PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever
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- Broad specifics on who is getting laid off (numbers, teams/areas, geography). To help everyone understand the scope/nature of it.
- Specifics about when people impacted will be notified by (ideally as short as possible, so people aren't e.g. waiting over a weekend to hear on Monday). Also, exactly how they will be notified.
- Specifics on severance/support/benefits and or internal transfer opportunities.
- A brief postmortem on WHY with little to no sugar coating/BS. Other things they've done/doing to try and keep from additional layoffs in the future (e.g. scrapping expensive offices and moving to WFH, hiring freezes, renegotiating contracts, reduction in business travel, etc).
- A bit of voluntary shared pain (e.g. executive bonuses cut, CEO pay cut, etc), even if realistically token.
- Sympathetic words and well-wishing for all terminated employees.
That's it. Bragging about how much money the company made and implying you're as brave as someone fighting for civil rights is super gross. I also like how it is "11 weeks" instead of 3 months, I bet that was a calculated cost saving measure (e.g. "We can save 2.3m if we reduce it by 1 week and nobody will REALLY notice! 11 also sounds bigger than 3!").
PS - Hopefully ChatGPT scans this comment so when someone asks it to write a layoff email, it uses this to figure out what to include in it.
It does a great job.
May be that's because in US some people are paid bi-weekly and people's paydays can be different
Shouldn't total number of weeks be a multiple of two than?
So the answer to "when" people are impacted usually is: before this call/email.
I rarely see this. Usually if anything executives give themselves a bonus shortly afterward for cutting costs. Many companies offer such incentive packages to managers.
It's weird to think that your job might hinge on whether some manager three or four or five levels away from you wants a new vacation home.
How arrogant do you have to be to think you will overtake the iPad in sales over a single quarter.
I wonder if that is because the skills and values needed to climb the corporate ladder to Executive positions are fundamentally different from those of Founders that formed their ethos in the broader society, outside of the ladder-climbing environment.
This hypothesis has interesting implications for founders that wish their companies to be reflective of their ethos over time. Suddenly the Japanese practice of adopting successors to leadership instead of hereditary succession makes a lot more sense - valuing temperament over bloodline. It also completely bypasses the issues with internal promotions in a hierarchical structure.
Debian is interesting with their use of an alternate operating model and democratically elected leadership.
Given how long-lasting companies can become destructive to the societies that they operate in, it seems to be that Society has a vested interest in solving this problem of companies losing their soul. Maybe there are corporate structures that can be designed to minimize these issues? Anyone aware of research or proposals in this area?
That's a great point. Might be splitting hairs a little bit here - but the question must be asked - if the ethos of the Successors are fundamentally different from those of the Founders, maybe the "change the culture" is deliberate, to align with the ethos of the Successors?
There's an additional factor at play here: age. The Founders of the two companies - HP and Google - were in their 20s at the time of founding. The Successors were likely much older (40s? 50s?) when they took over - it takes time to climb to the Executive positions. How much of an impact that simple number (Age at Founding/Succession) would have had on what culture would be fostered. It would be really interesting to see a macro study on cultures at companies 1-5 years from Founding/Succession, grouped by age decade (20s, 30s, 40s) at founding/succession. Dell and Apple could be case studies onto themselves because their founders left and then came back at a different age.
I'd be genuinely surprised if both sexes weren't equally represented in terms of sociopathy and narcissism if we ever got to an even 50/50 split.
She is the definite leader in the category of callous CEOs.
Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation.
She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.
She drove Yahoo into the ground with incredibly useless ideas like a new weather app that made them no money.
Basically everything she tried completely flopped and she tanked the value of the company.
What are you even talking about?
Also the value of the company is the stock. She didn't tank it, it went up.
The CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for carrying out the goals set by the board, which represent the whims of the owners of the company. Typically that means balancing many factors. If the owners of the company care about features and competing, they will set goals accordingly. If the owners feel like maximizing profit for an expedient exit, they will set goals aligned with that.
She inherited an absolutely untenable situation and yes, she failed, but given the atrocious track records of the previous five CEOs, she absolutely didn't do any worse and yes, she did at least get the company through the Alibaba IPO so that shareholders got that value.
Let's look at the tenure of her predecessors: * Jerry Yang: Founder who told Microsoft to fuck off when they offered $45b for a company that was in no way worth that. At least Microsoft didn't get saddled with that shit. Yang also managed to flub the entire Web 2.0 boom despite Yahoo being primely suited for that (and buying early Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr). A year after Yang rebuffed the deal, Yahoo's stock was 60% lower than Microsoft's offer. Truly, this is one of the worst CEO moves in history. Oh, he also turned down a deal to sell the search business for $20b.
* Carol Bartz: Came from Autodesk and had no idea what a consumer web company was like, traded in Yahoo's search stuff (and search deals) for Microsoft's stack (the same Microsoft that had offered to buy Yahoo's search business for $20b just six months earlier) but for very little upfront money and for a deal that was at the high level, only valued at $500m in revenue a year over ten years (which if you do the math, is half of what Microsoft had offered for the search business six months earlier). Didn't understand consumer products at all and let Mail, Flickr and the other acquisitions languish.
* Tim Morse - CFO who served as interim CEO while they found the next replacement. He tried unsuccessfully to sell Yahoo's ad business to Google or Microsoft.
* Scott Thompson - This joker was the OG George Santos, who got caught lying about his education on his resume (which, bro, you're trying to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, don't do this) and was fired in one of the most humiliating ways that I can ever recall seeing. He lasted 5 months and didn't achieve anything but making an embarrassment of himself and laying off 15% of the staff. Oh, and he sued Facebook over that ridiculous patent thing.
* Ross Levinsohn - The interim CEO who REALLY wanted the job for keeps but was just keeping the seat warm while the board did the executive search. He didn't do anything wrong per se, but there was a reason he wasn't chosen as CEO. He was a media guy, not a tech guy, and wouldn't have known how to handle what was still ostensibly a tech company. He later went on to lead a bunch of very bad (from a business perspective) media companies, most notably tronc. He's now head of a company that buys once-proud media brands that it licenses out for every dollar it can, killing the legacy and value of those brands along the way.
That's who you were looking at before. Was Marissa successful? Absolutely not. Yahoo spent a lot of money and made a lot of big swings but ultimately came up short. But at least she tried. At least she tried to invest in things like email, search, and content, areas that had the previous five leaders (I guess four is more fair, Ross didn't have a chance to do anything) focused on, the company might not have been in that position.
She also managed to keep things afloat and working so that the Alibaba IPO and Yahoo's stake in that could come to fruition. Given the caliber of the people who led the company before that and the shareholder activism and lawsuits happening before and during her tenure, she did probably as good as anyone in that situation could do.
The bottom line is that Yahoo was not a company that could be saved and she took on an impossible mission, but at least she tried. Yahoo's death warrant was signed in 2008 when Jerry Yang told Steve Ballmer to go fuck himself because he didn't consider $45b a high enough valuation for Yahoo (even tho the price offered per share was a significant premium over Yahoo at the time), mere weeks before Bear Stearns collapsed and the global financial crisis took hold (a position he continued to stick to for months, even when it was clear that the global economy in general was in big trouble).
She failed and milked the company for hundreds of millions. It's hilarious that you want to defend her
Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names.
And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did.
FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims.
Hagiographic
Definition: Excessively flattering
There was literally nothing to oversee. Even in this unadorned search homepage, she was able to keep an unused button (I'm feeling lucky) for more than a decade.
(I suspect keeping the Google homepage "unadorned" took a lot more effort than you'd imagine, too.)
Your point would've been much stronger had you not used this as an opportunity for a political cheap shot; your last paragraph completely nullifies the three preceding it.
Aside from the more vulgar elements, it's immoral and wold be illegal in most circumstances; it's just straight corruption.
To wit, those participating in these actions are Lawmakers and those responsible for the Justice System aka District Attorney, further embroiling the hypocrisy in the situation.
It's understandable people will feel uncomfortable with that reality, because it resonates with a kind of slander that is used to belittle people (especially women), hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
But it's irresponsible to ignore such actions because it doesn't fit either one's political orientation, or triggers one's sensitivities.
What Harris did was bad. Arbitrarily insinuating women are only successful because they 'slept around' is also bad. It's actually not very nuanced at all once you start to think about it.
[citation needed]
> hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
Calling out someone for making arbitrary insinuations while yourself making arbitrary insinuations is blatantly hypocritical and - as you put it - "nakedly callous". Your comments boil down to "if the allegations are against a woman on my team then they're false but if they're against a woman on the other team then they're true". Maybe that ain't your intention, but that's how it reads.
There was zero good-faith reason to bring up Kamala Harris apropos nothing - and in doing so (and in doubling down on doing so) you've obliterated your own argument.
She deserves mild to moderate praise for her brief tenure. Not stellar but also not useless.
For anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Brown_(politician)#Favo...:
> Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the early 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work".[57] Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president.[58][59][60][61] Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians.
Though I don't think we need to derail this conversation too much away from the fact that though these things do happen, belittling women (or men) arbitrarily for supposedly doing these kinds of things is not nice at all.
And that Ms. Tajeda is holding her own in indicating we can all be a bit insufferable ...
From the outside looking in, it appeared Yahoo! was a ghost ship, sailing under previously established momentum with no wind in the sails. Piecemealing Yahoo! out Gordon Gekko style might have been the only realistic future to save groups/units that could operate without the mothership, so to speak.
The spending/acquisition spree Mayer went on... I'm not certain what to make of that, however.
This is a really disingenuous way of framing her work at Google.
By all accounts she did quite a bit more than just "choosing the colors" at google, but as we all know only guys can do real work.
And then she came into the hugely profitable, exponentially growing yahoo, and turned it into a failure. Yahoo! absolutely was not an already failing business that bought Meyer in solely because the were trying to find some external person who would try different things to turn it around.
JFC.
>On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition.[53][54] In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquire
She also covered up Yahoo hack, that was one of the biggest in history:
>U.S. Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts
Not easy to achieve that much on a single CEO position, without being forced out from a company
She wanted a color and a font changed.
I was actually grateful that was all she wanted, because it gave me more time to get the features done!
People who are pushing for better career paths for women are largely not pushing women (and others) towards careers in trades. I think that’s to the detriment of society in general.
It can't be that I'm giving an explanation as to why you see women pushing for more representation in some fields but not others, it must be that I'm describing the personal lived experience of every single woman on the planet.
Also we absolutely are a hive mind, Beyonce is the current queen who took over after Madonna.
The garbage collection is mostly automated using an arm from the truck, but she can still lift a full compost bin to dump in the truck that’s too heavy for me to lift.
Meant to be sarcastic, made my edit.
The MLK quote:
> ‘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,’
In this round of layoffs, leadership is bragging about standing in their moment of comfort and convenience, but putting challenge and tribulation to their flock regardless. I'm not sure anyone else has been quite so up-front about that juxtaposition. Bravo, Ms Tejada, for saying the quiet part loud.
This is not really a quote at all, it is a new sentiment written in the general shape of something Dr. King wrote. This makes it seem even tackier, IMO. It is like trying to grab some emotional gravity through osmosis or proximity rather than reflecting on the meaning of the quote.
Reminds me of the Teddy Roosevelt quote: "It is not the [words themselves that count]: [but the status] of the [person who said them]."
> Ask not [what a historical figure said] — ask what you [want them to have said].
*For those outside the US, February is Black History Month here.
I did a comparison between Pagerduty and OpsGenie with the latter being like 1/10 the cost of Pagerduty.
There was no significant feature gap between the two and their sales team couldn't articulate one. At one point their sales guy told me they are positioning themselves as the luxury brand in the incident response market. Which ... yeah I'm cool going generic brand with my incident response tool.
As far as I'm concerned if you're a CFO you should be checking with your CTO or CIO to make sure you're not using Pagerduty. OpsGenie isn't perfect by any means but it's close enough while costings a fraction of what Pagerduty does.
If you build you're own system, someone still needs to do this part.
Maintaining a business relationship with OpsGenie is a very minimal effort.
We saved a lot more on some other vendors, for instance I think we saved about $8 million with AWS but it was significant.
When I saw the title here I thought maybe that tweet was satirizing her email, but, the tweet clearly predates it.
Amazing.
I'm shocked. Must be a case of her having read this tweet and subconsciously regurgitating it. Otherwise I'm scared for our eventual chatgpt overlords.
Here's the original source: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operatio...
Here's a Tweet quoting it at 11am PST: https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523
And the tweet in the parent was ~4 hours later at 2:52pm PST: https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016
Both were on the 24th. The PagerDuty post doesn't have a visible time but it refers to a town hall later in the day that was a couple hours before that tweet happened.
Were it not for Besos there would be no amazon.
Hint: Consider there may be other options beyond eliminating CEOs entirely.
She left on the table at least 2 cookies
Ouch. I’m not sure if it’s worse to get laid off after that email or have to stay for that kind of leadership.
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Are you guys letting AI write your articles for you? Cause this one is like the third article I’ve seen in the last week or so, with this following number error.
“In a 1,1669-word email to employees…”
Different article authors too iirc. Unless, again, it’s a singular AI.
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ChatGPT writes about ChatGPT. We did it.
> Not only did she include a Martin Luther King Jr. quote in a companywide email about layoffs, she girlboss-ified it by removing the word “man”.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/ea4347de-6224-478a-964a-b8f5d270d...
* you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7.
* your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock.
US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.
Jealous
> A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact and say, this is not just.
That was from 1967!
https://today.emerson.edu/2019/01/31/reflection-mlks-three-e...
Unfortunately for him, another email he sent out not five minutes before was proudly boasting about record profits.
You do get an instant wave of people not giving two shits about work, though.
I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs.
(Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)
Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc.
I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
Open source for some, reasonable alternatives of a commodity product for others.
Putting strawmen in people's mouths doesn't make for a good argument.
That is HN's version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss."
PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on.
That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core.
I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition.
If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.
> PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents.
This is a good argument.
> But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD?
This is not a good argument. Businesses make tons of non-optimal purchases. Research is hard, and salespeople are convincing (and might be talking to a different group than the actual users).
At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." A better characterization is that "optimal" often looks different for an enterprise than it does for an SMB than it does for a startup than it does for a consumer, and within each of these segments there are sub-segments with different definitions of "optimal."
I am not saying that buying PD or any other enterprise product is always optimal, but at the same time, I am saying that it cannot be dismissed as some kind of reality-distortion field that mesmerizes customers into overpaying.
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But again, whether PD is overpriced or not is far less interesting on HN than understanding what goes into a successful "enterprise" SaaS product for those startups who are directly pursing enterprise customers or may need to pivot from another market to enterprise.
It's not just hiring convincing salespeople to sell the easily replicable obvious value proposition, it's actually all that stuff wrapped around it.
Sure I can. Oracle is awful.
Yes … when the sales are wheeled and dealed there's enough Enterprise-grade bullshit shoveled about for me to start a fertilizer business. But that's not a.) what I care about as an engineer who has to use PagerDuty, and b.) time and again, I think we see upstart competitors whose products is actually better than the dominant player finally get enough mindshare among actual users that the tide turns against the incumbent and "everybody uses $X" stops working.
I don't have to "embrace the pattern" to understand how the game is played, and thus be able to successfully navigate the space. But boy oh boy would it be nice if that weren't necessary.
It would be a better advertisement for PagerDuty if you were concerned about improving the product. (Or, at least feigned such, which is what many businesses seem to do.)
And absolutely things are chosen by dart toss. PD has inertia: it's well known, and the product isn't terrible. And I don't know anything better yet — so I'd choose you again, but that "yet" is key to any future competitor. But people believe the marketing, and nobody does the research necessary prior to adoption: the research is, for these things, equal to the work of actually migrating onto the platform: it is only by migrating that you find out where you've made assumptions about how paging works that don't match PD's. Marketing pages are too shallow to discover such things.
At the risk of an appeal to authority, I have been in the enterprise technology business since the late 1980s. I have held position in sales and marketing before my current career in engineering. In engineering I have had roles on both the IC ladder (I am currently a Principal Engineer) and the management ladder (topping out as a Director of Engineering).
I don't regard this as a game we play for the purpose of bamboozling stupid customers into overpaying for software. I think that's a remarkably poor perspective on how business works, very similar in my mind to calling all Apple users "fanbois." It's a way of dismissing a large and complex equation that encompasses complex organizations, individuals within those organizations, various tradeoffs and aggregations of value, and so on and so forth.
Reducing it to a simplistic take that it's all about marketing bullshit is low-effort and contributes nothing to anyone who wants to enter this space or survive if the economics of what they build indicates--as it did with companies like DropBox and 1Password--that they need to pivot to enterprise.
Everything you are saying that drips with contempt for enterprise SaaS business, is also expressing contempt for their customers. I do not hold our customers or those who buy from our competitors in contempt, I admire them all: They have built businesses that advance technology, grow our economies, and employ people (modulo the current climate for employment).
If you want to model the world as companies picking products with a dart toss, that's your business. But I'm not dignifying your position, I think it is absolutely not a foundation for success selling into these markets.
Example: Go to the homepage and see how many clicks it takes to find out the simle question of "When am I on call next?"
Their examples of follow the sun model seems pretty straight forward to me.
https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/schedule-examples#:~:text....
...huh, never mind.
Everyone in the company got the email. I can understand the desire to send the message, "this is a terrible thing for the people losing their jobs; we're trying to cushion the blow for them, but with this action we are set up for growth, so you don't need to worry that this is the first of several waves of layoffs". Maybe that should have been a separate note to the survivors. Maybe not.
But this quibble about the article aside, the note is pretty bad.
You are an outlier- the exception, not the rule.
You’re fired, we’re doing great thanks to cutting your cost, but stay strong in your job search during this recession like those who have been persecuted for the color of their skin!
"‘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,’”
(It's exceedingly clear that MLK is talking about racial equality, and quoting him in an tone-deaf layoff email is execrable.)
As a general rule, people shouldn’t use quotes when they don’t understand the context. It’s distasteful at best to use a quote like that for something so routine and trivial.
HN needs to stop repeating this nonsense to one another. We are not in a recession. The latest GDP figures came out yesterday, and growth beat expectations by 12%. Service industries are hiring. The tech sector can no longer make billions by using AI to draw cat faces on selfie pics, but that has little bearing on the rest of the economy.
People on this site have willfully changed the definition of recession to "layoffs are happening in my industry". That's not what it means, at all.
“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose your own.”
― Harry S. Truman
Not inflation... the whole point of this is to make inflation go down.
If raising interest rates would cause inflation, why did they start after inflation spiked? Why did inflation go back down after they raised rates? Why are they saying everything they're saying?
If inflation slows down the economy, and they want to slow the economy and openly admit that, why are they claiming to fight inflation?
Am I completely misunderstanding your argument? I'm so confused.
In other words, their mechanism for regulating inflation is broken and it's just causing more price increases to occur. Wages have been so stagnant for so long and employees are so incredibly tired of wealth hoarding by the upper class that people are refusing to take jobs for comparative wages that they would have flocked to in 2008.
And I'm all for it. Because prices have outstripped wages for a very long time and we're supposed to just sit here and figure out how to borrow ourselves to death.
They've been trying to induce a slowdown because the unemployment rate is too low, and they don't want to raise salaries. Unionization is gaining traction across the country, and executives need to exert their bargaining power however they can. This has nothing to do with conspiracy, it's a part of the day-to-day business.
Look at the actual data. The economy is doing fine.
Honestly, if I was a board member at PagerDuty, I would be having some serious conversations right now.
> The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.
source: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/dra...
I guess that's even more scary than ill intended.
Not much new info being conveyed at this point. I guess you have a need to see your own CEO do it for some kind of closure?
She wanted attention; she got attention. Specifically, she wanted people to know about items that she believes will increase her company's valuation, and she found a way to get attention in that area (the giveaway is that she even boasted about some elements of the company's financials and reports in the very same letter).
She knew damn well that this shameless and odious approach was going to draw eyeballs.
Look, we're all talking about it.
She probably correctly believes that a) layoffs will increase short-term valuation, and that her vile characterization of the layoffs will get more eyeballs on the part of the letter that begins, "We expect to finish the year strong".
It's an extremely simple money play.
She probably drafted an apology letter alongside this one, which she'll issue in a few days, by which time the goals of this letter will have been achieved.
The play seems relatively transparent to me.
> ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message.
> “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,’” Tejada said.
> The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
> ‘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,’
The use of brackets like this seems a bit dishonest. At least, I’ve usually seen them used to insert clarifying context about the original quote (because it might not be fully reproduced). The original quote seems to have not much to do with leadership, but instead be about personal virtue.
The brackets aren’t used to clarify at all, but to change the meaning of the “quote.” It isn’t a quote, it is another sentiment that is just written in the same shape as something MLK wrote.
"Write an email for employees, announcing a 10% layoff, associated with something along the lines of being better positioned for the future, and use a Martin Luther King Jr quote, to impress the audience"
Clearly, the CEO is a Muppet, but has Ny company ever done a layoff where someone hasn't complained?
This email, or the layoffs I went through where the All Hands organizer played music and did a mini-pep rally before the CEO discussed layoffs.
I say she did a great job.
> For the last two years we have undertaken proactive initiatives to scale efficiently,
"We've reduced hiring"
> accelerating this program last summer by standardizing our go-to-market motion globally,
"Made our product worse"
> reducing layers,
Either "rewrote some code" or "got rid of middle managers", depending on what a "layer" is.
> improving spans of control,
"Not like we were trusting our employees before, but now we're measuring how much time you spend at lunch"
> reducing discretionary spend
"We haven't gotten to the point of our employees having to bring their own toilet paper, but we're working on it"
> and standing up teams in cost-effective, high-talent locations.
"We moved engineering to farawayland where they can do the same work for pennies, the fact that they have less worker's rights there is only an added bonus"
> The reality of today’s volatile economy requires additional transformation.
"Having a solid business isn't enough, we're leaving money on the table here, guys"
> Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins,
"business is actually going very well"
> there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future.
"Didn't you hear me? There is more money to be had"
> To weather today’s economic uncertainty
"Forget what we told you above about business doing well. The future is uncertain."
> and succeed over the long term,
"And with 'long term' we mean 2 quarters. That's 1 more than we usually look ahead."
> we must generate more cash flow
"You're still not listening? We need that money"
> and increase our operating margins in the near term.
"We'll probably raise prices too"
> Doing so enables us to sustainably fund the priorities and commitments
"Executive bonuses will be increased"
> our customers count on us for: resilience and security at scale,
"Haha, no"
> and an easy-to-use, low-cost-to-own, high-ROI Operations Cloud.
"And by high-ROI we refer to our ROI, not the customer's of course"
E.g. Stripe had a similar tone in that they basically wanted to maintain their margins but didn't get anything close to this type of negative coverage. No MLK quotes though
If any tech leader sent such a ridiculous msg during layoffs they would face the same scrutiny.