It is a bit silly, but I kinda like it. I'm generally pretty anti-koolaid, but having a shared unique term for yourself and your coworkers seems like a reasonable way to build some positive tribalism, even if it's a stretch linguistically.
Colleagues is conspicuously not tribe-specific though. If you want to build an us-vs-them (which is beneficial in a lot of circumstances), you may want a label that helps separate your teams into an "us" that's distinct from the "thems".
I'm similarly anti-koolaid and I agree. It seems pretty harmless (it's just a shared noun, it's not saying we're a family etc etc) and it's kind of easier than just randomly selecting one of friends/colleagues/associates/comrades etc.
It predates me (6 years), I don't know the origin either, except for coming from "Duty". At least we're not Pageys. There can be only one.
The real curse of PagerDuty, though, is calling everything "-duty". Parental leave is BabyDuty, the training department is LearningDuty, the LGBTQ ERG is RainbowDuty, you get the idea.
Hat-tip to our veterans ERG for not going with DutyDuty, although I hope it was in the running at least.
(I mean I also kind of love it, but you know, it's a lot.)
Which contains gems like "exceptionally talented, mission driven, innovative and kind Asanas" and "once an Asana, always an Asana" — considering some of the Sanskrit usages are equivalent to "chair" or "seated posture".
"You were good chairs, but you have to go. As they alway say, once a place where you put your ass, always a place where you put your ass."
I'd say making money is the CEO's primary job. You can't just hire a "CRO" or whatever other random C title and blame them when things go south at the company. I doubt the person fired had that much influence on company headcount, product strategy and operational budgets.
They've had great sales, and the stock was even upgraded by a major analyst last week because they show a track record of being resilient and still being able to grow. So unless they suddenly had a bad quarter (which ends next week), the CRO seems to have done a great job.
I think I respect that at least one of the executives whose responsibility it was to NOT let this happen is being exited out. Google and others have babbled on about executives taking full responsibility for the layoffs, but I don't see any of the key SVPs or VPs taking hits on failing in their leadership.
Also I understand they say to pursue other opportunities, but I think the reason for the CRO departure feels transparent enough here.
Maybe those other shops don't throw people under the bus so publicly. Wondering if following up 6-12 months later to see who left to "pursue other opportunities".
I think that is because it still unclear if executives actually failed in their responsibilities to shareholders and the bottom line.
I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different.
Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now?
> I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different.
on the other hand, the alternative to "over hiring" is jobless people. At least they were job providers for some time.
That's not necessarily true, those people could have gone to work for smaller companies and startups. Those companies also would not have had their resources stretched in a wage bidding war against FAANG and unicorns. Maybe there'd be more companies and more roles to apply for.
I didn't want to get into the pros and cons of over-hiring. but there are definitely some of each. Big con is people don't like getting laid off, and some would not have joined, taken other jobs had they known. A pro is that it really cranked up salaries for most people hired during a labor shortage, including those who aren't laid off.
That said, I think it is all beside my main question: Are shareholders unhappy with executive leadership. If I were an executive, I would be making the case (privately) that my over-hiring and subsequent layoffs were in fact GOOD for the company.
I don't think you axe the execs for opex cut, you axe the execs for failing to perform. It seems they get significantly more favorable terms in these sort of layoffs than rank+file employees.
I don’t have any special sympathy to execs, but aren’t these tech layoffs driven by the abrupt increase in interest rates? Even if execs could have seen this coming 6 months before the rate increases, there probably still would have been significant layoffs and of course not even a quorum of top economists were predicting these impacts on tech at that time.
If the idea is “exec heads should role out of solidarity/catharsis/whatever” then that’s a different question than “someone failed to prevent this from happening”. Apologies if I’m misunderstanding the root causes of these layoffs.
That's what everyone keeps telling you until you're locked into 30+ services equaling an additional 20% of each employee's salary, plus the time to educate on and maintain those services.
And then they don't even communicate with one another.
Yup now imagine you built all of those in house and how much more of a nightmare it would be to maintain those services. That's basically a separate software product right there
Their moat is the same as Jira's. Despite being expensive, and easily replaced by a bevy of alternatives, management are familiar with the name and purchase it.
At least for JIRA (and SAP), there is another aspect as well: users know how to use it, and it has a halfway decent UI when compared to stuff such as Bugzilla. Avoiding training existing and new employees in bespoke software is a business value on its own.
While not difficult to build a basic version, at-scale incident alert & escalation systems are a mix of all the things that engineers hate building for (timezones, calendars, telephones, human-injected overrides, contact management, and 3rd party notification / acknowledgement tracking) all wrapped into a system that's being watched and scrutinized by everyone from compliance, legal and eng all the way to the CEO when they're at their most emotional during and after an incident.
IME for most companies it only takes a homegrown system failing once during a major outage for the budget to open up.
You need to have your own infrastructure monitored by completely different infrastructure, otherwise they will fail at the same time. Instead of having your AWS shop maintain a separate Rackspace-coloed team, etc. it is much simpler to outsource
I'm guessing you aren't a software engineer on a team that shares oncall responsibility, in an org with other engineering teams and dozens of mircoservices.
> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future.
Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.
People First is still wildly different from "we are family". The former implies treating people with respect as humans versus entries in a spreadsheet, whereas the latter implies nothing can ever separate your bond. I see nothing wrong with people first on their about page. What part do you take issue with?
(Dutonians is cheeky, but a reasonable standin for stodgy 'PagerDuty Employees')
> People First is still wildly different from "we are family". The former implies treating people with respect as humans versus entries in a spreadsheet
Few things embody better the "entries in a spreadsheet" concept than laying off people to adjust a finance balance.
They are not a charity, sure, but "People first" is still bullshitting people.
I keep seeing this sentiment everywhere. I think it's just two continental plates continuing to rub together:
1. Employment is purely transactional. Time is exchanged for money and money-equivalents. Full stop.
2. Your work is an act of self-expression. You derive meaning from your work, take pride in it, and feel a sense of ownership and responsibility in it. The work and its output bears the indelible mark of the mind and hands that crafted it. To try to separate the self from the fruit its hands bore is not only futile, but an act of alienation of human nature.
(I don't know if I'm a Marxist yet, but everything he wrote about alienation makes a lot of sense to me.)
(And I'm not saying 1 and 2 are the only 2 positions to take - I'm just saying they're the two opposing distilled ideas that are butting heads.)
Combine these with the fact that (in the US):
- you have ~no protections against being dismissed.
- there is a tremendous power imbalance between the company (which is a fictitious entity composed of many sub-units, and can just be dissolved or restructured etc) and the employee (which is O(1) human organisms and prone to starvation)
- employment isn't just the simple money and money-equivalents outlined in 1). It's access to affordable, competent healthcare. If I go without health insurance, I do not simply exchange some amortized payment plan for paying per-service. I incur a huge amount of risk if anything major happens to me or my family.
- etc
it's just a recipe for disaster and nobody being happy. We're left in this quagmire of everyone wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Personally, I think we should create a strong social safety net at the government/societal level (guaranteed income/guaranteed basics, healthcare, education, etc) and then make employment the sellsword's dream that companies seem to want it to be (they seem to enjoy being able to fire at-will more than they enjoy employees acting like family, afaict).
Japan seems to have tried out the other extreme (where the company becomes a quasi-government and acts like your paternal-feudal lord) and is now having some problems with it.
"I switch jobs every 2 years for a raise" vs "my employer laid me off, this should be illegal".
You get the good with the bad. It's easier to get hired if it's easy to get fired.
I'd buy your point about power imbalance if it was about blue collar workers. But not for IT, where jobs are plentiful and compensation is through the roof.
Why not start a coop with likeminded folks and give yourselves the protection from being laid off?
"I switched jobs" lets you plan, eg a small gap in unemployment to reduce missed paychecks or to minimize chance of needing COBRA.
"My employer laid me off" doesn't and adds on the implications of a lay off in your field of work, so you get to start your search after being unemployed and possibly in a field with many others looking for jobs.
What I meant was: especially in IT employees feel zero loyalty to their employer. On the other side, they expect their employers to be loyal to them. The same is true in reverse, too, companies don't care about their employees but feel betrayed when the employees leave for greener pastures. Everyone plays the same game.
If you want to work in a stable environment where you don't get fired and your promotions and raises are few and far between and planned years in advance, you go and find a job in some bureaucracy. If you want the benefits of fast-moving high-compensation private economy, it feels weird to complain that this also includes quick termination on occasion.
You call a company of fictitious entity, but What entity is not fictitious? A company is just an organized collection of humans, sometimes outnumbering the employees. Is a group of employees a fictitious entity? Is a union a fictitious entity? A family or a marriage?
I don't see anything fictitious about it.
If your point is that a company is not a human, of course it isn't. Nothing but a human is a human.
I'm not trying to argue but genuinely curious what you think that conveys because I have seen this point or a variation brought up multiple times by different people and it always goes over my head
I think it's an interesting philosophical question, like how it's presented in Sapiens [1].
But concretely what I mainly mean is, if a company "fails" (and while there's lots of different definitions of failing, let's here take the most extreme one, where the company runs out of money and just has to fold) then it's not like a person is dying. Debt will be restructured, employees can be laid off, it can be bought/assets sold off, and most notably the actual people who profit most off these companies are substantially protected since the incorporation protects their personal assets from liability. Their biggest threat is the loss of stock price they presumably own, and that's a risk profile they've very clearly accepted. So when a company "dies", it's typically not really death in nearly the same sense that we normally think of the word. And it's slow, with (typically) no one person being a big load-bearing point, and tons of options and exit strategies and protections for people's personal affairs.
This resiliency, flexibility, and non-corporealness means companies almost always have more power in negotiations.
Compared to a human of mortal flesh, who typically have somewhere between 0 and a few months of runway before cobra payments and lack of income start to strain spousal relationships, mortgage payments come in danger, etc. And the 1-2 breadwinners, either of whose income loss is an existential risk to the family, are single points of failure if you're laid off or fired. Are typically scrambling to lock in employment again.
I think that makes sense. Because they are incorporeal, they have fewer and different needs to fulfil, and this can give them a bargaining advantage.
If this is what most people are trying to say, I think the incorporeal language is much more direct and clear than calling them fictitious, which has other meanings
Here are a few notes from their latest financial statement:
- Revenue was $94.2 million, an increase of 31.3% year over year.
- Delivered a third quarter dollar-based net retention rate of 123% as of October 31, 2022, compared to 124% in the year ago period.
- Achieved non-GAAP profitability a quarter ahead of previous guidance, expanding non-GAAP operating margin to 3% for the three months ended October 31, 2022, an improvement of 1,000 basis points over the year ago period.
My point isn't to say that employees are owed something. You are right, business is not charity. The problem is the lack of any consistent social contract. You can spend all of your time and energy executing at 110% and still be shown the door. At the end of the day, you are labor, not capital. And capital reigns supreme today. As a public company, PD has to make its shareholders happy at all costs. I'm not casting judgement on that, but no real assurance of loyalty in employment combined with no good social safety net (at least here in the USA) is a dangerous and often stressful mix. Add out-of-control inflation, increasing housing costs, and a tightening labor market to that to really ramp up the pressure on folks.
For publicly traded companies you can reverse engineer investors' future growth expectations by analyzing the stock price relative to their current financial statements. Those expectations then flow to top executives via the Board. Obviously not all of those expectations can be met.
Many quarters of flailing to find the next thing, that this time, will really restart the growth engine. New markets, changing sales channel strategy, product pivots, reorgs.
I was laid off like this during the pandemic. Our company had one product that we were pinning all our hopes on and my department was operating at the highest levels of success according to industry benchmarks. However, that meant that my job wasn’t the bottleneck to this product’s success, so the folks who weren’t excelling kept their jobs (for the company’s time horizon, it didn’t make sense to replace them) but my department was laid off. It sucked at the time, but it was an understandable call for the business and I landed a much better job on the flip side. Business is weird.
A lot of people say that but then realize it's a bit more complicated if you want the resiliency of PagerDuty and are okay dealing with the maintenance and up-keep required for such a system.
And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.
"We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."
If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.
Ah no, please spare me. Also recruiters, what a lot! I was once invited to their lair and I couldn’t help notice the leaderboards, the brass bell to be rung when deals were closed, and the smell of Axe deodorant. Quote literally the set of Boiler Room, except on the posh n-th floor of Amsterdam business district
This is the main reason I feel stuck with PagerDuty. I have used it a lot over very many years with deployments both small and large, and no part of it has ever failed me in that time.
I get that they must work very hard on building that perception because it's easily shattered, but still. It's hard to ignore how reliable it has been.
Not really. The dramatic increase in price has gone to pay for features that are above and beyond the core offering. The problem is that the additional offerings aren't worth the dramatic price, especially for those with grand fathered pricing.
Could you outline what features you ended up building? In the past I something similar that would call someone's cell phone if "ERROR" appeared in a Slack channel, which was very crude but it worked...
Consider wearing a product hat as well; is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources?
There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.
> is doing undifferentiated work the best use of your very limited engineering resources?
I see this sentiment often, however it's one of the best ways to get profitable business ideas. I start making something, and if in the course of doing so, I find a problem that I can solve (which is not related to the primary product), I turn around and start selling my undifferentiated work as its own product.
I have seen plenty of companies that hand roll their own ops/alerting system, and sure that is a fine strategy if you can put enough resources into it, but that is mostly never the case. Do you host it separately from the rest of your infra? Does it have multi-DC failovers? Does it have a dedicated SRE/on-call team? Do you load test it? Do you test that it can send texts to one of your developers who has bad coverage in the middle of India or Romania or Bali?
The problem usually is, when the rest of your systems are down then this one is likely to be down as well, making it useless. People are paying PagerDuty primarily for their uptime and reliability.
i think these really depends on the requirements of the company. there will always be a long tail of scenarios to support, that doesn't mean every company needs support in all those scenarios. some things can be good enough
All of what I mentioned (except maybe international user support) is table stakes for an alerting system regardless of whether the company size is 1 or 100,000. A system that works 99% of the time is useless because it is only really needed for the other 1%.
> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future.
This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalty, remember these events.
Depends on how bad the people you laid off are. Look at it this way, if 20% of programmers are bad, and you lay off the bottom 10%, and rehire let's say at a disadvantage (50% bad), you now have a 75% bad workforce instead of an 80% bad workforce.
This assumes you can identify bad workers (for some metric of bad which may or may not be ethical or sensible)
Stats still work out, try it yourself with whatever numbers you care to use. I'm not saying I defend layoffs I'm just pointing out the underlying logic of why a company might want to do them (I think it's missing important factors, but what you claim is not one of them)
This also assumes that PagerDuty's hiring process is so shitty that 1 in 5 of their hires suck. In that case there's no guarantee they'll hire better talent, lol
On the one hand PagerDuty's hiring process is shitty, but on the other hand the rest of the industry's process for identifying which heads to reduce is worse?
Fraction of employees detected as bad (and therefore fired)
p(1-q2)+(1-p)q1
Suppose you pay a discount on ability to hire new good employees as d (so probability to hire a new good employee is dp instead of p)
So you benefit as long as
p(1-q2)/((1-p)q1)<dp/(1-dp)
Or
(1-q2)/q1 < d (1-p)/(1-dp)
Plugging in
p=.8, d=.5, q1=q2=q (knowing good and bad is equally hard)
(1-q)/q < .167
Break even is then
q = 1/1.167=.857
So if you start with 80/20 distribution and after a while improve your discrimination to 86/14 then firing benefits you even if you are hiring from a 40/60 pool.
If you subscribe to this logic then doesn't it follow that you're trying to rehire only 50% "bad" programmers from a pool that is (again by your definition) newly comprised of individuals a previous company recently identified as 100% "bad"?
This not only assumes that you can identify bad workers, but that you can also identify some percent of "good workers that other companies identified as bad workers".
Shameless profit taking by executives and shareholders seems a lot more likely. Google and Microsoft providing PR cover for smaller companies to do it under the radar.
What's bad for one company is not necessarily bad for another company. For example I would think very hard before hiring any senior from FAANG (layoffs or otherwise) at a startup, especially in the pre-100 employees stage. Might even be worse during the rapid growth phase.
Maybe those "better developers" were suddenly laid off by even bigger corps? I've noticed a trickle down effect in our very-small hiring queue. I can't help but imagine mid-sized companies are getting access to devs that only wanted to work for FAANG before.
By your logic the people laid off from other companies would also be the kind that weren't worth keeping. If everyone is firing bad developers and looking for good developers, where do all these good developers magically come from?
I would not take it as a given that the individuals laid off were the worst performers at the company. It could be that they were highly compensated and deemed too expensive, or happened to work in the wrong department/business unit.
Except by the original train of thought "everyone is laying off bad developers" so if you accept this (IMO flawed) premise you're going to be in a worse position after you get through this gigantic process.
unless you have identified a company whose bad developers are better than your bad developers. And if you have developed a process to identify that I think it's time to pivot.
It's a little sickening to take your train of thought to its destination, which is that all of the developers being laid off right now are "bad developers" and will put other companies in a "worse position" if hired.
Should someone laid off as a developer simply accept they can't cut it, leave the industry, and find a job as a barista where at least they can earn some tips?
You make a lot of assumptions about what devs are being laid off in the first place. And about the absolute quality of a developer.
One company's garbage developer is another company's 10x.
That's illegal in some countries and PG operates in the UK too. I've seen a tech writer being made redundant, then the same company was looking for a tech writer 7 months later. Fired guy won big money for unfair redundancy.
I think this is a joke comment, but I've seen variations of this made in earnest over the past few months.
It's clear by now that these layoffs aren't targeting low performers. They're not targeting any individual. They are an accounting exercise with selection based on meeting a formula.
The suggestion in some quarters is that there's a kind of collective hysteria driving the layoffs amongst tech companies. Incorrect. The one thing all these companies have in common is that they all have the same pool of institutional shareholder.
The layoffs are not about saving money, they are about being seen to save money.
The institutional shareholders have demanded this be done, and the boards have complied. The big layoffs - Google, Amazon, MS, etc - are largely pointless and don't make any meaningful savings. And let's not do the "thinning of the herd" bullshit, please.
Why have the institutional investors demanded this?
1) because they've become accustomed to make obscene amounts of money and want to continue making obscene amounts of money even when things are slowing down, and they (wrongly) believe laying people off is the way to do this
2) because they can. They hold the real power.
Apple have largely avoided doing layoffs because his 40% paycut has soothed the baying suits, and Tim Cook is in a powerful position anyway. Most other CEOs, not so much...
Pagerduty doesn't have a big moat, either. They've just cut loose a bunch of people who know the intimate details of how to build a product exactly like theirs, ripe for the plucking by a competitor who knows they have a business with healthy margins.
Looking forward to more competition in this space, PD is not as cheap as it should be.
We need a competitor. I find PagerDuty to be over priced for what they are, and Atlassian is doing their best to destroy all of their services including OpsGenie which was very good until Atlassian bought them
Those are the big 2 in the space, who else is there?
Small chance you worked anywhere near it, but just wanted to say the logging in OpsGenie is amazing - I kinda love working on anything that requires me to dive into the OpsGenie logs because they are so verbose and well done.
Well, good job on it! Seriously I wish this was the standard for any enterprise SaaS tool. Debugging these things is always a pain without logs like it. Useful and performative, plus easy and intuitive to use.
My only complaint was remembering it was /log and /logs would 404 - so I just made my own redirect rule for it haha.
I think Datadog is getting all the pieces in place to checkmate Pagerduty. They've been steadily building out their Service Catalog feature with fields for on call contact info for teams responsible for services. Once they have all that in place, they just need to wire something up to a dialer/SMS/push notifications, set up a scheduling tool, and they can start consuming Pagerduty's lunch.
Datadog isn't cheap, but trying to replicate their complete functionality in house, with their uptime, would require a dedicated team and infrastructure that would be even less affordable.
Yeah, it's not cheap but there are a lot of places who don't manage their datadog bill at all because they either don't understand the pricing models like metric tag cardinality, or they use logs/APM/rum for something they should be using metrics for, or using metrics for something that should be logging etc etc.
Founder of ilert.com here. We're a Germany based SaaS for alerting, on-call and status pages. We even have an importer that migrates your data (escalation policies, schedules, etc.) from PagerDuty to ilert.
they haven't yet though, have they? why not? this isn't a new market need.
Something like AWS Pager would make a lot of sense to me...but I could also imagine it being like AWS CodeCommit or CodeDeploy, a weird and inferior service you only use when your boss' boss decided to be really cheap 3 years ago.
Challenge is that the biggest, best customers are most inclined to get something that is part of a big product suite. So you can start a competitor, but likely stuck with with low end of the market where there is the least chance of actually eeking out a living, until you get big enough for a big company to come knocking.
Would be interesting to study if there is a correlation between layoffs and remote work and employee churn. It's easier to layoff people if you don't have a connection with them.
Or you get more rigorous about what is being accomplished and realize that you don't really need as many people. Or you decide that a remote worker can be anywhere, so why not use the global talent pool? These are the dark sides of WFH for employees.
There is a huge difference between “short term gain” - ie the company is profitable and wants to be more profitable - and a company is losing money and needs to cut cost to remain solvent.
No, but by that logic they knew what was going to happen if they hired people and did so anyway. That doesn't even pass the most basic of ethical smell tests.
I don't think its quite that simple without knowing who specifically was laid off, tenure, specialty, for what reason, etc.
I cant imagine anyone would hire people with the intention of laying them off, so I can't agree with that conclusion.
I'd guess they hired with the intention of growing the company and for a myriad of reasons that didn't happen. Expansion and contraction are normal cycles in a company.
You said it yourself. They're not profitable and they lack cash flow. If they hired under those circumstances without telling employees what kind of risk they were taking, that is unethical. I don't need to know who got laid off or how long they were there to know that. Before I give empathy to rich CEOs and execs, they can explain themselves transparently. This never happens though.
So you're suggesting a company can't hire employees unless they have positive income/cash flow? Like, a legal requirement?
How do you even suggest a company tells employees of "the risk they are taking"? No job is guaranteed, risk is inherit no matter the company. They've been public since 2019, anyone can look at their financials and decide for themselves.
If someone was hired in 2019 and laid off today, was that "unethical"? What about 2015? This isn't about empathy for CEOs and execs, the business will attempt to sustain itself and there are harsh realities that come along with that.
Google had an average tenure of 2.5 years for 25 years (before the current layoffs).
So, it's bullshit reason given by an entitled generation. Basically they want High Salary, High Benefits, Psychological Safety, Activism Time using company resources, Always support progressive causes.
None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures (ROI, ROE) or have managed a profitable division in their life.
> None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures
Maybe they rightly don't care about those things when they see what blindly optimizing for ROI and other "capitalistic values" does to the rest of the society they live in.
Like Dropbox I've always felt that PagerDuty was a feature that became a business – hats off to both companies for building a business while being underestimated
> PagerDuty's Results Sparkle Amid Gloom in Enterprise Software
> For its fiscal second quarter, ended July 31, PagerDuty (ticker: PD) reported revenue of $90.3 million, up 33.6% from a year ago. That is ahead of both the company’s guidance range of $87 million to $89 million, and the Wall Street consensus call of $88 million.
> On an adjusted basis, the company lost 4 cents a share in the quarter, while management had forecast a loss of 8 to 9 cents a share. The consensus view on the Street was that the loss would be 8 cents. Under generally accepted accounting practices, the company lost 44 cents a share.
> For the January 2023 fiscal year, the company now sees revenue of $365 million to $370 million, with a loss of 10 to 12 cents a share. It earlier forecast revenue of $364 million to $369 million, with a loss of 17 to 21 cents a share.
It's kind of interesting to me that PagerDuty's stock is down 7% right now. If I'm remembering right, when Google and Meta, and maybe some of the others, announced layoffs their stocks actually went up, didn't it? Why the difference?
Imo. Google and Facebook doing cuts meant that they let go of the recent hires or allocations in recent moon projects. Their core business is intact and is likely thriving. PD cutting is a signal that the company is getting affected by the waves in the industry as in there's less startup funding
The PagerDuty CEO quotes MLK in the layoff notice:
> None of this would be possible without you, our leadership, and our board — thank you for your grit and resilience, your commitment to our customers and your support of our values and people. I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.
“the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.”
I don't think the challenges and controversies MLK was thinking of at the time had to due with cost-cutting measures by a corporate entity.
PagerDuty is.. woke. Just saying that matter-of-fact; people who work or have worked there know what I mean.
If you don't like being voluntold to record thank you messages to Georgia get-out-the-vote workers, whites-not-welcome Slack channels, and Slack bots telling you to not use "you guys" in every channel including private channels.. You won't like PagerDuty much.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadThe real curse of PagerDuty, though, is calling everything "-duty". Parental leave is BabyDuty, the training department is LearningDuty, the LGBTQ ERG is RainbowDuty, you get the idea.
Hat-tip to our veterans ERG for not going with DutyDuty, although I hope it was in the running at least.
(I mean I also kind of love it, but you know, it's a lot.)
But I guess I have to echo what others are saying, it's eye-roll-worthy some of the demonyms these companies come up with. So lame.
The Dutonians join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Mozillians, Stripes, Tweeps, Peeps, Veeps, Elasticians, SoundHounders, Vimeans, Rackers, Krakenites, Latticians and Plaids.
Kinda doesn't really sound right for names like Meta I admit, but metamates is just cringe inducing
Which contains gems like "exceptionally talented, mission driven, innovative and kind Asanas" and "once an Asana, always an Asana" — considering some of the Sanskrit usages are equivalent to "chair" or "seated posture".
"You were good chairs, but you have to go. As they alway say, once a place where you put your ass, always a place where you put your ass."
Is that an exec taking responsibility? Respect, I guess.
To your point though, seems PDs revenue and other numbers are doing pretty darn good year-over-year..
Also I understand they say to pursue other opportunities, but I think the reason for the CRO departure feels transparent enough here.
I think you can make a strong argument that they failed some sort of responsibility to the employee expectations by over hiring, but that is different.
Are boards and shareholders even dissatisfied with executives right now?
on the other hand, the alternative to "over hiring" is jobless people. At least they were job providers for some time.
That said, I think it is all beside my main question: Are shareholders unhappy with executive leadership. If I were an executive, I would be making the case (privately) that my over-hiring and subsequent layoffs were in fact GOOD for the company.
Not with prior actions, but they are with current margins. Which is why you see both layoffs and other cost-cutting measures that get less press.
If the idea is “exec heads should role out of solidarity/catharsis/whatever” then that’s a different question than “someone failed to prevent this from happening”. Apologies if I’m misunderstanding the root causes of these layoffs.
And then they don't even communicate with one another.
At least for JIRA (and SAP), there is another aspect as well: users know how to use it, and it has a halfway decent UI when compared to stuff such as Bugzilla. Avoiding training existing and new employees in bespoke software is a business value on its own.
IME for most companies it only takes a homegrown system failing once during a major outage for the budget to open up.
Thank you for all your hard work and execution - please be sure to pick up your pink slip on the way out the door.
https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/pagerdutys-people-first-appro...
(Dutonians is cheeky, but a reasonable standin for stodgy 'PagerDuty Employees')
Few things embody better the "entries in a spreadsheet" concept than laying off people to adjust a finance balance.
They are not a charity, sure, but "People first" is still bullshitting people.
1. Employment is purely transactional. Time is exchanged for money and money-equivalents. Full stop.
2. Your work is an act of self-expression. You derive meaning from your work, take pride in it, and feel a sense of ownership and responsibility in it. The work and its output bears the indelible mark of the mind and hands that crafted it. To try to separate the self from the fruit its hands bore is not only futile, but an act of alienation of human nature.
(I don't know if I'm a Marxist yet, but everything he wrote about alienation makes a lot of sense to me.)
(And I'm not saying 1 and 2 are the only 2 positions to take - I'm just saying they're the two opposing distilled ideas that are butting heads.)
Combine these with the fact that (in the US):
- you have ~no protections against being dismissed.
- there is a tremendous power imbalance between the company (which is a fictitious entity composed of many sub-units, and can just be dissolved or restructured etc) and the employee (which is O(1) human organisms and prone to starvation)
- employment isn't just the simple money and money-equivalents outlined in 1). It's access to affordable, competent healthcare. If I go without health insurance, I do not simply exchange some amortized payment plan for paying per-service. I incur a huge amount of risk if anything major happens to me or my family.
- etc
it's just a recipe for disaster and nobody being happy. We're left in this quagmire of everyone wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Personally, I think we should create a strong social safety net at the government/societal level (guaranteed income/guaranteed basics, healthcare, education, etc) and then make employment the sellsword's dream that companies seem to want it to be (they seem to enjoy being able to fire at-will more than they enjoy employees acting like family, afaict).
Japan seems to have tried out the other extreme (where the company becomes a quasi-government and acts like your paternal-feudal lord) and is now having some problems with it.
Just my analysis and 2c though.
You get the good with the bad. It's easier to get hired if it's easy to get fired.
I'd buy your point about power imbalance if it was about blue collar workers. But not for IT, where jobs are plentiful and compensation is through the roof.
Why not start a coop with likeminded folks and give yourselves the protection from being laid off?
"My employer laid me off" doesn't and adds on the implications of a lay off in your field of work, so you get to start your search after being unemployed and possibly in a field with many others looking for jobs.
If you want to work in a stable environment where you don't get fired and your promotions and raises are few and far between and planned years in advance, you go and find a job in some bureaucracy. If you want the benefits of fast-moving high-compensation private economy, it feels weird to complain that this also includes quick termination on occasion.
I’d love to find somewhere I could just spend the next 20 years, but that’s hard to find. There’s no job security no matter how good you are.
I don't see anything fictitious about it.
If your point is that a company is not a human, of course it isn't. Nothing but a human is a human.
But concretely what I mainly mean is, if a company "fails" (and while there's lots of different definitions of failing, let's here take the most extreme one, where the company runs out of money and just has to fold) then it's not like a person is dying. Debt will be restructured, employees can be laid off, it can be bought/assets sold off, and most notably the actual people who profit most off these companies are substantially protected since the incorporation protects their personal assets from liability. Their biggest threat is the loss of stock price they presumably own, and that's a risk profile they've very clearly accepted. So when a company "dies", it's typically not really death in nearly the same sense that we normally think of the word. And it's slow, with (typically) no one person being a big load-bearing point, and tons of options and exit strategies and protections for people's personal affairs.
This resiliency, flexibility, and non-corporealness means companies almost always have more power in negotiations.
Compared to a human of mortal flesh, who typically have somewhere between 0 and a few months of runway before cobra payments and lack of income start to strain spousal relationships, mortgage payments come in danger, etc. And the 1-2 breadwinners, either of whose income loss is an existential risk to the family, are single points of failure if you're laid off or fired. Are typically scrambling to lock in employment again.
If this is what most people are trying to say, I think the incorporeal language is much more direct and clear than calling them fictitious, which has other meanings
- Revenue was $94.2 million, an increase of 31.3% year over year.
- Delivered a third quarter dollar-based net retention rate of 123% as of October 31, 2022, compared to 124% in the year ago period.
- Achieved non-GAAP profitability a quarter ahead of previous guidance, expanding non-GAAP operating margin to 3% for the three months ended October 31, 2022, an improvement of 1,000 basis points over the year ago period.
My point isn't to say that employees are owed something. You are right, business is not charity. The problem is the lack of any consistent social contract. You can spend all of your time and energy executing at 110% and still be shown the door. At the end of the day, you are labor, not capital. And capital reigns supreme today. As a public company, PD has to make its shareholders happy at all costs. I'm not casting judgement on that, but no real assurance of loyalty in employment combined with no good social safety net (at least here in the USA) is a dangerous and often stressful mix. Add out-of-control inflation, increasing housing costs, and a tightening labor market to that to really ramp up the pressure on folks.
With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing
Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere
And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.
"We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."
If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.
I get that they must work very hard on building that perception because it's easily shattered, but still. It's hard to ignore how reliable it has been.
- PagerDuty is great when my budget is big and I need something ASAP - Buy vs Build.
- Home grown alternative is great when the word from Finance is the cost savings to build is now more important than the time it takes.
There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.
I see this sentiment often, however it's one of the best ways to get profitable business ideas. I start making something, and if in the course of doing so, I find a problem that I can solve (which is not related to the primary product), I turn around and start selling my undifferentiated work as its own product.
The problem usually is, when the rest of your systems are down then this one is likely to be down as well, making it useless. People are paying PagerDuty primarily for their uptime and reliability.
This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalty, remember these events.
This assumes you can identify bad workers (for some metric of bad which may or may not be ethical or sensible)
Good: P(good)=p Bad: P(bad)=(1-p)
Have a bad employee detector
P(detected as bad|bad)=q1
P(detected as good|bad)=1-q1
P(detected as good|good)=q2
P(detected as bad|good)=1-q2
Fraction of employees detected as good:
pq2+(1-p)(1-q1)
Fraction of employees detected as bad (and therefore fired)
p(1-q2)+(1-p)q1
Suppose you pay a discount on ability to hire new good employees as d (so probability to hire a new good employee is dp instead of p)
So you benefit as long as
p(1-q2)/((1-p)q1)<dp/(1-dp)
Or
(1-q2)/q1 < d (1-p)/(1-dp)
Plugging in p=.8, d=.5, q1=q2=q (knowing good and bad is equally hard)
(1-q)/q < .167
Break even is then
q = 1/1.167=.857
So if you start with 80/20 distribution and after a while improve your discrimination to 86/14 then firing benefits you even if you are hiring from a 40/60 pool.
This not only assumes that you can identify bad workers, but that you can also identify some percent of "good workers that other companies identified as bad workers".
Shameless profit taking by executives and shareholders seems a lot more likely. Google and Microsoft providing PR cover for smaller companies to do it under the radar.
Should someone laid off as a developer simply accept they can't cut it, leave the industry, and find a job as a barista where at least they can earn some tips?
You make a lot of assumptions about what devs are being laid off in the first place. And about the absolute quality of a developer.
One company's garbage developer is another company's 10x.
If they are firing people for performance reasons during their normal performance review cycle, it's not really a layoff.
It's clear by now that these layoffs aren't targeting low performers. They're not targeting any individual. They are an accounting exercise with selection based on meeting a formula. The suggestion in some quarters is that there's a kind of collective hysteria driving the layoffs amongst tech companies. Incorrect. The one thing all these companies have in common is that they all have the same pool of institutional shareholder.
The layoffs are not about saving money, they are about being seen to save money.
The institutional shareholders have demanded this be done, and the boards have complied. The big layoffs - Google, Amazon, MS, etc - are largely pointless and don't make any meaningful savings. And let's not do the "thinning of the herd" bullshit, please.
Why have the institutional investors demanded this? 1) because they've become accustomed to make obscene amounts of money and want to continue making obscene amounts of money even when things are slowing down, and they (wrongly) believe laying people off is the way to do this 2) because they can. They hold the real power.
Apple have largely avoided doing layoffs because his 40% paycut has soothed the baying suits, and Tim Cook is in a powerful position anyway. Most other CEOs, not so much...
Looking forward to more competition in this space, PD is not as cheap as it should be.
Those are the big 2 in the space, who else is there?
My only complaint was remembering it was /log and /logs would 404 - so I just made my own redirect rule for it haha.
https://grafana.com/products/oncall/
[1] https://firehydrant.com
Something like AWS Pager would make a lot of sense to me...but I could also imagine it being like AWS CodeCommit or CodeDeploy, a weird and inferior service you only use when your boss' boss decided to be really cheap 3 years ago.
It's expensive and hard to use. Lot of opportunity to someone to come in on the "pagerduty but simple" train and start taking market share away.
So no R&D, which is who would know the intimate details?
Pager duty is not profitable.
I cant imagine anyone would hire people with the intention of laying them off, so I can't agree with that conclusion.
I'd guess they hired with the intention of growing the company and for a myriad of reasons that didn't happen. Expansion and contraction are normal cycles in a company.
How do you even suggest a company tells employees of "the risk they are taking"? No job is guaranteed, risk is inherit no matter the company. They've been public since 2019, anyone can look at their financials and decide for themselves.
If someone was hired in 2019 and laid off today, was that "unethical"? What about 2015? This isn't about empathy for CEOs and execs, the business will attempt to sustain itself and there are harsh realities that come along with that.
Some groups in companies which require forced ranking and culling slyly do this.
So, it's bullshit reason given by an entitled generation. Basically they want High Salary, High Benefits, Psychological Safety, Activism Time using company resources, Always support progressive causes.
None of them care about growth or understand basic capitalistic structures (ROI, ROE) or have managed a profitable division in their life.
Maybe they rightly don't care about those things when they see what blindly optimizing for ROI and other "capitalistic values" does to the rest of the society they live in.
> PagerDuty's Results Sparkle Amid Gloom in Enterprise Software
> For its fiscal second quarter, ended July 31, PagerDuty (ticker: PD) reported revenue of $90.3 million, up 33.6% from a year ago. That is ahead of both the company’s guidance range of $87 million to $89 million, and the Wall Street consensus call of $88 million.
> On an adjusted basis, the company lost 4 cents a share in the quarter, while management had forecast a loss of 8 to 9 cents a share. The consensus view on the Street was that the loss would be 8 cents. Under generally accepted accounting practices, the company lost 44 cents a share.
> For the January 2023 fiscal year, the company now sees revenue of $365 million to $370 million, with a loss of 10 to 12 cents a share. It earlier forecast revenue of $364 million to $369 million, with a loss of 17 to 21 cents a share.
Go big or go home eh?
> None of this would be possible without you, our leadership, and our board — thank you for your grit and resilience, your commitment to our customers and your support of our values and people. I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.
“the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.”
I don't think the challenges and controversies MLK was thinking of at the time had to due with cost-cutting measures by a corporate entity.
[1]: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operatio...
If you don't like being voluntold to record thank you messages to Georgia get-out-the-vote workers, whites-not-welcome Slack channels, and Slack bots telling you to not use "you guys" in every channel including private channels.. You won't like PagerDuty much.