Honestly it sounds like a terrible company to work at with a CEO that demands the respect of his staff rather than doing anything to earn it.
In what way you would think this is a good example is confusing? His staff seem to be openly mocking his response by forwarding his emails to the press.
> In what way you would think this is a good example is confusing?
This is a difficult position for companies in the modern day, many employees have taken a stance and are trying to bring social issues into work. I think what the CEO is alluding to, is this, that while the company is open to understanding these issues and understanding employees concerns, the role of the company is to make money.
You see it in the article, stating that layoffs lead to staff being demoralized, well guess what, if you keep losing ground because staff are focused on bringing outside issues into the office, then layoffs could be somewhat seen as a response to the losses the company is making.
While some tend to make moves towards to the extremes, the company seems to be trying to find a balance, supporting issues and having programs in place, while trying not alienate some of it's customers.
>employees using their company to further their personal political or religious beliefs needs to be stomped.
Why? What's wrong with employees wanting some ownership of and control over the fruits of their labour?
Personally, I believe the reckoning that Tech is now facing is a direct result of decades of ethically-bankrupt profit-chasing and the cults of personality that certain CEOs nurtured and their fans exacerbated.
I think a little humility, particularly in the upper echelons of the tech sector, is past due.
So it's ok for a company to further their agenda by supporting a political cause as NewRelic has done with their support of the matter... But it's no OK for an employee to think that they should actually mean what they've said and supported by trying to actually support the movement. K...
So new relic supports the Movement. But fuck the employees that actually believe them and try to further the change. It's only OK if the employer exploits a current social movement. I see you buddy.
“The blunt letter exhorts employees to work harder”
If newrelic thinks employee loyalty and engagement are the cause or driver of their issues, then they should totally offer buyouts to deal with that problem. But as a user of the product I know that’s a bs excuse, you can observe the organizational dysfunction ooze out the UI at all corners.
> you can observe the organizational dysfunction ooze out the UI at all corners
Really? Because I've always found New Relic's UI to be far and away the most useful out of the half dozen or so APM's I'm often re-evaluating.
Maybe Infrastructure & Browser or what have you are not as good (I use Infra & Insights and have some complaints about them), but their APM imo has always really nailed it with presenting the pertinent info.
I don't think there's any harm in having an internal all-hands where labor and management can discuss how a company can forward social aims. Having a ban hammer come down like this gives the impression the company doesn't care about employees, and while that may be the truth for many more companies, it's never the impression you want to set. Have a chat, blow off some steam (people are stressed about other stuff too), then keep working.
For one, I really like Netflix's commitment to keep $100M in black-owned banks, so they can farm out loans to under-represented communities. Progress is a state of mind, but I think that one move has the potential for a lot of materially positive change.
This comment is only addressing the airing of political / social opinions at work, not the rest of the email which seems ill judged at best. Sounds like the issue with this topic is that employees are requesting that the company not sell to certain companies / organizations. When an established company loses $91 million in a year it starts to worry about survival. I can understand the CEO being terrified of the employees losing focus on productivity and earnings and turning their focus on things that cost money rather than produce it.
On top of that the internal discussion of how a manager working late sets a bad example means a good portion of the employees have lost the plot and see the company as a hang out where certain things are expected. I appreciate work life balance as much as the next person but castigating someone for working harder and trying to succeed is a dangerous precedent for the employees of a struggling company to take.
Another issue with allowing controversial subjects to become common discussion points in work is that people disagree and this can lead to problems working together. If Bob is a massive supporter of BLM and goes around expecting everyone to agree with him and Sam responds All lives matter, there are going to be issues. Same with someone being an ardent Trump supporter going around speaking about him to everyone and being shocked when someone expresses disdain. Its not conducive to an acrimonious work environment. The company eventually goes under and Portland has lost its largest tech company.
Just a side note, issue with New Relic is just the software is not great, I genuinely don't like using it, its not a good experience. I do wish them and all other companies the best.
We don’t actually know the reason why the manager was called out for working hard. Was it because they are naturally awesome and motivated? Is it because they were covering for a problem with the team? Is it because the manager is new and doesn’t have experience delegating? Without the context it’s impossible to draw a conclusion.
This is a dumb email from the CEO because it makes the company look bad to the peers of employees. There are plenty of companies who don’t care about racism, they say the right things and move on changing nothing, allowing people who work there to still hold their heads high at dinner parties. However if you have to be the person who works at the place where the “CEO doesn’t care about racism” that’s a lot harder to do.
The winning move here is to say the right things with a somber face regardless of the strategy you intend to execute.
I think that assumes there's no cost to hypocrisy. It sounds like New Relic have tried the approach you advocate (publicly showing the apparently now mandatory support for BLM) whilst actually trying to ignore it, and that was insufficient for a few of the employees.
Is his claim true? I'm glad some companies like Basecamp provide a counterexample...
> “History has not been kind to technology companies who do not continue to grow. Technology companies either grow or they die. There is no middle option.”
There are not that many Basecamps though. If a niche is competitive enough then the eat-or-be-eaten law tends to be applied quite rigorously and one way to avoid being eaten (or at least, to avoid being eaten on someone else's terms) is to show healthy growth. That's why month-to-month growth is a very good metric to gauge a start-ups eventual success.
Think of Basecamp as a very successful exception. And there is nothing wrong with that, in fact I'd like it if there were many more companies like that. In NL we have an interesting IT cooperative that I was an early investor in that is moderately successful, nowhere near as successful as Basecamp but at least they have tried. The remainder all seems to follow the usual patterns.
Stagnation makes you into a sitting target rather than a moving one and those are much simpler to dispatch so better keep moving.
Basecamp is a relatively small company. Comparing Basecamp to a publicly traded enterprise is apples and oranges.
Furthermore, it’s important to realize that Basecamp’s company culture evangelization is partially a PR push for the company. I have no problems believing that Basecamp’s employees enjoy the work environment, but their constant insistence that their way is the only way to run a company and that all other company cultures are fatally flawed is some dishonest rhetoric. I loved it when I was a junior IC straight out of college and thought every DHH Tweet was a new revelation about how my employer was dumb, but the more time I spend on the operations side, the more I realize that Basecamp’s PR push is more about sowing discord to sell books and products than about actionable advice.
>Basecamp is a relatively small company. Comparing Basecamp to a publicly traded enterprise is apples and oranges.
yet there are also significantly more small companies than large companies in terms of employment. Looking at the last stackoverflow survey, half of all developers report to work companies with fewer than 100 employees, whereas only ~10-15% work at very large firms. The same is true for publicly traded business of course, it's a small minority of the market.
So I wouldn't disregard basecamps attitude as atypical because they are small. Small is normal.
> So I wouldn't disregard basecamps attitude as atypical because they are small. Small is normal.
New Relic (the company discussed in this article) is a publicly-traded company. I wasn’t dismissing Basecamp for being small, I was pointing our that what works for Basecamp’s 57 employees isn’t necessarily going to work for New Relic’s 2000 employees.
Stack Overflow’s survey is a self selected sample. If you are working in a large company doing enterprisey things in something like C# or Java and you are a “dark matter developer”, you probably aren’t hanging out on StackOverflow.
Also how many small companies are “lifestyle companies” and not small companies trying to grow fast and get acquired?
I'm not sure lifestyle company is the right description. The overwhelming majority of companies are small businesses, privately owned. Think Qt. Or Datomic. The startup scene itself is only a tiny fraction of the global tech sector, it's a sort of business pretty much exclusive to a few cities around the world. All unicorns on the planet summed up are smaller than Apple in value.
That’s the usually definition of a lifestyle company. One that just wants to be a profitable privately held business with no interest in either going public or getting acquired.
So I think this is 'how not to do it' for a few reasons.
1) This kind of thing has to be done in person. Writing angry emails from above will only have the effect of getting people upset.
2) Scolding people about 'not working hard enough' is lacking in insight. 'Hard work' is probably not the issue, almost certainly, it's structural etc. - which is to say - it's probably more 'managements' fault than anything. Which implies a hefty does of hypocrisy.
So the message should have been mostly about 'the problems we're facing, what some underlying issues are, and a plan for addressing them' and how everyone has a responsibility to participate.
At most - if there is a legitimate problem of distractions or slagging off ... he can hint at it and that's about it. But only in the context of material plan and assuming responsibility himself for the overall concerns.
3) It's fair for a CEO to be concerned about staff trying to take on 'too much concern' for their ostensible political causes - but - he should not deny that a) his staff feels as though the issue is important and b) the company, on some level has a responsibility to be a good corporate actor.
So what he can do, first, validate their real concerns instead of dismissing them, explain why social responsibility for these things are often an individual thing to be done outside work and why organisations generally are not in and of themselves political or issue oriented, but also indicate some things the company can do to be 'good corporate actors' in the context of these issues.
To put a different way, it's not a corporations job to 'sponsor protests' for example, but it definitely is a corporations responsibility to make sure they are 'not being racist' within their own operations and relations. In fact 'political action' is often secondary to the real, material actions which in and of themselves are 'root causes'. For example 'not being racist' is much more important that 'going to a protest' because if we all behaved appropriately, such problems would arise much less often.
Surely there are at least some things the company could do to improve their actions as a group, which I think would in fact be more relevant and material to the concerns of some of the staffers anyhow. By implementing some appropriate measures, and indicating that 'this is actually the best way to address such problems' - he's both making his company better at the same time as addressing their real and emotional concerns.
For one they could improve their product. Every suggestion I made was ignored, despite us being one of their larger customers. I even told them how to implement what I wanted but never heard anything further. I wish we would go elsewhere as their product is not sufficient. Maybe the problem starts at the CEO not the developers.
Fully agree, I think that would be the overall implication of 'we need to do better' impetus of the CEO. But "I even told them how to implement what I wanted but never heard anything further." ... every company has a million voices saying 'what they want', it's usually not possible, and if there is no process or he process was not followed for feedback, you're not necessarily going to get a response. I worked at a large corp and would get 'I want this' in some form or another every time I spoke to customers or partners, which was at least weekly, for example.
I don’t know what the culture at New Relic is like, but if the CEO of my company told us to work harder, there would be a coup. Everyone who still has a job knows they are lucky, and is working at 150%, losing sleep, and experiencing a lot of strain on their lives on top of the strain of the state of reality. Nobody is asking for a pat on the back, but it takes its toll. I wouldn’t tolerate my CEO doing this, but that’s easy to say - since mine didn’t, and as said earlier, I have a job.
It’s pretty despicable for a CEO to do this, at a time like this.
You do understand that not every company is the same as yours, right? Maybe there is a bad culture there and perhaps the ceo has information that you don’t have? Also, since when did criticism became despicable in the virus crisis?
> Wonder how much does this CEO work and what their effective hourly wage is.
If employees are paid fairly, then should it matter? As a founder and an owner I gather, it means less, as a publicly traded company it means a little more. But in the big picture, it matters very little if employees are duly compensated. BTW he has a boss (or bosses) also (or investors, boards, customers).
Yes very much so. The workers are producing the value (CEO is also a worker). Is the CEO producing x times the value of their average worker? If not then that compensation doesn't make sense and in effect is stealing from others who are producing that value.
Any other view is justifying stealing from people just because they're "well compensated."
> Any other view is justifying stealing from people just because they're "well compensated."
That ideology hasn't worked to well in the past.
> If not then that compensation doesn't make sense and in effect is stealing from others who are producing that value.
While I admire the premise of this line of thinking, this is not how Capitalism works. It is also very difficult to quantify value also, how does person X compare to person Y doing the same job compare in regards to the term of value. If person X has more seniority, or maybe less but greater skills, produces more etc. Let alone person X and Y who are equivalent, but work on different parts of the machine. Heck devs are drastically more valued at the moment than receptionists but receptionist may work harder.
Now I sit somewhere between Ayn Rand and a Socialist, but I definitely believe in Capitalist ideals, that a person should be paid on their market value, and profits are made for those on top in regards to what value the entire machine produces. Those in the middle shouldn't suffer though, but that can never be attributed to theft (there are a few cases which escape this), unless you take on a more Communist idealism.
I completely disagree with you and capitalism is an immoral system of economy. It might have been a necessary transition but as it stands right now it's ruining the world bit by bit.
It's also still theft no matter what system of economy you believe in.
If someone is taking the compensation of the value you're adding to the economy, that's theft.
> completely disagree with you and capitalism is an immoral system of economy.
As I said I stand between an Ayn Rand type of system and and a socialist system. So while I think Capitalism is definitely the better options, I don't deny it's failings.
> It might have been a necessary transition but as it stands right now it's ruining the world bit by bit.
There are obviously areas it can be improved, however as it stands there are a lot more benefits than problems.
> It's also still theft no matter what system of economy you believe in.
> If someone is taking the compensation of the value you're adding to the economy, that's theft.
If people are compensated for their work then it isn't theft, when you agree to sell X (you effort) for Y (money), especially where Y is not capped in too many ways then it is not theft.
Remember person isn't adding the entire value to the economy, the company is, the product is.
Without the company context or even the text of the memo, we’re all just guessing and projecting.
I’ve left a company before because there were no negative consequences for the people who were slacking off. When you’re putting in 150% because the other guy on your team is only putting in 50%, it gets old fast. The good people leave for more productive environments while the slackers tend to accumulate.
No one likes being on the receiving end of a memo to work harder. Ideally the CEO would have taken a more discreet, targeted approach to performance problems. However, it really is better for everyone to have the situation and goals laid out in public without sugar coating it.
It really isn’t better. It’s a sign of a completely dysfunctional company that won’t find any esprit de corps under such a infantile outburst. I expect this CEO will step down within a week.
Company wide emails scolding productivity sound like a death knell to me. What do they think the individual reactions to this are? Like, "oh yeah, they're right, I've been slacking, and I will do better"? Is that a real thing?
Newrelic, isn't that one of those companies whose Javascript never makes it past my blockers? I never liked tracking companies to begin with, this internal memo makes me like them even less. The management should introspect a bit more rather than blame their employees, if a company fails in comparison to their competitors that is usually not something the employees have nearly as much influence over as the management does.
This CEO should look in the mirror and wonder what he could do to improve things.
Prediction: that won't work. If people are not productive or distracted by other issues that is a sign there is something wrong with the company culture. You won't fix that by yelling at your employees, you fix it by addressing the root cause.
> You gain insights into the moral base upon which Paul makes his own decisions. All of this is couched in a form which makes Paul and his people admirable. I am their advocate. But don't lose sight of the fact that House Atreides acts with the same arrogance toward "common folk" as do their enemies I am showing you the superhero syndrome and your own participation in it. The arrogant are, in part, created by the meek. [0]
CEOs, I think, get away with stuff like this because the "common folk" accept their place in the hierarchy and don't question them. So without honest feedback the people at the top of the hierarchy lose touch with reality.
> “History has not been kind to technology companies who do not continue to grow. Technology companies either grow or they die. There is no middle option.”
This is hopefully beyond obvious, but if upper management ever says something like this, it is time to at minimum start working on making other opportunities available to you.
Whether you do this by interviewing, networking, blogging, public speaking, or whatever your preference is doesn't matter much. As long as you do something.
In my personal experience, whenever anything like this happened, there would be layoffs within a year. Also whenever management would make an official statement addressing "rumors", saying that "everything is fine, zero risk of layoffs", layoffs happened within a year.
> In my personal experience, whenever anything like this happened, there would be layoffs within a year.
A few months before Microsoft laid off 18,000 people in 2014 my team and I sat in an all hands meeting for our group (or division, or whatever it was called). The merging of the SDET and SDE career paths was explained, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation contained a slide which had as its only content something like, "No jobs will be lost," in bold, red, all-caps font on a white background. Over the following weeks, several SDETs who worked closely with my team found SDE positions in other parts of the company. Sure enough, come July, thousands of SDETs were laid off.[0]
That slide is burned into my memory, and I often wonder if it was a warning from management who knew what was coming but were not permitted to say.
[0] Many would later be hired back, but that's another story.
I'd like to point out that TFA does not actually link to the memo itself. So any phrasing in the article like "scolds," "blunt," or "exhorts" must be taken with a grain of salt--and by extension, any comments here that are opining on the letter based on these adjectives.
In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the article in its current state is at best worthless (and at worst a hatchet job).
It's entirely possible that the tone of the letter/memo was indeed harsh, or tone-deaf, or cringe-worthy. But perhaps it wasn't, and honestly the few quotes in the article make it impossible to tell.
Exactly. It’s very possible the author of the article is sensitive / has an agenda / etc and interprets anything said in the memo in the least charitable way possible.
I've been using NewRelic for a while now, and it's a great product. But, I don't see many moats around the business model. There's nothing preventing other competitors from popping up and taking market share. The cost of switching is equivalent to the cost of installing a competitor's system of perf measurement which shouldn't be very high. If I were to guess, I'd say this is a competitive market.
Following because I actually started browsing APM software this week. I haven’t used it in 5 or more years... seems the same players, except with higher prices (notice how every price is now “contact me”)
Are there any reasonable APM software that can monitor a small k8s cluster for a few hundred a month? I built my own really simple “free” APM, but would rather buy something than sink 100 more hours into it. But I’m not spending $7,000 a month to monitor a handful of servers. Don’t need 6 billion graphs and monitors like data dog does
We use Dynatrace at my dayjob, it’s not “cheap” by any means but it’s cheaper than New Relic and hot damn does it work nicely with kubernetes.
Costs something in the ballpark of $75-70/mo per 16GB of RAM on monitored system, user monitoring and synthetics cost extra.
It’s a tool that easily saves us the ~15K/yr spend we have with them - I still feel like we are getting fleeced a bit but I review the field annually and it’s still the best tool from a value perspective. Unless you have need to purchase 50+ host units there’s not really any contract discount, so you can try out their pay-as-you-go offering and see if it works for you.
If you are telling your employees to "...work harder" this is a failure of management in the product mix and roadmap. But the "solution" is always, as it seems to be here, to hire a new round of tired executive faces and layoff a bunch of people.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadIn what way you would think this is a good example is confusing? His staff seem to be openly mocking his response by forwarding his emails to the press.
This is a difficult position for companies in the modern day, many employees have taken a stance and are trying to bring social issues into work. I think what the CEO is alluding to, is this, that while the company is open to understanding these issues and understanding employees concerns, the role of the company is to make money.
You see it in the article, stating that layoffs lead to staff being demoralized, well guess what, if you keep losing ground because staff are focused on bringing outside issues into the office, then layoffs could be somewhat seen as a response to the losses the company is making.
While some tend to make moves towards to the extremes, the company seems to be trying to find a balance, supporting issues and having programs in place, while trying not alienate some of it's customers.
Why? What's wrong with employees wanting some ownership of and control over the fruits of their labour?
Personally, I believe the reckoning that Tech is now facing is a direct result of decades of ethically-bankrupt profit-chasing and the cults of personality that certain CEOs nurtured and their fans exacerbated.
I think a little humility, particularly in the upper echelons of the tech sector, is past due.
Because it is a public company and their purpose is to make the investors money not cater to the "activist" cause-du-jour.
So new relic supports the Movement. But fuck the employees that actually believe them and try to further the change. It's only OK if the employer exploits a current social movement. I see you buddy.
If newrelic thinks employee loyalty and engagement are the cause or driver of their issues, then they should totally offer buyouts to deal with that problem. But as a user of the product I know that’s a bs excuse, you can observe the organizational dysfunction ooze out the UI at all corners.
Really? Because I've always found New Relic's UI to be far and away the most useful out of the half dozen or so APM's I'm often re-evaluating.
Maybe Infrastructure & Browser or what have you are not as good (I use Infra & Insights and have some complaints about them), but their APM imo has always really nailed it with presenting the pertinent info.
Infrastructure & Insights are terrible. Just terrible.
For one, I really like Netflix's commitment to keep $100M in black-owned banks, so they can farm out loans to under-represented communities. Progress is a state of mind, but I think that one move has the potential for a lot of materially positive change.
On top of that the internal discussion of how a manager working late sets a bad example means a good portion of the employees have lost the plot and see the company as a hang out where certain things are expected. I appreciate work life balance as much as the next person but castigating someone for working harder and trying to succeed is a dangerous precedent for the employees of a struggling company to take.
Another issue with allowing controversial subjects to become common discussion points in work is that people disagree and this can lead to problems working together. If Bob is a massive supporter of BLM and goes around expecting everyone to agree with him and Sam responds All lives matter, there are going to be issues. Same with someone being an ardent Trump supporter going around speaking about him to everyone and being shocked when someone expresses disdain. Its not conducive to an acrimonious work environment. The company eventually goes under and Portland has lost its largest tech company.
Just a side note, issue with New Relic is just the software is not great, I genuinely don't like using it, its not a good experience. I do wish them and all other companies the best.
The winning move here is to say the right things with a somber face regardless of the strategy you intend to execute.
> “History has not been kind to technology companies who do not continue to grow. Technology companies either grow or they die. There is no middle option.”
Think of Basecamp as a very successful exception. And there is nothing wrong with that, in fact I'd like it if there were many more companies like that. In NL we have an interesting IT cooperative that I was an early investor in that is moderately successful, nowhere near as successful as Basecamp but at least they have tried. The remainder all seems to follow the usual patterns.
Stagnation makes you into a sitting target rather than a moving one and those are much simpler to dispatch so better keep moving.
Furthermore, it’s important to realize that Basecamp’s company culture evangelization is partially a PR push for the company. I have no problems believing that Basecamp’s employees enjoy the work environment, but their constant insistence that their way is the only way to run a company and that all other company cultures are fatally flawed is some dishonest rhetoric. I loved it when I was a junior IC straight out of college and thought every DHH Tweet was a new revelation about how my employer was dumb, but the more time I spend on the operations side, the more I realize that Basecamp’s PR push is more about sowing discord to sell books and products than about actionable advice.
yet there are also significantly more small companies than large companies in terms of employment. Looking at the last stackoverflow survey, half of all developers report to work companies with fewer than 100 employees, whereas only ~10-15% work at very large firms. The same is true for publicly traded business of course, it's a small minority of the market.
So I wouldn't disregard basecamps attitude as atypical because they are small. Small is normal.
New Relic (the company discussed in this article) is a publicly-traded company. I wasn’t dismissing Basecamp for being small, I was pointing our that what works for Basecamp’s 57 employees isn’t necessarily going to work for New Relic’s 2000 employees.
Also how many small companies are “lifestyle companies” and not small companies trying to grow fast and get acquired?
1) This kind of thing has to be done in person. Writing angry emails from above will only have the effect of getting people upset.
2) Scolding people about 'not working hard enough' is lacking in insight. 'Hard work' is probably not the issue, almost certainly, it's structural etc. - which is to say - it's probably more 'managements' fault than anything. Which implies a hefty does of hypocrisy.
So the message should have been mostly about 'the problems we're facing, what some underlying issues are, and a plan for addressing them' and how everyone has a responsibility to participate.
At most - if there is a legitimate problem of distractions or slagging off ... he can hint at it and that's about it. But only in the context of material plan and assuming responsibility himself for the overall concerns.
3) It's fair for a CEO to be concerned about staff trying to take on 'too much concern' for their ostensible political causes - but - he should not deny that a) his staff feels as though the issue is important and b) the company, on some level has a responsibility to be a good corporate actor.
So what he can do, first, validate their real concerns instead of dismissing them, explain why social responsibility for these things are often an individual thing to be done outside work and why organisations generally are not in and of themselves political or issue oriented, but also indicate some things the company can do to be 'good corporate actors' in the context of these issues.
To put a different way, it's not a corporations job to 'sponsor protests' for example, but it definitely is a corporations responsibility to make sure they are 'not being racist' within their own operations and relations. In fact 'political action' is often secondary to the real, material actions which in and of themselves are 'root causes'. For example 'not being racist' is much more important that 'going to a protest' because if we all behaved appropriately, such problems would arise much less often.
Surely there are at least some things the company could do to improve their actions as a group, which I think would in fact be more relevant and material to the concerns of some of the staffers anyhow. By implementing some appropriate measures, and indicating that 'this is actually the best way to address such problems' - he's both making his company better at the same time as addressing their real and emotional concerns.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2020/06/29/layoffs...
It’s pretty despicable for a CEO to do this, at a time like this.
Wonder how much does this CEO work and what their effective hourly wage is.
If employees are paid fairly, then should it matter? As a founder and an owner I gather, it means less, as a publicly traded company it means a little more. But in the big picture, it matters very little if employees are duly compensated. BTW he has a boss (or bosses) also (or investors, boards, customers).
Any other view is justifying stealing from people just because they're "well compensated."
That ideology hasn't worked to well in the past.
> If not then that compensation doesn't make sense and in effect is stealing from others who are producing that value.
While I admire the premise of this line of thinking, this is not how Capitalism works. It is also very difficult to quantify value also, how does person X compare to person Y doing the same job compare in regards to the term of value. If person X has more seniority, or maybe less but greater skills, produces more etc. Let alone person X and Y who are equivalent, but work on different parts of the machine. Heck devs are drastically more valued at the moment than receptionists but receptionist may work harder.
Now I sit somewhere between Ayn Rand and a Socialist, but I definitely believe in Capitalist ideals, that a person should be paid on their market value, and profits are made for those on top in regards to what value the entire machine produces. Those in the middle shouldn't suffer though, but that can never be attributed to theft (there are a few cases which escape this), unless you take on a more Communist idealism.
It's also still theft no matter what system of economy you believe in.
If someone is taking the compensation of the value you're adding to the economy, that's theft.
As I said I stand between an Ayn Rand type of system and and a socialist system. So while I think Capitalism is definitely the better options, I don't deny it's failings.
> It might have been a necessary transition but as it stands right now it's ruining the world bit by bit.
There are obviously areas it can be improved, however as it stands there are a lot more benefits than problems.
> It's also still theft no matter what system of economy you believe in.
> If someone is taking the compensation of the value you're adding to the economy, that's theft.
If people are compensated for their work then it isn't theft, when you agree to sell X (you effort) for Y (money), especially where Y is not capped in too many ways then it is not theft.
Remember person isn't adding the entire value to the economy, the company is, the product is.
And it is fine if you disagree.
Maybe, but I don’t think it makes it any more defensible.
during a time like this I expect a CEO to take charge, be a leader, and make a steady plan for the future of the company, not punish people.
I’ve left a company before because there were no negative consequences for the people who were slacking off. When you’re putting in 150% because the other guy on your team is only putting in 50%, it gets old fast. The good people leave for more productive environments while the slackers tend to accumulate.
No one likes being on the receiving end of a memo to work harder. Ideally the CEO would have taken a more discreet, targeted approach to performance problems. However, it really is better for everyone to have the situation and goals laid out in public without sugar coating it.
This CEO should look in the mirror and wonder what he could do to improve things.
He is trying to improve things by telling his employees to get back to work and stop pearl clutching.
> You gain insights into the moral base upon which Paul makes his own decisions. All of this is couched in a form which makes Paul and his people admirable. I am their advocate. But don't lose sight of the fact that House Atreides acts with the same arrogance toward "common folk" as do their enemies I am showing you the superhero syndrome and your own participation in it. The arrogant are, in part, created by the meek. [0]
CEOs, I think, get away with stuff like this because the "common folk" accept their place in the hierarchy and don't question them. So without honest feedback the people at the top of the hierarchy lose touch with reality.
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[0]: https://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/ch03.html
This is hopefully beyond obvious, but if upper management ever says something like this, it is time to at minimum start working on making other opportunities available to you.
Whether you do this by interviewing, networking, blogging, public speaking, or whatever your preference is doesn't matter much. As long as you do something.
In my personal experience, whenever anything like this happened, there would be layoffs within a year. Also whenever management would make an official statement addressing "rumors", saying that "everything is fine, zero risk of layoffs", layoffs happened within a year.
A few months before Microsoft laid off 18,000 people in 2014 my team and I sat in an all hands meeting for our group (or division, or whatever it was called). The merging of the SDET and SDE career paths was explained, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation contained a slide which had as its only content something like, "No jobs will be lost," in bold, red, all-caps font on a white background. Over the following weeks, several SDETs who worked closely with my team found SDE positions in other parts of the company. Sure enough, come July, thousands of SDETs were laid off.[0]
That slide is burned into my memory, and I often wonder if it was a warning from management who knew what was coming but were not permitted to say.
[0] Many would later be hired back, but that's another story.
In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the article in its current state is at best worthless (and at worst a hatchet job).
It's entirely possible that the tone of the letter/memo was indeed harsh, or tone-deaf, or cringe-worthy. But perhaps it wasn't, and honestly the few quotes in the article make it impossible to tell.
I've checked Datadog but their pricing is a bit outrageous.
Anyone has any other solution to recommend?
Are there any reasonable APM software that can monitor a small k8s cluster for a few hundred a month? I built my own really simple “free” APM, but would rather buy something than sink 100 more hours into it. But I’m not spending $7,000 a month to monitor a handful of servers. Don’t need 6 billion graphs and monitors like data dog does
It’s a tool that easily saves us the ~15K/yr spend we have with them - I still feel like we are getting fleeced a bit but I review the field annually and it’s still the best tool from a value perspective. Unless you have need to purchase 50+ host units there’s not really any contract discount, so you can try out their pay-as-you-go offering and see if it works for you.
I used New Relic, and its a pretty great product. But that left a bad taste in my mouth.
They also kept deprecating services causing more work.