Posted by dakrone 1 day ago
They lost a lot of goodwill back then. Some of their potential customers migrated to OpenSearch and never looked back, even after they backed down and went open-source again under AGPL.
The underlying message is a lot clear - they are a public company. They have to do this and more show to net positive income to keep the market value from falling further.
Companies can keep the employees with market value drop but it gets hard with negative income. Salesforce also lost ~37% value in last 5 years but they still print billions in net income every year.
The same story with companies like Gitlab. They lost 75% market value and negative income since going public.
In theory, a small layoff can target the least productive employees.
But this remains true after a layoff and the layoff often acts a motivator for your best employees to start looking even if they weren't previously.
Usually they aren't thinking "well, glad I survived that layoff and now my job is safe forever", they are thinking "huh, is this a sinking ship? Maybe I should look around and see what else is out there..."
...speaking as someone that has been at several companies during layoffs...
Granted, in that context, you'd be laying off 5% every two-ish years until industry trends changed direction.
Large companies model attrition in their financials, and those assumptions start to break when macro conditions around the job market shift like that.
Wouldn't that suggest you need those workers more?
Can someone help me understand why sales is immune to this strategy and still is employing the “more bodies” approach. I thought we were working smarter in 2026?