New Relic CEO scolds employees in internal memo
oregonlive.com
oregonlive.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2020/06/29/layoffs...
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.
> “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?
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.
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.
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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The winning move here is to say the right things with a somber face regardless of the strategy you intend to execute.