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.
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.
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.
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...
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.