OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce | Hacker News Reader

OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

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96 pointsjussivee107 comments

I'm always amazed with how big tech companies get in terms of employee count. I once wandered the engineering area of the HQ (with an employee) of a FAANG (MAANG sounds... silly) and made a tick mark on my notebook when I saw someone actually coding - or at least having code on screen. There were over 1200 people on the development team and at the time most worked out of HQ. So... when I was done walking, I had 22 tick marks. Lots of email, lots of documents, and very little programming.

Yes, but haven't you heard that productivity has gone up since we've moved to WFH? You'd probably have like 30-40 tick marks now if you toured all their homes.

Yeah i don’t think this is true though people love to say it is true

Productivity is a very subjective term

Are you making more dollars for less money? This is productivity, everything else doesn’t matter

I think a developer productivity is measured by the eng output, not the market pricing of the goods they sell.

Im pretty sure LOC/person went down a lot with the pandemic across all companies.

I would love to make more dollars for less money. I think.

Its almost like the practice of software engineering in a large organization involves (much) more than writing code?

I get the sentiment here. But I can understand why someone would want to optimize towards writing more code than dealing with organizational politics. I guess the tradeoff would be to go to a smaller company.

Everywhere I've worked (including for MAANG companies), software engineering was best done by a combination of three things, listed in priority order:

A) thinking

B) programming

...

Z) meetings

The meetings contained something useful maybe 1/10th of the time, lasted maybe 4x longer than they should have, and involved maybe 20x more people than they should have. Those numbers skew higher the larger the organization.

Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

May we all be so fortunate to have tasks defined so specifically and selected so precisely that one can accomplish them only by thinking and programming, and find satisfaction in doing so.

Heh. I knew I’d get downvoted.

I’ve generally been on the most productive teams in my segment of the business. The biggest differentiator seems to be that my teams had devs that knew when to ask questions and what questions to ask. This is probably the most important skill a dev can learn.

The solution to ambiguous requirements is not meetings. At least, not in the usual sense. It’s knowing who and what to ask, and occasionally meeting with customers or knowledgeable stakeholders.

22 is less than 2% of the engineering effort. I agree that code part of the engineering effort, but if your business is software driven, you would think it is more than 2% of the effort. A lot of the adjacent roles to an engineer, i.e. documentation, devops, sre, all have code involved, too.

Many of them are Software Bureocrats - their job is to keep organisational processes running with the goal of avoiding expensive mistakes. They are a lot like corporate lawyers. They don't create new stuff, but they save your organisation from descending into chaos.

Actual engineering still happens at the heart of the organisation, that heart is just shielded by the gigantic army of software bureaucrats.

More of them are akin to social workers enduring the morale never gets to expectant of rewards and the corporate sociopathy never disrupts too much

> (MAANG sounds... silly)

and mangy.

Big MAMAA?

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

>Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy exactly what they were going to anyway.

Perhaps they have to pay out some SLA type stuff to advertisers. However I don't think there is a single outage of a major tech company that has lasted 24hrs in the last 20 years. Major tech company is of course debatable.

Facebook does not make money selling physical items though, it makes money on page views and clicks. If the site is down, they lose all of those ad views and clicks, they are gone because the time needed to view them and all of the other ads is gone.

I have not worked in the ad space so I'm certainly ignorant of the day to day mechanics. How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads? Just in a different timeframe? Is the cost of an ad at 6PM really that much greater than at 10PM?

IME SLA's rarely pay out enough to really make it worth pursuing. However I have gotten a couple payouts from SLAs for companies i worked at in the past. I didn't think it was worth the time but I got paid either way.

I get they have profit models that "prove" they lost money but they all must be based on an assumption. The assumption that there was only this one chance to catch the attention of the customer and never again. To me this is a very big assumption that simply cannot be proven and is probably wrong.

Total Time Spent, Total Post Impressions, Total DAP are both easy to measure and relatively predictable week over week, so its fairly easy to see regressions. Outages definitely impact consumer apps, which makes sense if you stop to consider that a large chunk of time spent on platform comes during the downtime between other activities. Probably less so for commerce apps, especially ones that sell staple goods.

>How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads?

Why do you assume intelligent people who make decisions based on this haven't tracked spend by week, spend by month, regression models and the five hundred other ways to try and model this? We're talking about trillion dollar industries and you're assuming they don't do basic sanity checking.

dunning-kruger

I did start out saying I simply do not believe them. They don't have data from the time they were down, presumably. That is a big hole in the data for one instance.

>assuming they don't do basic sanity checking.

I'm sure they have a million ways to say its not my fault. I started writing a huge response about human nature and the incentive to massage stats but I think you will dismiss it. If a system is down its a great opportunity to get a blame hedge in case sales are not as good as you predicted. There is no incentive to take an honest look if a brief downtime really affected sales in a meaningful way. I doubt anyone even does look. They just say this it what it would have been in our models if the downtime did not happen.

Think the extreme case - what if the site is down for a whole month, a whole day? Then you can understand.

Another way: you have nothing else to do at the time. so you might click the ads. But now the site is down, there is no ads for you to click.

I mean there was an article yesterday about people not buying/playing GTA5 because of a 5 minute load time.

Commercial web sites lose money when they are down. This is obvious to everyone.

For sure. My issue was that I think its way overestimated. They have every incentive from the sales side to pump up that number as much as possible.

Atlassian?

Facebook was down for 6 hours last year during the day (in the western world) so that was very impactful most likely. And as wonderwonder said advertising is an eyeballs game and if no one is on the site then they're not seeing/clicking/attributing to ads. Any non-monopoly would have a decent impact from downtime as customers either spend their time on other sites or buy more time sensitive things on other sites.

edit: There's also a lot of revenue impacting things short of downtime especially given the automated and ML heavy paths for most of these sites. A few slightly broken features in a key model can cause a 1% drop in your revenue which for facebook is over a billion a year.

The reason they aren’t down more is because they have systems and processes to keep them up. It generally requires multiple failures for them to go down in any meaningful way.

That being said if your service went down for 24 hours because of a bad code change, it probably means and your service goes down a lot. Because whatever caused that 24hr outage probably points to a systemic lack of process and discipline within the organization.

A classic rant on the subject: Steve Yegge's "Code's Worst Enemy:"

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.h...

Mentally I always chuckle at MANGA (sleeve in Spanish, or the comic style),and it could also be MAGNA, but has possibly too good of a sound to it to be worth it.

Most of these jobs hire software engineers, not programmers. The job is more than coding.

Software engineering is writing technical design docs. Gathering business requirements. Gathering technical requirements. Negotiating with stakeholders like InfoSec, legal and accounting. Discussing user research and new features with UX practitioners. Etc.

FAANG sounds silly too, we’re just used to it.

I wonder how many of layoffs that have happened, the ones coming are actually needed financially. For example: I suspect a lot of companies took the opportunity of the first covid lockdowns to fire some people?

Nothing against it since every company is just improving its chances of survival, just thinking out loud about the reasons they share publicly. Also, of course there would be some whose survival was in good shape, but the layoffs were just to increase the profits?

I was thinking the exact same thing. It's easy to say it's because of the market sentiments, but you could also use that as an excuse.

Covid lockdowns forced businesses to rethink their operational models. For some remote work etc. turned out to be profitable opportunities - you could do the same with less infrastructure.

On another note, their CEO said "There are exciting days ahead for OneTrust as we transform into the Trust Intelligence Platform company." That sounds pretty wtf. Like someone just put some fancy words in line.

Founded in 2016. Raised 926 million dollars. On track for record profits this year.

Yeah, IMHO this was just an excuse to slim down the fat. Better returns for investors and better position to swoop in and grab other businesses that can no longer get funding. Shrewd but heartless IMHO.

I think we’re seeing a lot of this in the economy today. I think a lot of the inflation were seeing is companies that know they can get away with it given the narrative, and taking the opportunity.

Same thing here, no one can dispute that the overall macroeconomic picture is deteriorating. So you have cover for some fat trimming

More likely: Worried about runway given difficultly of raising capital, cutting down to ensure burn-rate assumes capital isnt raised.

With profits, shouldn't you have an infinite runway?

That depends on where your profits are coming from. If a large number of your customers depend (say) on VC funding . . .

Yes, so assume the word profits should have quotes around it.

Only if the profits are sustainable and wont go down/away with the recession.

Also, with stocks not going up infinitely, comp needs to change to less stock ("free") and more cash, further reducing profits.

I was confused as well. Did PP mean revenue?

The closest public info I can find is revenues of about $125mm in the past year.

With about 4000 employees, that’s an average of about $30k per employee.

That sounds pretty low to make any sort of profit.

Scale up rapidly and then mass fire the bottom 10-25% of performers. This is a well known tactic.

I imagine this sort of move makes some of the top people leave along with the worst people. If I was in a company that cut 25% of the workforce I'd look for the door regardless of how good I was. Nothing happens in isolation.

I think the part about that strategy that bugs me is that the workforce doesnt know they are effectively doing a tryout for the company

But at the same time, these are probably the same companies that say "competitive work environment" somewhere on the job application so maybe employees should expect it

> these are probably the same companies that say "competitive work environment" somewhere on the job application so maybe employees should expect it

Anecdotally, I've seen touchy feely corporate tone along with this strategy, and would suspect that is a fairly common combination. What you describe certainly exists, but it's not always so obvious.

ugh, i hate it. "We are a family here" ... "haha jk, get lost"

I keep hearing people say this, but when I worked doing layoffs I don’t think I ever saw a stack ranking happen. It was always either a)every team loses x% or more commonly b) getting rid of a function or location entirely.

At the end of the day the differences in employee performance just aren’t that big and everyone knows it’s hard to accurately judge.

I only saw the highest paid/everyone in HCOL area and in many cases it was the top performers of the team.

This happens too. Its great to get paid top of band, until cost cutting comes around - you better be justifying it.

> bottom 10-25% of performers

I've been around awhile and seen plenty of layoffs, layoffs are almost never about performance at the individual level.

It's nice to believe they are because in times like these thinking to yourself "I'm a least in the top half of performers" can give the illusion that you're safe. However, this thinking is ultimately harmful because when you or your friends and colleagues do get laid off you will continue this thinking and considering it a valuation of your self worth, or the worth of colleagues you respect.

They're not primarily about individual performance, but if a company decides to cut X% of some group, it's going to make an effort to cut those it can most afford to lose, which is going to tend toward those they evaluate as lower performers, accurately or not.

I’ve recently seen this, but still performance was not the driver. A small company had two teams, a data eng team and a cloud products team. Both very high performing. The economic tide turned and they needed to cut % headcount to survive. Instead of cutting from both teams, they cut the cloud products team and put the idea on hold. This kept the long term play on data intact. They’ll hire full stack later. Yes they could afford to lose people, but not due to individual performance.

The differentiation here is that these layoffs are not for urgent financial reasons. This is similar to the recently announced Tesla layoffs.

You don’t lay-off 10% of your work force without need, and you don’t do it at random.

Netflix and Amazon are big, vocal proponents of this.

It could also be businesses reacting to the swinging pendulum of the economy, it's been a crazy 2 years.

First we have a booming economy, brought to it's knees by the pandemic. Everything shuts down so businesses lay off. But then it came back, in some places in a very major way, and businesses that were laying off yesterday are back hiring today. But as the economy cooled off again, companies realize they can't afford these inflated workforces and start making cuts again.

Or, software companies and employees aren't as important as they make themselves out to be?

I mean, rarely do companies have a stack of termination paperwork ready just in case - more likely it was handed down to line managers "We're trying to cut X$ out of our budget, you're responsible for Y% of that, please choose accordingly"

I've definitely had that list ready to go before (and also been on there fighting to say no, it's not tenable for the business to let Y% of my team go). It depends on circumstances and the team.

But yeah, if the company needs to save a few hundred grand off my budget this year, I know exactly who I'm taking off payroll - good enough to not get fired, but more work to keep them on task than they're producing. I'd rather half a dozen juniors that are amenable to direction than a superstar that's a fight to even give bowling bumpers to.

There is always a list. When heads need to roll, the list comes out and heads are selected in some meaningful order.

"I know this news is surprising, especially as you heard last month that the business is on track with record quarters and increasing customer demand. However, capital markets sentiment shifted to a more balanced approach between growth and profitability, and at this time, we have decided the best course of action is to reorganize to position OneTrust for continued long-term success."

Translation: we over-hired based on the assumption that VC money would keep being easy to come by, and now that VCs might be tightening their purse strings, we want to preemptively lower our burn rate in case the next round of funding is tougher.

I get it, but every pre-IPO company that does this just indicates that their leadership are short sighted and gobble up as much VC money as possible just because they can, rather than raising only the amount needed for their growth goals.

This whole "let's over hire while the VC money is flowing and mass lay off as soon as it's not" thing will make talent think twice before applying to your company, and will make your existing talent eager to look elsewhere for more a more secure role.

> This whole "let's over hire while the VC money is flowing and mass lay off as soon as it's not" thing will make talent think twice before applying to your company, and will make your existing talent eager to look elsewhere for more a more secure role.

It really won’t though. People have short term memories and ego. Also, the next hiring round will most likely be from a fresh crop of graduates that will zero collective memory of what happened since they were still in school.

> Also, the next hiring round will most likely be from a fresh crop of graduates

Sure, if you're only hiring new graduates. They're always cheap. And frequently those positions are a revolving door.

I would be more concerned about hiring senior people, and what they heard through their network.

You're right. You need quite strong leadership from upper management to accomplish this as middle management will tend to bias for increasing their own headcount now.

It's not even necessarily out of selfishness per se - more just that most managers are confident and believe that if they have more resources, that will inevitably translate into success for the company.

> leadership are short sighted and gobble up as much VC money as possible just because they can, rather than raising only the amount needed for their growth goals.

When money is excessively easy and cheap, far-sighted leaders might reasonably choose to gorge on that opportunity.

I guess what I meant to say is that the way they’re using that funding is short sighted, ie the over hiring.

Goals are defined by capabilities, are they not? And if you have greater capability (more VC money in this case) your goals will surely be loftier as well.

> This whole "let's over hire while the VC money is flowing and mass lay off as soon as it's not" thing will make talent think twice before applying

If it did, why were people applying since the cycle has repeated many times already? The dot.com crash happened after all.

Also, VCs generally give the company money for the purpose of growing, so when the VC money is flowing you kinda have to do that.

OneTrust's cookie consent manager is literally the worst product I have ever used.

Same. I'd have fired all the employees

I would say firing 25% would be enough assuming you start from the top down. User hostile software usually hostile by design.

I don't think firing 25% would be enough. Ultimately the entire purpose of the company is to provide a solution that allows companies to pseudo-comply with the GDPR without actually complying.

Actual compliance would require removing all the trackers & other bullshit and then you no longer need a "consent management platform", therefore this company ceases to exist and 100% of the employees are let go.

If you ask people whether they want to be tracked (in a GDPR-compliant way, which involves listing all the data points collected, how is it stored & used and with whom it is shared) 99% of people will outright say no, therefore the best course of action is to remove the trackers and no need for this company to exist at all.

Yeah, my remark was based on the presumption that there would be a viable product without all the lying and cheating. You’re probably right there isn’t.

That reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where the head waiter commands to sack the entire washing staff because of a dirty fork.

https://youtu.be/oCLtaK7KLEM?t=72

I emailed them about their abomination against God and they replied something like "customer configured it wrong, not our fault".

Had to help implement this at a previous employer. Terrible to work with from the dev side as well.

There's a Chrome addon that will dispense with it quickly with reject all being default. Can't remember the name.

And they actually violate European data privacy laws, as do most of the consent management platforms. Or, they are implementend in a way that breaches GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive - pre-ticked boxes etc.

For context: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/04/noyb-second-cookie-complai...

They also use deceptive design and make it too hard for a website visitor to understand what's going on under the hood.

I often wonder how companies like this exist. Their "Market" isn't really a market but forced government regulation. I suppose its all sweethart deals, kickbacks, lobbying for contracts, and fedramp.

Having 4000 employees for what is essentially streamlining the process of filling out government paperwork seems absurd to me. Don't misunderstand I've delt with compliance and know very well how much a headache it is and the mountains of paperwork. Yet I just cannot possibly see how this many employees could be needed or profitable to hire.

Their "Market" isn't really a market but forced government regulation.

Regulatory compliance is a huge, stable, market. (IDK anything about the specifics of this company, just pointing out that government regulation creates markets.)

Perhaps. I'm not an economist but I would think they probably have some word I don't know that describes this situation.

Interesting, I had a call with one of their sales people a couple days ago.

The whole product is a glorified spreadsheet. It is super customizable, which is almost a bad thing since you really just want a product like this to kind of guide you through all the laws and regulations. Instead, it is tailored towards creating a job description for someone to sit there and fill in data that nobody will ever look at.

They employ ~4000 people? What on earth where they all doing?

Same thing as the other "tech" companies: "tech" stuff and if you can't imagine what that is then you haven't drank enough Kool-Aid yet. Something something products, internal tooling, documentation, yadda yadda.

> documentation

Oh I wish. I have only heard all these jokes about being forced to write useless docs but I have yet to see a place where there are docs when I try to get into the projects someone left me.

Building an engineering playground. It doesn't matter what business problem the tech solves, the tech itself is the goal even if it produces no useful output as long as the (self-inflicted) complexity convinces investors to pour even more money into it.

The current recession suggests the investor money is becoming scarce and you actually need to find other sources of income, so all the useless complexity is being cut back.

Discovered this when nobody from OneTrust showed up to our implementation meeting this morning....not a good sign for a new customer.

Seems like a service company disguised as a SaaS company which says their revenue is coming from "SaaS" but actually they have an internal tool which doesn't scale and 4000 engineers that are doing basically one-off services. But given you say you are a SaaS company you can get 50x multiples (or you could in the past). but the moment there is downturn the "scam" is floating up because every engineer you cut is directly affecting revenue due to the underlying service model.

Interesting to see how many more "SaaS" companies like this are in the market

The job market for developers right now is tough. My last time interviewing I was 2 offers for 4 interviews. I started looking for a job a month ago and I've gotten 0 offers for probably 10 interviews. It's my first time interviewing over virtual meetings, maybe that's it, but I think it's the general job market. My last feedback was "TL;DR - The general agreement was that you can code, and likely code well. However, there were opportunities to lean into deeper context and alternatives to problem solving." Maybe recruiters trying to only hire the "perfect" candidate with the increased supply of developers in the job market right now.

We have 5 open software engineering roles and we haven’t seen any changes in our pipeline.

are the 2/4 and 0/10 interviews the same level of work? Or are you applying to higher level positions now?

I'm was looking at senior levels both times.

If the market was really tough you wouldn’t have found 10 interviews.

I’m sorry to hear your search is going so poorly. Do some retrospective and practice the bits you think you might be missing.

Then we must live in a different reality. All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

Same. Just yesterday, I had a company wanting to negotiate employment terms after saying they were passing on me last week.

I've had 8 recruiters reach out just this morning on LinkedIn. Granted, most of them are crap gigs but they were mostly crap gigs 6 months ago too. Plenty are interesting though. I'm really glad I specialized early on and found a niche.

>All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

All companies can be struggling to hire if their bar is too high and/or their pay is too low.

I'm being contacted for rates at 50%+ what the market was 3 years ago and they don't even care what my background is. And these are corporate recruiters, not phonebanks.

> All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

Struggling to find developers is often a self-inflicted problem by making the processs unattractive (nope, I'm not doing an 8 hour take-home project for free) or silly (nope, I'm not spending 6 months leetcoding).

Companies that adjust their hiring pipeline process to be an enabler of hiring tend to have an easier time hiring.

> The job market for developers right now is tough

The opposite of true.

i am in the market now and have the opposite experience.

I do agree that lots of ppl are very prepared for interviews now, it wasn't the case even few years ago. They expect you to do everything perfectly in interviews these days.

In your case you were probly expect to explore other ways to solve problems, eg: some alogorithm will have worst put complexity but most calls are to get so we can sacrifice some put complexity to improve get complexity. stuff like this.

pls see this : https://www.teamblind.com/post/7-onsites-7-offers-aAFTykAD

That's definitely frustrating feedback. Even so, I would consider asking for specifics about those opportunities were, potentially even reaching out to individual interviewer engineers who are more likely to share as opposed to only the recruiter or HR rep.

But we still need H1B visas because the domestic population doesn't have enough coders.

Actually there seems to be a decreased supply of developers because everyone is trying to hire them. If you're getting feedback, I'd say take it seriously and see how you can proactively address it on your next interview. It's like Sales: anticipate the objection and be prepared to handle it.

These guys all write the same script - heavy heart, hardest decision.

Come on. You did some projections, met with the board, discussed at exec level and decided to make this change.

Wonder if they will get any payouts on their unused "unlimited" PTO

Great!

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