11 ms·

Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

167 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

123sereusername 3y ago
>Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. Absolutely true.
steveBK123 3y ago
Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your runway. You can cobble together something worse with FOSS.. And biggest question is - who cares about p99 latencies anyway when your 2 year runway has shrunk to 6 months, ZIRP is over and you are doubtful of your next funding round. I can't imagine another whale like Coinbase writing a $65M/year check to a Datadog at this point... "Things you only see at the top"
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I get to peak into a few different financial services org's IT strategies (and where infosec overlaps) and in every org I have seen ruthless cutting (hundreds of millions of dollars in one case) if there is any hint of overlap or the ability to go without. Have also seen aggressively playing VARs/reseller off of each other to drive down cost. I would not want to be someone attempting to GTM in this space right now unless you are very confident in your value prop and your ability to communicate that your customer absolutely cannot live without your product. Top passed, winter is coming.
  - eigenvalue 3y ago
    Yes, and Splunk is likely the most overpriced offering across all vendors, both in terms of absolute cost and in in terms of how overpriced it is relative to how good it is. So easy to see how it would be on the chopping block.
    - postexitus 3y ago
      doubts in datadog
      - eigenvalue 3y ago
        Yes, datadog and newrelic are both crazy expensive. Seems like the space could really use a disruptive competitor with a totally different business model and approach. I think a lot of customers would be OK with higher latency if it could cost 90% less. Would also be cool if you could somehow use your spare on-prem compute to shoulder some of the load to bring the cost to serve down.
  - kjs3 3y ago
    in every org I have seen ruthless cutting (hundreds of millions of dollars in one case) if there is any hint of overlap or the ability to go without Can confirm; I'm on a team doing this analysis right now. And, frankly, it's a really good idea. When I started asking questions like "why do we have 4 different proxy technologies solving the same use case", "why are we using an on-prem solution over here and a SaaS over there to do the same thing" and "why are you buying this tool when we have an MSA with one of their competitors that will save us 60% on the licensing", it was enlightening. Occasionally, there was a really good reason ("it has feature X which makes us Y percent more efficient"...ok, that makes sense) but almost always we got something like "I didn't know anyone was using Product D when we purchased Product E". I dunno if it's going to be 100s of millions in savings, but we're definitely going to see 10s of millions. Have also seen aggressively playing VARs/reseller off of each other to drive down cost. Hey now...that's the fun part.
- orochimaaru 3y ago
  It’s hard to get application performance monitoring (APM) tools using FOSS because of the complexity of writing libraries. You could ideally work most things with FOSS. Use opentelemtry extensions to a time dries DB of your choice. Use elk or opensearch for logs, osquery for Linux, native cloud monitoring tools that come out of the box, etc. Problem is it takes a lot of setup and maintenance. It can bite you back in the worst of times - when you’re trying to work an outage and find out alerting is dead because your fluentbit daemon is hung and no logs came through.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Or you can spending a day or two creating enough things to track the "end to end" numbers and debug problems the hard way when they appear. Modern APM is completely out of proportion, and most people that use it do absolutely not get enough benefit for paying for those systems. My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes that survive as a meme on the high-management minds and don't survive touching the ground.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Worse yet I saw a lot of APM-or-nothing mentality from CTOs & senior management such that we skipped over very simple to implement, basic monitoring that catches the typical issues.. because "APM is coming" and "we hired an SRE" and and and.. People want to chase the bright new thing that Gartner is pushing (its always these guys).
    - geodel 3y ago
      > My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes... Bang on! Its part of same buzzword bullshittery of Kubernetes/ Cloud native / Micro services / observability and so on. Create an out of proportion tech stack that no one would understand and then one needs these APMs to monitor "p99 latencies" because who the fuck knows now on how incoming http request will get processed.
      - hughesjj 3y ago
- specialp 3y ago
  There might be pricing pressure, and a lot of people entering the space, but it is more than a nice to have. If you do not have some sort of SIEM solution, you will pay more for or not be insurable for cybersecurity/ransomware insurance. Implementing observability/SIEM yourself has also become a lot more complicated because the domain of things that have to be observed is increasing. There are many organizations now that have things that need to be monitored in several clouds, infrastructures like k8s, and stuff on prem. So you need a vendor that has the tools to collect this data easily and aggregate it. The startup world and startup whales might be dying now. But there is a giant iceberg of companies that are becoming more hybrid and their systems that used to do things like funnel syslogs and firewall flow logs to a collector are no longer adequate.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    SIEM like in SolarWinds? Yeah, I imagine insure companies still require this.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Grumpy old developer devils advocate voice: Why does a lot of the modern tech stack seem designed to make you have to pay for a bunch of other SaaS? Like containers/serverless was supposed to mean "cattle not pets" and it autoscales and autoheals and blah blah blah. And then we break everything into micro services and we need to pay for some SaaS to orchestrate it, and another SaaS to observe/monitor it, and another SaaS to...
    - geodel 3y ago
      These questions are heresies. Just had meeting where discussion was whether system can handle additional 8tps (not 8k tps!) load or they need to stagger it.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > what do people think of the "observability" space from here? Splunk and other observability companies (Datadog has been hiring like crazy on the security side) have been pivoting into becoming a SIEM 2.0 for a couple years now. Infra budgets now include Security spend, so an entire generation of Infra companies in segments such as Observability/Application Management (Datadog), Data Platform (Databricks, Snowflake), API Management (Imperva, Wallarm, Postman), and DevTooling (Hashicorp) have begun pivoting into the Security segment. The same thing happened with networking in the 2010s.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Right I figured Splunks defensive play was to market themselves as infosec which every CTO needs to buy in order to tick a box.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Yep. It's a 2 birds-1 stone strategy because Splunk can be used by your Platform team as an APM and by your Infosec team as a SIEM. This way you can file 1 PO and use a smaller portion of your budget. This is was a major reason why Cisco acquired Splunk as their SIEM offering is shit, and there is a massive overlap in customer base.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I work at an observability service and have a personal stake in the outcome so you can disregard my opinion I guess. But it seems to me that observability is there to enable you to get along with fewer people. The more stats and logs and profiles you have the fewer human operators you need.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    The savings only really works at scale though right. I've worked in plenty of engineering departments with 200 engineers and essentially 5 operators. You need bare minimum 3 of them for holidays/timezones and key man risk reasons. So you can maybe help a 200 person org save 0.5-1% of their lower paid staff? Is your bill + engineering integration costs going to be less than $200-400k/year?
    - jacobr1 3y ago
      Depends on how much the non-operators are using the data. In SaaS companies it is common for the engineering teams to own the performance of their sub-systems, which entails the need for instrumentation, monitoring, dashboards, alerting and investigative tooling. The trend has been to combine things like logs, distributed tracing, APM, error collection and general metrics collection into the same toolset so that you can more easily cross-coordinate between them when tracking down what is happening in a large system. microservices architecture and "devops" make this a much bigger thing requiring every team to take on some aspect of operational capability.
    - jeffbee 3y ago
      I've worked in 100-person groups where everyone spent all of their time trying to figure out what the hell the system was doing because it did not have tracing or logging.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        microservices I take it ;-) ?
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > what do people think of the "observability" space from here? I don't think it's cut entirely, but when you're looking at your cloud spend, it's got a target painted on it. It doesn't produce revenue on its own, so people will ask a lot of "do we really need X" or "can we lower retention."
  - pm90 3y ago
    100%. Obs tools are still needed for debugging, incident recovery and just being able to make better products, but there is a lot of optimization going on. The market still does seem big. Datadog is needlessly very expensive and the experience is just ok.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      The experience (other than the sales process) is great.
- codemac 3y ago
  It's a classic "dev tooling" play that struggles in downturns. - Company wants to save money, tells team they're cancelling service that costs them $20k/month to observe their production env. - Dev team starts building small parts they need anyways, chews up significant engineering resources. - Company now pays more for highly custom solution no one can compete with. If the company ends up being successful, they'll probably point to all their custom stuff as why. If they end up failing they'll talk about all the boondoggles they went on. This replays so much.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Argument to be made that it may be a better outcome anyway. Custom solution no one can compete with. Engineers usually have some wiggle room to build things they find interesting & useful in their 10% time. You build the parts that are most urgent as they come up..
    - hughesjj 3y ago
      Where is this mythical place with 10% time to muck around? Or is that the 10% of after 9-5 free time you're talking about?
- Lammy 3y ago
  > what do people think of the "observability" space from here? They're all effectively surveillance systems with extra steps. The Network itself is always listening.
saos 3y ago
Company gets acquired. Company lays off employee. Typical.
- draugadrotten 3y ago
  Yes, any acquisition is a signal to look for a new position. Your cheese has moved.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
  And for some reason we as employees continue to let companies abuse us, despite having the option to fight back. I am so bitter and jaded when it comes to this entire system.
  - nxm 3y ago
    Fight back by starting your own company then
    - saos 3y ago
      And the cycle continues. Maybe they are talking of unionising
      - ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
        I am talking about unionizing. Workers deserve better than what they've got and the deserve the protection against a company a union brings.
- avrionov 3y ago
  The company is not acquired yet.
tedivm 3y ago
Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. I was at Kenna Security when Cisco bought them (I was only there for a month too, so Kenna hired me knowing the purchase was going to happen). They lied through their teeth about the process. They promised every resume would be reviewed for leveling, but then gave out the worst offers I've ever seen. They were literally dropping people by multiple levels, and if anyone complained they told them they couldn't make personal exceptions. They wouldn't even listen to people's managers about it, it was just a bunch of anonymous resume reviews. At the same time Kenna leadership said they'd pay for Cobra for me if I didn't want to stay. The VP of Eng, David La France, at Kenna promised me that to my face. Then once they sale went through he refused to talk to me and told me to cover it myself. Ultimately they did back down, and were "kind" enough to give me a whole two weeks severance. However it made me realize that Cisco views it's acquisitions in the worst way possible, and if I ever work at a company that Cisco purchases I will immediately start looking for a new job. It's worth noting that I've kept in touch with a lot of the Kenna people who stayed (at least initially), and according to my old manager more than half of the people who stayed on are gone now.
- leetrout 3y ago
  > The VP of Eng at Kenna promised me that to my face The real lesson to learn here is twofold: - People recruiting / hiring are incentivized to say whatever is needed to close the deal. With the exception of a bold faced lie (I don't think this was that). - People at the company being acquired are more often than not going to lose most of their power. Including the C-suite. No one is safe and as an employee/victim you won't know the actual arrangements of the deal until the dust settles.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    Three fold: - People forget and circumstances change. Signed documents don't.
    - chii 3y ago
smugma 3y ago
Oracle should have bought them. They are the ultimate rent seekers.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same playbook. I wish there was a CEO who was brave enough to ignore the herd mentality, take a look at what the actual needs of the company, and make a bold plan like "fuck it we're doing 8 and a half percent".
- werrett 3y ago
  “I’ll be there in 7 minutes” is my standard answer when I know it’s going to be more than 5, probably less than 10.
- cyberlurker 3y ago
  Talk to enough MBAs and you realize most of them are following the same playbook. They all say and do the same things and no one cares as long as things aren’t disastrous. But it is the safer option and probably results in less innovation. So the 7% cuts will continue until someone boldly breaks the mold and standardizes 8% and brands it “the rule of 8s” and preaches it at overpriced executive retreats.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    "Better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally" - IMO, this often leads for people making decisions that are defensible by comparison to "industry norms".
    - hughesjj 3y ago
      Big "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" energy
- dangus 3y ago
  My guess is that it’s a safe number where you can lay off at that level and guarantee minimal disruptions in operations. 7% equates to laying off one person per group of 14 people. It would be hard to argue that most companies couldn’t get by with 13 people doing the work of 14. I think you would feel the loss of one person on a team of 10 a lot more.
sireat 3y ago
I am still amazed how quickly Cisco destroyed Flip from 2009 to 2011 - basically 590Million down the drain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video Sure you could argue that by 2011 Flip was on the way out as phones were taking over, but there was plenty of room to pivot and plenty of good will. Had a relative whose company was to be bought by Cisco but thankfully Flip debacle destroyed that deal.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Flip basically shows up at the same time the iPhone got video. They were dead already and only Cisco didn’t realize it.
  - sireat 3y ago
    Oh Flip was dead in the long run no question about it. It was not only iPhone but Android phones that finally got good enough video quality. It is just that Cisco cut their losses extremely early. There were still 2-5 years left where Flip could have been profitable.
    - foobiekr 3y ago
      Without insider information, which I don't have, who knows. But I will say this: 1. cisco is not a consumer company. they tried with linksys, bailed. tried with scientific atlanta, bailed. no surprise that they bailed on PD. 2. having seen a lot of ASIC acquisitions in my lifetime, which is basically what Pure Digital was - apple knockoff packaging and branding plus an encoder - in my experience tons of startup teams get their first ASIC done, but then totally flub their second (and some of this is the layoff dynamics of how ASIC startups operate on the HW side - unless you immediately start the next chip before finding fit, you have dead weight that you cut). Also, once you show how it's done and have fit, the professionals show up, like Qualcomm, which makes that even harder. It wouldn't surprise at all if (2) was the culprit.
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    Despite the iPhone 3gs and HTC Magic offering video recording in mid-2009, GoPro's market cap peaked in October 2014.
vb-8448 3y ago
Unfortunately, it's how M&A works since forever, even if the official statement is "The overall market has retracted". I guess most of the cuts are in the "non-productive" departments like sales, marketing, hr and stuff like this.
- kjs3 3y ago
  It's not that they're 'nonproductive', per se; that's kinda pejorative. And it's not the 'market'. It's that you just don't need 2 HR, accounting, marketing, finance or other back-office departments, post-merger, so most of those folks become redundant. The acquiring company is going to convert to their systems asap anyway; economies of scale mean you don't need as many bodies to cover the acquisition. You usually try and keep a good percentage of sales guys if for no other reason than there are deals in flight you don't want to loose, but eventually those guys get whittled down too, usually right after the change from "small company fast and loose comp plans" to "corporate comp plan same as everyone". And, of course, the execs have cut their own deal. It's when they start cutting core engineering and support right away that you go "wassup with that???". In the cold calculus of M&As, 7% sounds like an entirely normal number, IME. I remember vividly when one of my companies got bought by IBM, and a couple of the younger back-office folks came by to ask me "what do you think?" because I'd been through M&As before. "I think you need to look for another job" was the best I could do, and it was a little disheartening.
avrionov 3y ago
This is bad news because it happened before the acquisition. When Cisco buys them, there are going to be more rounds of layoffs.
tiffanyh 3y ago
CFO's will follow suit and Wallstreet will begin to expect tech to make cuts ... It's getting noticed that Twitter/X reduced it's staff by 80%, and also reduced it's cloud spend by 60% ... and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Some might argue that Twitter/X has been able to innovate faster as a result. Now I'm not suggesting that FANG is going to layoff 80% overnight. But I wouldn't be surprised if CFOs gradually over time continue reduce their headcount, or keep headcount flat over the years to come. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-... https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1717754398410240018 https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1717754398410240018
- buggy6257 3y ago
  I don't think ANY CEO is looking at Musk's handling of Twitter/X and thinking the layoffs had "no material change to their business" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-x-worth-less-221637467.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-x-worth-less-221637...
- nova22033 3y ago
  and there hasn't been any material change to their business. The business is worth less half of what Musk paid for it. And that's his estimate of the value.
  - tiffanyh 3y ago
    Twitter's valuation dropped more than 32%+ below the price Elon offered to acquire it for (prior to purchase). That's the only reason why Twitter forced him to honor his offer. So it's a mischaracterization to state the value of Twitter halved while on Elon's watch. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/twitter-shares-sink-after-elon-musk-terminates-44-billion-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/twitter-shares-sink-after-el...
- asfasfo 3y ago
  > and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Their revenue has halved. That's pretty material.
spaintech 3y ago
Well, never the less, these deal are all done with a set of vested interests that in many occasion don’t necessarily align with neither the customer’s (why companies should even exist) or that of their employees ( the motor of companies success) but more in the realm of financial spreadsheets, where, due diligence sways in the direction of those stakeholders in the deal… And I purposely look at it this way as no to take any given side without the details. Non the less, IMO, the only winners here are the stockholders, Splunk as a business, and many others with the same model of “schema selling” are in a high risks stake in the new erra of AI/LLMs. If you consider the accelerating world of AI we are living in, and the emergence/trend towards Domain Specific Large Language Models (DS-LLMs) and advancement like MEMgpt, they represent a transformative approach to data analytics. Instead of using a schema-specific model, as seen in tools like Splunk which extract and transform data into a predefined schema, DS-LLMs offer a flexible, continuously trained approach. They not only analyze data but also learn from it in real-time. The “actors”, or bots, leveraging tech like MEMgpt that not only collect but also learn from the vast streams of data are far more capable than those schema models. As these models self-train and trade knowledge, they are poised to provide insights more organically aligned with the data’s inherent structure, rather than a pre-defined schema. This means businesses could potentially gain deeper, more intuitive insights without the confines of structured data models. With the rapid pace of innovation in the AI sector, it’s worth questioning whether traditional, schema-based solutions will be able to keep up with the dynamic learning capabilities of DS-LLMs. I still wonder who got the better deal here. Wishing the best to all the Splunk employees moving forward.
lucidguppy 3y ago
M&A is noncompetitive and should either be prohibited or heavily taxed. Create a subsidiary? Fine... Buy up all the tadpoles so you don't have to deal with frogs? Noncompetitive...
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I don't totally disagree but the consequence would be 80% of VC investment vanishing overnight and a whole class of founders just not bothering. The chance of a successful IPO is faaaaar less than "bigcorp wants you to go away, so here's some $$"
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Where would the VCs put their money instead? NFTs?
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      VCs are given money by larger investors to play around with finding the next Oracle/Facebook/Uber/etc. If VCs have nowhere to invest or VCs mess up a fund, LPs will ask for their money back and invest elsewhere. This is what happened to Softbank, though they ended up having the last laugh, thus cementing the fact that Mayaoshi Son is our industry's Sheogorath.
123sereusername 3y ago
only 7%?
technick 3y ago
It would be cool if there were laws or something requiring the acquiring company to keep all employees on the payroll at their pay rate when the acquisition occurred, for a minimum of a 18-24 months. Sadly the majority of our politicians are glorified fluffers for big corporations, so nothing like this would ever happen.
- fred_is_fred 3y ago
  With that plan you may as well just make M&A illegal. The net result would be 0 mergers other than giant companies acquiring small startups with minimal payroll.
beezlewax 3y ago
Does anyone use New Relic here? I've seen a couple of jobs posted from them on LinkedIn recently but not sure of the companies current status in the market. Where does it fit in against splunk and datadog etc?
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  New Relic was amazing when I used it a few years ago. One of the few products I’ve been seriously impressed by. It is expensive but seems worth it. They had very good support for async tracing, much better than splunk and Open Telemetry at the time. Their graph and front end tools were just seamless to use. It was a very well done product.
  - beezlewax 3y ago
    This seems to be the impression I've gotten from the little research I've done but other names are ringing out more in the general chats I've seen, I'm just not clear why. They're also in the middle of being acquired by Fransisco Partners and TPG. I'm not sure what to expect there... cuts or restructuring would leave me pretty exposed if I moved there in the recent future but it seems like a good place with a bright future... Decisions decisions!
- alephnerd 3y ago
  They delisted and got acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG recently. They aren't doing that hot because Datadog and (surprisingly) Splunk has a stronger vision. They have a pretty nice rolodex though, so it's a good PE move. Bad as an employee.
sastaha 3y ago
The past year and a half has revealed that a lot of programmers have the same "sense of entitlement" as laid-off Ohio steelworkers or West Virginia Coal miners. I'm not saying you shouldn't complain about your employer. But the notion that companies are ethically obligated to hold onto workers who aren't necessary, I thought we were way passed that.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  That entitlement was always there, it was just papered over by a boom driven by ZIRP. Now that market conditions are less favorable, perhaps that entitlement might actually be channeled towards unionization activity.
morgango 3y ago
https://archive.ph/gYGDv https://archive.ph/gYGDv
nthngtshr 3y ago
Anyone has any info on any specific teams that got cut?
- thatguy324354 3y ago
  You can check out on Blind. This round seems to be pretty senior-level heavy. Layoffs mostly hit the senior/principal engineers.
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167 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

>Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. Absolutely true.

steveBK123 3y ago

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your runway. You can cobble together something worse with FOSS.. And biggest question is - who cares about p99 latencies anyway when your 2 year runway has shrunk to 6 months, ZIRP is over and you are doubtful of your next funding round. I can't imagine another whale like Coinbase writing a $65M/year check to a Datadog at this point... "Things you only see at the top"

toomuchtodo 3y ago
I get to peak into a few different financial services org's IT strategies (and where infosec overlaps) and in every org I have seen ruthless cutting (hundreds of millions of dollars in one case) if there is any hint of overlap or the ability to go without. Have also seen aggressively playing VARs/reseller off of each other to drive down cost. I would not want to be someone attempting to GTM in this space right now unless you are very confident in your value prop and your ability to communicate that your customer absolutely cannot live without your product. Top passed, winter is coming.
- eigenvalue 3y ago
  Yes, and Splunk is likely the most overpriced offering across all vendors, both in terms of absolute cost and in in terms of how overpriced it is relative to how good it is. So easy to see how it would be on the chopping block.
  - postexitus 3y ago
    doubts in datadog
    - eigenvalue 3y ago
      Yes, datadog and newrelic are both crazy expensive. Seems like the space could really use a disruptive competitor with a totally different business model and approach. I think a lot of customers would be OK with higher latency if it could cost 90% less. Would also be cool if you could somehow use your spare on-prem compute to shoulder some of the load to bring the cost to serve down.
- kjs3 3y ago
  in every org I have seen ruthless cutting (hundreds of millions of dollars in one case) if there is any hint of overlap or the ability to go without Can confirm; I'm on a team doing this analysis right now. And, frankly, it's a really good idea. When I started asking questions like "why do we have 4 different proxy technologies solving the same use case", "why are we using an on-prem solution over here and a SaaS over there to do the same thing" and "why are you buying this tool when we have an MSA with one of their competitors that will save us 60% on the licensing", it was enlightening. Occasionally, there was a really good reason ("it has feature X which makes us Y percent more efficient"...ok, that makes sense) but almost always we got something like "I didn't know anyone was using Product D when we purchased Product E". I dunno if it's going to be 100s of millions in savings, but we're definitely going to see 10s of millions. Have also seen aggressively playing VARs/reseller off of each other to drive down cost. Hey now...that's the fun part.
orochimaaru 3y ago
It’s hard to get application performance monitoring (APM) tools using FOSS because of the complexity of writing libraries. You could ideally work most things with FOSS. Use opentelemtry extensions to a time dries DB of your choice. Use elk or opensearch for logs, osquery for Linux, native cloud monitoring tools that come out of the box, etc. Problem is it takes a lot of setup and maintenance. It can bite you back in the worst of times - when you’re trying to work an outage and find out alerting is dead because your fluentbit daemon is hung and no logs came through.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Or you can spending a day or two creating enough things to track the "end to end" numbers and debug problems the hard way when they appear. Modern APM is completely out of proportion, and most people that use it do absolutely not get enough benefit for paying for those systems. My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes that survive as a meme on the high-management minds and don't survive touching the ground.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Worse yet I saw a lot of APM-or-nothing mentality from CTOs & senior management such that we skipped over very simple to implement, basic monitoring that catches the typical issues.. because "APM is coming" and "we hired an SRE" and and and.. People want to chase the bright new thing that Gartner is pushing (its always these guys).
  - geodel 3y ago
    > My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes... Bang on! Its part of same buzzword bullshittery of Kubernetes/ Cloud native / Micro services / observability and so on. Create an out of proportion tech stack that no one would understand and then one needs these APMs to monitor "p99 latencies" because who the fuck knows now on how incoming http request will get processed.
    - hughesjj 3y ago
specialp 3y ago
There might be pricing pressure, and a lot of people entering the space, but it is more than a nice to have. If you do not have some sort of SIEM solution, you will pay more for or not be insurable for cybersecurity/ransomware insurance. Implementing observability/SIEM yourself has also become a lot more complicated because the domain of things that have to be observed is increasing. There are many organizations now that have things that need to be monitored in several clouds, infrastructures like k8s, and stuff on prem. So you need a vendor that has the tools to collect this data easily and aggregate it. The startup world and startup whales might be dying now. But there is a giant iceberg of companies that are becoming more hybrid and their systems that used to do things like funnel syslogs and firewall flow logs to a collector are no longer adequate.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  SIEM like in SolarWinds? Yeah, I imagine insure companies still require this.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Grumpy old developer devils advocate voice: Why does a lot of the modern tech stack seem designed to make you have to pay for a bunch of other SaaS? Like containers/serverless was supposed to mean "cattle not pets" and it autoscales and autoheals and blah blah blah. And then we break everything into micro services and we need to pay for some SaaS to orchestrate it, and another SaaS to observe/monitor it, and another SaaS to...
  - geodel 3y ago
    These questions are heresies. Just had meeting where discussion was whether system can handle additional 8tps (not 8k tps!) load or they need to stagger it.
alephnerd 3y ago
> what do people think of the "observability" space from here? Splunk and other observability companies (Datadog has been hiring like crazy on the security side) have been pivoting into becoming a SIEM 2.0 for a couple years now. Infra budgets now include Security spend, so an entire generation of Infra companies in segments such as Observability/Application Management (Datadog), Data Platform (Databricks, Snowflake), API Management (Imperva, Wallarm, Postman), and DevTooling (Hashicorp) have begun pivoting into the Security segment. The same thing happened with networking in the 2010s.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Right I figured Splunks defensive play was to market themselves as infosec which every CTO needs to buy in order to tick a box.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Yep. It's a 2 birds-1 stone strategy because Splunk can be used by your Platform team as an APM and by your Infosec team as a SIEM. This way you can file 1 PO and use a smaller portion of your budget. This is was a major reason why Cisco acquired Splunk as their SIEM offering is shit, and there is a massive overlap in customer base.
jeffbee 3y ago
I work at an observability service and have a personal stake in the outcome so you can disregard my opinion I guess. But it seems to me that observability is there to enable you to get along with fewer people. The more stats and logs and profiles you have the fewer human operators you need.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  The savings only really works at scale though right. I've worked in plenty of engineering departments with 200 engineers and essentially 5 operators. You need bare minimum 3 of them for holidays/timezones and key man risk reasons. So you can maybe help a 200 person org save 0.5-1% of their lower paid staff? Is your bill + engineering integration costs going to be less than $200-400k/year?
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    Depends on how much the non-operators are using the data. In SaaS companies it is common for the engineering teams to own the performance of their sub-systems, which entails the need for instrumentation, monitoring, dashboards, alerting and investigative tooling. The trend has been to combine things like logs, distributed tracing, APM, error collection and general metrics collection into the same toolset so that you can more easily cross-coordinate between them when tracking down what is happening in a large system. microservices architecture and "devops" make this a much bigger thing requiring every team to take on some aspect of operational capability.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    I've worked in 100-person groups where everyone spent all of their time trying to figure out what the hell the system was doing because it did not have tracing or logging.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      microservices I take it ;-) ?
dehrmann 3y ago
> what do people think of the "observability" space from here? I don't think it's cut entirely, but when you're looking at your cloud spend, it's got a target painted on it. It doesn't produce revenue on its own, so people will ask a lot of "do we really need X" or "can we lower retention."
- pm90 3y ago
  100%. Obs tools are still needed for debugging, incident recovery and just being able to make better products, but there is a lot of optimization going on. The market still does seem big. Datadog is needlessly very expensive and the experience is just ok.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    The experience (other than the sales process) is great.
codemac 3y ago
It's a classic "dev tooling" play that struggles in downturns. - Company wants to save money, tells team they're cancelling service that costs them $20k/month to observe their production env. - Dev team starts building small parts they need anyways, chews up significant engineering resources. - Company now pays more for highly custom solution no one can compete with. If the company ends up being successful, they'll probably point to all their custom stuff as why. If they end up failing they'll talk about all the boondoggles they went on. This replays so much.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Argument to be made that it may be a better outcome anyway. Custom solution no one can compete with. Engineers usually have some wiggle room to build things they find interesting & useful in their 10% time. You build the parts that are most urgent as they come up..
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    Where is this mythical place with 10% time to muck around? Or is that the 10% of after 9-5 free time you're talking about?
Lammy 3y ago
> what do people think of the "observability" space from here? They're all effectively surveillance systems with extra steps. The Network itself is always listening.

saos 3y ago

Company gets acquired. Company lays off employee. Typical.

draugadrotten 3y ago
Yes, any acquisition is a signal to look for a new position. Your cheese has moved.
ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
And for some reason we as employees continue to let companies abuse us, despite having the option to fight back. I am so bitter and jaded when it comes to this entire system.
- nxm 3y ago
  Fight back by starting your own company then
  - saos 3y ago
    And the cycle continues. Maybe they are talking of unionising
    - ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
      I am talking about unionizing. Workers deserve better than what they've got and the deserve the protection against a company a union brings.
avrionov 3y ago
The company is not acquired yet.

tedivm 3y ago

Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. I was at Kenna Security when Cisco bought them (I was only there for a month too, so Kenna hired me knowing the purchase was going to happen). They lied through their teeth about the process. They promised every resume would be reviewed for leveling, but then gave out the worst offers I've ever seen. They were literally dropping people by multiple levels, and if anyone complained they told them they couldn't make personal exceptions. They wouldn't even listen to people's managers about it, it was just a bunch of anonymous resume reviews. At the same time Kenna leadership said they'd pay for Cobra for me if I didn't want to stay. The VP of Eng, David La France, at Kenna promised me that to my face. Then once they sale went through he refused to talk to me and told me to cover it myself. Ultimately they did back down, and were "kind" enough to give me a whole two weeks severance. However it made me realize that Cisco views it's acquisitions in the worst way possible, and if I ever work at a company that Cisco purchases I will immediately start looking for a new job. It's worth noting that I've kept in touch with a lot of the Kenna people who stayed (at least initially), and according to my old manager more than half of the people who stayed on are gone now.

leetrout 3y ago
> The VP of Eng at Kenna promised me that to my face The real lesson to learn here is twofold: - People recruiting / hiring are incentivized to say whatever is needed to close the deal. With the exception of a bold faced lie (I don't think this was that). - People at the company being acquired are more often than not going to lose most of their power. Including the C-suite. No one is safe and as an employee/victim you won't know the actual arrangements of the deal until the dust settles.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  Three fold: - People forget and circumstances change. Signed documents don't.
  - chii 3y ago

smugma 3y ago

Oracle should have bought them. They are the ultimate rent seekers.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same playbook. I wish there was a CEO who was brave enough to ignore the herd mentality, take a look at what the actual needs of the company, and make a bold plan like "fuck it we're doing 8 and a half percent".

werrett 3y ago
“I’ll be there in 7 minutes” is my standard answer when I know it’s going to be more than 5, probably less than 10.
cyberlurker 3y ago
Talk to enough MBAs and you realize most of them are following the same playbook. They all say and do the same things and no one cares as long as things aren’t disastrous. But it is the safer option and probably results in less innovation. So the 7% cuts will continue until someone boldly breaks the mold and standardizes 8% and brands it “the rule of 8s” and preaches it at overpriced executive retreats.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  "Better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally" - IMO, this often leads for people making decisions that are defensible by comparison to "industry norms".
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    Big "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" energy
dangus 3y ago
My guess is that it’s a safe number where you can lay off at that level and guarantee minimal disruptions in operations. 7% equates to laying off one person per group of 14 people. It would be hard to argue that most companies couldn’t get by with 13 people doing the work of 14. I think you would feel the loss of one person on a team of 10 a lot more.

sireat 3y ago

I am still amazed how quickly Cisco destroyed Flip from 2009 to 2011 - basically 590Million down the drain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video Sure you could argue that by 2011 Flip was on the way out as phones were taking over, but there was plenty of room to pivot and plenty of good will. Had a relative whose company was to be bought by Cisco but thankfully Flip debacle destroyed that deal.

foobiekr 3y ago
Flip basically shows up at the same time the iPhone got video. They were dead already and only Cisco didn’t realize it.
- sireat 3y ago
  Oh Flip was dead in the long run no question about it. It was not only iPhone but Android phones that finally got good enough video quality. It is just that Cisco cut their losses extremely early. There were still 2-5 years left where Flip could have been profitable.
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    Without insider information, which I don't have, who knows. But I will say this: 1. cisco is not a consumer company. they tried with linksys, bailed. tried with scientific atlanta, bailed. no surprise that they bailed on PD. 2. having seen a lot of ASIC acquisitions in my lifetime, which is basically what Pure Digital was - apple knockoff packaging and branding plus an encoder - in my experience tons of startup teams get their first ASIC done, but then totally flub their second (and some of this is the layoff dynamics of how ASIC startups operate on the HW side - unless you immediately start the next chip before finding fit, you have dead weight that you cut). Also, once you show how it's done and have fit, the professionals show up, like Qualcomm, which makes that even harder. It wouldn't surprise at all if (2) was the culprit.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  Despite the iPhone 3gs and HTC Magic offering video recording in mid-2009, GoPro's market cap peaked in October 2014.

vb-8448 3y ago

Unfortunately, it's how M&A works since forever, even if the official statement is "The overall market has retracted". I guess most of the cuts are in the "non-productive" departments like sales, marketing, hr and stuff like this.

kjs3 3y ago
It's not that they're 'nonproductive', per se; that's kinda pejorative. And it's not the 'market'. It's that you just don't need 2 HR, accounting, marketing, finance or other back-office departments, post-merger, so most of those folks become redundant. The acquiring company is going to convert to their systems asap anyway; economies of scale mean you don't need as many bodies to cover the acquisition. You usually try and keep a good percentage of sales guys if for no other reason than there are deals in flight you don't want to loose, but eventually those guys get whittled down too, usually right after the change from "small company fast and loose comp plans" to "corporate comp plan same as everyone". And, of course, the execs have cut their own deal. It's when they start cutting core engineering and support right away that you go "wassup with that???". In the cold calculus of M&As, 7% sounds like an entirely normal number, IME. I remember vividly when one of my companies got bought by IBM, and a couple of the younger back-office folks came by to ask me "what do you think?" because I'd been through M&As before. "I think you need to look for another job" was the best I could do, and it was a little disheartening.

avrionov 3y ago

This is bad news because it happened before the acquisition. When Cisco buys them, there are going to be more rounds of layoffs.

tiffanyh 3y ago

CFO's will follow suit and Wallstreet will begin to expect tech to make cuts ... It's getting noticed that Twitter/X reduced it's staff by 80%, and also reduced it's cloud spend by 60% ... and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Some might argue that Twitter/X has been able to innovate faster as a result. Now I'm not suggesting that FANG is going to layoff 80% overnight. But I wouldn't be surprised if CFOs gradually over time continue reduce their headcount, or keep headcount flat over the years to come. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-... https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1717754398410240018 https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1717754398410240018

buggy6257 3y ago
I don't think ANY CEO is looking at Musk's handling of Twitter/X and thinking the layoffs had "no material change to their business" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-x-worth-less-221637467.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-x-worth-less-221637...
nova22033 3y ago
and there hasn't been any material change to their business. The business is worth less half of what Musk paid for it. And that's his estimate of the value.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  Twitter's valuation dropped more than 32%+ below the price Elon offered to acquire it for (prior to purchase). That's the only reason why Twitter forced him to honor his offer. So it's a mischaracterization to state the value of Twitter halved while on Elon's watch. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/twitter-shares-sink-after-elon-musk-terminates-44-billion-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/twitter-shares-sink-after-el...
asfasfo 3y ago
> and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Their revenue has halved. That's pretty material.

spaintech 3y ago

Well, never the less, these deal are all done with a set of vested interests that in many occasion don’t necessarily align with neither the customer’s (why companies should even exist) or that of their employees ( the motor of companies success) but more in the realm of financial spreadsheets, where, due diligence sways in the direction of those stakeholders in the deal… And I purposely look at it this way as no to take any given side without the details. Non the less, IMO, the only winners here are the stockholders, Splunk as a business, and many others with the same model of “schema selling” are in a high risks stake in the new erra of AI/LLMs. If you consider the accelerating world of AI we are living in, and the emergence/trend towards Domain Specific Large Language Models (DS-LLMs) and advancement like MEMgpt, they represent a transformative approach to data analytics. Instead of using a schema-specific model, as seen in tools like Splunk which extract and transform data into a predefined schema, DS-LLMs offer a flexible, continuously trained approach. They not only analyze data but also learn from it in real-time. The “actors”, or bots, leveraging tech like MEMgpt that not only collect but also learn from the vast streams of data are far more capable than those schema models. As these models self-train and trade knowledge, they are poised to provide insights more organically aligned with the data’s inherent structure, rather than a pre-defined schema. This means businesses could potentially gain deeper, more intuitive insights without the confines of structured data models. With the rapid pace of innovation in the AI sector, it’s worth questioning whether traditional, schema-based solutions will be able to keep up with the dynamic learning capabilities of DS-LLMs. I still wonder who got the better deal here. Wishing the best to all the Splunk employees moving forward.

lucidguppy 3y ago

M&A is noncompetitive and should either be prohibited or heavily taxed. Create a subsidiary? Fine... Buy up all the tadpoles so you don't have to deal with frogs? Noncompetitive...

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I don't totally disagree but the consequence would be 80% of VC investment vanishing overnight and a whole class of founders just not bothering. The chance of a successful IPO is faaaaar less than "bigcorp wants you to go away, so here's some $$"
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Where would the VCs put their money instead? NFTs?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    VCs are given money by larger investors to play around with finding the next Oracle/Facebook/Uber/etc. If VCs have nowhere to invest or VCs mess up a fund, LPs will ask for their money back and invest elsewhere. This is what happened to Softbank, though they ended up having the last laugh, thus cementing the fact that Mayaoshi Son is our industry's Sheogorath.

123sereusername 3y ago

only 7%?

technick 3y ago

It would be cool if there were laws or something requiring the acquiring company to keep all employees on the payroll at their pay rate when the acquisition occurred, for a minimum of a 18-24 months. Sadly the majority of our politicians are glorified fluffers for big corporations, so nothing like this would ever happen.

fred_is_fred 3y ago
With that plan you may as well just make M&A illegal. The net result would be 0 mergers other than giant companies acquiring small startups with minimal payroll.

beezlewax 3y ago

Does anyone use New Relic here? I've seen a couple of jobs posted from them on LinkedIn recently but not sure of the companies current status in the market. Where does it fit in against splunk and datadog etc?

VirusNewbie 3y ago
New Relic was amazing when I used it a few years ago. One of the few products I’ve been seriously impressed by. It is expensive but seems worth it. They had very good support for async tracing, much better than splunk and Open Telemetry at the time. Their graph and front end tools were just seamless to use. It was a very well done product.
- beezlewax 3y ago
  This seems to be the impression I've gotten from the little research I've done but other names are ringing out more in the general chats I've seen, I'm just not clear why. They're also in the middle of being acquired by Fransisco Partners and TPG. I'm not sure what to expect there... cuts or restructuring would leave me pretty exposed if I moved there in the recent future but it seems like a good place with a bright future... Decisions decisions!
alephnerd 3y ago
They delisted and got acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG recently. They aren't doing that hot because Datadog and (surprisingly) Splunk has a stronger vision. They have a pretty nice rolodex though, so it's a good PE move. Bad as an employee.

sastaha 3y ago

The past year and a half has revealed that a lot of programmers have the same "sense of entitlement" as laid-off Ohio steelworkers or West Virginia Coal miners. I'm not saying you shouldn't complain about your employer. But the notion that companies are ethically obligated to hold onto workers who aren't necessary, I thought we were way passed that.

Apocryphon 3y ago
That entitlement was always there, it was just papered over by a boom driven by ZIRP. Now that market conditions are less favorable, perhaps that entitlement might actually be channeled towards unionization activity.

morgango 3y ago

https://archive.ph/gYGDv https://archive.ph/gYGDv

nthngtshr 3y ago

Anyone has any info on any specific teams that got cut?

thatguy324354 3y ago
You can check out on Blind. This round seems to be pretty senior-level heavy. Layoffs mostly hit the senior/principal engineers.

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