Engine Yard Cuts 15% Of Workforce

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/07/engine-yard-cuts-15-of-workforce/

by qhoxie • 18 years ago

26 18 18 years ago

techcrunch.com

axod• 18 years ago

"confirm that 12 out of 82 people have been let go"

They had 82 people??? Wow. That seems a lot for a relatively young startup.

qhoxie2• 18 years ago

I could be wrong but I imagine support staff accounts for a large portion of that.

bkbleikamp• 18 years ago

They have a lot of support staff (they respond almost instantly to problems) and also do a lot of Ruby development and make a lot of open source contributions, etc.

ezmobius• 18 years ago

Yes this was mostly support staff. The main reason for this is that we have become much more efficient and automated so we did not need as many support staff anymore to support our systems.

river_styx• 18 years ago

Well, this certainly flies in the face of the sensationalist tone of the linked article.

TechCrunch Layoff Tracker? Seriously?

bprater• 18 years ago

Often, I wonder if this kind of public news hurts them (or any company) overall.

Would you be less tempted to use Engine Yard for hosting knowing that they just laid off some folks? Even slightly?

And if so, would it be worth keeping these folks around just so you aren't making "negative press" for yourself?

qhoxie2• 18 years ago

I think it all depends on wording. EY's official blog statement talked about helping the employees find new jobs, which is impressive. To me, it would also be beneficial for them to include a statement like Ezra's above, to ease customer or potential customer concerns: They laid of support staff because they have further automated their environment - that is reassuring.

ciscoriordan• 18 years ago

Anecdotally, I'm shopping around for a Rails host right now and being reminded of Engine Yard because of this article increases my chance of going with them.

If the layoffs had been 50% I would be worried, but at this level it doesn't trouble me as a potential customer.

goodkarma2• 18 years ago

As a customer I'm glad they are laying off people. They charge far more than they should for the resources you get, and it seemed like they had way too many employees than they needed. Our sales rep was totally clueless and gave us bad information several times - I wonder if he is still there..

quellhorst3• 18 years ago

Recently moved a client off engine yard that was paying ~$2600/month they are now having substantial savings for more capacity with EC2/AWS.

mattmaroon3• 18 years ago

How sad is it when EC2/AWS represents a substantial savings over your service?

swombat• 18 years ago

Why is it sad? Don't forget that using EC2/AWS isn't free either. There are costs to migrate to that architecture, to maintain it, to debug weird bugs that will inevitably arise, etc.

Those problems also exist on an infrastructure like EY's, but part of the price you pay to EY is to have a team of people who deal with those problems for you.

I'd be interested in knowing whether quellhorst's fees are included in the "substantial saving".

goodkarma2• 18 years ago

We're paying around $1100/month and looking to migrate off EngineYard as well - can you point me in the right direction and/or provide any tips for a migration to AWS?

quellhorst3• 18 years ago

Tips:

* Automate Server Configuration with Puppet

* Store your database on an EBS

* Backup often to S3

* Use cloudfront to host your most common static files (CSS, JPG, JS)

* If you don't have too much email volume, use google apps for your domain.

* Use DNSMadeEasy.com for your DNS and also failover to your backup.

* Anything that you didn't automated, document it so that its easier to automate later.

* Have a backup plan if EC2 goes down.

If you want some help with this, you could always email me dan {at} abtain {dot} com.

Engine Yard Cuts 15% Of Workforce

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