CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees : technology

[+] Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 154 points 11 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 50 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Say it with me boys and girls… Infinite growth is not sustainable…

[–] Spaniard@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yep, cancer isn't sustainable.

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Good analogy …. 🤯

[–] WhiteBurrito@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

Exactly.

This is why I'm happy I work for a Family owned company. They know some years revenue just won't be bigger and that's ok. I've only seen like one wave of "layoffs" and even then most of the people that left just took an early retirement deal coz they were going to retire that year anyways, so that basically fixed the re organization that needed to happen

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's fine, a human or any other life too only grow until they die.

The problem is that some companies don't die when they should.

That includes Microsoft and Apple and Intel, among others.

[–] Spaniard@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Infinite growth in living beings is known as cancer.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

On another level it's known as Sosnovsky's hogweed

OK, my sense of humor is conditioned by playing video games for like 6-7 hours to avoid seeing people sending dumb May 9 congratulations.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 35 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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

[+] Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] Album@lemmy.ca 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] leverage 8 points 11 months ago

Might be worth mentioning how much money the company spent in stock buybacks, and how much the executives were compensated in previous years. It's a shame.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Profit isn’t required to maintain a company. Only enough revenue to cover costs. Everything else is a surplus.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Profit would be appropriate if it were earmarked to offset difficult future fiscal periods, so that the business could continue to operate in lean times without having to punish employees through layoffs or failure to keep up with cost of living or cutting back on other benefits.

But we all know that's not what happens. Owners never have to experience consequences; customers and employees always do, for things that they have no control over.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Absolutely, but I would even go as far as to say that things like rainy day funds or reinvestment should be considered costs of business not “things we might do with profit”.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 3 points 11 months ago

Oh yeah, yeah - from a financial/reporting perspective, such a fund wouldn't be considered "profit" in the strictest capitalist sense.

If you consider that kind of fund to be for the benefit of customers and employees, it might be considered "socialist profit." Capitalist profit serves the ownership class. Socialist profit serves labor and consumers.

[+] TachyonTele@lemm.ee -13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The no needless pedantry for one day challange: failed.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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 departments... 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...and decreased morale, increased stress basically always reduces efficiency, to some extent.

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

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

It’s not needless pedantry because the original comment is just wrong. They probably can’t coast by on 200 million fewer dollars of revenue, while they surely could on 200 million fewer dollars in profit.

[–] thedruid@lemmy.world 72 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Layoffs.

Otherwise known as "fuck you for working your ass off to make us rich, we're taking your health care, benefits and retirement. Your rent is now in jeopardy and we recommend potatoes at , or in place of, every meal".

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I actually like potatoes, the safest food in terms of digestion and, sorry, body odors. With some sunflower or olive oil and salt potatoes are actually delicious. Add just some beef or herring, and some raw onions cut in rings (preferably the red sweet ones, but not necessarily), and maybe some thyme, and it becomes the food that should be.

Except I'm too lazy to go grocery shopping for that herring alone.

[+] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 60 points 11 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 39 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I got berated by my director for calling them clownstrike in a phone call with them after they crashed every machine in our organization with their garbage software.

[–] WagnasT@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ah, the crowdstroke.

[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I have never heard that one but I'm stealing it.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That July 2024 outage must have hit their forecast pretty hard. Best wishes to those affected :(

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner frankly.

[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

What a fucking shit company.

[–] resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Were they all in QA?

[–] mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Clownstrike doesn’t know what that is, but they will be sure to ask an LLM about it some time!

[–] j0ester@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I just read from a different article, they’re laying off 5% around the world.. and using AI instead.

https://apple.news/AwY8FlirxTvCuuFU7QKPT4g

[–] bruhduh@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Well... Time to do some strike with the crowd

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Guess getting p0vvN3d cut their legs out after all. Who's going to buy them, y'think?

[–] db2@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Probably Oracle. It's evil enough for their liking.

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 9 points 11 months ago

Don’t forget Broadcom!

[–] muusemuuse@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago

If Oracle buys crowdstrike they will lose even more customers. That is a toxic brand. Anybody who can avoid them does.

[–] mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

My money is on Clownflare, truly a match made in hell.

[–] Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

This headline... Could mean we're laying off 1 million people and the 500 people left better keep up.

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