Elastic lays off 7% of employees
elastic.co231 points by dakrone 2 days ago
231 points by dakrone 2 days ago
Makes me sad to read it as an ex-Elastic employee.
AI is used to justify the redundancies, and the company still expects to grow in this fiscal year. In the SEC filling the specifically mention more “head count” in “go-to-market” roles [1].
> a reduction of approximately 7% of our workforce
> Advances in AI, automation, and technology are reshaping how work gets done, and we're changing with them. (…) That's what this reorganization is for: a simpler structure, with fewer layers, less complexity, and less friction.
> The changes we announced today are a sign of confidence in the business, not a retreat from it. We continue to invest in key growth areas and expect total headcount to grow year-over-year this fiscal year [the SEC filling says “ The Company plans to continue hiring in key strategic areas and locations, including continuing to grow headcount in customer-facing go-to-market functions, and expects total headcount to grow this fiscal year compared to last fiscal year, as it continues to invest in future growth opportunities”]
[1]: https://ir.elastic.co/financials/sec-filings/sec-filings-det...
>more “head count” in “go-to-market” roles
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.
What’s also sad is looking at the quotes you posted GAI was obviously used to churn it out - it’s a simulacrum of thought, signifying nothing. This is what the CEO is trying to claim will save the company, and unfortunately this is the sort of mediocrity relying on LLMs gives you.
ex-Elastic here, too. It was a great place to work pre-IPO. It seems the culture has shifted a lot since the IPO, though.
Might've been better if AWS and GCP didn't steal your goodies and take so much meat off the bones.
Fair source > Open source.
Trillion dollar companies need to pay to play.
Open source removes your jobs, your exit equity, and transfers it to the hyperscalers. Sucks that it happened to you guys.
Elastic isn't Open Source though, they abandoned Open Source. It seems to me like this is an example of non-Open Source whatever licensing causing job loss. Or just plain bad leadership.
(Elastic employee here) Elastic is in fact open source again.
- Was originally open source Apache license
- Switched to non-open source Elastic license in Jan 2021 [^1]
- Switched to open source AGPL license in Aug 2024 [^2]
Not to defend the license change(s).
[1] https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change
[2] https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...
I feel so sorry for you guys. You've been totally fucked.
You should have started with the Elastic license and kept it.
Because you switched in 2021, it was too late to stop Amazon and Google from fucking you and stealing your hard work, and even going so far as stealing your name and marketing.
Then the pro-hyperscaler "OSS purists" pulled out their pitchforks and called the Elastic license evil. As fucking if.
It seems plausible the people protesting your Fair Source license work for AWS, have stock in AWS, or just want to cause you grief because they know they have you cornered. They already have an OSI pure version of your product and you're stuck between a rock and a hard place with no real leverage to maximize the return in your core product and labor.
Such a shitty place to be stuck in. That's why other, newer database vendors start as Fair Source from day one. Or just stay entirely proprietary.
Switching back to appease the angry mob happened because too much of the "open source community" doesn't understand how much they're getting fucked over by big tech. They see you guys as the evil ones, which is totally wrong. You're the ones being reverse Robin Hooded.
Why isn't AWS itself open source? It encrusted a lot of OSS infrastructure. Why do they get to steal your product and make more money than your company on your labor? Same with Redis and all the other stuff they stole.
Let me rephrase that - why do they get to directly put their grubby hands into your rightfully earned revenue stream? One which should be yours entirely? Why do they get to suffocate your company's decade plus of hard work and pilfer those cloud revenue streams for themselves?
And all of this is stealing. Because they're wrapping stuff other people and other companies built in a proprietary ecosystem offering meanwhile starving the original authors of oxygen. Just because the letter of the OSI law doesn't say that doesn't mean that isn't exactly what's up. They're the ones who authored the rule book.
This world should be more pro-startup, pro-smaller company. As an ethos and as a means of maximizing return on labor. But the ICs in this space seem to pledge allegiance to the giants that are doing their careers the most harm.
Elastic layoffs happened because Amazon and Google choked you to death. Amazon and Google layoffs happen because they're commoditizing the labor force and using their might to devalue labor.
To everyone else who clings to OSI and open source purism - do you guys know who wrote the OSI and sits on the board? It's literally right in front of your eyes.
Big tech is stealing from you, devaluing your careers, and in the same breath demanding that you license over your labor to them for free. They're killing startups left and right, leaving no oxygen left in the ecosystem, moving into healthy industries and dumping on them in search of endless growth, and they're destroying society (tracking, attestation, age verification, platformization, the algorithm making everyone insane, etc.) to maximize their own profits.
We've got twenty six years of regulatory capture and lax antitrust enforcement to blame for this. They bought the regulators. OSI purism is how they pulled the shroud over your eyes - without paying you - to keep you blind to what an invasive species they have become.
It was.
The idea behind free software was the software was free, but you'd sell the support -- installation help (floppies even)
Elastic were on board with that, and it worked
Until a larger incumbent decided to do their own support (fine), but then sell their service.
Not even a price thing. Far easier for me to spend $50k a year with aws than $5k a year with elastic because we already have a relationship and framework with aws.
They've switched to AGPL, which is a great license, they were just too late, they're the poster child of why AGPL is so important (whether it's another or not is another question)
They switched from open source when big tech stole their goodies.
It was too late to stop it.
It’s been five years since they changed their license. Today’s layoffs cannot be blamed on AWS and GCP. It’s been years and they have differentiated products now.
Big tech didn't steal anything. Elastic used open source software as the foundation of their product (specifically, Apache Lucene), and released their product as open source. The license allowed Elastic to do so, and likewise, the license Elastic used allowed "big tech" to use Elastics product. If it wasn't for open source, Elastic wouldn't exist.
Then, Elastic whined about Amazon using Elastic under the open source license they used to build their product. They whined that Amazon wasn't contributing enough. So they switched the license to their product. So Amazon took over maintaining the open source software. Doing exactly what Elastic asked them to do.
Sorry, but everything about Elastic, and especially this most recent announcement of layoffs, scream "bad leadership".
Don’t be a shill for big tech over elastic in this fight. AWS was using elastic’s trademark and aggressive advertising to push their managed elasticsearch. They left elastic with no economically logical choice. MongoDB and countless others also made similar choices.
AWS was super greedy and honestly I’m glad elastic even survived their aggressive tactics.
For the longest time, elastic didn't even have a cloud offering. And by the time they did it was far far too late.
In the early days AWS elastic offering was very weak. It had lots of foot guns and operational problems. We tried hard to use an more native elastic offering and would have preferred it, but it didn't exist.
The anti AWS rhetoric is exhausting.
The fact AWS crappy hosted ES gained any market share is more a testament to how bad ES sales practices were than anything else.
ES really missed the mark by not having a simple, self-serve sales model and instead going all in convoluted "contact a sales rep" enterprise model no one wanted to deal with.