Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff | Hacker News Reader

Hashicorp lays off 8% of staff

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155 pointsjstx175 comments

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly.

The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next.

It sucked, but it was pretty humane.

But...

There was a leak two days before that it was coming. The dread of knowing you might be laid off is worse than being laid off. And everyone had it for 48 hours. It was brutal and the company ground to a halt.

I'm not mad at the leaker. They probably felt it was better that people know. But I don't think they were right.

I don't think telling investors about the layoff before the people being laid off is right. But I also don't think dragging it out for many days or weeks is healthy for anyone.

Also laid off by Shopify. Agree that leaking was not the right call but I would have to vigorously disagree about the “well done” lay-off bit.

Issues I observed included:

* A complete lack of resourcing for the operational teams conducting the layoffs (talent, legal, etc)

* People receiving demands to sign their severance agreements within a few days.

* Severance agreements that were outright illegal in the regions of the employees there were laying off

* Severance agreements with wildly incorrect numbers

* Severance agreements that Shopify refused to honor after signing (to the point that it’s triggered a class action in Ontario)

* Poorly coordinated equipment return. Many of us have not received return boxes for our laptops over a month after the layoff. Some have received 3 or more boxes despite having no additional equipment.

* Questionably times layoff of all personnel in Berlin shortly before a works council was established. This has also resulted in an investigation by the local authorities.

Now I’ve been through my share of layoffs—they always suck and it’s reasonable to expect large ones will have problems. But this mantra that Shopify has done a good job of the May 2023 layoff or the previous layoff last year is a fallacy being pushed by an executive board at Shopify that has become increasing unaccountable for poor decisions and exercised even worse leadership.

Unless there’s a security concern they should just let the employee keep the machine. The company I work for that did layoffs this year did that. It’s just easier for everyone involved and I imagine makes the layoff slightly less shitty for the employee.

When Kenna was bought by Cisco I never got a box to ship my laptop back (despite asking repeatedly). Instead the Cisco team bricked all of the laptops remotely.

I had only worked there for two months, so this brand new rather expensive laptop was turned into a paperweight for no reason other than to spite as far as I can tell. I still have it in my closet in case they decide we need to return it still (despite it being two years later). Anyways, if Cisco buys a company you're working for my advice is to immediately start looking for a new job.

Bricked like fried? or just can't log-in / OS scrambled / reinstall the OS?

One way to brick if it’s an Apple product is to do an MDM wipe and not disable the activation lock. It would be kind of shitty to just turn the laptops into e waste by not disabling the lock but this is Cisco that the OP mentioned so I could absolutely see that as a reality. After you wipe there’s literally no reason to not unlock the device except spite (if the device is stolen, you obviously don’t want people to be able to sell or use it again so it makes perfect sense not to unlock it). But if it was legitimately used as an employee device then the employer gains nothing but forcing the employee to deal with junk by not unbricking the device

I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been wondering what the economics of shipping thousands of laptops internationally shakes out to be. I suspect it may be a wash given the laptops are used and are likely depreciating assets.

Anybody ever manage equipment return programs? Are there compelling reasons to do this at scale that don’t boil down to data loss prevention.

The issue is that company information gets immediately sold on Craigslist or OfferUp or whatever.

In returning the equipment it actually protects the employee from compromise by creating a chain of custody for corporate data.

Sounds counterintuitive but it’s not. If the equipment needs to be destroyed — and it often is — it can be done properly.

People have no idea how easy it is to recover data from a single formatted drive.

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I’d wager to agree, I don’t play in this space much but I can’t imagine MDM being unable to handle this kind of basic use case, and also for most companies the confidential data being worth enough to be more careful than relying on MDM. Sure if you work for a compay that builds weapons for the USG you probably need to worry about hardware chain of custody. But those people are not sending their employees home with laptops anyway. In other words, if you trust your employees enough to take that device home, whatever you have on there is probably fine to be handled by MDM

I'm of a similar mind. I also think the argument of this protecting the employee, while true, feels a it weak in the face of an employer deciding to leave a laptop they didn't adequately scrub with said ex-employee.

I can't speak to FileVault, but Bitlocker and TPM can be quite easily defeated through sniffing the bitlocker key as it's transmitted from the TPM chip to the CPU to decrypt the drive on boot over the LPC, I2C, or SPI bus. Unless you enable TPM+pin for preboot auth you can't easily protect the data on a Windows PC, even with FDE.

Pretty much every company does preboot auth nowadays for Windows laptops. And remote wipe is also possible, as the side comment says.

Letting the former employee keep the laptop is the default, IMO. Although, frankly, I am not sure I would want to keep mine... sitting on a pile of a dozen laptops accumulated over the years.

And everyone watches porn on their on own devices anyway.

> sitting on a pile of a dozen laptops accumulated over the years.

low power consumption and can probably run a couple of VMs, albeit not super well but well enough

If there's a remote wipe done (one click in MDM software) then there is no key left.

The company I work for had layoffs recently and we were notified nearly 3 weeks in advance. I think they meant well but it was awful. Maybe there’s some science behind the transparency or something but it was pretty terrible to me. I would prefer that the day we’re told layoffs will happen that they do the layoffs.

I don't necessarily disagree. On the other hand, I have been in situations (both affected and not) where pretty much everyone with even the most minimal degree of self-awareness knew a hammer was coming in the relatively near future whether anyone had said anything or not.

The company where I had my first "proper" job got bought by some international corporation half a year after I joined. Not long after I noticed me and my coworkers had nothing to do, just sitting in the office twiddling thumbs all day rather than visiting clients doing work.

Since I had no point of reference, with this being my first job, I asked a coworker if this was normal. He said no, all his friends with similar jobs at other companies were working like crazy.

That's when I knew this wouldn't last long. A few months later the company got sold for scraps to our largest competitor.

I learned then that it's better with a bit too much to do, rather than too little.

How has the job market been? And out of curiosity, we’re you an engineer?

I have not loved my work’s strategy of announcing a layoff in the coming months.

Why? At least at a personal level, assuming it wasn't already obvious to you, it seems as if it could serve as a kick in the pants to start looking around. A statement that it's going to happen doesn't change the reality.

From a company perspective, it possibly makes less sense because you might prefer the oblivious folks to stay oblivious. But, personally, I'd prefer clear signals especially if it's not already blindingly obvious.

It's the opposite of a clear signal and it's not like "looking around" necessarily means more stability in sector-wide downturns. The cynic in me suspects the idea is to scare people into working harder.

It's worth considering that the desire to pre arrange those outcome emails may be why a leaker ended up in the circle of trust.

Messy layoffs may involve fewer people aware before the public announcement.

It read like a righteous indignation piece, without the benefit of being right, just to jump on the "aren't companies terrible?" bandwagon.

Hopefully they realize their products are too expensive for the value they provide beyond the open core offering. The recent Terraform Cloud pricing changes are not going in the right direction, please hire folks who understand how to price and capture value for your customers appropriately.

I hadn’t seen these and had been looking at Terraform Cloud for something recently… and as an existing Terraform user who has had to debug and examine things… that pricing is basically a perverse incentive waiting to happen.

I’ve seen a number of terraform modules that try to use many small elements for things like AWS IAM permissions or Kubernetes configMaps, it helps document their individual purpose, it makes the output a bit cleaner sometimes, and until these pricing changes was basically just a style choice… now however it’s going to cost people more… I’d estimate at least a hundred (probably more) unnecessary resources are spread throughout the various custom modules and terraform registry modules in the last terraform repo I looked at… which adds up fast.

So moving forward I’d expect to see a slow trend towards features/fixes that function with more resources rather than less… Terraform has become somewhat legendary for its glacial pace of progress (go to GitHub, sort all the issues by thumbs up, have a read, see what gets closed what gets re-requested, what gets ignored with multiple pull requests) … this pricing change doesn’t fill me with confidence in the projects long term future… and neither does laying off staff at a company that already appears to be struggling to support its existing products while simultaneously trying to grow several new ones.

Of the thousands of providers that exist for Terraform (where the implementation details you discuss would exist) only a half dozen are maintained by HashiCorp. Usually in some form of partnership with the vendor in question (e.g., AWS).

There’s no pricing based incentive structure for the type of sprawl you’re worried about. Not to say the trend you observed won’t continue. Just that if it does it’ll likely be due to composability or maintenance needs of the specific providers rather than juicing pricing.

The sprawl of providers contains a lot of stale forks and copies, and on top of that its not easy to say “let’s just use John Smiths provider to setup the root credentials of our new K8S cluster because Hashicorp aren’t fixing issues we care about.

I use a few third party providers and the quality difference is wildly variable, the update cadence is sporadic and unreliable on average, and not wanting to build scripts and tools is why maintaining my own terraform providers forked fro hashicorp isn’t really viable time wise either.

Sprawl of providers due to forks for whatever reason is a completely different issue to the resource sprawl you originally called out.

The point remains though: there’s no incentive system for the people who make the implementations decisions re resource granularity within providers to increase that because of this pricing change. For the most part they don’t work at HashiCorp. And even when they do, those abstractions are more often due to the underlying API they’re communicating with.

I think I may have been too subtle with the point about security. Hashicorp’s providers are more trusted because they come from the tool vendor, they are using them in a commercial product and running them on their own hardware as part of terraform cloud. They are all but “implicitly” trusted since you trust Hashicorp code with secrets in order to have Terraform do its job. Yes you can architect a lot of safety layers around credentials and treat Terraform as untrusted, but it’s a sliding scale.

There is an incentive for project management on the AWS, GCE, Azure, Kubernetes, and the other Hashicorp maintained providers, to not prioritise work that reduces the number of potentially chargeable resources.

The first one I thought of was the time provider. It’s a virtual module like the null provider and all it does is put a logical delay into the dependency chain to handle edge cases… it would be all too easy to start assuming that customers use this module more in order to handle functionality that would require more code in other modules. They probably have metrics on resource and module use via terraform cloud (I don’t have the privacy policy and ToS memorised)

How strong the incentive is and if it’s ever really more than a subconscious influence on Hashicorp’s code the code that customers are more likely to use than 3rd party providers… is basically impossible to tell, but the inventive is absolutely there because Hashicorp’s pricing changes have made “number of resources in use by a terraform cloud customers” into a metric that the management will be looking at… the business development, the parts of the company that are responsible for making the money happen, will be measuring this number because it’s obviously important to them now…

And once you begin to measure something as a metric the incentive to game the metrics begins.

Utility providers aside (e.g., `null_resource` which for many use cases you can replace with `terraform_data` in versions >= 1.4), I think you’ve missed the point I was making. Which is:

- HashiCorp employees directly maintain an astonishingly small number of those providers.

- For the most significant ones (e.g., AWS, Azure) they are working in some form of collaboration with the relevant vendors.

- The primary determination on what is broken out into a separate resource or not is based on the API said vendor exposes.

- For those major strategic providers I mentioned, they’ve been working to have the providers programmatically generated so it has little to no human intervention and increases the likelihood of day 1 support for any new service or features.

Incentives aside, there isn’t opportunity to affect things in the way you’re fearful of. The people with the biggest influence on the design of these things, and whether resources are consolidated or decomposed, work at AWS, Microsoft, Google, etc.

The Terraform Cloud pricing model is absurd. It does not align with how the tool is used or how it provides value. It comes off as rent seeking.

The problem is that, once you know what you are doing and understand the ecosystem, you can build a better experience using open source than they provide through TFC/TFE.

I wish I had a better idea for them…

I find this attitude entitled. They have never made a profit, and are trying to find a pricing model that allows them to exist as a company while still providing value, which is extremely challenging with an open core model. If you believe the value is not there, then do not pay for the services and continue to use the free versions.

Play open core games, win open core prizes. Companies think open core is like a shareware/trial model. It's not. Instead, you have to spend almost the same amount of resources as you put into the open core offering into the enterprise version to move the needle.

Terraform is open source. What are people paying for?

This right here HashiCorp, this is part of the problem. Layoffs are not going to solve this.

I think Terraform has the same problem as Docker: HashiCorp isn't capturing the value of Terraform, and other companies are making more money off of it by seeing the real opportunity (like Docker/Docker Inc and Kubernetes). Cloud providers are reaping the benefits, and the other TACOS (Terraform Automation & Collaboration Software) like SpaceLift and Env0 see the value in bringing more collaboration and workflow aspects. There's nothing really "sexy" about automating and governing Terraform apply/plan.

Docker is even worse in that they changed terms and started sending goons to recover what they believe they are owed. Didn’t even try to sell the value of what they offer.

I didn’t give them a dime and wouldn’t consider doing so in the future.

I find it weird that anyone thinks even the people deciding to do the layoffs think they are a solution. They are a consequence of a problem.

Terraform Core is open source and free. TFE and Terraform Cloud (aside from the capped free version) are not.

Terraform still needs bit of help when you want to run production grade:

state-locking (dynamodb) state-storing (s3) workspace/template management CI/CD functions (atlantis) secret management (vault)

and TFE gives you these right out of the box in a neatly packaged way. Of course, you can come up with different tools to meet those reqs (parenthesized above)

Azure has its own Key Vault so no need for the Vault product. As far as state, you can remotely store states in an Azure storage account. Storage container provides locking via the lease mechanism.

Terraform as a product is awesome and the azurerm backend plus azurestack provider is great. I hate Bicep and Terraform simplifies it all.

A key value store in the cloud. With locking!

But why? Free Terraform with Azurerm backend gives you this (speaking from an Azure context)

The cloud version & enterprise support.

At every F500 or other large Enterprise I've been at you need to have some sort of support and escalation model. Lotta pushes to SaaS offerings too, esp. turnkey ones where it's their cloud and you pay an all-in price for software+infra+support.

Support is a big part of what you get. Red Hat uses a similar model. You also get some niceties like state management/locking in the cloud.

I'd be paying but it's too expensive for what you get. Cost prohibitive for a small shop.

State management and locking is free with Azure and azurerm backend. AWS can use a S3 as a remote backend for free as far as Terraform is concerned.

At IBM cloud a terraform service (schematics) is offered as a freebie, I can’t imagine that someone would pay significant cash for it

Something is off with their product management. Terraform Cloud misses all the use cases, the performance, the features, and a sane pricing structure that competitors like Scalr and Spacelift understand. I gave them two years but had to move away.

There's a huge prize for the company who delivers on how to build change management (windows, approvals, etc) into the IaC workflow.

> Investors heard it first, together with employees let go. The rest of staff heard nothing formal just yet.

https://ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

I'm no expert but the numbers seem pretty good and only getting better. Puzzling.

HCP Operating Incomes (in thousands of dollars)

- 1/31/2020: -56,217

- 1/31/2021: -84,009

- 1/31/2022: -289,314

- 1/31/2023: -297,287

This line seems to heading in a direction which is never making profit.

Nearly all of the tech IPOs over the last few years share the same story. These are companies that have never been shown to make a profit, with no clear model how to. Finally these companies need to prove this is possible.

We have an entire generation of C-levels running these sorts of companies that have never worked in a non-tech bubble where money is free.

Based on my own experience in a similar company, "leadership" has absolutely no clue how to make these things happen, but enthusiastically believes they will. Leadership earnestly believes that this about surviving a tough time, and soon everything will be back to low interest rates and free money.

I suspect these small layoffs will continue for a long time and then we'll start seeing more of these companies completely collapse.

The price of software and "tech" is coming down extremely quickly. This combined with as you say, the end of free money is probably a fairly deadly storm for a lot of non-profitable companies.

Open source is involved in nearly every single aspect of the tech world and continues to dominate at an accelerating pace. Now, even commercial "AI" and even Robotics products seems like like they might also be in the crosshairs of the open source movement. This has happened in no time at all.

I've actually seen "spot" from Boston Dynamics clones which aren't as polished but would get the job done and what's incredible is, they're completely open source models and designs which people can start to manufacture from.

Sometimes I wonder if software and other areas of tech aren't far from becoming like other "boring" industries where there is a surplus of skills and workers and less demand. The days of the big money might be slowing down.

Let's see where it goes, but I completely agree with your statement about free money. It was easy to feel valuable and useful when money was free. Many people could be the CEO of a multi-million dollar start up. Now what's left is only those who actually have something to offer at an affordable price point. It will sort out the men from the boys.

> This line seems to heading in a direction which is never making profit

They are growing and the cash burning each year is stabilizing. Isn't that the road to eventual profit?

If their operating income is accurately reflected above, there is no indication they are going in the right direction. There is a period of several years where a company is in innovation mode and they will burn through investment, but there must be an inflection point where Operating Income starts increasing YoY, even if they are still operating at a loss. Hashicorp has gone too far in the wrong direction.

As near as I can tell, they've never turned a profit. That cant go on indefinitely.

It certainly hasn't been great for retail investors. I got in with a small investment right after the IPO. I swept it up with a bunch of other doggy stocks I didn't want in my account last year at one point.

It's their money. So, of course investors would need to be informed, consulted, and reassured.

There are a lot of legalities and practicalities around laying off people. It's one of those things that can get really expensive when it is not done properly. Telling people that they are being layed-off is pretty much the last step in that process. Companies don't actually have a lot of wiggle room here and have to plan for people lawyering up and pushing back.

I've been layed off myself by Nokia in 2012. It was a weird period for Nokia and there were many layoff rounds as the company was basically imploding. It sucks when that happens to you but I never took it personally.

I can't fault Nokia for the way they handled things and I never took it personally and look back on this as positive thing:

- They made me a nice financial offer based on years served.

- They offered plenty of support; including some startup funding. I ended up making use of that.

- Given what happened to the company afterwards, I'm not unhappy to not have been there for that wild ride.

Layoffs are largely avoidable: stay profitable, avoid expanding too fast, treat employees well, and (time vested) worker-owned co-op.

Argument can be made, the workers that are losing their jobs wouldn’t have these jobs at all if they didn’t expand, IPO out and etc.

They would have a different job already and wouldn't have to go through a layoff and find a job in a time where most tech companies are in hiring freeze.

You appear to be making workers out to be helpless and dependent and should be thankful for the "benevolent generosity" of corporate greed and mismanagement. Advocating Amazon is generous for giving workers the privilege of urinating in bottles doesn't have a good ring to it.

Perhaps workers should change the structures of where they work with fractional ownership and a cut of the value they helped to create?

terraform destroy --target employees

If you want to do it immediately you should add “-auto-approve” to skip the confirmation.

Employees should be singular as it’d be the type of resource. Each employee would have their own resource entry.

It’d be something like employees[id] repeated for each employee. Otherwise you’d be terminating everybody by targeting the entire collection.

comment threads like this are the beauty of hackernews

I used to work for Pivotal before its acquisition by VMWare and one of the ops person told me that the town halls became a lot less interesting once the company went public and employees are usually the last ones to know with respect to insider-trading rules and policies. While I think the layoffs could have been better but I don't see Hashicorp flagrantly violating their own principles, as claimed by Gergely. Also - hope that employees affected by layoffs find another place soon.

I’m sorry to everyone impacted. Losing your job hurts in a way that’s hard to describe and harder to recover from. Good luck, and remember this isn’t your worth.

It’s hard indeed but after what happened in other companies, I’d expect everyone in tech to be mindful about the layoff possibility. It’s been months of serial layoffs.

Personally, I wouldn’t feel surprised if I were to get laid off tomorrow.