Skip to content

CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

Technology
8 6 0
  • 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:

  • Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App

    Technology technology
    11
    1
    122 Stimmen
    11 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    L
    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.
  • 551 Stimmen
    26 Beiträge
    1 Aufrufe
    S
    100% agreed. Here's a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
  • WhatsApp provides no cryptographic management for group messages

    Technology technology
    3
    1
    17 Stimmen
    3 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    S
    Just be sure to add only the people you want to be there. I've heard some people add others and it's a bit messy
  • 534 Stimmen
    31 Beiträge
    1 Aufrufe
    ulrich@feddit.orgU
    If you want a narrative, look at all the full-price $250k Roadster pre-orders they've been holding onto for like 8 years now with zero signs of production and complete silence for the last...5 years?
  • Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

    Technology technology
    23
    1
    171 Stimmen
    23 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    L
    i can this for essay writing, prior to AI people would use prompts and templates of the same exact subject and work from there. and we hear the ODD situation where someone hired another person to do all the writing for them all the way to grad school( this is just as bad as chatgpt) you will get caught in grad school or during your job interview. might be different for specific questions in stem where the answer is more abstract,
  • Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings

    Technology technology
    26
    1
    103 Stimmen
    26 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    T
    Edit: no, wtf am i doing The thread was about inept the coders were. Here is your answer: They were so fucking inept they broke a fundamental function and it made it to production. Then they did it deliberately. That's how inept they are. End of.
  • 14 Stimmen
    2 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    J
    This is why they are businessmen and not politicians or influencers
  • Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

    Technology technology
    4
    1
    0 Stimmen
    4 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    S
    Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry