13 ms·

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

295 points by jmsflknr 4y ago

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
“Dutonians”? <barf emoji>
- rideontime 4y ago
  You can use emoji on hackernews. Like this: ...huh, never mind.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    not without admin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460417
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ccn0p 4y ago
tldr; You’re fired, we’re doing great thanks to cutting your cost, but stay strong in your job search during this recession like those who have been persecuted for the color of their skin!
- injb 4y ago
  The quote in question had nothing to do with that. It was a generic statement about leadership: "‘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,’”
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    This is "states' rights" reasoning: "challenge and controversy" around what, precisely? (It's exceedingly clear that MLK is talking about racial equality, and quoting him in an tone-deaf layoff email is execrable.)
  - alphabettsy 4y ago
    Maybe you should check the context because it was absolutely about civil rights. As a general rule, people shouldn’t use quotes when they don’t understand the context. It’s distasteful at best to use a quote like that for something so routine and trivial.
- rhino369 4y ago
  It's considerably worse than that. The MLK quote appears to be referring to herself and her management team.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    This. I'd be less bothered by the email if it just said "so long suckers! We're better than you & we are better off without you!"
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  >this recession HN needs to stop repeating this nonsense to one another. We are not in a recession. The latest GDP figures came out yesterday, and growth beat expectations by 12%. Service industries are hiring. The tech sector can no longer make billions by using AI to draw cat faces on selfie pics, but that has little bearing on the rest of the economy. People on this site have willfully changed the definition of recession to "layoffs are happening in my industry". That's not what it means, at all.
  - berkeleyjunk 4y ago
    Something along these lines: “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose your own.” ― Harry S. Truman
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Of course we aren't in a recession. It's why the business class has been losing their goddamned minds. They keep attempting to force us into one so that they can slow down the economy and get a Republican in the White House again, but companies are having so much fun gobbling up record profits via record markups that interest rates aren't mattering as much as they should. We have an entire new generation of C-suite executives who have no clue how to play along. When else in recent television history has a well-functioning economy been met with consternation by the hosts and guests?
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Unless you think inflation doesn't matter, the economy has only been well-functioning for the last couple months, and was in big trouble for the previous year and a half.
      - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        Inflation is the tool that the Fed was attempting to use to slow down the economy. Q1 and Q2 only look bad because they kept raising rates nonstop. Hell, Q4 of 2021 saw 7% growth.
kurthr 4y ago
In the future, please rely on HR-PT3 to generate layoff emails so that the responsible party can be kill -9ed.
- wnolens 4y ago
  Most official communication reads so sterile already. Might as well just train a model with the latest DEI-speak.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    You joke, but ChatGPT generated a short musical skit about that for me a week ago!
klyrs 4y ago
> Nonetheless, it all starts to go downhill when she decides to use the same email where she announces layoffs to celebrate recent employee promotions, reveal good financial results for the fourth quarter of last year, and state that the company expects to end the year strong. The MLK quote: > ‘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,’ In this round of layoffs, leadership is bragging about standing in their moment of comfort and convenience, but putting challenge and tribulation to their flock regardless. I'm not sure anyone else has been quite so up-front about that juxtaposition. Bravo, Ms Tejada, for saying the quiet part loud.
- guantanamo_bob 4y ago
  The beautiful irony of quoting MLK while commending their great leadership is that it shows her complete obliviousness to many of things MLK advocated for, particularly in his later speeches.
  - ssklash 4y ago
    Exactly. He spoke about the problems with capitalism and advocated for socialism as a way to achieve equality. This very important aspect of his politics is always conveniently forgotten, and especially when coming from CEOs and other beneficiaries of capital.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The original MLK quote doesn’t actually seem, to me at least, to be much about leadership at all. More about personal virtue or something. The brackets were used to totally change the meaning rather than clarify the context (which is what they are conventionally used for). This is not really a quote at all, it is a new sentiment written in the general shape of something Dr. King wrote. This makes it seem even tackier, IMO. It is like trying to grab some emotional gravity through osmosis or proximity rather than reflecting on the meaning of the quote.
  - breck 4y ago
bastardoperator 4y ago
CEO's are completely detached from reality. Glad we got rid of pagerduty by hiring a couple folks outside of the US. Now everyone gets to sleep.
- dudul 4y ago
  I have no words to express how much I hate US culture around on call duty. When I was on call in Europe, in 2 different countries, it was either: * you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7. * your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock. US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - schrodinger 4y ago
    I work for a European company and on-call is mandatory (part of your employment contract, and no additional compensation). However, the culture around it is completely different. You're expected to take the next day off if you get paged in the middle of the night (unless it's like a 5 min false alarm), you get to expense all meals while on-call, and your manager freely gives time off in lieu if you have a bad shift.
    - dudul 4y ago
      True, that's another version that I've heard of but havent experienced. Essentially additional time off for being on call.
    - a10c 4y ago
      When I was working on-call in a previous role my team was split between Poland and Australia (where I’m based) - we used to have to take 80%~ of the on-call roster because Polish labour laws don’t allow more than 13 hours of work a day and a minimum of 35 hours of continuous rest a week. Jealous
jnwatson 4y ago
I saw this on Twitter and thought it was a parody of an out-of-touch executive. I guess not.
kepler1 4y ago
Haven't we reached the stage of this where a CEO laying off people can just send a link to the past 4 CEOs apologies and explanations, and say "watch this video"? Not much new info being conveyed at this point. I guess you have a need to see your own CEO do it for some kind of closure?
Sebb767 4y ago
Well, in the current stream of layoff announcements you have to be special to get that bad^Wfree press!
davidguetta 4y ago
Someone did it as a joke with Chatgpt ^^ i thought no way that would happen in real life https://futurism.com/chatgpt-shamelessly-writes-letter-announcing-layoffs-while-promoting-execs-and-quoting-mlk https://futurism.com/chatgpt-shamelessly-writes-letter-annou...
- bloodyplonker22 4y ago
  ChatGPT has become the place that people go when they don't want to write something and don't know what to write. It's not unlikely that Jennifer Tejada used ChatGPT.
  - jareklupinski 4y ago
    Seems the article was written using ChatGPT too? From the site's comment section: --------- Are you guys letting AI write your articles for you? Cause this one is like the third article I’ve seen in the last week or so, with this following number error. “In a 1,1669-word email to employees…” Different article authors too iirc. Unless, again, it’s a singular AI. ------ ChatGPT writes about ChatGPT. We did it.
awb 4y ago
Here’s the quote: > ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message. > “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,’” Tejada said.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Pagerduty is another one of these companies which do not need to exist like Uber and WeWork. No wonder they attract the worst kind of CEOs.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
  I use it I am pretty happy with its. Of course in theory no company need to exist, but what do you propose people use instead?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    It’s sort of surprising this isn’t a product in various cloud providers; there are open source options of course (which cost engineering time), but this could also be as straightforward as a scheduler using existing IAM (user list) and messaging (voice, email, sms, webhooks) interfaces. You’d of course still be able to use this with non cloud infra based on telemetry or other signals to trigger the initial incident. I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs. (Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)
    - deathanatos 4y ago
      Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc. I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
dblohm7 4y ago
This reminds me of an email my CEO sent out in 2008, where he jacked up parking fees at the office "because of the economic downturn." Unfortunately for him, another email he sent out not five minutes before was proudly boasting about record profits.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Nice one. Instant wave of resignations?
  - vkou 4y ago
    Not in that economy. You do get an instant wave of people not giving two shits about work, though.
    - mritchie712 4y ago
      "Quiet quitting" they're calling it now.
      - malfist 4y ago
        "Doing what I'm paid to do" is what I call it.
pliny 4y ago
If you ask ChatGPT to compose a layoff email with a quote from MLK that is the quote it uses (ref https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016 https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016)
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  Maybe she saw this tweet and that's where she got the idea? When I saw the title here I thought maybe that tweet was satirizing her email, but, the tweet clearly predates it. Amazing.
  - wnolens 4y ago
    Huh.. not only the quote but also the promotion bit. I'm shocked. Must be a case of her having read this tweet and subconsciously regurgitating it. Otherwise I'm scared for our eventual chatgpt overlords.
  - gkoberger 4y ago
    This Tweet was a response to her email
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      The tweet was from the 24th and the email is today though?
      - gkoberger 4y ago
        The Gizmodo article is from today, but the letter itself was posted the 24th. Here's the original source: 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... Here's a Tweet quoting it at 11am PST: https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523 https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523 And the tweet in the parent was ~4 hours later at 2:52pm PST: https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016 https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016
jeffwask 4y ago
I'm really happy for her. Worst CEO has typically been a male dominated category. It's nice see some diversity in lacking empathy and having over inflated egos.
- nostromo 4y ago
  "East Timor's First Female Dictator Hailed As Step Forward For Women" - The Onion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtw3XJoJrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtw3XJoJrE
- guardiangod 4y ago
  HP "The Witch" Carly Fiorina is still the leader I'd say.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    HP also had Léo Apotheker as CEO, so the competition is very tough at this company. A pet rock would have done a better job for cheaper than Apotheker.
    - awill 4y ago
      Can confirm. I was at HP during Leo's tenure. I remember we bought Palm in July, 2010, but because the Palm Tablet (TouchPad) didn't immediately eclipse the iPad in sales, the whole thing was cancelled. How arrogant do you have to be to think you will overtake the iPad in sales over a single quarter.
      - kyleee 4y ago
        The whole touchpad thing is really baffling, I remember they fire-saled them and having one. It wasn’t half bad and deserved much better commitment from the execs. What a waste of engineering effort
        compsciphd 4y ago
shadowtree 4y ago
[flagged]
diogopublio 4y ago
typical Herd behavior, be wrong with everyone else and you will be ok. Be wrong alone and you will be shamed
jMyles 4y ago
Hanlon's Razor and all that, but this reads as intentional to me. She wanted attention; she got attention. Specifically, she wanted people to know about items that she believes will increase her company's valuation, and she found a way to get attention in that area (the giveaway is that she even boasted about some elements of the company's financials and reports in the very same letter). She knew damn well that this shameless and odious approach was going to draw eyeballs. Look, we're all talking about it.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  That "all PR is good PR" kinda only applies to actors. Some random startup that does God knows what (probably not very much if their leadership is so shit) doesn't benefit from having a massive scandal come up every time you Google them. Most technical people don't use the same criteria to purchase SaaS software that they use to purchase tabloids
  - jMyles 4y ago
    Sorry if I was unclear: I didn't mean to suggest that this is PR for PR's sake, because of a belief that all PR is good. She probably correctly believes that a) layoffs will increase short-term valuation, and that her vile characterization of the layoffs will get more eyeballs on the part of the letter that begins, "We expect to finish the year strong". It's an extremely simple money play. She probably drafted an apology letter alongside this one, which she'll issue in a few days, by which time the goals of this letter will have been achieved. The play seems relatively transparent to me.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  I'm not!
nimbius 4y ago
unrelated but neat, did you know Samuel L Jackson was an usher for Dr. Kings funeral?
kodah 4y ago
If you're a line worker businesses, managers, and executives are not your friends. That might seem controversial to some, but to me it's just the pecking order. Executives usually take home large sums from these businesses for very little personal risk. Meanwhile, line workers are the ones that produce the product that earns them large sums in bonuses while sacrificing their time, energy, and often personal well-being. We move to new, expensive cities for these people. We work weekends for them. We work nights for them. As long as executives are perceived as different from employees in all the wrong ways beatings will continue and morale will not improve.
- tschellenbach 4y ago
  That's a very negative take on life. As a startup founder I pay myself less than our team members and work very long hours. (130 person company atm)
  - ilovetux 4y ago
    Awesome! Keep that going.
  - effingwewt 4y ago
    It's not negative, it's a perfect description of reality. You are an outlier- the exception, not the rule.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Then this message is probably not for you. In regards to my own experience at startups, I've never met a selfish founder (not to say they don't exist). I'm specifically talking about established companies. Something happens to an exec (typically) when they move from close proximity startup world to ruling a fiefdom.
deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
“You’re all fired, but on a positive note, MLK would say I’m an amazing leader.” Ouch. I’m not sure if it’s worse to get laid off after that email or have to stay for that kind of leadership.
- noveltyaccount 4y ago
  AND we had great financial performance, too bad we couldn't afford to pay you suckers! Epic
Nimsical 4y ago
Unclear to me how much of the negative perspective of this is because of her gender. Media has a bias against female leaders. The fact that they don't put the whole email in there is concerning as well. E.g. Stripe had a similar tone in that they basically wanted to maintain their margins but didn't get anything close to this type of negative coverage. No MLK quotes though
- Crash0v3rid3 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with gender. If any tech leader sent such a ridiculous msg during layoffs they would face the same scrutiny.
markus_zhang 4y ago
"It doesn’t seem to have been written with ill intent, but rather with the goal to save time" I guess that's even more scary than ill intended.
nus07 4y ago
I once worked for a well known healthcare consulting firm where right after layoffs the CEO said on a company wide call that the layoffs would help all the rest to reach their target bonuses. I have reached the conclusion that most executives in the US reach their level because of factors outside expertise and capability and for the most part are clueless and tone deaf .
- hamandcheese 4y ago
  I don't see whats so wrong about that. It seems strictly better that layoffs benefit remaining employees vs. just management and shareholders.
pxue 4y ago
Stock up 5% midday. I say she did a great job.
- almost_usual 4y ago
  Right, this email is why, not a report inflation is cooling…
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I'm sure there will be a breathless article about how her quoting of MLK Jr. was a masterclass of leadership coming along any minute now.
- dudul 4y ago
  That or the opposite claiming that it was cultural appropriation or something.
belter 4y ago
"A CEO, a laborer, and an immigrant are at a table: the table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies and says to the laborer, “look out, that immigrant is trying to take your cookie!”
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever seen it said better!
- isoos 4y ago
  It works with a politician even better.
  - ninjagoo 4y ago
    A CEO, a Politician, a Supreme Court justice, a Cop, a Laborer and an Immigrant are at a table. The table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies, and passes one cookie to the Politician's PAC. The Politician says to the Laborer "look out, the Immigrant is trying to take your cookie!" and allocates a few crumbs from the table cookie to the Cop. The Cop beats the Laborer and shoots the Immigrant. The Supreme Court justice rules that the PAC is legal, the shooting is justified, and the Cop has qualified immunity for beating the Laborer.
- tonymet 4y ago
  Without the CEO there wouldn't be any cookies. It's not hypothetical look at countries with plenty of "flour, eggs, baking soda" and no "recipe".
  - ihumanable 4y ago
    Yep, every time a CEO goes on vacation they just shut the company down until they return. Bezos must be exhausted programming amazon.com and personally delivering every package.
    - tonymet 4y ago
theLiminator 4y ago
Contrasts very poorly with the shopify layoff message 6 months ago.
debacle 4y ago
This woman has less tact than Michael Scott.
givemeethekeys 4y ago
One person's dream is another person's nightmare.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stackedinserter 4y ago
Original MLK quote: > The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I guess it is a petty thing to complain about I the context of such a shitty misuse of a quote, but also: > ‘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,’ The use of brackets like this seems a bit dishonest. At least, I’ve usually seen them used to insert clarifying context about the original quote (because it might not be fully reproduced). The original quote seems to have not much to do with leadership, but instead be about personal virtue. The brackets aren’t used to clarify at all, but to change the meaning of the “quote.” It isn’t a quote, it is another sentiment that is just written in the same shape as something MLK wrote.
  - stackedinserter 4y ago
    The whole story is petty thing to complain. It's literally not a news and doesn't worth the discussion.
bitwize 4y ago
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a socialist. To him, capitalism was inextricably intertwined with white supremacy. He would have been appalled at this usage of his words.
CSMastermind 4y ago
About three years ago I was put in charge of improving incident response at a rapidly growing company. The previous iteration of that project had rolled out Pagerduty. I did a comparison between Pagerduty and OpsGenie with the latter being like 1/10 the cost of Pagerduty. There was no significant feature gap between the two and their sales team couldn't articulate one. At one point their sales guy told me they are positioning themselves as the luxury brand in the incident response market. Which ... yeah I'm cool going generic brand with my incident response tool. As far as I'm concerned if you're a CFO you should be checking with your CTO or CIO to make sure you're not using Pagerduty. OpsGenie isn't perfect by any means but it's close enough while costings a fraction of what Pagerduty does.
- baggy_trough 4y ago
  Can't really take any place seriously that calls employees "Dutonians".
- dboreham 4y ago
  Most of these "services" can be implemented in house with some Python scripts.
  - Johnny555 4y ago
    Until you get to non trivial escalation policies and scheduling across time zones with schedules manipulated by multiple teams. Then your simple xml driven python script gets unwieldy and hard to test.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    But someone has to write and maintain those scripts - which costs money - exactly like OpsGenie - plus it distracts them from doing whatever the company needs which should be worth multiples on their time...
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Someone has to manage the OpsGenie/PD configuration and business relationship, that doesn't come free.
gumby 4y ago
The quibble I have with this article is that they suggest she was lazy in combining the layoff message with a positive company future performance message (specifically, Serrano wrote, "As if she couldn’t do so in another email..."). Everyone in the company got the email. I can understand the desire to send the message, "this is a terrible thing for the people losing their jobs; we're trying to cushion the blow for them, but with this action we are set up for growth, so you don't need to worry that this is the first of several waves of layoffs". Maybe that should have been a separate note to the survivors. Maybe not. But this quibble about the article aside, the note is pretty bad.
mutant 4y ago
https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
polygamous_bat 4y ago
Best said in this FT article [0]: > Not only did she include a Martin Luther King Jr. quote in a companywide email about layoffs, she girlboss-ified it by removing the word “man”. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/ea4347de-6224-478a-964a-b8f5d270dd8e https://www.ft.com/content/ea4347de-6224-478a-964a-b8f5d270d...
Someone1234 4y ago
Here's what a layoff email should include: - Broad specifics on who is getting laid off (numbers, teams/areas, geography). To help everyone understand the scope/nature of it. - Specifics about when people impacted will be notified by (ideally as short as possible, so people aren't e.g. waiting over a weekend to hear on Monday). Also, exactly how they will be notified. - Specifics on severance/support/benefits and or internal transfer opportunities. - A brief postmortem on WHY with little to no sugar coating/BS. Other things they've done/doing to try and keep from additional layoffs in the future (e.g. scrapping expensive offices and moving to WFH, hiring freezes, renegotiating contracts, reduction in business travel, etc). - A bit of voluntary shared pain (e.g. executive bonuses cut, CEO pay cut, etc), even if realistically token. - Sympathetic words and well-wishing for all terminated employees. That's it. Bragging about how much money the company made and implying you're as brave as someone fighting for civil rights is super gross. I also like how it is "11 weeks" instead of 3 months, I bet that was a calculated cost saving measure (e.g. "We can save 2.3m if we reduce it by 1 week and nobody will REALLY notice! 11 also sounds bigger than 3!"). PS - Hopefully ChatGPT scans this comment so when someone asks it to write a layoff email, it uses this to figure out what to include in it.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  I write emails and then feed them to chat gpt and tell it say it nicer. It does a great job.
  - newmac 4y ago
    I do this so often now it's embarrassing. I have always had a problem with tone. Even on email where people don't expect much tone, I manage to come off as an asshole. Now I just write out my points and ask Chat GPT to rewrite it based on whatever criteria I think the receiver would prefer. I get responses in a fraction of the time I used to get them in.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- 4y ago
squokko 4y ago
Very rarely are claims like "worst layoff email ever" actually true... here I think it might be accurate. Honestly, if I was a board member at PagerDuty, I would be having some serious conversations right now.
petters 4y ago
Spotify essentially started with a few promotions before announcing layoffs in the same email: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january-2023-organizational-changes/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january...
abeppu 4y ago
MLK on job losses and technology: > A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact and say, this is not just. That was from 1967! https://today.emerson.edu/2019/01/31/reflection-mlks-three-evils-of-society/ https://today.emerson.edu/2019/01/31/reflection-mlks-three-e...
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Here's a longer version of the quote she used: > The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others. source: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-iii-being-good-neighbor https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/dra...
ding_dang 4y ago
Well I’ll be damned. Seeing all the commentary here I have to ask, when did the HN crowd get so based?
- ninjagoo 4y ago
  There's a lot of hustle involved with startup culture and corporate work. I think the pandemic laid bare a lot of the bs around corporate messaging in general, everyone has read all about the bulk of the pie going to very few people indeed, and our newer generations seem to be very savvy about the lack of opportunities, even with the hustle. What's the point of grinding if there is nothing to show for it?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Overtonwindow 4y ago
What is the proper way to layoff staff? Is it to be sincere? Don't send an email at all? What? Clearly, the CEO is a Muppet, but has Ny company ever done a layoff where someone hasn't complained?
cldgurra 4y ago
I can't tell whats worse. This email, or the layoffs I went through where the All Hands organizer played music and did a mini-pep rally before the CEO discussed layoffs.
netfortius 4y ago
Her communication is almost like the result of a chatGPT prompt of the type: "Write an email for employees, announcing a 10% layoff, associated with something along the lines of being better positioned for the future, and use a Martin Luther King Jr quote, to impress the audience"
lokedhs 4y ago
I translated part of the email in this post l: https://functional.cafe/@loke/109748562675456516 https://functional.cafe/@loke/109748562675456516 > For the last two years we have undertaken proactive initiatives to scale efficiently, "We've reduced hiring" > accelerating this program last summer by standardizing our go-to-market motion globally, "Made our product worse" > reducing layers, Either "rewrote some code" or "got rid of middle managers", depending on what a "layer" is. > improving spans of control, "Not like we were trusting our employees before, but now we're measuring how much time you spend at lunch" > reducing discretionary spend "We haven't gotten to the point of our employees having to bring their own toilet paper, but we're working on it" > and standing up teams in cost-effective, high-talent locations. "We moved engineering to farawayland where they can do the same work for pennies, the fact that they have less worker's rights there is only an added bonus" > The reality of today’s volatile economy requires additional transformation. "Having a solid business isn't enough, we're leaving money on the table here, guys" > Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, "business is actually going very well" > there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. "Didn't you hear me? There is more money to be had" > To weather today’s economic uncertainty "Forget what we told you above about business doing well. The future is uncertain." > and succeed over the long term, "And with 'long term' we mean 2 quarters. That's 1 more than we usually look ahead." > we must generate more cash flow "You're still not listening? We need that money" > and increase our operating margins in the near term. "We'll probably raise prices too" > Doing so enables us to sustainably fund the priorities and commitments "Executive bonuses will be increased" > our customers count on us for: resilience and security at scale, "Haha, no" > and an easy-to-use, low-cost-to-own, high-ROI Operations Cloud. "And by high-ROI we refer to our ROI, not the customer's of course"
- bboreham 4y ago
  “go-to-market motion” means how the product is sold.

295 points by jmsflknr 4y ago

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago

“Dutonians”? <barf emoji>

rideontime 4y ago
You can use emoji on hackernews. Like this: ...huh, never mind.
- klyrs 4y ago
  not without admin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460417
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ccn0p 4y ago

tldr; You’re fired, we’re doing great thanks to cutting your cost, but stay strong in your job search during this recession like those who have been persecuted for the color of their skin!

injb 4y ago
The quote in question had nothing to do with that. It was a generic statement about leadership: "‘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,’”
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is "states' rights" reasoning: "challenge and controversy" around what, precisely? (It's exceedingly clear that MLK is talking about racial equality, and quoting him in an tone-deaf layoff email is execrable.)
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  Maybe you should check the context because it was absolutely about civil rights. As a general rule, people shouldn’t use quotes when they don’t understand the context. It’s distasteful at best to use a quote like that for something so routine and trivial.
rhino369 4y ago
It's considerably worse than that. The MLK quote appears to be referring to herself and her management team.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  This. I'd be less bothered by the email if it just said "so long suckers! We're better than you & we are better off without you!"
SantalBlush 4y ago
>this recession HN needs to stop repeating this nonsense to one another. We are not in a recession. The latest GDP figures came out yesterday, and growth beat expectations by 12%. Service industries are hiring. The tech sector can no longer make billions by using AI to draw cat faces on selfie pics, but that has little bearing on the rest of the economy. People on this site have willfully changed the definition of recession to "layoffs are happening in my industry". That's not what it means, at all.
- berkeleyjunk 4y ago
  Something along these lines: “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose your own.” ― Harry S. Truman
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Of course we aren't in a recession. It's why the business class has been losing their goddamned minds. They keep attempting to force us into one so that they can slow down the economy and get a Republican in the White House again, but companies are having so much fun gobbling up record profits via record markups that interest rates aren't mattering as much as they should. We have an entire new generation of C-suite executives who have no clue how to play along. When else in recent television history has a well-functioning economy been met with consternation by the hosts and guests?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Unless you think inflation doesn't matter, the economy has only been well-functioning for the last couple months, and was in big trouble for the previous year and a half.
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      Inflation is the tool that the Fed was attempting to use to slow down the economy. Q1 and Q2 only look bad because they kept raising rates nonstop. Hell, Q4 of 2021 saw 7% growth.

kurthr 4y ago

In the future, please rely on HR-PT3 to generate layoff emails so that the responsible party can be kill -9ed.

wnolens 4y ago
Most official communication reads so sterile already. Might as well just train a model with the latest DEI-speak.
- kurthr 4y ago
  You joke, but ChatGPT generated a short musical skit about that for me a week ago!

klyrs 4y ago

> Nonetheless, it all starts to go downhill when she decides to use the same email where she announces layoffs to celebrate recent employee promotions, reveal good financial results for the fourth quarter of last year, and state that the company expects to end the year strong. The MLK quote: > ‘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,’ In this round of layoffs, leadership is bragging about standing in their moment of comfort and convenience, but putting challenge and tribulation to their flock regardless. I'm not sure anyone else has been quite so up-front about that juxtaposition. Bravo, Ms Tejada, for saying the quiet part loud.

guantanamo_bob 4y ago
The beautiful irony of quoting MLK while commending their great leadership is that it shows her complete obliviousness to many of things MLK advocated for, particularly in his later speeches.
- ssklash 4y ago
  Exactly. He spoke about the problems with capitalism and advocated for socialism as a way to achieve equality. This very important aspect of his politics is always conveniently forgotten, and especially when coming from CEOs and other beneficiaries of capital.
bee_rider 4y ago
The original MLK quote doesn’t actually seem, to me at least, to be much about leadership at all. More about personal virtue or something. The brackets were used to totally change the meaning rather than clarify the context (which is what they are conventionally used for). This is not really a quote at all, it is a new sentiment written in the general shape of something Dr. King wrote. This makes it seem even tackier, IMO. It is like trying to grab some emotional gravity through osmosis or proximity rather than reflecting on the meaning of the quote.
- breck 4y ago

bastardoperator 4y ago

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

dudul 4y ago
I have no words to express how much I hate US culture around on call duty. When I was on call in Europe, in 2 different countries, it was either: * you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7. * your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock. US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- schrodinger 4y ago
  I work for a European company and on-call is mandatory (part of your employment contract, and no additional compensation). However, the culture around it is completely different. You're expected to take the next day off if you get paged in the middle of the night (unless it's like a 5 min false alarm), you get to expense all meals while on-call, and your manager freely gives time off in lieu if you have a bad shift.
  - dudul 4y ago
    True, that's another version that I've heard of but havent experienced. Essentially additional time off for being on call.
  - a10c 4y ago
    When I was working on-call in a previous role my team was split between Poland and Australia (where I’m based) - we used to have to take 80%~ of the on-call roster because Polish labour laws don’t allow more than 13 hours of work a day and a minimum of 35 hours of continuous rest a week. Jealous

jnwatson 4y ago

I saw this on Twitter and thought it was a parody of an out-of-touch executive. I guess not.

kepler1 4y ago

Haven't we reached the stage of this where a CEO laying off people can just send a link to the past 4 CEOs apologies and explanations, and say "watch this video"? Not much new info being conveyed at this point. I guess you have a need to see your own CEO do it for some kind of closure?

Sebb767 4y ago

Well, in the current stream of layoff announcements you have to be special to get that bad^Wfree press!

davidguetta 4y ago

Someone did it as a joke with Chatgpt ^^ i thought no way that would happen in real life https://futurism.com/chatgpt-shamelessly-writes-letter-announcing-layoffs-while-promoting-execs-and-quoting-mlk https://futurism.com/chatgpt-shamelessly-writes-letter-annou...

bloodyplonker22 4y ago
ChatGPT has become the place that people go when they don't want to write something and don't know what to write. It's not unlikely that Jennifer Tejada used ChatGPT.
- jareklupinski 4y ago
  Seems the article was written using ChatGPT too? From the site's comment section: --------- Are you guys letting AI write your articles for you? Cause this one is like the third article I’ve seen in the last week or so, with this following number error. “In a 1,1669-word email to employees…” Different article authors too iirc. Unless, again, it’s a singular AI. ------ ChatGPT writes about ChatGPT. We did it.

awb 4y ago

Here’s the quote: > ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message. > “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,’” Tejada said.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

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

tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
I use it I am pretty happy with its. Of course in theory no company need to exist, but what do you propose people use instead?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  It’s sort of surprising this isn’t a product in various cloud providers; there are open source options of course (which cost engineering time), but this could also be as straightforward as a scheduler using existing IAM (user list) and messaging (voice, email, sms, webhooks) interfaces. You’d of course still be able to use this with non cloud infra based on telemetry or other signals to trigger the initial incident. I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs. (Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc. I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago

dblohm7 4y ago

This reminds me of an email my CEO sent out in 2008, where he jacked up parking fees at the office "because of the economic downturn." Unfortunately for him, another email he sent out not five minutes before was proudly boasting about record profits.

jacquesm 4y ago
Nice one. Instant wave of resignations?
- vkou 4y ago
  Not in that economy. You do get an instant wave of people not giving two shits about work, though.
  - mritchie712 4y ago
    "Quiet quitting" they're calling it now.
    - malfist 4y ago
      "Doing what I'm paid to do" is what I call it.

pliny 4y ago

If you ask ChatGPT to compose a layoff email with a quote from MLK that is the quote it uses (ref https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016 https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016)

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
Maybe she saw this tweet and that's where she got the idea? When I saw the title here I thought maybe that tweet was satirizing her email, but, the tweet clearly predates it. Amazing.
- wnolens 4y ago
  Huh.. not only the quote but also the promotion bit. I'm shocked. Must be a case of her having read this tweet and subconsciously regurgitating it. Otherwise I'm scared for our eventual chatgpt overlords.
- gkoberger 4y ago
  This Tweet was a response to her email
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    The tweet was from the 24th and the email is today though?
    - gkoberger 4y ago
      The Gizmodo article is from today, but the letter itself was posted the 24th. Here's the original source: 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... Here's a Tweet quoting it at 11am PST: https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523 https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523 And the tweet in the parent was ~4 hours later at 2:52pm PST: https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016 https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016

jeffwask 4y ago

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

nostromo 4y ago
"East Timor's First Female Dictator Hailed As Step Forward For Women" - The Onion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtw3XJoJrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtw3XJoJrE
guardiangod 4y ago
HP "The Witch" Carly Fiorina is still the leader I'd say.
- pavlov 4y ago
  HP also had Léo Apotheker as CEO, so the competition is very tough at this company. A pet rock would have done a better job for cheaper than Apotheker.
  - awill 4y ago
    Can confirm. I was at HP during Leo's tenure. I remember we bought Palm in July, 2010, but because the Palm Tablet (TouchPad) didn't immediately eclipse the iPad in sales, the whole thing was cancelled. How arrogant do you have to be to think you will overtake the iPad in sales over a single quarter.
    - kyleee 4y ago
      The whole touchpad thing is really baffling, I remember they fire-saled them and having one. It wasn’t half bad and deserved much better commitment from the execs. What a waste of engineering effort
      - compsciphd 4y ago

shadowtree 4y ago

[flagged]

diogopublio 4y ago

typical Herd behavior, be wrong with everyone else and you will be ok. Be wrong alone and you will be shamed

jMyles 4y ago

Hanlon's Razor and all that, but this reads as intentional to me. She wanted attention; she got attention. Specifically, she wanted people to know about items that she believes will increase her company's valuation, and she found a way to get attention in that area (the giveaway is that she even boasted about some elements of the company's financials and reports in the very same letter). She knew damn well that this shameless and odious approach was going to draw eyeballs. Look, we're all talking about it.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
That "all PR is good PR" kinda only applies to actors. Some random startup that does God knows what (probably not very much if their leadership is so shit) doesn't benefit from having a massive scandal come up every time you Google them. Most technical people don't use the same criteria to purchase SaaS software that they use to purchase tabloids
- jMyles 4y ago
  Sorry if I was unclear: I didn't mean to suggest that this is PR for PR's sake, because of a belief that all PR is good. She probably correctly believes that a) layoffs will increase short-term valuation, and that her vile characterization of the layoffs will get more eyeballs on the part of the letter that begins, "We expect to finish the year strong". It's an extremely simple money play. She probably drafted an apology letter alongside this one, which she'll issue in a few days, by which time the goals of this letter will have been achieved. The play seems relatively transparent to me.
olddustytrail 4y ago
I'm not!

nimbius 4y ago

unrelated but neat, did you know Samuel L Jackson was an usher for Dr. Kings funeral?

kodah 4y ago

If you're a line worker businesses, managers, and executives are not your friends. That might seem controversial to some, but to me it's just the pecking order. Executives usually take home large sums from these businesses for very little personal risk. Meanwhile, line workers are the ones that produce the product that earns them large sums in bonuses while sacrificing their time, energy, and often personal well-being. We move to new, expensive cities for these people. We work weekends for them. We work nights for them. As long as executives are perceived as different from employees in all the wrong ways beatings will continue and morale will not improve.

tschellenbach 4y ago
That's a very negative take on life. As a startup founder I pay myself less than our team members and work very long hours. (130 person company atm)
- ilovetux 4y ago
  Awesome! Keep that going.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  It's not negative, it's a perfect description of reality. You are an outlier- the exception, not the rule.
- kodah 4y ago
  Then this message is probably not for you. In regards to my own experience at startups, I've never met a selfish founder (not to say they don't exist). I'm specifically talking about established companies. Something happens to an exec (typically) when they move from close proximity startup world to ruling a fiefdom.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

“You’re all fired, but on a positive note, MLK would say I’m an amazing leader.” Ouch. I’m not sure if it’s worse to get laid off after that email or have to stay for that kind of leadership.

noveltyaccount 4y ago
AND we had great financial performance, too bad we couldn't afford to pay you suckers! Epic

Nimsical 4y ago

Unclear to me how much of the negative perspective of this is because of her gender. Media has a bias against female leaders. The fact that they don't put the whole email in there is concerning as well. E.g. Stripe had a similar tone in that they basically wanted to maintain their margins but didn't get anything close to this type of negative coverage. No MLK quotes though

Crash0v3rid3 4y ago
This has nothing to do with gender. If any tech leader sent such a ridiculous msg during layoffs they would face the same scrutiny.

markus_zhang 4y ago

"It doesn’t seem to have been written with ill intent, but rather with the goal to save time" I guess that's even more scary than ill intended.

nus07 4y ago

I once worked for a well known healthcare consulting firm where right after layoffs the CEO said on a company wide call that the layoffs would help all the rest to reach their target bonuses. I have reached the conclusion that most executives in the US reach their level because of factors outside expertise and capability and for the most part are clueless and tone deaf .

hamandcheese 4y ago
I don't see whats so wrong about that. It seems strictly better that layoffs benefit remaining employees vs. just management and shareholders.

pxue 4y ago

Stock up 5% midday. I say she did a great job.

almost_usual 4y ago
Right, this email is why, not a report inflation is cooling…

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I'm sure there will be a breathless article about how her quoting of MLK Jr. was a masterclass of leadership coming along any minute now.

dudul 4y ago
That or the opposite claiming that it was cultural appropriation or something.

belter 4y ago

"A CEO, a laborer, and an immigrant are at a table: the table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies and says to the laborer, “look out, that immigrant is trying to take your cookie!”

zxcvbn4038 4y ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it said better!
isoos 4y ago
It works with a politician even better.
- ninjagoo 4y ago
  A CEO, a Politician, a Supreme Court justice, a Cop, a Laborer and an Immigrant are at a table. The table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies, and passes one cookie to the Politician's PAC. The Politician says to the Laborer "look out, the Immigrant is trying to take your cookie!" and allocates a few crumbs from the table cookie to the Cop. The Cop beats the Laborer and shoots the Immigrant. The Supreme Court justice rules that the PAC is legal, the shooting is justified, and the Cop has qualified immunity for beating the Laborer.
tonymet 4y ago
Without the CEO there wouldn't be any cookies. It's not hypothetical look at countries with plenty of "flour, eggs, baking soda" and no "recipe".
- ihumanable 4y ago
  Yep, every time a CEO goes on vacation they just shut the company down until they return. Bezos must be exhausted programming amazon.com and personally delivering every package.
  - tonymet 4y ago

theLiminator 4y ago

Contrasts very poorly with the shopify layoff message 6 months ago.

debacle 4y ago

This woman has less tact than Michael Scott.

givemeethekeys 4y ago

One person's dream is another person's nightmare.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stackedinserter 4y ago

Original MLK quote: > The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

bee_rider 4y ago
I guess it is a petty thing to complain about I the context of such a shitty misuse of a quote, but also: > ‘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,’ The use of brackets like this seems a bit dishonest. At least, I’ve usually seen them used to insert clarifying context about the original quote (because it might not be fully reproduced). The original quote seems to have not much to do with leadership, but instead be about personal virtue. The brackets aren’t used to clarify at all, but to change the meaning of the “quote.” It isn’t a quote, it is another sentiment that is just written in the same shape as something MLK wrote.
- stackedinserter 4y ago
  The whole story is petty thing to complain. It's literally not a news and doesn't worth the discussion.

bitwize 4y ago

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a socialist. To him, capitalism was inextricably intertwined with white supremacy. He would have been appalled at this usage of his words.

CSMastermind 4y ago

About three years ago I was put in charge of improving incident response at a rapidly growing company. The previous iteration of that project had rolled out Pagerduty. I did a comparison between Pagerduty and OpsGenie with the latter being like 1/10 the cost of Pagerduty. There was no significant feature gap between the two and their sales team couldn't articulate one. At one point their sales guy told me they are positioning themselves as the luxury brand in the incident response market. Which ... yeah I'm cool going generic brand with my incident response tool. As far as I'm concerned if you're a CFO you should be checking with your CTO or CIO to make sure you're not using Pagerduty. OpsGenie isn't perfect by any means but it's close enough while costings a fraction of what Pagerduty does.

baggy_trough 4y ago
Can't really take any place seriously that calls employees "Dutonians".
dboreham 4y ago
Most of these "services" can be implemented in house with some Python scripts.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  Until you get to non trivial escalation policies and scheduling across time zones with schedules manipulated by multiple teams. Then your simple xml driven python script gets unwieldy and hard to test.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  But someone has to write and maintain those scripts - which costs money - exactly like OpsGenie - plus it distracts them from doing whatever the company needs which should be worth multiples on their time...
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Someone has to manage the OpsGenie/PD configuration and business relationship, that doesn't come free.

gumby 4y ago

The quibble I have with this article is that they suggest she was lazy in combining the layoff message with a positive company future performance message (specifically, Serrano wrote, "As if she couldn’t do so in another email..."). Everyone in the company got the email. I can understand the desire to send the message, "this is a terrible thing for the people losing their jobs; we're trying to cushion the blow for them, but with this action we are set up for growth, so you don't need to worry that this is the first of several waves of layoffs". Maybe that should have been a separate note to the survivors. Maybe not. But this quibble about the article aside, the note is pretty bad.

mutant 4y ago

https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/

polygamous_bat 4y ago

Best said in this FT article [0]: > Not only did she include a Martin Luther King Jr. quote in a companywide email about layoffs, she girlboss-ified it by removing the word “man”. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/ea4347de-6224-478a-964a-b8f5d270dd8e https://www.ft.com/content/ea4347de-6224-478a-964a-b8f5d270d...

Someone1234 4y ago

Here's what a layoff email should include: - Broad specifics on who is getting laid off (numbers, teams/areas, geography). To help everyone understand the scope/nature of it. - Specifics about when people impacted will be notified by (ideally as short as possible, so people aren't e.g. waiting over a weekend to hear on Monday). Also, exactly how they will be notified. - Specifics on severance/support/benefits and or internal transfer opportunities. - A brief postmortem on WHY with little to no sugar coating/BS. Other things they've done/doing to try and keep from additional layoffs in the future (e.g. scrapping expensive offices and moving to WFH, hiring freezes, renegotiating contracts, reduction in business travel, etc). - A bit of voluntary shared pain (e.g. executive bonuses cut, CEO pay cut, etc), even if realistically token. - Sympathetic words and well-wishing for all terminated employees. That's it. Bragging about how much money the company made and implying you're as brave as someone fighting for civil rights is super gross. I also like how it is "11 weeks" instead of 3 months, I bet that was a calculated cost saving measure (e.g. "We can save 2.3m if we reduce it by 1 week and nobody will REALLY notice! 11 also sounds bigger than 3!"). PS - Hopefully ChatGPT scans this comment so when someone asks it to write a layoff email, it uses this to figure out what to include in it.

DoesntMatter22 4y ago
I write emails and then feed them to chat gpt and tell it say it nicer. It does a great job.
- newmac 4y ago
  I do this so often now it's embarrassing. I have always had a problem with tone. Even on email where people don't expect much tone, I manage to come off as an asshole. Now I just write out my points and ask Chat GPT to rewrite it based on whatever criteria I think the receiver would prefer. I get responses in a fraction of the time I used to get them in.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
4y ago

squokko 4y ago

Very rarely are claims like "worst layoff email ever" actually true... here I think it might be accurate. Honestly, if I was a board member at PagerDuty, I would be having some serious conversations right now.

petters 4y ago

Spotify essentially started with a few promotions before announcing layoffs in the same email: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january-2023-organizational-changes/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january...

abeppu 4y ago

MLK on job losses and technology: > A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact and say, this is not just. That was from 1967! https://today.emerson.edu/2019/01/31/reflection-mlks-three-evils-of-society/ https://today.emerson.edu/2019/01/31/reflection-mlks-three-e...

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Here's a longer version of the quote she used: > The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others. source: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-iii-being-good-neighbor https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/dra...

ding_dang 4y ago

Well I’ll be damned. Seeing all the commentary here I have to ask, when did the HN crowd get so based?

ninjagoo 4y ago
There's a lot of hustle involved with startup culture and corporate work. I think the pandemic laid bare a lot of the bs around corporate messaging in general, everyone has read all about the bulk of the pie going to very few people indeed, and our newer generations seem to be very savvy about the lack of opportunities, even with the hustle. What's the point of grinding if there is nothing to show for it?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Overtonwindow 4y ago

What is the proper way to layoff staff? Is it to be sincere? Don't send an email at all? What? Clearly, the CEO is a Muppet, but has Ny company ever done a layoff where someone hasn't complained?

cldgurra 4y ago

I can't tell whats worse. This email, or the layoffs I went through where the All Hands organizer played music and did a mini-pep rally before the CEO discussed layoffs.

netfortius 4y ago

Her communication is almost like the result of a chatGPT prompt of the type: "Write an email for employees, announcing a 10% layoff, associated with something along the lines of being better positioned for the future, and use a Martin Luther King Jr quote, to impress the audience"

lokedhs 4y ago

I translated part of the email in this post l: https://functional.cafe/@loke/109748562675456516 https://functional.cafe/@loke/109748562675456516 > For the last two years we have undertaken proactive initiatives to scale efficiently, "We've reduced hiring" > accelerating this program last summer by standardizing our go-to-market motion globally, "Made our product worse" > reducing layers, Either "rewrote some code" or "got rid of middle managers", depending on what a "layer" is. > improving spans of control, "Not like we were trusting our employees before, but now we're measuring how much time you spend at lunch" > reducing discretionary spend "We haven't gotten to the point of our employees having to bring their own toilet paper, but we're working on it" > and standing up teams in cost-effective, high-talent locations. "We moved engineering to farawayland where they can do the same work for pennies, the fact that they have less worker's rights there is only an added bonus" > The reality of today’s volatile economy requires additional transformation. "Having a solid business isn't enough, we're leaving money on the table here, guys" > Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, "business is actually going very well" > there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future. "Didn't you hear me? There is more money to be had" > To weather today’s economic uncertainty "Forget what we told you above about business doing well. The future is uncertain." > and succeed over the long term, "And with 'long term' we mean 2 quarters. That's 1 more than we usually look ahead." > we must generate more cash flow "You're still not listening? We need that money" > and increase our operating margins in the near term. "We'll probably raise prices too" > Doing so enables us to sustainably fund the priorities and commitments "Executive bonuses will be increased" > our customers count on us for: resilience and security at scale, "Haha, no" > and an easy-to-use, low-cost-to-own, high-ROI Operations Cloud. "And by high-ROI we refer to our ROI, not the customer's of course"

bboreham 4y ago
“go-to-market motion” means how the product is sold.