(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...

They switched from open source when big tech stole their goodies.

It was too late to stop it.

> I don’t think a lot of us employees will be happy to admit that AI is turning out to be a legitimate productivity aid that is allowing individuals to accomplish more work per person.

Growth companies respond to efficiency by asking "what can we do now that we can get more done."

Stagnant companies say "how can we cut costs."

The math is pretty simple. If you expect that doing more will have positive ROI, you do more; if you think your position is about as strong as it can ever be, and don't have ideas for growing the space or your spot in it, you assume that more spend on new things would be negative ROI.

And if you're stagnant and there are prevailing narratives giving you an excuse to cut costs without scaring investors into thinking you've lost optimism, you jump on it even if you haven't even verified if the productivity gains are real for your employees.

> many parts of the Japanese system of hiring for life

This is a terrible strategy. It encourages inefficiency to metastasize throughout the company.

No wonder Japan is stuck in a rut since the 90s and its debt-to-GDP ratio is 205% which is one of the highest in the world.

Your romantic idea of Japan would get destroyed by just browsing www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/

Japan has one of the worst work culture and low productivity in the world.

> The thing is, a profitable company that sees an obvious efficiency staring it in the face is still going to take that efficiency.

Judging by this CEO’s vapid post stuffed with meaningless LLMisms, and the condition of this company, the efficiency savings don’t seem to be there and are at best illusory.

Good luck to any companies who think they’re improving operations by jamming generative AI (or worse unreliable ‘agents’ based on the purported intelligence of GAI) into all sorts of processes where they don’t belong.

We’ll see over the next few years whether the 10x efficiencies are real or a mirage.

I’d love to hire for life, but what commitment can an employee give? It can’t be one sided or it’s terrible.

Just get Dodge v. Ford Motor Co reversed.

That's what the pollution is for.

most investors want maximum short term profit. execs have to do what they say because of fiduciary duty and shareholder votes to fire them. the only way to prevent it is use debt financing exclusively or make every investor sign a contract that limits the companies duty to "dont do things that will actively lose money". thats hard when a lot of vcs strategy is extract as much as possible and let it fall.

The goal should be a single payer health care system. I am not asking for like luxury spa five star treatment. However, there definitely should be a "free of cost at the point of service" option that does not have any means testing of any kind.

That should be the goal and once we have that, it will not matter if you are self employed or own a business. We keep doing half measures and pretend to be surprised when it doesn't work.

vacationing/digital nomading in belgium atm, it looks erhm rich. traveling between brussels, leuven, ghent, bruges, soon antwerp... people dress well, never been anywhere with so many german luxury cars on the road, meals cost about the same as US.

I'm sure statistics this and that, but something doesn't translate, sanguine reality is different.

Reminded me of https://youtu.be/ML3qYHWRIZk

> standards of living

As measured by ... purchasing power.

Let's take a look, Safety Index - US 50.8, Belgium 50.6. Health care index - Belgium 75.9, US 67.8, Pollution Index - US 36.7, Belgium 49.2, Climate index - Belgium 86, US 78.5.

As it stands US standard of living is better really only in "you can buy a larger house" (shocking, giving the relative size), and "it'll be slightly cheaper".

Not by any other metric.

How do you want to measure standards of living here?

It is a delusion that US is rich because of capitalism.

It is an insult to the people that founded the country and people that developed science/tech/finance etc. in it. And ofc the space, natural resources and isolation from wars.

Saying US is rich because capitalism is about as accurate as saying it is rich because it is christian

>Now compare your cousin’s yearly salary in Belgium with the average salary of a US employee doing the same job.

Take home is about the same after including health insurance and all the myriad taxes that US employees are subject to.

Now you compare the all-in cost of living across salary, taxes, housing, healthcare, and everything else.

Economics is hardly a reproducible science, but an American company has basically instant access to 350 million consumers (and workers) with no language barrier and little inter-state red tape.

It's hard to imagine that this isn't a larger differentiator than the ability to fire hundreds at will.

Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich.

Like, a while back my employer had 10% layoffs, and their most profitable year ever, in the same year. There’s a real reason why that happened, ans the reason is that the C suite seriously fucked up on managing the company’s finances. In a sane world they should be the first to bear the consequences. Instead they got fat bonuses while hundreds of people who had no part in creating the problem lost their jobs. And the moral justification for a society that allows this is somehow, “But isn’t it great that it’s easier for privileged people to play fast and loose like that?” That is, at best, circular reasoning.

Tell that to ASML.

No, he's arguing that if it's not legal, it's not enforceable by men with nightsticks.

Social contracts only work in high trust societies that are also ethnically and culturally homogenous so the only grumble citizens have is fighting over class and not race.

But if you have a very diverse society that operates on tribalism, then you need a strong rule of law with strong checks and bounds to weed out tribalism, but this doesn't come for free as policing and lawyering the behavior of all members of society to check if they aren't discriminating each other over immutable characteristics, is gonna costs the government and companies operating in this environment a lot of money, so you're gonna have higher operating costs. Which is why it's so much cheaper for US companies to hire in places like central europe where your payroll expense are mostly ICs and you don't need auxiliary armies of diversity consultants like in the US.

As far as I understand companies will take out loans against their own stocks in good times as they expect their stocks to generally go up and to make more money than the payments on the interest of those loans. If their stocks go down they need to make up the shortfall elsewhere. The loans are generally used to keep business operations running smoothly irrespective of actual business cashflow (for example some businesses make most of their profits at certain times of the year). I'm not saying this for sure applies to Elastic but I believe its a pretty common pattern across major businesses.

They carry $575m in debt, which is around 80-100 devs a year if they are paying something like 4.5% on it, ignoring tax write-offs on either case as well as equity comp. There is some calculus to all that, carrying some debt, doing buybacks, whatever other strategies to manage perceptions sure.

Tech companies use RSUs to game the accounting system and then have to do stock buybacks to keep the outstanding shares in line.

Perhaps, but there are optics only when someone sees. It's not unusual to fund retention increases using some of the budget freed up by a layoff, but that won't be explicitly stated in a public announcement.