Elastic lays off 7% of employees

Software engineers tend to put their heads in the sand, once a company/product reaches a certain maturity - it's the time for it to be milked. You need less product people - hence why most companies end up outsourcing to India etc, "A.I" is just outsourcing to "agents".

Now Salespeople - they can keep selling - and as long as they're willing buyers.

this is all part of the Product Maturity lifecycle.

One day the product stops being an attractive cash cow - then it gets sold to PE & finally dies or remains a zombie.

as an engineer - your job is to know where in the product lifecycle the company|product you're currently working on is.

It's something like:

(A) To the public (e.g. prospects, customers, investors): "This is a good thing and we're going to be an even better bet!"

(B) To the remaining team: "This is tough and I feel your pain and will do better."

(C) To the laid off: "It's not you, it's me, thank you and good luck."

It's hard if not impossible to handle all three of these authentically, concisely, and in the same message. Which is why you can almost immediately find something not to like..

If you're generating benefits, there should be very few reasons you need to let go people massively.

The U.S. is suffering from office worker bloat. They have an increasing growing population of people who know very little about physical labor and most likely won't be able to adapt to upcoming AI induced mass unemployment. I only see the pain getting worse for them.

Not sure what the solution is for them here.

At the time I remember talking about this becoming a norm as CEOs follow the lead and getting downvoted heavily. Its unfortunate that we are here, but also not surprising, given how limited empathy people have for each other at times here on HN. Unless we stand for each other, this won’t change.

It is almost like the company really is just doing it to arbitrage or get rid of expensive (aka old) employees.

Yeah and psychology was considered unserious, computers were still new, civil rights was barely ten years old and most work was unskilled labor.

What is your point? Stop using "not how it was 50 years ago" as an argument because it isn't one.

I work in IT and when we needed something new we'd just implement or build it.

Now we have long certification processes for anything new, checking if it complies with hundreds of pages of policies. A lifecycle management program which we constantly have to keep updated. Governance teams that are constantly looking over our shoulders. All shit that has nothing to do with IT whatsoever.

As a result we spend 90% of time doing busywork jumping through hoops these guys set up for us. Only 5% is real technical work and a lot is outsourced or consulted out to a friend of the vice president who spends all day chatting in his office for 1000 bucks a day. Or a Deloitte guy who looks great in a suit and has no idea what he's talking about. Because companies hate employing people who have actual knowledge.

I really hate IT work now. Not sure about the rest of the industry but this change happened about 10 years ago. Until then we still were able to do actual useful work.

I can only imagine how awful a place to work it will become when they will use AI to dream up even more inhibiting policies to keep us down with.

Oh and meanwhile the CEO still goes around how innovative we are even though any innovation is absolutely killed by all this bureaucracy. Most of the time we come up with a great idea it doesn't move ahead because nobody wants to deal with years of pencil pushing to get it approved.

I can totally see how startups can do actual work with little money and we can't do anything.

In theory, a small layoff can target the least productive employees.