillians, Stripes, Tweeps, Peeps, Veeps, Elasticians, SoundHounders, Vimeans, Rackers, Krakenites, Latticians and Plaids.
- mattlondon 4y agoWay back in the day we called our selves IBMers. I figured that the "ers" was fairly common and made sense. Kinda doesn't really sound right for names like Meta I admit, but metamates is just cringe inducing
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoFacebookers scanned much better, at the very least.
- eropple 4y agoWhen at IBM I could not read it as anything other than “ibb-mer”.
- Apocryphon 4y agowtf is a "Peep" or a "Veep", you can't just co-op preexisting slang like that!
- toast0 4y agomissed Yahoos :P
- gman2093 4y agoI work for a company called "Fetch" and I call us "Fetchens"
- kirubakaran 4y agoA whole company of people dedicated to "Making Fetch Happen"?
- 4y ago
- danpalmer 4y ago> Revenue Officer to Exit Is that an exec taking responsibility? Respect, I guess.
- vasco 4y agoThe difference between that and a scapegoat is not abundantly clear.
- gkoberger 4y agoI mean, I don't think it's fair to call a CRO a scapegoat... it's literally their job.
- paxys 4y agoI'd say making money is the CEO's primary job. You can't just hire a "CRO" or whatever other random C title and blame them when things go south at the company. I doubt the person fired had that much influence on company headcount, product strategy and operational budgets.
- Rapzid 4y agoI think it's both a way to delegate and shield the CEOs 12m base pay from economic uncertainty haha. To your point though, seems PDs revenue and other numbers are doing pretty darn good year-over-year..
- seizethecheese 4y agoYes it is. A scapegoat is a “lightning rod” of blame. In this case, people were laid off beside them, so scapegoat isn’t an accurate term.
- jorts 4y agoI'm sure Dave was asked to exit the business.
- 4y ago
- darkwizard42 4y agoI think I respect that at least one of the executives whose responsibility it was to NOT let this happen is being exited out. Google and others have babbled on about executives taking full responsibility for the layoffs, but I don't see any of the key SVPs or VPs taking hits on failing in their leadership. Also I understand they say to pursue other opportunities, but I think the reason for the CRO departure feels transparent enough here.
- Rapzid 4y agoMaybe those other shops don't throw people under the bus so publicly. Wondering if following up 6-12 months later to see who left to "pursue other opportunities".
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI think that is because it still unclear if executives actually failed in their responsibilities to shareholders and the bottom line. I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different. Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now?
- jacobr1 4y ago> Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now? Not with prior actions, but they are with current margins. Which is why you see both layoffs and other cost-cutting measures that get less press.
- heywhatupboys 4y ago> I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different. on the other hand, the alternative to "over hiring" is jobless people. At least they were job providers for some time.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoI never understood PagerDuty. Isn't it just IFTTT with SMS and email at scale? What is their moat even?
- miked85 4y agoIt's a little more than IFTTT, but not much.
- _joel 4y agoScheduling, Groups, Escalation. Yea you could probably do something with IFTTT but I'd rather just pay a little bit and not deal with the hastle.
- sokoloff 4y agoIf it was "a little bit", I agree. Their business plan is a few bucks shy of $500/user/year.
- ativzzz 4y agoIf you're a business paying software engineer salaries, that 500 / user is basically pennies compared to paying someone to maintain a homegrown system
- cooperadymas 4y agoThat's what everyone keeps telling you until you're locked into 30+ services equaling an additional 20% of each employee's salary, plus the time to educate on and maintain those services. And then they don't even communicate with one another.
- ativzzz 4y agoYup now imagine you built all of those in house and how much more of a nightmare it would be to maintain those services. That's basically a separate software product right there
- jscheel 4y ago> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.
- fourseventy 4y agoIt's a business not a charity. Did the company not pay them for their work already?
- mutatio 4y agoI'm with you, so long as this "work family" and other crap ends.
- beambot 4y agoDid PagerDuty ever say "Work family" or is this just a strawman?
- prettyStandard 4y agoSorry... "People First" https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/pagerdutys-people-first-approach-to-community/ https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/pagerdutys-people-first-appro...
- next_xibalba 4y agoNothing in that article seems to indicate a perpetual guarantee of employment.
- wintogreen74 4y agoThey refer to employees as "Dutonians". Barf.
- beambot 4y ago
- agrippanux 4y agoWith my VP Eng hat on, PagerDuty is a useful service With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere
- bsg75 4y agoTranslation?: - PagerDuty is great when my budget is big and I need something ASAP - Buy vs Build. - Home grown alternative is great when the word from Finance is the cost savings to build is now more important than the time it takes.
- SCUSKU 4y agoCould you outline what features you ended up building? In the past I something similar that would call someone's cell phone if "ERROR" appeared in a Slack channel, which was very crude but it worked...
- jorts 4y agoA lot of people say that but then realize it's a bit more complicated if you want the resiliency of PagerDuty and are okay dealing with the maintenance and up-keep required for such a system.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoLots of open source options out there: https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e528310ec4 https://jayaj.medium.com/top-10-yellowant-integrations-f2e52... And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.
- alexpotato 4y agoA co-worker at as past job once said: "We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."
- _ktx2 4y ago> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalty, remember these events.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoWhat if they are laying off to make room for better developers?
- pwinnski 4y agoYou are unlikely to successfully hire better developers after getting rid of 7% of your workforce. Better developers will stay away.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoDepends on how bad the people you laid off are. Look at it this way, if 20% of programmers are bad, and you lay off the bottom 10%, and rehire let's say at a disadvantage (50% bad), you now have a 75% bad workforce instead of an 80% bad workforce. This assumes you can identify bad workers (for some metric of bad which may or may not be ethical or sensible)
- wintogreen74 4y agoit's way easier to tell if someone is bad after you hire them vs. before though.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoStats still work out, try it yourself with whatever numbers you care to use. I'm not saying I defend layoffs I'm just pointing out the underlying logic of why a company might want to do them (I think it's missing important factors, but what you claim is not one of them)
- tonymet 4y agoLike Dropbox I've always felt that PagerDuty was a feature that became a business – hats off to both companies for building a business while being underestimated
- laxk 4y agoIs it just me who finds PD very complicated and not very intuitive to use?
- trynewideas 4y agoSept. 2022: https://archive.ph/WsLD7 https://archive.ph/WsLD7 > PagerDuty's Results Sparkle Amid Gloom in Enterprise Software > For its fiscal second quarter, ended July 31, PagerDuty (ticker: PD) reported revenue of $90.3 million, up 33.6% from a year ago. That is ahead of both the company’s guidance range of $87 million to $89 million, and the Wall Street consensus call of $88 million. > On an adjusted basis, the company lost 4 cents a share in the quarter, while management had forecast a loss of 8 to 9 cents a share. The consensus view on the Street was that the loss would be 8 cents. Under generally accepted accounting practices, the company lost 44 cents a share. > For the January 2023 fiscal year, the company now sees revenue of $365 million to $370 million, with a loss of 10 to 12 cents a share. It earlier forecast revenue of $364 million to $369 million, with a loss of 17 to 21 cents a share.
- losvedir 4y agoIt's kind of interesting to me that PagerDuty's stock is down 7% right now. If I'm remembering right, when Google and Meta, and maybe some of the others, announced layoffs their stocks actually went up, didn't it? Why the difference?
- negamax 4y agoImo. Google and Facebook doing cuts meant that they let go of the recent hires or allocations in recent moon projects. Their core business is intact and is likely thriving. PD cutting is a signal that the company is getting affected by the waves in the industry as in there's less startup funding
- delfinom 4y agoGotta love they decided to quote errr, Martin Luther King, for their layoffs notice. Go big or go home eh?
- tmpz22 4y agoThe PagerDuty CEO quotes MLK in the layoff notice: > None of this would be possible without you, our leadership, and our board — thank you for your grit and resilience, your commitment to our customers and your support of our values and people. I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust. “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” I don't think the challenges and controversies MLK was thinking of at the time had to due with cost-cutting measures by a corporate entity. [1]: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operational-resilience-to-achieve-our-long-term-vision-and-goals/ https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operatio...
- Rapzid 4y agoPagerDuty is.. woke. Just saying that matter-of-fact; people who work or have worked there know what I mean. If you don't like being voluntold to record thank you messages to Georgia get-out-the-vote workers, whites-not-welcome Slack channels, and Slack bots telling you to not use "you guys" in every channel including private channels.. You won't like PagerDuty much.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mathattack 4y agoI wasn’t a fan of their Oraclesque sales techniques. They have a lot of customers waiting for them to fail.
- pdlayoffs 4y agoList of employees (58): https://pastebin.com/0kGZWjau https://pastebin.com/0kGZWjau