13 ms·

HashiCorp just let go 8%

189 points by ushakov 3y ago

chrisbolt 3y ago
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235444
- neom 3y ago
  Are you CTO of DeviantART Chris Bolt? If so, dAmn! :)
bhaney 3y ago
How many people is that?
- jmcomets 3y ago
  2022 headcount was estimated at ~1850[0], so that would be 150 employees (allegedly). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp
  - metaphor 3y ago
    That headcount estimate is off by at least -23% relative to this year. From Hashicorp's latest 10-K[1] filed circa March 2023: > As of January 31, 2023, we had over 2,400 employees operating across the world. > As of January 31, 2023, we had more than 1,050 employees in our sales and marketing organizations. > As of January 31, 2023, we had more than 670 employees in our research and development organization. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000162828023009241/hcp-20230131.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000162828023...
roschdal 3y ago
They will be vagrants.
epolanski 3y ago
I'm curious why do these company just don't freeze hiring instead of such huge cuts that have been shown to be expensive and morale killing? You start firing people, people start refreshing their CV instead. Cooperation at work dies, toxic competition takes its place. It becomes more important to look better than your peers than getting stuff done as a team. Kills morale, kills productivity, bad for the future. Instead by simply freezing hiring you could "remove" a similar amount of workers in 18/24 months just by the natural turnover that most tech has without the correlated drama.
- Macha 3y ago
  Two reasons: 1. Many of these companies had year+ long hiring freezes as a prelude to layoffs 2. Companies that overuse hiring freezes end up promoting over hiring in periods where there is open hiring as teams hire in anticipation of not being able to in the future when they might need to
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Also 3 If you have a need for hiring, it is likely for a higher priority project in need of a skill / domain you don't have free resources for internally. Simply having a hiring freeze means you hamstring high priority projects you'd have allocated resources for, while letting others that may lower priority ride due to inertia.
    - smeagull 3y ago
      Must be difficult to work in a company that can't reallocate resources.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        You can't just tell guy that moves boxes in CSS for a living to start writing database code
        3y ago
modernpink 3y ago
It is somewhat tiring but Gergely Orosz continuously makes the naive mistake of citing the company values as a critique of their behaviour. Taking a lesson from the "realist" perspective in international relations, companies are acting rationally. They are protecting their own interests. Both in espousing values they may not actually hold, and in dispatching with unwanted workers swiftly. In a high interest rate regime and with downturn in the market it is entirely rational for tech companies to shed workers with this sort of clinical brutality. That's why we've seen so many do it. On the other side of the balance under low interest rates and a booming market, we also see tech workers playing off companies against each other to improve their compensation or even slacking off work. This is also rational. This kind of moralizing has become the bread and butter of his Twitter brand and it really is tiresome.
- Macha 3y ago
  This argument boils down to: Companies can't be criticised for using values for marketing with no intent to abide by them because it makes market sense to be ruthless The problems with this idea: 1. It misses that morals can be criticised not just legality, and as economically advantageous as it is, it is still unethical to decieve 2. Even in a totally cold economic sense, the criticism you get if you go back on them is itself a risk that these companies should have considered when they produced these marketing values. This blowback should be an economic disincentive against acting that way in the future if it decreases trust in the company. This may materialise in economic effects as less free overtime and higher wage demands from prospective employees who adopt a similar ruthless attitude.
  - pxc 3y ago
    No. The argument is more like: > Companies aren't the kinds of things that can meaningfully have values, and 'criticism' along the lines of the OP takes for granted that they can and do, in a way that makes outcomes like this Hashicorp layoff meaningfully surprising. This gets in the way of the correct critique— and thereby in setting the correct expectations. The moralistic tone makes the event described seem somehow exceptional, when the crucial lesson is that it is not at all. It also directs people towards a useless simulation of politics (yelling at people, or in this case companies, to scold them) in place of the real thing (fighting institutions by disrupting their basic functioning, exercising power to change incentive structures, etc.). The stress on the economics is about directing people to the information of strategic significance, not narrowing the bounds of acceptable critique per se.
simonbarker87 3y ago
The way US companies do these kinds of layoffs staggering. In the UK redundancies are announced, the areas of the business to be impacted are informed, there is a review period of a few days to a few weeks, you are then told you are being made redundant or not, you then have a chance to propose an alternative role if you wish and if you’re still being let go you will be told a date and a process put in place for exiting. At a large company this process can take a couple of months and the steps are made very clear and transparent.
- jcfrei 3y ago
  Switzerland has also liberal labour laws and people can usually get fired with either 1 month or 3 months notice. This kind of flexibility in the labour market is clearly an advantage because the US and CH have some of the highest salaries and lowest unemployment in the world.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    Can you show causation here?
  - hyperpape 3y ago
    That may be permissive in international terms, but it’s a huge protection for workers compared to the US. You are not guaranteed any days warning in the US.
  - funklute 3y ago
    > This kind of flexibility in the labour market is clearly an advantage because the US and CH have some of the highest salaries and lowest unemployment in the world. It really is quite a big stretch to assume that this is a causal mechanism. You only need to look to Scandinavia to find a counter-example. I think it is more reasonable to argue that high salaries in US are fuelled by borderline slave wages for menial labour. And Switzerland's wealth comes in a historical context that is completely different from the US - it's almost impossible to blanket compare them side-by-side. The difference in population size is another huge issue with such a comparison.
  - 3y ago
pachico 3y ago
Unrelated, but they recent change of the free tier, from sits to resources, made me switch to self managed backend. I might be far from the 500 resources limit but I can't avoid seeing it as a Damocles sword on my infra :)
asim 3y ago
Not the only company doing stealth cuts. The only reason it was declared is because it's public. Many will try to mitigate reputation damage by brushing it under the covers. They will not tell other employees who left or why. It'll just be unspoken about. Horrible toxicity created with this behaviour. Speaking from experience.
revskill 3y ago
Once the product is 80% built, you can layoff 8%. It's the rule of Layoff !
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ridruejo 3y ago
"HashiCorp just let go 8%. Investors listening to earnings heard it before most employees." As much as I can empathize with the employees let go (it sucks), Hashicorp has a legal duty to inform investors of material information like this as soon as it becomes public, so it is normal that employees learn this way. There are a bunch of things that can be done better (or worse) handling layoffs but this one is hard to get around
0xCAP 3y ago
Premise: not referring directly to Hashicorp employees, as I'm sure they're leagues above my average colleagues. As a SWE who's been in a couple of companies of small-to-medium size, and now in a relatively successful fintech scale-up that's running a (very long) hiring freeze, I can say that I've seen this layoffs season coming from a thousand kilometers. Now matter how successful your company is, you can't start hiring bonobos with no clue about how a computer works just because your investors asked for an X% increase in head count and then be like "sorry, we didn't plan to fire you as soon as things got serious" with clueless employees. And people have been gifted tech jobs for years now. It's not people's fault if they're not good at their job yet they get hired for senior positions, just to realize something's not working as soon as the job market needs qualified professionals in tough times. Now we're all in a bad predicament: we have to waste countless hours interviewing "senior" engs with basically no skills to speak of, and they are getting depressed because nobody's gifting titles anymore, but have no clue on how the whole process actually works. Now somebody has to tell Jessica that posting screenshots of code on Twitter is not devrel, and Guillermo that not knowing React 18 is not totally ok for a tech lead of a React shop. And I totally don't want to be that guy.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - 0xCAP 3y ago
    Sorry, but what's the anti-diversity part of my comment, counting out the way you read it?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      If you'd chosen "Alice" and "Bob" as the metasyntactic names, I'd have thought nothing of it. "Jessica" and "Guillermo" I read quite differently.
      - maaanu 3y ago
        For all we know, these are the most popular names in OPs county.
19h 3y ago
I’m confused — how is this legally binding? In Germany, a termination is valid IFF the termination has been submitted to the employee in writing in a timely manner — that is, they need to have been able to receive it before end of month or it’ll delay the notice period by a month. The standard notice period is 3 months. (I had to do this quite a few times recently unfortunately). Are worker rights really this bad in the US?
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Here's a post on Reddit that describes the flip side of this coin https://old.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/s9yu11/resigning_without_serving_notice_period/ https://old.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/s9yu11/resigning_w... Overall it's just different societies making different trade-offs. The US values market efficiency, Germany stability.
  - mcntsh 3y ago
    To be fair, I've submitted multiple requests for a fristlose Kündigung in Germany and never had it declined. Unless your role is absolutely critical to the company and a replacement must be thoroughly trained, most employers would be happy to oblige. As it turns out, it's expensive for the company to keep paying someone who's effectively "checked out" for 3+ months after they submit notice.
- simantel 3y ago
  Yeah, employment in the US is at-will, meaning employees can be dismissed at any time without cause, and no advanced notice is required.
wickedsickeune 3y ago
Can we please stop using double speak and just say ~~fired~~ laid off? We don't owe these companies anything, using their PR speak is insulting.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  I could be wrong, but I think fired usually means "for cause". It makes a difference in unemployment claims and unemployment liability. For example, I believe if someone sexually harassed someone and is fired it doesn't count for unemployment liability on the part of the company.
  - wickedsickeune 3y ago
    Yes you are correct, laid off is the appropriate term.
whoomp12342 3y ago
terraform destroy

189 points by ushakov 3y ago

chrisbolt 3y ago

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36235444

neom 3y ago
Are you CTO of DeviantART Chris Bolt? If so, dAmn! :)

bhaney 3y ago

How many people is that?

jmcomets 3y ago
2022 headcount was estimated at ~1850[0], so that would be 150 employees (allegedly). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp
- metaphor 3y ago
  That headcount estimate is off by at least -23% relative to this year. From Hashicorp's latest 10-K[1] filed circa March 2023: > As of January 31, 2023, we had over 2,400 employees operating across the world. > As of January 31, 2023, we had more than 1,050 employees in our sales and marketing organizations. > As of January 31, 2023, we had more than 670 employees in our research and development organization. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000162828023009241/hcp-20230131.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000162828023...

roschdal 3y ago

They will be vagrants.

epolanski 3y ago

I'm curious why do these company just don't freeze hiring instead of such huge cuts that have been shown to be expensive and morale killing? You start firing people, people start refreshing their CV instead. Cooperation at work dies, toxic competition takes its place. It becomes more important to look better than your peers than getting stuff done as a team. Kills morale, kills productivity, bad for the future. Instead by simply freezing hiring you could "remove" a similar amount of workers in 18/24 months just by the natural turnover that most tech has without the correlated drama.

Macha 3y ago
Two reasons: 1. Many of these companies had year+ long hiring freezes as a prelude to layoffs 2. Companies that overuse hiring freezes end up promoting over hiring in periods where there is open hiring as teams hire in anticipation of not being able to in the future when they might need to
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Also 3 If you have a need for hiring, it is likely for a higher priority project in need of a skill / domain you don't have free resources for internally. Simply having a hiring freeze means you hamstring high priority projects you'd have allocated resources for, while letting others that may lower priority ride due to inertia.
  - smeagull 3y ago
    Must be difficult to work in a company that can't reallocate resources.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      You can't just tell guy that moves boxes in CSS for a living to start writing database code
      - 3y ago

modernpink 3y ago

It is somewhat tiring but Gergely Orosz continuously makes the naive mistake of citing the company values as a critique of their behaviour. Taking a lesson from the "realist" perspective in international relations, companies are acting rationally. They are protecting their own interests. Both in espousing values they may not actually hold, and in dispatching with unwanted workers swiftly. In a high interest rate regime and with downturn in the market it is entirely rational for tech companies to shed workers with this sort of clinical brutality. That's why we've seen so many do it. On the other side of the balance under low interest rates and a booming market, we also see tech workers playing off companies against each other to improve their compensation or even slacking off work. This is also rational. This kind of moralizing has become the bread and butter of his Twitter brand and it really is tiresome.

Macha 3y ago
This argument boils down to: Companies can't be criticised for using values for marketing with no intent to abide by them because it makes market sense to be ruthless The problems with this idea: 1. It misses that morals can be criticised not just legality, and as economically advantageous as it is, it is still unethical to decieve 2. Even in a totally cold economic sense, the criticism you get if you go back on them is itself a risk that these companies should have considered when they produced these marketing values. This blowback should be an economic disincentive against acting that way in the future if it decreases trust in the company. This may materialise in economic effects as less free overtime and higher wage demands from prospective employees who adopt a similar ruthless attitude.
- pxc 3y ago
  No. The argument is more like: > Companies aren't the kinds of things that can meaningfully have values, and 'criticism' along the lines of the OP takes for granted that they can and do, in a way that makes outcomes like this Hashicorp layoff meaningfully surprising. This gets in the way of the correct critique— and thereby in setting the correct expectations. The moralistic tone makes the event described seem somehow exceptional, when the crucial lesson is that it is not at all. It also directs people towards a useless simulation of politics (yelling at people, or in this case companies, to scold them) in place of the real thing (fighting institutions by disrupting their basic functioning, exercising power to change incentive structures, etc.). The stress on the economics is about directing people to the information of strategic significance, not narrowing the bounds of acceptable critique per se.

simonbarker87 3y ago

The way US companies do these kinds of layoffs staggering. In the UK redundancies are announced, the areas of the business to be impacted are informed, there is a review period of a few days to a few weeks, you are then told you are being made redundant or not, you then have a chance to propose an alternative role if you wish and if you’re still being let go you will be told a date and a process put in place for exiting. At a large company this process can take a couple of months and the steps are made very clear and transparent.

jcfrei 3y ago
Switzerland has also liberal labour laws and people can usually get fired with either 1 month or 3 months notice. This kind of flexibility in the labour market is clearly an advantage because the US and CH have some of the highest salaries and lowest unemployment in the world.
- Tade0 3y ago
  Can you show causation here?
- hyperpape 3y ago
  That may be permissive in international terms, but it’s a huge protection for workers compared to the US. You are not guaranteed any days warning in the US.
- funklute 3y ago
  > This kind of flexibility in the labour market is clearly an advantage because the US and CH have some of the highest salaries and lowest unemployment in the world. It really is quite a big stretch to assume that this is a causal mechanism. You only need to look to Scandinavia to find a counter-example. I think it is more reasonable to argue that high salaries in US are fuelled by borderline slave wages for menial labour. And Switzerland's wealth comes in a historical context that is completely different from the US - it's almost impossible to blanket compare them side-by-side. The difference in population size is another huge issue with such a comparison.
- 3y ago

pachico 3y ago

Unrelated, but they recent change of the free tier, from sits to resources, made me switch to self managed backend. I might be far from the 500 resources limit but I can't avoid seeing it as a Damocles sword on my infra :)

asim 3y ago

Not the only company doing stealth cuts. The only reason it was declared is because it's public. Many will try to mitigate reputation damage by brushing it under the covers. They will not tell other employees who left or why. It'll just be unspoken about. Horrible toxicity created with this behaviour. Speaking from experience.

revskill 3y ago

Once the product is 80% built, you can layoff 8%. It's the rule of Layoff !

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ridruejo 3y ago

"HashiCorp just let go 8%. Investors listening to earnings heard it before most employees." As much as I can empathize with the employees let go (it sucks), Hashicorp has a legal duty to inform investors of material information like this as soon as it becomes public, so it is normal that employees learn this way. There are a bunch of things that can be done better (or worse) handling layoffs but this one is hard to get around

0xCAP 3y ago

Premise: not referring directly to Hashicorp employees, as I'm sure they're leagues above my average colleagues. As a SWE who's been in a couple of companies of small-to-medium size, and now in a relatively successful fintech scale-up that's running a (very long) hiring freeze, I can say that I've seen this layoffs season coming from a thousand kilometers. Now matter how successful your company is, you can't start hiring bonobos with no clue about how a computer works just because your investors asked for an X% increase in head count and then be like "sorry, we didn't plan to fire you as soon as things got serious" with clueless employees. And people have been gifted tech jobs for years now. It's not people's fault if they're not good at their job yet they get hired for senior positions, just to realize something's not working as soon as the job market needs qualified professionals in tough times. Now we're all in a bad predicament: we have to waste countless hours interviewing "senior" engs with basically no skills to speak of, and they are getting depressed because nobody's gifting titles anymore, but have no clue on how the whole process actually works. Now somebody has to tell Jessica that posting screenshots of code on Twitter is not devrel, and Guillermo that not knowing React 18 is not totally ok for a tech lead of a React shop. And I totally don't want to be that guy.

sokoloff 3y ago
[flagged]
- 0xCAP 3y ago
  Sorry, but what's the anti-diversity part of my comment, counting out the way you read it?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    If you'd chosen "Alice" and "Bob" as the metasyntactic names, I'd have thought nothing of it. "Jessica" and "Guillermo" I read quite differently.
    - maaanu 3y ago
      For all we know, these are the most popular names in OPs county.

19h 3y ago

I’m confused — how is this legally binding? In Germany, a termination is valid IFF the termination has been submitted to the employee in writing in a timely manner — that is, they need to have been able to receive it before end of month or it’ll delay the notice period by a month. The standard notice period is 3 months. (I had to do this quite a few times recently unfortunately). Are worker rights really this bad in the US?

renewiltord 3y ago
Here's a post on Reddit that describes the flip side of this coin https://old.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/s9yu11/resigning_without_serving_notice_period/ https://old.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/s9yu11/resigning_w... Overall it's just different societies making different trade-offs. The US values market efficiency, Germany stability.
- mcntsh 3y ago
  To be fair, I've submitted multiple requests for a fristlose Kündigung in Germany and never had it declined. Unless your role is absolutely critical to the company and a replacement must be thoroughly trained, most employers would be happy to oblige. As it turns out, it's expensive for the company to keep paying someone who's effectively "checked out" for 3+ months after they submit notice.
simantel 3y ago
Yeah, employment in the US is at-will, meaning employees can be dismissed at any time without cause, and no advanced notice is required.

wickedsickeune 3y ago

Can we please stop using double speak and just say ~~fired~~ laid off? We don't owe these companies anything, using their PR speak is insulting.

throwawaymaths 3y ago
I could be wrong, but I think fired usually means "for cause". It makes a difference in unemployment claims and unemployment liability. For example, I believe if someone sexually harassed someone and is fired it doesn't count for unemployment liability on the part of the company.
- wickedsickeune 3y ago
  Yes you are correct, laid off is the appropriate term.

whoomp12342 3y ago

terraform destroy