Layoffs at Fly.io | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs at Fly.io

twitter.com

111 pointsghiculescu11 comments

We did. We'll probably post something tomorrow. Everyone we let go was doing great work. Everyone got 4 months of severance. The cuts were primarily to business units in a reconfiguration of the company (people working in devrel and growth were disproportionately affected; core engineering generally not). The idea is to double down on what's working with the business and put out past 2026 the need to consider funding.

What we didn't want to do was write a fluffy post about this and pull focus from the people we let go.

It's an ugly business and there's little to do to make it not ugly, at best all you can be is as human and compassionate as possible. In an ideal world us peons would like to think the C-suite saw it all coming and didn't hire whatever people in the first place. Depending on the work culture it can be devastating to culture and morale - at goldman it's harmless (they do it every year) but in collaborative environments it can drive the collaborative kind souls to seek safer harbor and embolden the narcissists by way of demonstrably outperforming that other guy, which taken together can completely annihilate a previously halcyon culture.

If it's a teachable moment, fine, but teachable moments at the expense of livelihoods sucks.

The layoffs will continue until morale improves.

> Recently I was part of a full-stack lay-off of about 40 people, from founders to staff.

Founders got laid off?

They willingly took the poisoned chalice of VC funding.

Thats rough. Not surprising considering almost everyone is tightening their budgets.

What does the long term strategy for alternate cloud providers like flyio look like? Cater exclusively to startups/small firms? Supplement existing cloud providers by letting some teams build/deliver quicker without being blocked by infra issues?

> What does the long term strategy for alternate cloud providers

There have been plenty ever since for many many years... there's a market for them. Not sure if they're alternate.

E.g. DigitalOcean, Upcloud, Vultr, Hetzner, OVH, Ionos, Scaleway, HostDime, etc all of various sizes and capacity. No problem.

What strategy do you need? It's not really a scary thing.

Something I've learnt about layoffs:

It's to no one's advantage for employers to give a reason. It just invites pushback/argument. Better to just say "you can't fight management/VPs/people above our pay grade" and move on.

This story seems to be getting buried, but I'd like to hear confirmation, etc.

Xe Iaso (ex-devrel at Fly) was laid off as well: https://pony.social/@cadey/113068429436336080

also saw this: https://x.com/peregrine/status/1830954206234071515

I can't and won't access twitter... What is surprising about layoffs? This is capitalism, baby. What do you think it is? Did you believe that you are one big family or something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com