WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 33809631

Elastic.co lays off 13% of team

97 points| clone1018 | 3 years ago |elastic.co

69 comments

order

TylerE|3 years ago

This seems really tone deaf:

“ As hard as this is for all of us, our future is bright. I look forward to working with you to propel Elastic into that future as we make Elastic a generational brand”, especially since he earlier says those being laid off may not even know that for up to 24 hours.

version_five|3 years ago

I've had this happen somewhere I worked: "ceo: well be laying off a big portion of the company, you'll find out who tomorrow". I don't know the right way to do this, but I know this is the wrong way. What possible good does this achieve?

semiquaver|3 years ago

It has stiff competition, but I’m certain that “Elastician” is the worst company demonym I’ve heard so far.

dohdhdaa|3 years ago

May I introduce you to “Metamate”

adharmad|3 years ago

There is Tweep

mherdeg|3 years ago

Is there a db of these somewhere? What does IBM call its staff? Oracle?

404mm|3 years ago

Does Redditor count?

miduil|3 years ago

If you scroll down to the very bottom there is a big "we are hiring" icon. I wish everyone who was laid off all the best. I wonder if Amazon with it's elastic fork will try to acquire some of the talent.

bigtunacan|3 years ago

Given that Amazon is also laying off and the CEO recently stated that they expected additional staff reductions into next year it seems unlikely.

gaws|3 years ago

> If you scroll down to the very bottom there is a big "we are hiring" icon.

Layoff expensive workers to hire cheaper ones.

drdo|3 years ago

You don't need to scroll down at all, at least on desktop.

It's right there at the top, very prominently.

myth_drannon|3 years ago

Reminds me of November/December 2008 when absolutely everybody was laying off. I have a sudden urge to open ZeroHedge.com and buy some gold bullion.

fear91|3 years ago

Just use self hosted OpenSearch. It’ll save your company millions anually if you are large enough.

bogomipz|3 years ago

>"I didn't take this decision lightly. Since becoming CEO, I have had the opportunity to spend time with Elasticians around the globe."

One bizarre side-effect of these layoff announcements is learning all the cringe-worthy names these companies have for their employees. Elasticicans? Tweeps? Stripes? I'm guessing this is a SV thing? Do these infantilizing names actually do anything to build company culture?

kthejoker2|3 years ago

Did it start with Googlers? Or maybe Teamsters?

EdwardDiego|3 years ago

Not even eight months ago they were recruiting hard.

Does no-one plan beyond the next quarter anymore?

gk1|3 years ago

You'd make Bloomberg-level of money if you could accurately predict the economic climate eight months from now.

manuelabeledo|3 years ago

A couple years ago, I was evaluating moving our ES clusters to the cloud. I got quotes from both Elastic and AWS.

How much more Elastic wanted than AWS, didn't make sense, not even factoring support and hosting. It was like almost twice as much.

Morally, I get why I should have gone with Elastic. Too bad businesses aren't about morals.

sk55|3 years ago

In all fairness, there is more than just cost when choosing a provider. Elastic has had higher uptime than the AWS alternative. I had to switch off AWS Elasticsearch hosting because it kept going down.

nirmalc|3 years ago

If your use case is faster search - ES cloud is way more efficient/performs better than AWS. They manage their cloud stack pretty well. I hate those `amazon.internal` stack trace in thread stack ( when you try to troubleshoot something in prod) as you have no access to code to see what it even does.

apicaesar|3 years ago

True, last I check the gap wasn't too big anymore, I think even comparable for certain machine configurations.

One thing is that the "mainstream" ELK develops at a much faster speed than the OpenSearch fork, and a lot of the nice features in new versions are nowhere to be seen in OpenSearch.

elforce002|3 years ago

Well, companies are doing it to avoid a PR disaster. It's a business move. The big players took the hit from the public (fb, amazon, etc...), then we do it and the public can blame it on the current climate. Let's not forget the Feds literally saying businesses have to ramp up firings to slow down inflation on one side and the current government on the other side is trying to tell the public they are creating more jobs.

The cynic in me is telling me this is all planned by big tech and government. Heck, Zuckerberg waited to fire his staff a day after the midterms were done. This is no coincidence.

goodroot|3 years ago

Lots of great people there. Condolences to those impacted.

It's disappointing. Elastic had it. Unforced errors abound.

nemo44x|3 years ago

Yeah it’s amazing how much potential that company had and then blew it with a series of questionable business decisions. They had a ton of really quality talent too but much of it has moved on the last few years.

Pretty much everything MongoDB did right, Elastic did the opposite and failed. Instead of being the best place to run Elasticsearch, one of the most popular open source projects ever, they blew all that brand equity on a series of mediocre solutions that were outcompeted.

gk1|3 years ago

Considering the widespread layoffs even at superb places like Stripe, I'd guess this has more to do with overhiring during "the good times" than with product-related decisions.

razodactyl|3 years ago

There’s a “we’re hiring” banner at the end of the article… oops.

uglyrumours|3 years ago

Other things I have heard: 1) the claim is that lower levels of management "were not told". I suspect that is not completely true, since many people's projects had new people parachuting in the last week or two. 2) Survivors are wondering if the selection process was "random". 3) Survivors are wondering if there will be another layoff in January.

uglyrumours|3 years ago

Here's a question: why on earth didn't Elastic offer a voluntary separation package? They probably would have gotten at least a good chunk of people to accept, reducing the need to behead 13% of the company yesterday.

re9|3 years ago

Nice touch, with empathy and such. Blogpost saying we're firing our people along the ad "We're hiring"...

404mm|3 years ago

How many heads does it come up to?

bamboozled|3 years ago

Would be so nice to stop seeing these articles?

clone1018|3 years ago

It's interesting to think about how much these types of articles help lead to the panic of a recession that ends up making a recession happen.

rrix2|3 years ago

yeah, it would be so nice if our industry hadn't over-hired for the last five years on the promise of everlasting ZIRP and trickle-down funding from adtech giants. alas, here we are.