11 ms·

GoDaddy Announces Layoffs of “About 8%”

153 points by lucg 4y ago

Tinkerbell5481 4y ago
This honestly shook our family as we were included in the 8%. We have been with them for over 17+ years and were treated very well throughout our time with them. I've read the news stories and the "public statements" so many times and we still can't figure out the why. The morning after the layoffs, they hosted a townhall assuring the lucky remainers that profits were up, and there was still security in their jobs. So again, we go back to the question of the why. We were mid-projects that needed to be handed off to contract workers, as our access was taken away almost immediately.
ulfw 4y ago
Ah yes the across-all-industries-of-tech bullshit bonanza continues.
officialchicken 4y ago
Oh good... another CEO mass-firing statement that takes no responsibility and indicates no negative side-effects for their "leadership" ability. To those recently let go, I hope you find a new opportunity in a place where the those in charge actually care about their employees; and they have the foresight to ensure their long-term well-being.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Really? You think any employer “cares about their employees”? A job is a transaction a way for me to trade labor for money and support ny addiction to food and shelter. It’s my responsibility to save accordingly always expecting a lay off. This has been my mindset since I was 22 years old making 11/hour as a computer operator saving my overtime pay until today at 49 where I stumbled into a role at $BigTech three years ago and save/invested all of my after tax signing bonus and divest my RSUs once vested.
  - 0xAFFFF 4y ago
    > Really? You think any employer “cares about their employees”? It can actually happen sometimes, but I've never seen it outside of small structures.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Wait until they have a choice of going out of business or laying people off. Also most small companies are investor backed. I assure you that their investors don’t care about you. The CEO of the 1.5 million employee company I work for doesn’t know me from Adam.
    - cseleborg 4y ago
      But small structures are the norm, or at least very common, aren't they? There are plenty of established, small to medium businesses out there. Someone for whom this is important can certainly find a job like that within one of those.
  - kristiandupont 4y ago
    >You think any employer “cares about their employees”? Employers are people. Some people are cynical and greedy, others are empathetic. Yes, they will fire people as is some times necessary and as an employee you should plan for that. They won't make great sacrifices for you like family or very close friends might, but I've definitely had employers who wanted the best for me and made an effort to help me achieve it.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Employers are not “people”, corporations are legal entities that are specifically created to shield the people. Any for profit (or for that matter even non profit company ) is most interested in its own survival and well being.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    A job is a transaction a way for me to trade labor for money and support ny addiction to food and shelter. It’s my responsibility to save accordingly always expecting a lay off. I'm sorry you're being down-voted, because the frank truth is... you're exactly right. To a first approximation, 0 companies really "care about their employees" in any meaningful sense. Work is simply a transaction arrangement, where you trade some of your time for some of their money. And either party can (generally) terminate that arrangement at any time, for any reason. That's simply reality. One can choose to accept that reality and live accordingly, or they can choose to live in a pollyanna'ish world where one doesn't have to take personal responsibility.
Aardwolf 4y ago
Any idea why 6-8% are such common numbers in most of the recent tech industry layoffs?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  It's an amount you can do safely without your employees or shareholders thinking you are a sinking ship, as that's what everyone is doing. However don't be fooled - it will be 7% repeatedly until things stabilize. People think it's just 7% once. It might be, but this will be repeated if needed.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    you're not kidding. I just did an internet search for "7% layoff" and it's staggering how many results there are.
    - dboreham 4y ago
      Same reason Wall St takes a 7% commission on IPOs.
      - CSMastermind 4y ago
        https://www.insidescience.org/news/brain-seven-magic-number https://www.insidescience.org/news/brain-seven-magic-number For those unaware the number 7 seems to have a special place in the human brain as it's the number of distinct things most humans can hold in their brain at once before needing abstractions or other devices to keep track of the information. It's also the point at which our brains seem to switch from "a few" to "many" and because it's prime it's the highest a few number that we don't mentally split into groups of other numbers.
        Aardwolf 4y ago
        7% actually really is 0.07 though (or around 1/14th), the multiplication by 100 is completely arbitrary
likeabbas 4y ago
GoDaddy was the first software engineering job I worked for. I had interned there too. It's understandable that the external perception of the company is bad (and even sexist), but internally GoDaddy was a great place to work. They're always a major sponsor of Grace Hopper. They were adamant about hiring women. They made my internship so much fun, and I am still friends with many of my co-interns from that summer. Of the places I worked for, GoDaddy was the only one I would say had a "family" like quality.
- TOMDM 4y ago
  I've literally never heard about sexism directed their way, but given you worked there I'm sure you know better the story of treatment they get. What was the sexism, who was it directed against and why do you reckon they recieved it? The only experience I have with GoDaddy is their awful support, and predatory practices. Ditching them has been the biggest single improvement to our IT practice.
  - bena 4y ago
    The sexism was directed towards the public. They had quite a few commercials that were more appropriate advertising for Hooters than for web hosting.
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    GoDaddy's entire brand presence was based on objectification of women for their early life. After GoDaddy's founder Bob left, it got better. Bob was a character and arguably the entire reason for the insane brand -- strange, strange man.
    - likeabbas 4y ago
      Yes this is what I'm referring to - the Danica Patrick bikini ads in the mid 2000s. The first day of our internship they briefed us on that history. Bob had thought that the market for small-businesses in need of a domain name were men aged 35-55. Once bob was gone, actual market research was done and it turned out that over half of their clients were women, so he had completely mis-identified the market. But, because of the commercials, the brand recognition was over 90% in the US so they couldn't change the name.
neom 4y ago
It's interesting seeing GoDaddy/Gitlab lay off so late in the game. Jeff Lawson (TWLO) who is a fantastic financial and product focused CEO did his prep work in September last year with 11% of the company. I find it pretty hard to grok what your FP&A team must be like if you're a b2b supply chain business thinking about this stuff Q1 in global economic downturn.
- carpe171 4y ago
  this aged well
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Are infra companies the last to be affected typically?
  - neom 4y ago
    Yes, that said... depends how you define infra, I chatted with a marketing tool CEO last week who compare themselves to servers, so I've been thinking CEOs are out to lunch a bit these days. Your point is well taken, but again: this is the power of a strong FP&A team, a good CFO and thoughtful FP&A shouldn't be blaming macroeconomics at this point. I advise CEO's and I was flagging in August last year, I talk to bankers and read the news. Seems to me if you're at this point in Q1 or Q2, you were in denial about the reality of what 2023 would look like, doesn't matter when you'll be affected, the writing was on the wall Q2 last year. It's kinda sad for your staff to be in the "last to lay off" bucket.
- orange_joe 4y ago
  I don’t even understand what you’re saying. This fantastic CEO did prep work last year with 11% of his company? Do you mean that he laid off 11% last year?
  - neom 4y ago
    Laying people off in harsh economic times is both bad for the employees laid off and bad for the shareholders.
thanatropism 4y ago
I have the feeling that these announcements never specify that it's mostly programmers or technical people, but HN reacts like it is. Maybe they don't need as many secretaries and gophers as before?
- msikora 4y ago
  Very very few devs got laid off. Vast majority was recruiting and marketing.
- deely3 4y ago
  Maybe even upper management?
  - Tinkerbell5481 4y ago
    We were affected by this layoff, software engineering family over here.It seemed to be so random. It was people from so many different areas. We have beena GoDaddy family for over 17 years. This was a shock for sure
moneywoes 4y ago
Another day another layoff Another day no reply to job applications sigh
- brookst 4y ago
  Hang in there. It’s a numbers game, and you will find something. In the meantime you could try grifting some crypto bros with an AI NFT or something, I hear that’s easy money these days.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Good luck, man. Tough times.
lapcat 4y ago
"To start, I want to express my gratitude to those who will be leaving." That's some grade A BS right there. Among the worst corporate euphemism I've seen.
- djha-skin 4y ago
  It is only in good taste to express gratitude. I would expect nothing less. Indeed, speaking of gratitude, it's nice that this announcement even exists. Many companies don't even tell their employees that people are getting laid off, much less tell the public. And calling it a euphemism is only confusing. A euphemism for what?
  - mininimal 4y ago
    They sent the company an email at 3pm saying 8% of the company was being laid off, then sent Zoom meeting invites to the people being laid off 2 hour later. They didn’t tell us.
    - djha-skin 4y ago
      They sent you an email and had a meeting about it. That's telling you.
yalogin 4y ago
At this point do we just have to expect all the other companies that haven’t announced layoffs will also do so?
pelasaco 4y ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/fire-blame-ceo-tech-employee-layoffs-google-facebook-salesforce-amazon-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/fire-blame-ceo-tech-employee...
neuronic 4y ago
So is this officially a trend now? Just drown the bad news in a massive pool of other bad news about other companies? Good time to soften the blow of bad PR? It doesn't cause too much attention when you lay off 10-15% of your workforce despite profits if 20 other big name companies are doing it as well.
- elforce002 4y ago
  I mean, it makes sense. The issue here is knowing when you have to do it. This news will get under the rug right away because people are paying attention to more "important" news like chatGPT, the state or the union, other companies laying off people, etc... I mean, this is the perfect time to lay off people from a PR perspective. You'll see that by tomorrow morning, the public will be still talking about something else, prob. how google lost 100 billions in market value, Lebron breaking the all-time scoring record, etc...
ProAm 4y ago
This is one company I do not feel bad for.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  It's still people like you and me that are losing their jobs.
  - ProAm 4y ago
    I wish them the best finding a new job at an ethically and morally good company.
    - Tinkerbell5481 4y ago
      Our family has been with GoDaddy for over 17 years and both my husband and myself have personally loved working for the company. Our whole marriage, the birth of our children, we ere there and we are deeply rooted in the company and have been treated very well. Which I guess makes this that much harder honestly. The last few days have been tears of both fear and sadness that this is no longer a part of our life.
    - anononaut 4y ago
      Get over yourself.
- aww_dang 4y ago
  They bought out one of the registrars I had been using. I cringe whenever those domains come up for renewal.

153 points by lucg 4y ago

This honestly shook our family as we were included in the 8%. We have been with them for over 17+ years and were treated very well throughout our time with them. I've read the news stories and the "public statements" so many times and we still can't figure out the why. The morning after the layoffs, they hosted a townhall assuring the lucky remainers that profits were up, and there was still security in their jobs. So again, we go back to the question of the why. We were mid-projects that needed to be handed off to contract workers, as our access was taken away almost immediately.

ulfw 4y ago

Ah yes the across-all-industries-of-tech bullshit bonanza continues.

officialchicken 4y ago

Oh good... another CEO mass-firing statement that takes no responsibility and indicates no negative side-effects for their "leadership" ability. To those recently let go, I hope you find a new opportunity in a place where the those in charge actually care about their employees; and they have the foresight to ensure their long-term well-being.

scarface74 4y ago
Really? You think any employer “cares about their employees”? A job is a transaction a way for me to trade labor for money and support ny addiction to food and shelter. It’s my responsibility to save accordingly always expecting a lay off. This has been my mindset since I was 22 years old making 11/hour as a computer operator saving my overtime pay until today at 49 where I stumbled into a role at $BigTech three years ago and save/invested all of my after tax signing bonus and divest my RSUs once vested.
- 0xAFFFF 4y ago
  > Really? You think any employer “cares about their employees”? It can actually happen sometimes, but I've never seen it outside of small structures.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Wait until they have a choice of going out of business or laying people off. Also most small companies are investor backed. I assure you that their investors don’t care about you. The CEO of the 1.5 million employee company I work for doesn’t know me from Adam.
  - cseleborg 4y ago
    But small structures are the norm, or at least very common, aren't they? There are plenty of established, small to medium businesses out there. Someone for whom this is important can certainly find a job like that within one of those.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  >You think any employer “cares about their employees”? Employers are people. Some people are cynical and greedy, others are empathetic. Yes, they will fire people as is some times necessary and as an employee you should plan for that. They won't make great sacrifices for you like family or very close friends might, but I've definitely had employers who wanted the best for me and made an effort to help me achieve it.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Employers are not “people”, corporations are legal entities that are specifically created to shield the people. Any for profit (or for that matter even non profit company ) is most interested in its own survival and well being.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  A job is a transaction a way for me to trade labor for money and support ny addiction to food and shelter. It’s my responsibility to save accordingly always expecting a lay off. I'm sorry you're being down-voted, because the frank truth is... you're exactly right. To a first approximation, 0 companies really "care about their employees" in any meaningful sense. Work is simply a transaction arrangement, where you trade some of your time for some of their money. And either party can (generally) terminate that arrangement at any time, for any reason. That's simply reality. One can choose to accept that reality and live accordingly, or they can choose to live in a pollyanna'ish world where one doesn't have to take personal responsibility.

Aardwolf 4y ago

Any idea why 6-8% are such common numbers in most of the recent tech industry layoffs?

monero-xmr 4y ago
It's an amount you can do safely without your employees or shareholders thinking you are a sinking ship, as that's what everyone is doing. However don't be fooled - it will be 7% repeatedly until things stabilize. People think it's just 7% once. It might be, but this will be repeated if needed.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  you're not kidding. I just did an internet search for "7% layoff" and it's staggering how many results there are.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Same reason Wall St takes a 7% commission on IPOs.
    - CSMastermind 4y ago
      https://www.insidescience.org/news/brain-seven-magic-number https://www.insidescience.org/news/brain-seven-magic-number For those unaware the number 7 seems to have a special place in the human brain as it's the number of distinct things most humans can hold in their brain at once before needing abstractions or other devices to keep track of the information. It's also the point at which our brains seem to switch from "a few" to "many" and because it's prime it's the highest a few number that we don't mentally split into groups of other numbers.
      - Aardwolf 4y ago
        7% actually really is 0.07 though (or around 1/14th), the multiplication by 100 is completely arbitrary

likeabbas 4y ago

GoDaddy was the first software engineering job I worked for. I had interned there too. It's understandable that the external perception of the company is bad (and even sexist), but internally GoDaddy was a great place to work. They're always a major sponsor of Grace Hopper. They were adamant about hiring women. They made my internship so much fun, and I am still friends with many of my co-interns from that summer. Of the places I worked for, GoDaddy was the only one I would say had a "family" like quality.

TOMDM 4y ago
I've literally never heard about sexism directed their way, but given you worked there I'm sure you know better the story of treatment they get. What was the sexism, who was it directed against and why do you reckon they recieved it? The only experience I have with GoDaddy is their awful support, and predatory practices. Ditching them has been the biggest single improvement to our IT practice.
- bena 4y ago
  The sexism was directed towards the public. They had quite a few commercials that were more appropriate advertising for Hooters than for web hosting.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  GoDaddy's entire brand presence was based on objectification of women for their early life. After GoDaddy's founder Bob left, it got better. Bob was a character and arguably the entire reason for the insane brand -- strange, strange man.
  - likeabbas 4y ago
    Yes this is what I'm referring to - the Danica Patrick bikini ads in the mid 2000s. The first day of our internship they briefed us on that history. Bob had thought that the market for small-businesses in need of a domain name were men aged 35-55. Once bob was gone, actual market research was done and it turned out that over half of their clients were women, so he had completely mis-identified the market. But, because of the commercials, the brand recognition was over 90% in the US so they couldn't change the name.

neom 4y ago

It's interesting seeing GoDaddy/Gitlab lay off so late in the game. Jeff Lawson (TWLO) who is a fantastic financial and product focused CEO did his prep work in September last year with 11% of the company. I find it pretty hard to grok what your FP&A team must be like if you're a b2b supply chain business thinking about this stuff Q1 in global economic downturn.

carpe171 4y ago
this aged well
moneywoes 4y ago
Are infra companies the last to be affected typically?
- neom 4y ago
  Yes, that said... depends how you define infra, I chatted with a marketing tool CEO last week who compare themselves to servers, so I've been thinking CEOs are out to lunch a bit these days. Your point is well taken, but again: this is the power of a strong FP&A team, a good CFO and thoughtful FP&A shouldn't be blaming macroeconomics at this point. I advise CEO's and I was flagging in August last year, I talk to bankers and read the news. Seems to me if you're at this point in Q1 or Q2, you were in denial about the reality of what 2023 would look like, doesn't matter when you'll be affected, the writing was on the wall Q2 last year. It's kinda sad for your staff to be in the "last to lay off" bucket.
orange_joe 4y ago
I don’t even understand what you’re saying. This fantastic CEO did prep work last year with 11% of his company? Do you mean that he laid off 11% last year?
- neom 4y ago
  Laying people off in harsh economic times is both bad for the employees laid off and bad for the shareholders.

thanatropism 4y ago

I have the feeling that these announcements never specify that it's mostly programmers or technical people, but HN reacts like it is. Maybe they don't need as many secretaries and gophers as before?

msikora 4y ago
Very very few devs got laid off. Vast majority was recruiting and marketing.
deely3 4y ago
Maybe even upper management?
- Tinkerbell5481 4y ago
  We were affected by this layoff, software engineering family over here.It seemed to be so random. It was people from so many different areas. We have beena GoDaddy family for over 17 years. This was a shock for sure

moneywoes 4y ago

Another day another layoff Another day no reply to job applications sigh

brookst 4y ago
Hang in there. It’s a numbers game, and you will find something. In the meantime you could try grifting some crypto bros with an AI NFT or something, I hear that’s easy money these days.
renewiltord 4y ago
Good luck, man. Tough times.

lapcat 4y ago

"To start, I want to express my gratitude to those who will be leaving." That's some grade A BS right there. Among the worst corporate euphemism I've seen.

djha-skin 4y ago
It is only in good taste to express gratitude. I would expect nothing less. Indeed, speaking of gratitude, it's nice that this announcement even exists. Many companies don't even tell their employees that people are getting laid off, much less tell the public. And calling it a euphemism is only confusing. A euphemism for what?
- mininimal 4y ago
  They sent the company an email at 3pm saying 8% of the company was being laid off, then sent Zoom meeting invites to the people being laid off 2 hour later. They didn’t tell us.
  - djha-skin 4y ago
    They sent you an email and had a meeting about it. That's telling you.

yalogin 4y ago

At this point do we just have to expect all the other companies that haven’t announced layoffs will also do so?

pelasaco 4y ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/fire-blame-ceo-tech-employee-layoffs-google-facebook-salesforce-amazon-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/fire-blame-ceo-tech-employee...

neuronic 4y ago

So is this officially a trend now? Just drown the bad news in a massive pool of other bad news about other companies? Good time to soften the blow of bad PR? It doesn't cause too much attention when you lay off 10-15% of your workforce despite profits if 20 other big name companies are doing it as well.

elforce002 4y ago
I mean, it makes sense. The issue here is knowing when you have to do it. This news will get under the rug right away because people are paying attention to more "important" news like chatGPT, the state or the union, other companies laying off people, etc... I mean, this is the perfect time to lay off people from a PR perspective. You'll see that by tomorrow morning, the public will be still talking about something else, prob. how google lost 100 billions in market value, Lebron breaking the all-time scoring record, etc...

ProAm 4y ago

This is one company I do not feel bad for.

barbazoo 4y ago
It's still people like you and me that are losing their jobs.
- ProAm 4y ago
  I wish them the best finding a new job at an ethically and morally good company.
  - Tinkerbell5481 4y ago
    Our family has been with GoDaddy for over 17 years and both my husband and myself have personally loved working for the company. Our whole marriage, the birth of our children, we ere there and we are deeply rooted in the company and have been treated very well. Which I guess makes this that much harder honestly. The last few days have been tears of both fear and sadness that this is no longer a part of our life.
  - anononaut 4y ago
    Get over yourself.
aww_dang 4y ago
They bought out one of the registrars I had been using. I cringe whenever those domains come up for renewal.