Okta lays off 400 employees – almost a year after last staff cuts | Hacker News Reader

Okta lays off 400 employees – almost a year after last staff cuts

techcrunch.com

50 pointsmikece40 comments

7% is the default selection in the dropdown in the layoff planning app.

So I wonder. If we ever go back to zero interest rates, will companies start hiring like crazy again, or will they have learned?

As long as there are middle managers and executives with kingdom-building ambition there will be overhiring.

This is the right answer. As long as corporations continue to promote management based on headcount instead of promoting based on outcomes/leadership in tough situations, there will only be more and more empire building.

Even if interest rates do not decline, the empire builders will only migrate from current set of tech companies to other companies that are seeing a boom.

Remember, the goal of management is not innovation or working in specific industry. It is to build larger empires and to climb up an arbitrary ladder.

The companies themselves were empire-builders. In the absence of profits, wall street had to use other metrics to assess future profitability, and headcount, as dumb as it sounds, was one of them.

What types of companies do you have in mind?

I've gotten the impression that some startups hire a bit many people (to impress investors, and friends/peers?), otherwise I haven't heard about that.

I'd thought shareholders of public companies, though, care more about revenue and mostly don't know how many employees each company has? (And that primarily middle managers are doing the over-hiring?)

If you have a link where I can read more :-)

They've learned that they can do cuts later.

If the return on investment for purchasing a s/w engineer's salary, properly scaled by the probability/risk that the investment will yield no result, beats the absolutely certain return on investment of purchasing treasury bonds and every other class of probable-yield-adjusted investment, then investors will invest in s/w engineer salaries rather than t-bills or other investments.

The idea that anyone is going to get real term returns on bonds of a government > $30T in debt already and increasing it by like $1T every ~140 days now is silly.

Learned what? When it's zero interest rates, funding from desperate investors would dwarf any possible profits you could make, and the bigger headcount makes raising money easier.

It's the policymakers and society in general that should learn. A decade of low interest rates together with outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced created hordes of useless people that add little value and feel entitled to their salary. As you get more and more of those, the value of money decreases, and inflation starts piling up (COVID accelerated it nicely, but things like housing, educational and medical were off the charts for a long while).

The hangover from those rates will last longer than most expect.

close to 0 interest rate is not something that will happen for a long time now. But as someone else has pointed out, empire building will never stop once companies open up hiring and budget freezes.

It’s always a space filling curve.

When money is cheap it's easy to fund new ventures, and the bigger companies have an incentive to raise headcounts to prevent people from taking easy money to build things that would compete with them.

The implicit assumption being that R&D-heavy endeavors should operate at constant (or increasing) headcount?

Article says it’s a 7% cut, so around 5400 employees before the cut. I’d love to know which roles are getting cut the most. I’m not sure if this is tech companies ahead of the curve using ai to eliminate work, or because tech over hired during the pandemic.

If you'd have told me that Okta has 540 employees, I would believe you. Even double that seems plausible. But damn, 5400 is a lot.

can we not do this comment in every. single. layoff. thread ?

I think its an interesting discussion to have personally.

I don't tend to think about the scale of companies in terms of number of employees. I'm often very surprised at how big or small a company is, especially based on their perceived size.

I also think this is a good forum to have those discussions on. Many people here either work in tech, have worked in tech before, and maybe have solved similar problems at similar scales to other companies before.

It's only natural to look at a company that seems to employ 10x more people than you expect and wonder "what the heck are all those people doing"

There are interesting discussions that could happen on the topic.

I think P's frustration is that saying "Wow, $Companys head count is high" on every thread is not an interesting, insightful, or discussion driving comment.

Why is the headcount high (outside the obvious)? How could it be prevented in the future? What are the ramifications of this in the future? Even as you suggest, why not respond to "What the heck are all these people doing?"

Not "Wow, headcount high!"

But I does sound like a lot of people for something like Okta. I think any comment explaining why it isn't would be interesting.

I hear this in every layoff thread.

The reality is that while there obviously was overhiring, (the generic) you do not have a true understanding of the totality of Okta's (or any of the other companies') businesses. You know what is public/user facing. That is it. Companies scale/sprawl because running a large publicly traded company is actually very complex.

Hell, run a startup and you'll understand the complexity. It's not just ship code, get paid. Shipping is often the simplest/most straight forward part.

I've worked at nothing but small start-ups/re-starts for most of my career.

I do get how/why headcount needs to balloon; thankfully I've mostly worked at places where we kept things lean and mean. For me, things stop being fun once head count gets into the hundreds!

The last place I worked with Okta, Okta routinely sent sales people onsite to meet and hang out with executives. Make this a common occurrence across a client base and your head count balloons pretty quickly.

From what I've seen it's over-hiring plus interest rates changing the criteria by which companies are measured. The market now favors profitability over exponential growth and for many companies that means slimming down.

I have yet to find cases where ppl outside of translation/content/marketing area were fired because were replaced by ai, especially software devs... Imo it's just interest rates. With low rate you can just invest in the market, get guaranteed return and afford experiments&overhiring to be competitive, on high interest, free money are gone/too risky, ao must cut everywhere

Tech must adjust to no more ZIRP.

Fat will be cut. Notice that Twitter is just fine technically with an 80% staff cut.

You mean the place that lost half its revenue, is down 70% on valuation, and its team unable to release any meaningful updates or maintain platform stability?

This is fine /s

And was so severely rate-limited that it was unusable for even logged in members for a while?

TBH, that was a self-inflicted wound, not a result of short staffing.

Ooh. I touched a nerve here.

I don't have a study, but Twitter works for me. No tech issues. As for the valuation, it's ancillary.

Large tech companies are filled with various paper pushers. They add nothing to the products, and often interfere with them, just so they can justify themselves.

Guess how I know.

It’s not a nerve. Using a poorly run company as an example of success is very bizarre.

I mean, he's right. Twitter is just as good as it ever was. In fact outside of the USA probably cant even tell there was a transition. I live in Argentina and literally nobody cared. The alternatives (mastodon, bluesky, etc) are nonexistent here.

The point is that twitter's problems have nothing to do with the fact that it massively reduced it's workforce.

The product is as good as it ever has been.

It's problems stem from a single person and many companies being afraid to be associated with them because of their increasingly toxic behavior.

Heres my anecdote: Its broken beyond all measure, the same tweets keep loading on every refresh, you click back it loses your path and resets to another random selection of tweets you have seen mixed with randos. Video has gotten MUCH WORSE to the point where I can't even finagle the damn player to work, it just randomly crashes(before I was able to get it to play with a refresh or two and clicking on the seek bar quickly), sometimes i'm clicking around and it just flat out fails with that "cannot be displayed" error leaving me in the lurch. Ignoring the fact that a lot of good people have left, it just sucks to use even if you want to see the updates of people who are remaining.

It's always been nearly incomprehensible to me, even pre-EM.

The user notes feature was the best thing Twitter ever did so I disagree that they can't release meaningful updates.

It's hard to disentangle how many of their problems are due to staff cuts vs Musk being unpopular with advertisers and the coronavirus tech bubble bursting.

The Community Notes feature was called "Birdwatch" and was launched in 2021. Elon took over in late 2022, and renamed the feature in early 2023.

The valuation fell with the market, like any other valuation.

The loss of revenue is not related to the layoffs. It's related to advertisers' personal feud with Musk. Even if Twitter had retained all its employees, it would have lost the same revenue as long as Musk stuck to his principles.

> its team unable to release any meaningful updates

You say that like it's new.

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