8 ms·
> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerD
by _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)
- ithkuil 4y agoThis also assumes that every company lays off people and thus new hires don't select companies based in whether they recently laid off people
- throwawaymaths 4y ago"rehire at a disadvantage"
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoThis also assumes that PagerDuty's hiring process is so shitty that 1 in 5 of their hires suck. In that case there's no guarantee they'll hire better talent, lol
- Phlarp 4y agoOn the one hand PagerDuty's hiring process is shitty, but on the other hand the rest of the industry's process for identifying which heads to reduce is worse?
- ivalm 4y agoStart with distribution for employee Good: P(good)=p Bad: P(bad)=(1-p) Have a bad employee detector P(detected as bad|bad)=q1 P(detected as good|bad)=1-q1 P(detected as good|good)=q2 P(detected as bad|good)=1-q2 Fraction of employees detected as good: pq2+(1-p)(1-q1) Fraction of employees detected as bad (and therefore fired) p(1-q2)+(1-p)q1 Suppose you pay a discount on ability to hire new good employees as d (so probability to hire a new good employee is dp instead of p) So you benefit as long as p(1-q2)/((1-p)q1)<dp/(1-dp) Or (1-q2)/q1 < d (1-p)/(1-dp) Plugging in p=.8, d=.5, q1=q2=q (knowing good and bad is equally hard) (1-q)/q < .167 Break even is then q = 1/1.167=.857 So if you start with 80/20 distribution and after a while improve your discrimination to 86/14 then firing benefits you even if you are hiring from a 40/60 pool.
- Phlarp 4y agoIf you subscribe to this logic then doesn't it follow that you're trying to rehire only 50% "bad" programmers from a pool that is (again by your definition) newly comprised of individuals a previous company recently identified as 100% "bad"? This not only assumes that you can identify bad workers, but that you can also identify some percent of "good workers that other companies identified as bad workers". Shameless profit taking by executives and shareholders seems a lot more likely. Google and Microsoft providing PR cover for smaller companies to do it under the radar.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoWhat's bad for one company is not necessarily bad for another company. For example I would think very hard before hiring any senior from FAANG (layoffs or otherwise) at a startup, especially in the pre-100 employees stage. Might even be worse during the rapid growth phase.
- paxys 4y agoIf they weren't able to hire these "better developers" in the first place what is going to change now?
- cooperadymas 4y agoMaybe those "better developers" were suddenly laid off by even bigger corps? I've noticed a trickle down effect in our very-small hiring queue. I can't help but imagine mid-sized companies are getting access to devs that only wanted to work for FAANG before.
- paxys 4y agoBy your logic the people laid off from other companies would also be the kind that weren't worth keeping. If everyone is firing bad developers and looking for good developers, where do all these good developers magically come from?
- wintogreen74 4y agoeasy: you add "We only hire rock stars" to your job postings.
- tesseract 4y agoI would not take it as a given that the individuals laid off were the worst performers at the company. It could be that they were highly compensated and deemed too expensive, or happened to work in the wrong department/business unit.
- wintogreen74 4y agoExcept by the original train of thought "everyone is laying off bad developers" so if you accept this (IMO flawed) premise you're going to be in a worse position after you get through this gigantic process.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agounless you have identified a company whose bad developers are better than your bad developers. And if you have developed a process to identify that I think it's time to pivot.
- agilob 4y agoThat's illegal in some countries and PG operates in the UK too. I've seen a tech writer being made redundant, then the same company was looking for a tech writer 7 months later. Fired guy won big money for unfair redundancy.
- outworlder 4y ago> What if they are laying off to make room for better developers? If they are firing people for performance reasons during their normal performance review cycle, it's not really a layoff.
- equalsione 4y agoI think this is a joke comment, but I've seen variations of this made in earnest over the past few months. It's clear by now that these layoffs aren't targeting low performers. They're not targeting any individual. They are an accounting exercise with selection based on meeting a formula. The suggestion in some quarters is that there's a kind of collective hysteria driving the layoffs amongst tech companies. Incorrect. The one thing all these companies have in common is that they all have the same pool of institutional shareholder. The layoffs are not about saving money, they are about being seen to save money. The institutional shareholders have demanded this be done, and the boards have complied. The big layoffs - Google, Amazon, MS, etc - are largely pointless and don't make any meaningful savings. And let's not do the "thinning of the herd" bullshit, please. Why have the institutional investors demanded this? 1) because they've become accustomed to make obscene amounts of money and want to continue making obscene amounts of money even when things are slowing down, and they (wrongly) believe laying people off is the way to do this 2) because they can. They hold the real power. Apple have largely avoided doing layoffs because his 40% paycut has soothed the baying suits, and Tim Cook is in a powerful position anyway. Most other CEOs, not so much...
- mullingitover 4y agoPagerduty doesn't have a big moat, either. They've just cut loose a bunch of people who know the intimate details of how to build a product exactly like theirs, ripe for the plucking by a competitor who knows they have a business with healthy margins. Looking forward to more competition in this space, PD is not as cheap as it should be.
- phpisthebest 4y agoWe need a competitor. I find PagerDuty to be over priced for what they are, and Atlassian is doing their best to destroy all of their services including OpsGenie which was very good until Atlassian bought them Those are the big 2 in the space, who else is there?
- base 4y agoWould be interesting to study if there is a correlation between layoffs and remote work and employee churn. It's easier to layoff people if you don't have a connection with them.
- egl2021 4y agoOr you get more rigorous about what is being accomplished and realize that you don't really need as many people. Or you decide that a remote worker can be anywhere, so why not use the global talent pool? These are the dark sides of WFH for employees.
- scarface74 4y agoThere is a huge difference between “short term gain” - ie the company is profitable and wants to be more profitable - and a company is losing money and needs to cut cost to remain solvent. Pager duty is not profitable.
- baby-yoda 4y agoAs a company PagerDuty is negative in both Income and Cash Flow. Do you suggest they maintain velocity in the death spiral until ground contact?
- kodah 4y agoNo, but by that logic they knew what was going to happen if they hired people and did so anyway. That doesn't even pass the most basic of ethical smell tests.
- baby-yoda 4y agoI don't think its quite that simple without knowing who specifically was laid off, tenure, specialty, for what reason, etc. I cant imagine anyone would hire people with the intention of laying them off, so I can't agree with that conclusion. I'd guess they hired with the intention of growing the company and for a myriad of reasons that didn't happen. Expansion and contraction are normal cycles in a company.
- kodah 4y agoYou said it yourself. They're not profitable and they lack cash flow. If they hired under those circumstances without telling employees what kind of risk they were taking, that is unethical. I don't need to know who got laid off or how long they were there to know that. Before I give empathy to rich CEOs and execs, they can explain themselves transparently. This never happens though.
- baby-yoda 4y agoSo you're suggesting a company can't hire employees unless they have positive income/cash flow? Like, a legal requirement? How do you even suggest a company tells employees of "the risk they are taking"? No job is guaranteed, risk is inherit no matter the company. They've been public since 2019, anyone can look at their financials and decide for themselves. If someone was hired in 2019 and laid off today, was that "unethical"? What about 2015? This isn't about empathy for CEOs and execs, the business will attempt to sustain itself and there are harsh realities that come along with that.
- deltree7 4y agoGoogle had an average tenure of 2.5 years for 25 years (before the current layoffs). So, it's bullshit reason given by an entitled generation. Basically they want High Salary, High Benefits, Psychological Safety, Activism Time using company resources, Always support progressive causes. None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures (ROI, ROE) or have managed a profitable division in their life.
- capableweb 4y ago> None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures Maybe they rightly don't care about those things when they see what blindly optimizing for ROI and other "capitalistic values" does to the rest of the society they live in.
- deltree7 4y agoWhere do you think their high salary comes from?