Skip to content

CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

Technology
8 6 80
  • This post did not contain any content.
  • This post did not contain any content.

    You don't need $10 billion in revenue. You could just coast along and only hit, what, $9.8 billion? And then you wouldn't have to ruin 500 people's lives. I'm betting the CEO has a bonus scheduled if he hits this goal.

  • You don't need $10 billion in revenue. You could just coast along and only hit, what, $9.8 billion? And then you wouldn't have to ruin 500 people's lives. I'm betting the CEO has a bonus scheduled if he hits this goal.

    I hear what you’re saying, but revenue isn’t profit.

  • The no needless pedantry for one day challange: failed.

  • I hear what you’re saying, but revenue isn’t profit.

    Yes, but I dont think that's relevant. Whether gross or net, they are still ruining lives to achieve a pointless profit motive.

    Edit: relevant, not irrelevant

  • Yes, but I dont think that's relevant. Whether gross or net, they are still ruining lives to achieve a pointless profit motive.

    Edit: relevant, not irrelevant

    It's relevant in that it's entirely misleading. If profits are low they aren't actually able to just "coast along" making less revenue.

    Crowdstrike posted a GAAP Net Loss of 20 million for 2025. So a 30-50M cost savings is the difference in continuing on at all or not. There's more to it than that, obviously.

    Your point is (probably) valid once you fix your words which is what I assume you mean by saying it's not relevant. But, instead of telling people their rebuttal is irrelevant you should try to adjust your own words to convey your message more accurately.

    The quarterly profit motive where CEOs are incentivized through bonus structures to focus on short term profit goals leads to situations where the companies product or service is substandard and they make bad long term decisions that affect the lives of many including their own employees when they over hire and then can no longer afford to pay them.

  • The no needless pedantry for one day challange: failed.

    It's not needless pedantry. Revenue is the income acquired before costs, and those costs include employee compensation. Reducing the number of employees has zero immediate effect on revenue. A company with US$10B in revenue can still be losing money if their expenses are higher than revenue.

    This is important to point out, because reporting very often uses the wrong metric to describe a company in comparison to its behavior. Revenue is rarely the correct metric, and mentioning it as a comparator in this article makes the issue less clear.

    Note that I am not defending CrowdStrike here. Hell, they're the ones saying that layoffs are going to magically increase revenue:

    According to CrowdStrike, the layoff plan is part of a bigger plan to improve different operations and processes and achieve the final goal of $10 billion in revenue by the end of the year.

    ‍ “[Layoffs represent] a strategic plan (the ‘Plan’) to evolve its operations to yield greater efficiencies as the Company continues to scale its business with focus and discipline to meet its goal of $10 billion in ending [Annual Recurring Revenue].”, the CrowdStrike company mentioned in their 8-K filing.

    I'm no paragon of business, but I fail to comprehend how having fewer employees is going to make your sales go up. Maybe they're laying off salespeople, which puts the fear of god in those who are left as a "motivator"? Laying off people who perform the services they sell seems counterproductive in relation to revenue.

    They're being intentionally misleading about this, and pointing that out is not pedantry.

  • It's not needless pedantry. Revenue is the income acquired before costs, and those costs include employee compensation. Reducing the number of employees has zero immediate effect on revenue. A company with US$10B in revenue can still be losing money if their expenses are higher than revenue.

    This is important to point out, because reporting very often uses the wrong metric to describe a company in comparison to its behavior. Revenue is rarely the correct metric, and mentioning it as a comparator in this article makes the issue less clear.

    Note that I am not defending CrowdStrike here. Hell, they're the ones saying that layoffs are going to magically increase revenue:

    According to CrowdStrike, the layoff plan is part of a bigger plan to improve different operations and processes and achieve the final goal of $10 billion in revenue by the end of the year.

    ‍ “[Layoffs represent] a strategic plan (the ‘Plan’) to evolve its operations to yield greater efficiencies as the Company continues to scale its business with focus and discipline to meet its goal of $10 billion in ending [Annual Recurring Revenue].”, the CrowdStrike company mentioned in their 8-K filing.

    I'm no paragon of business, but I fail to comprehend how having fewer employees is going to make your sales go up. Maybe they're laying off salespeople, which puts the fear of god in those who are left as a "motivator"? Laying off people who perform the services they sell seems counterproductive in relation to revenue.

    They're being intentionally misleading about this, and pointing that out is not pedantry.

    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in.

    The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025.

    What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities...

    ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees.

    So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses.

    Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that.

    ...

    But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens:

    Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management.

    Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new.

    So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did...

    So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess.

    ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent.

    Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak:

  • GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

    Technology technology
    210
    1
    1k Stimmen
    210 Beiträge
    1k Aufrufe
    M
    Thanks I ll try that
  • 100R — working offgrid efficiently

    Technology technology
    4
    30 Stimmen
    4 Beiträge
    56 Aufrufe
    M
    Love 100 rabbits! They have some very interesting projects and articles.
  • The Decline of Usability: Revisited | datagubbe.se

    Technology technology
    8
    68 Stimmen
    8 Beiträge
    82 Aufrufe
    R
    I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some "Zen" in computer UIs and that "Zen" is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of "you don't understand it". Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well. And also another idea of "you dummy talking about ergonomics can't be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit". So - pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked, almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that, blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications, objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that's why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.
  • Teachers Are Not OK

    Technology technology
    18
    1
    252 Stimmen
    18 Beiträge
    219 Aufrufe
    curious_canid@lemmy.caC
    AI is so far from being the main problem with our current US educational system that I'm not sure why we bother to talk about it. Until we can produce students who meet minimum standards for literacy and critical thinking, AI is a sideshow.
  • 41 Stimmen
    3 Beiträge
    47 Aufrufe
    P
    Yes. I can't use lynx for most of the sites I am used to go with it. They are all protecting themselves with captcha and other form of javascript computation. The net is dying. Fucking thank you AI-bullshitery...
  • the illusion of human thinking

    Technology technology
    2
    0 Stimmen
    2 Beiträge
    35 Aufrufe
    H
    Can we get more than just a picture of an Abstract?
  • ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

    Technology technology
    80
    1
    486 Stimmen
    80 Beiträge
    476 Aufrufe
    Z
    Their problem with China is the supposed atheism, and that they're not christian fundamentalists.
  • UK government withholding details of Palantir contract

    Technology technology
    3
    1
    15 Stimmen
    3 Beiträge
    42 Aufrufe
    T
    Of all the partners you could have picked. Eek.