GoDaddy Announces Layoffs of “About 8%”

https://aboutus.godaddy.net/newsroom/press-releases/press-release-details/2023/A-message-from-GoDaddy-CEO-Aman-Bhutani/default.aspx

by lucg • 3 years ago

153 97 3 years ago

aboutus.godaddy.net

ulfw• 3 years ago

Ah yes the across-all-industries-of-tech bullshit bonanza continues.

officialchicken2• 3 years ago

Oh good... another CEO mass-firing statement that takes no responsibility and indicates no negative side-effects for their "leadership" ability.

To those recently let go, I hope you find a new opportunity in a place where the those in charge actually care about their employees; and they have the foresight to ensure their long-term well-being.

scarface749• 3 years ago

Really? You think any employer “cares about their employees”?

A job is a transaction a way for me to trade labor for money and support ny addiction to food and shelter. It’s my responsibility to save accordingly always expecting a lay off.

This has been my mindset since I was 22 years old making 11/hour as a computer operator saving my overtime pay until today at 49 where I stumbled into a role at $BigTech three years ago and save/invested all of my after tax signing bonus and divest my RSUs once vested.

0xAFFFF• 3 years ago

Really? You think any employer “cares about their employees”?

It can actually happen sometimes, but I've never seen it outside of small structures.

kristiandupont3• 3 years ago

You think any employer “cares about their employees”?

Employers are people. Some people are cynical and greedy, others are empathetic.

Yes, they will fire people as is some times necessary and as an employee you should plan for that. They won't make great sacrifices for you like family or very close friends might, but I've definitely had employers who wanted the best for me and made an effort to help me achieve it.

mindcrime• 3 years ago

A job is a transaction a way for me to trade labor for money and support ny addiction to food and shelter. It’s my responsibility to save accordingly always expecting a lay off.

I'm sorry you're being down-voted, because the frank truth is... you're exactly right. To a first approximation, 0 companies really "care about their employees" in any meaningful sense. Work is simply a transaction arrangement, where you trade some of your time for some of their money. And either party can (generally) terminate that arrangement at any time, for any reason.

That's simply reality. One can choose to accept that reality and live accordingly, or they can choose to live in a pollyanna'ish world where one doesn't have to take personal responsibility.

boycott-israel• 3 years ago

tl;dr - you're part of the problem

officialchicken2• 3 years ago

Yes, I do. I really do care. And I know there are other founders and hiring managers who care too (except HR, they only care about the business).

re: walking uphill barefoot in snow both ways, attitude towards a financial plan is not your career; it has little to do with those who work around you.

Aardwolf2• 3 years ago

Any idea why 6-8% are such common numbers in most of the recent tech industry layoffs?

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

It's an amount you can do safely without your employees or shareholders thinking you are a sinking ship, as that's what everyone is doing.

However don't be fooled - it will be 7% repeatedly until things stabilize. People think it's just 7% once. It might be, but this will be repeated if needed.

mysterydip• 3 years ago

you're not kidding. I just did an internet search for "7% layoff" and it's staggering how many results there are.

eugenekolo• 3 years ago

Layoffs typically go like 7%... then you get another 1-2% of people who jump from the sinking ship. Then you get another round of 5%.. and another 1-2% who jump from the sinking ship and end up at a nice round number like 15%. Looks better than laying off 15% at once (although Zoom is doing great?)

InitialLastName• 3 years ago

It's suspiciously close to what I understand to be the normal steady-state turnover rates for the tech industry. Nobody quits their jobs in an economy like this, so the turnover must be achieved by other means (and this way lets the employer pick who turns over).

dboreham2• 3 years ago

Goldilocks.

likeabbas3• 3 years ago

GoDaddy was the first software engineering job I worked for. I had interned there too. It's understandable that the external perception of the company is bad (and even sexist), but internally GoDaddy was a great place to work.

They're always a major sponsor of Grace Hopper. They were adamant about hiring women. They made my internship so much fun, and I am still friends with many of my co-interns from that summer. Of the places I worked for, GoDaddy was the only one I would say had a "family" like quality.

TOMDM• 3 years ago

I've literally never heard about sexism directed their way, but given you worked there I'm sure you know better the story of treatment they get. What was the sexism, who was it directed against and why do you reckon they recieved it?

The only experience I have with GoDaddy is their awful support, and predatory practices. Ditching them has been the biggest single improvement to our IT practice.

bena• 3 years ago

The sexism was directed towards the public. They had quite a few commercials that were more appropriate advertising for Hooters than for web hosting.

phphphphp• 3 years ago

GoDaddy's entire brand presence was based on objectification of women for their early life. After GoDaddy's founder Bob left, it got better. Bob was a character and arguably the entire reason for the insane brand -- strange, strange man.

coredog64• 3 years ago

Externally, GoDaddy ran a very questionable Super Bowl ad in which Danica Patrick unzips her jumpsuit to reveal a stuffed beaver.

Internally, a previous employer was colonized by a group of ex-GoDaddy execs. They were half-witted folks who displayed every negative -ism that creates a toxic workplace.

bluedino• 3 years ago

They had controversial commercials (not all of them involving women)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTvYVxO_9N8

sybercecurity• 3 years ago

It was their early ad campaigns that featured Danica Patrick. They even showed some ads during the Super Bowl. You can still find them on YouTube.

It was the high (low?) point of techbro culture in ads (mid 2010's). They got a lot of bad press and pressure campaigns and started to change their culture after that.

scandox• 3 years ago

I'd say the family metaphor is very apt. As a customer I always felt they were family run. Possibly a very large, ethnically homogeneous family with interests in funeral homes, car parks, casinos and hospitality. That kind of family.

01ce8c91872dd6d• 3 years ago

ethnically homogeneous family

I'm foaming at the mouth from picturing that

kerpotgh• 3 years ago

Not even Asians/Indians?

likeabbas3• 3 years ago

ethnically homogeneous family

My tech lead (later manager) was a black lesbian woman. I'm sorry if that's not ethnically homogeneous enough for you.

rizach8• 3 years ago

I think a lot of us have a good feeling about early/first employer. But I am not sure we would feel the same if we started that job today. "It was better back in the days" mentality.

rubyist5eva• 3 years ago

It's understandable that the external perception of the company is bad (and even sexist)
They were adamant about hiring women.

So it seems like the perception is justified then.

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

The thing that angers me about GoDaddy is the sniping of customer searched domains. Maybe “everyone does it”, but still scummy.

tuerie666• 3 years ago

This is the biggest fake rumor that keeps on spreading. They don't even have the internal infra setup to support this.

mc322• 3 years ago

What always rubbed me the wrong way were two things. They have the impression of being spammy [even their UI felt/feels spammy] And then their UX really sucked. They almost felt like a parked domain itself.

garganzol• 3 years ago

This is an external perception, but internally they tried to upsell some web and email hosting stuff by including those options by default when purchasing a new domain. Those options were literally invisible to the unsuspecting customer like me, thanks to dark UI patterns and small fonts. And of course, the purchase wasn't refundable after the fact it was made! The only thing that saved me from being ripped off was a spending limit on my PayPal account. Mind you, that was the last time I've ever purchased a new domain from GoDaddy. They lost me forever.

At the same time, their domain broker service was excellent and allowed me to acquire a few already registered domains I desperately needed without spending too much.

ipunchghosts• 3 years ago

If it's so good, why arent you still working there?

standardUser• 3 years ago

In their heyday they set high water mark for aggressive/annoying marketing techniques. I think I was one of many, many developers who bought a domain through them precisely one time before realizing I'd made a huge mistake.

neom4• 3 years ago

It's interesting seeing GoDaddy/Gitlab lay off so late in the game. Jeff Lawson (TWLO) who is a fantastic financial and product focused CEO did his prep work in September last year with 11% of the company. I find it pretty hard to grok what your FP&A team must be like if you're a b2b supply chain business thinking about this stuff Q1 in global economic downturn.

moneywoes2• 3 years ago

Are infra companies the last to be affected typically?

neom4• 3 years ago

Yes, that said... depends how you define infra, I chatted with a marketing tool CEO last week who compare themselves to servers, so I've been thinking CEOs are out to lunch a bit these days.

Your point is well taken, but again: this is the power of a strong FP&A team, a good CFO and thoughtful FP&A shouldn't be blaming macroeconomics at this point. I advise CEO's and I was flagging in August last year, I talk to bankers and read the news. Seems to me if you're at this point in Q1 or Q2, you were in denial about the reality of what 2023 would look like, doesn't matter when you'll be affected, the writing was on the wall Q2 last year. It's kinda sad for your staff to be in the "last to lay off" bucket.

orange_joe• 3 years ago

I don’t even understand what you’re saying. This fantastic CEO did prep work last year with 11% of his company? Do you mean that he laid off 11% last year?

neom4• 3 years ago

Laying people off in harsh economic times is both bad for the employees laid off and bad for the shareholders.

kypro2• 3 years ago

What do you mean Jeff Lawson is a fantastic financial focused CEO?

His company has never turned a profit has it? I believe TWLO is one of the most unprofitable of large public tech companies.

neom4• 3 years ago

You sound like an amazon bear in 2004 - that's not how you measure the financial focus of a CEO.

https://www.vox.com/2017/5/15/15610786/amazon-jeff-bezos-pub...

noelsusman• 3 years ago

What global economic downturn?

carpe171• 3 years ago

this aged well

thanatropism• 3 years ago

I have the feeling that these announcements never specify that it's mostly programmers or technical people, but HN reacts like it is.

Maybe they don't need as many secretaries and gophers as before?

deely3• 3 years ago

Maybe even upper management?

Tinkerbell54813• 3 years ago

We were affected by this layoff, software engineering family over here.It seemed to be so random. It was people from so many different areas. We have beena GoDaddy family for over 17 years. This was a shock for sure

msikora• 3 years ago

Very very few devs got laid off. Vast majority was recruiting and marketing.

moneywoes2• 3 years ago

Another day another layoff

Another day no reply to job applications sigh

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Good luck, man. Tough times.

brookst• 3 years ago

Hang in there. It’s a numbers game, and you will find something.

In the meantime you could try grifting some crypto bros with an AI NFT or something, I hear that’s easy money these days.

lapcat• 3 years ago

"To start, I want to express my gratitude to those who will be leaving."

That's some grade A BS right there. Among the worst corporate euphemism I've seen.

djha-skin2• 3 years ago

It is only in good taste to express gratitude. I would expect nothing less.

Indeed, speaking of gratitude, it's nice that this announcement even exists. Many companies don't even tell their employees that people are getting laid off, much less tell the public.

And calling it a euphemism is only confusing. A euphemism for what?

mininimal• 3 years ago

They sent the company an email at 3pm saying 8% of the company was being laid off, then sent Zoom meeting invites to the people being laid off 2 hour later. They didn’t tell us.

yalogin• 3 years ago

At this point do we just have to expect all the other companies that haven’t announced layoffs will also do so?

pelasaco• 3 years ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/fire-blame-ceo-tech-employee...

neuronic• 3 years ago

So is this officially a trend now? Just drown the bad news in a massive pool of other bad news about other companies? Good time to soften the blow of bad PR?

It doesn't cause too much attention when you lay off 10-15% of your workforce despite profits if 20 other big name companies are doing it as well.

elforce002• 3 years ago

I mean, it makes sense. The issue here is knowing when you have to do it. This news will get under the rug right away because people are paying attention to more "important" news like chatGPT, the state or the union, other companies laying off people, etc...

I mean, this is the perfect time to lay off people from a PR perspective. You'll see that by tomorrow morning, the public will be still talking about something else, prob. how google lost 100 billions in market value, Lebron breaking the all-time scoring record, etc...

ProAm2• 3 years ago

This is one company I do not feel bad for.

barbazoo• 3 years ago

It's still people like you and me that are losing their jobs.

ProAm2• 3 years ago

I wish them the best finding a new job at an ethically and morally good company.

aww_dang• 3 years ago

They bought out one of the registrars I had been using. I cringe whenever those domains come up for renewal.

Tinkerbell54813• 3 years ago

This honestly shook our family as we were included in the 8%. We have been with them for over 17+ years and were treated very well throughout our time with them. I've read the news stories and the "public statements" so many times and we still can't figure out the why. The morning after the layoffs, they hosted a townhall assuring the lucky remainers that profits were up, and there was still security in their jobs. So again, we go back to the question of the why. We were mid-projects that needed to be handed off to contract workers, as our access was taken away almost immediately.

GoDaddy Announces Layoffs of “About 8%”

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