Saurabh Gupta, Author at DevopsCurry

Tech Layoffs 2024: McKinsey — Firm offers staff 9 months’ salary to quit, report claims

Saurabh Gupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:46:08 +0000

Global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. announced plans to eliminate almost 360 jobs globally. This will affect around 3 per cent of its specialist and technically-skilled workforce and will impact employees across various divisions, including design, data engineering, cloud, and software, Bloomberg reported citing people in the know.

“We invest to grow capabilities that match our clients’ priorities and adjust the size of a small number of others as appropriate. As part of this process, some roles will be eliminated within this small number of capabilities,” a spokesperson from McKinsey said in a statement, reveals the report.

At McKinsey, employees in client-facing roles who underperform typically leave after being advised to do so, a situation described as being “counselled to leave.” This suggests that the company does not wish to involve them in client projects and suggests they seek opportunities elsewhere. However, in this instance, employees in good standing are opting to leave on their own accord. Those who opt for the nine months’ pay offer would still be required to leave even if they were unable to secure alternative employment during that time.

Last year, McKinsey underwent an unusual round of layoffs, aiming to cut approximately 1,400 positions, primarily among support staff rather than those in client-facing roles.

Another reports also states that McKinsey has offered to pay hundreds of senior employees if they wish to leave the company and look for other jobs as the company attempts to reduce headcount amid a a sector-wide downturn, a report claimed.

The company has also reportedly told employees that during this period, they will continue to receive their full salary. This could amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds if employees utilise the entire nine-month duration. These managers will also have access to McKinsey’s resources and career coaching services,

McKinsey previously attempted to reduce its workforce amid a downturn as in 2023, the company announced plans to cut approximately 1,400 jobs, which accounts for around 3% of its workforce, Bloomberg then reported.

In February this year, McKinsey gave poor performance ratings to 3,000 employees who were then given around three months to improve their performance or they could leave the company, the report added.

The post Tech Layoffs 2024: McKinsey — Firm offers staff 9 months’ salary to quit, report claims appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Tech layoffs 2024 : Nearly 90% IT professionals in US are worried about job loss in 2024, finds survey from Authority Hacker

Saurabh Gupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:27:57 +0000

Tech layoffs In the first two months of 2024, we have seen about 193 companies laying off nearly 50,000 of their staff. Incidentally, in March so far seven companies have laid off close to 500 employees. Considering the rapid pace at which companies are resizing and undergoing an organisational overhaul, it seems there’s more to worry about for millions of tech professionals.

According to Layoffs.fyi, there have been more than 296,000 tech layoffs since 2023, with 33,000 coming in the first 5 weeks of 2024.

Now a new report by Authority Hacker claims that as many as 54.58 per cent of workers are increasingly worried about the possibility of job loss, and the tech sector is visibly distressed the most. The report states that professionals working in IT-Services and Data (89.66 per cent) and Software Development (74.42%) are experiencing the highest levels of anxiety related to job security.

As many as 72.42 per cent of workers surveyed admitted that they are feeling uneasy about the impact of AI on their jobs over the next five years.

Fear of job loss has rippled across the American workforce — 54.58% of full-time workers have increased concerns about job loss, with 27.08% feeling significant concern.

Based on the size, the report highlighted that employees in companies as large as 500-1000 employees (74.33 per cent) particularly feel they are vulnerable as they perceive a higher risk of job loss. Meanwhile, sectors that rely heavily on computers such as Software (67.44 per cent), finance (67.75 per cent), and Human Resources (64.29 per cent) expressed high levels of concern about job loss.

On the other hand, sectors that involve human interpersonal interactions such as education (43.04 per cent) and real estate (44.68 per cent), seem to be least concerned about the impact of AI on their jobs. The survey by Authority Hacker was conducted on 1,200 full-time employees across the US.

The post Tech layoffs 2024 : Nearly 90% IT professionals in US are worried about job loss in 2024, finds survey from Authority Hacker appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Tech Layoff 2024: Dell Becomes Latest Tech Giant To Do Layoffs, Fires 6,000 Employees

Saurabh Gupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:19:18 +0000

Tech Layoff 2024 .As the Information Technology industry struggles with its challenges, major tech giants have been on a layoff spree in March this year. The downsizing of the company size is mostly being attributed to “cost-cutting” .

Dell Technologies has announced yet another round of layoffs earlier this week, which has resulted in the termination of approximately 6,000 employees. This move adds to the tech giant’s significant reduction in headcount, which amounted to 13,000 employees over the last fiscal year, surpassing the initially projected numbers.

The company announced layoffs this month in response to an 11% decline in revenue from its fourth-quarter earnings, which was partially caused by the weak demand for its personal computers for almost two years.

The layoffs are part of Dell’s broader cost-cutting initiative, which includes measures such as limiting external hiring and implementing employee reorganizations and team restructuring.

End of work-from-home model

Dell was known for its hybrid work culture, but the company has changed its policy for remote workers. A recent report suggested that to get promotions, remote workers must switch to a hybrid work model, which requires them to spend at least three days a week in an office. This change has caused concerns among employees about their career growth and less flexibility.

The post Tech Layoff 2024: Dell Becomes Latest Tech Giant To Do Layoffs, Fires 6,000 Employees appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Tech Layoffs 2024: Edtech poster boy Byju’s continue with layoffs

Saurabh Gupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:10:58 +0000

Layoffs , Edtech company Byju’s initiated layoffs on phone calls and is letting go employees without putting them on a performance improvement plan (PIP), Moneycontrol reported citing people in the know. The company is also not asking employees to serve a notice period, the report claimed.

Troubled edtech Byju’s has laid off about 500 staffers, largely across sales and marketing functions, at a time when it is struggling to raise capital for day-to-day operations, as per sources familiar with the development.

In the past two years, Byju’s has sacked at least over 10,000 employees as the company grapples with dwindling funds and legal showdowns with investors and stakeholders. Currently, nearly 14,000 employees are on the payroll of Byju’s India entity.

A Byju’s spokesperson told Moneycontrol, “We are in the final stages of a business restructuring exercise announced in October 2023 to simplify operating structures, reduce the cost base, and improve cash flow management.”

In the current wave of layoffs, Byju’s is following phone calls with emails that read, “This is to confirm that your last working day with Think and Learn Pvt Ltd will be March 31, 2024. Your full and final settlement will be done as per the exit policy. Please hand over all the assets and proprietary information of the Company that are in your possession to enable processing your full and final settlement. In case of any queries on exit formalities, please contact separations@byjus.com.”

The once-leading Edtech company is dealing with a massive cash crunch. Byju’s has conducted several rounds of layoffs since the beginning of 2022 as the company grapples with slowing demand and a limited financial runway.

The post Tech Layoffs 2024: Edtech poster boy Byju’s continue with layoffs appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Tech Layfoffs 2024: Tech giant Apple Inc lays off 600 employees after car and smart screen projects shut shop

Saurabh Gupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:03:53 +0000

The global Tech industry continues to reel under layoffs as more and more companies are sacking staff from across departments.Based on Layoffs.fyi, so far 235 companies have laid off 57,785 employees in 2024. In January, 121 companies sacked 34,007 employees, and in February 74 companies axed 15,379 jobs. Although March saw a substantial decrease in layoffs, the month was marked by the biggest layoff from Dell with the company reducing its workforce by 13,000 jobs.

The latest to join is the Tech giant Apple that has reportedly laid off 600 employees across its self-driving car and smartwatch screen projects, news agency Bloomberg reported on Friday. Both projects were scrapped earlier this year. Apple began to shutter its initiatives after they failed to take off as expected. Apple has started laying off employees from its retail division. It is worth noting that these are the first reported layoffs of full-time employees at Apple.

The affected Apple employees worked at eight different facilities in Santa Clara, according to the WARN notice posted by California. These employees were officially informed of the cuts on March 28 and the changes are effective May 27, the filing said.

“Companies must file a report to the state agency for each California address that includes employees affected by a layoff. At least 87 of the people worked at an address corresponding to a secret Apple facility for its next-generation screen development, while the others were located at buildings related to the car project,” the report added.

The report noted that 371 employees were released at Apple’s main car-related office in Santa Clara, California, while dozens more at multiple satellite offices were also impacted.

The post Tech Layfoffs 2024: Tech giant Apple Inc lays off 600 employees after car and smart screen projects shut shop appeared first on DevopsCurry.

How important is Open-Source for Devops Success ?

Saurabh Gupta — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 11:34:06 +0000

How OpenSource technologies support Devops Success

DevOps and Open Source

Devops ; It was nearly a decade back in around 2009, that the term DevOps was coined by Belgian consultant, project manager and agile practitioner Patrick Debois, as a portmanteau of Developer & Operations . It slowly transitioned as a successor to the Agile methodology and ensured improvement to the Application Lifecycle Management process.

You can consider DevOps as a strategy or principle that every company should implement within their delivery pipeline.

To implement DevOps, you should have the right tools and processes at your disposal to make it work efficiently. There are a variety of open-source DevOps tools that help in streamlining the development and deployment process. These open-source tools are built with enhanced collaboration that improves performance and allows you to handle different market needs.

Why does DevOps need Open-source support?

Well, many companies have adopted the DevOps approach for effective and faster delivery. Most companies do not think of implementing open source software within their organization to enhance the DevOps approach. Also, companies restrain their developers from contributing to open source libraries, so they miss a huge opportunity for success. Below are a few reasons why a company should focus on the open-source community.

Open-source is low-cost :Open-source means it is available freely or at a lower cost than other closed-source systems.

Based on open standards :with open-source, you can find each tool, source code, and related troubleshooting documents easily. If you are still using traditional proprietary software, it will be difficult for your organization to evolve.

Open-source is customizable
Open-source offers customizability where you can use tools and products that are way more efficient and light-weight than other available closed-source options. You can freely choose your framework and easily migrate and automate processes with open-source tools and frameworks.

The open-source community is expanding: the open-source community is now expanding, with millions of contributors and developers writing open code and development. Now companies are even supporting its exposure to their DevOps process. By joining open-source, you will become part of the most dynamic group that provides a better solution for every problem.

DevOps Success aligns with Open-source

There is no doubt that opting for open-source as a part of your DevOps process is beneficial to your organization. But if you are still using highly-proprietary and old traditional IT solutions, you may not achieve the success you are working for. Open source has opened the gate for DevOps to work efficiently. Below are the reasons why DevOps success aligns with the Open-source system, tools, and practices.

DevOps groups should go for open-source because the tools and techniques available in the open-source community are either off the shelf or built at some other organization. This will eventually save you time and cost of developing the required tools at your end.
If you avail open-source, then you can choose any of the open-source frameworks to work on. You can easily migrate your project from one framework to another without any proprietary lock-in or vendor secrets. It allows your software delivery agile, which is essential in the DevOps process.
DevOps mainly focuses on the visibility of the project or application progress within the team members. If you add the open-source within the DevOps process, it ensures the visibility is maintained even to the code level of all the tools you use.
Suppose we get any problem during continuous delivery. In that case, there is no time that you contact proprietary vendors to resolve the issue as proprietary tools require expertise to look into the troubleshooting process. But if you go with open-source, you can resolve the issue by yourself as most of the problems are documented publicly for reference.
With closed systems, you cannot leverage various tools you are using by integrating them and making the system entirely automated. But with an open-source system, integration and automation are pretty efficient and straightforward.

Some Popular Open-source DevOps tools

You can accelerate an existing system by using open-source tools within your DevOps. Below is the list of the open-source DevOps tools.

Ansible
This tool offers software-related services like application deployment, configuration, etc. It allows you to automate IT tasks. You can easily integrate it with other DevOps tools. You can find its free version on GitHub, where Red Hat offers three different paid versions of Ansible.

Watir
It is a web application based open-source testing tool. This tool is the most flexible and reliable Ruby library tool that allows you to automate web browsers. It enables you to communicate with web browsers while performing various web functions.

Supergiant
A supergiant is an open-source tool for container management that is built on top of Kubernetes. It enables Kubernetes deployment on multiple clouds within no time. Also, it helps in streamlining the production deployment. It helps in lowering the hardware costs due to the packing algorithm of the Supergiant.

Nagios
This open-source tool provides a solution to infrastructure monitoring. This tool has a well-established base in the monitoring area and is highly efficient due to the broad community creating plugins for its support. You can choose this tool over others if you want to represent your result in various visual forms.

SaltStack
SaltStack is an enterprise paid version of Salt, which is highly flexible and intelligent open-source software for event-driven orchestration, remote execution, and configuration automation. This tool orchestrates the significant movement of the code into production and ensures optimal application delivery. It allows you to deploy and configure dynamic applications.

Chef
If you want to handle both traditional and cloud environments using a single tool, Chef is the right choice. This tool comes with the development kit that allows you to deploy and test the automation code locally before deploying it to production.

Docker
Docker offers portability due to its containerization technology that transforms IT environments. It packages libraries, tools, runtime everything required for an application to run irrespective of the deployment location.

Git
This open-source tool helps to maintain the source code and to host open-source projects. Git stands out of other tools due to its ability to handle merging and branching. This tool is used by many developers and has become popular in recent years. It offers plugins to integrate it with Jenkins for supporting deployment and integration.

Puppet
With Puppet, you can follow a standard way of managing and delivering software. Puppet enhances audibility, reliability, and agility. It offers continuous automation and delivery during complete SDLC. With the introduction of various new features, it allows you to handle dynamic systems with great ease.

Hudson
Hudson is an open-source tool that allows you to monitor and manage continuous testing and integration. Main features include source code management, code analysis, testing frameworks, and providing real-time failure notifications. You will also get several plugins that are an add-on to its capability.

These tools will help to bridge the gap between the development and production environment. You can choose any tool that suits your business requirement.

The post How important is Open-Source for Devops Success ? appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Understanding the importance of Chaos Engineering in Devops success

Saurabh Gupta — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 19:34:11 +0000

Chaos Engineering – History & Benefits | How Chaos Engineering help in DevOps

Before we get deeper into “Chaos Engineering”, let’s get some idea about the importance of testing in the software development cycle.

Typically, any organization’s goal is never to let their software crash. It needs to be available every time it is required. Software failures can cost outages for companies. It eventually leads to a bad customer experience for customers trying to shop, transact business, and get work done. This is where, organisations needed a rubust solution to solve this challenge. That is how Chaos Engineering came into picture.

Netflix is a leader in Chaos Engineering. In fact, the concept of Chaos engineering was introduced by Netflix. Chaos Engineering is a disciplined approach to identifying failures before they become outages.

As per definition from Wikipedia:

“Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a software system in production in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent and unexpected conditions”

By proactively testing how a system responds under stress, you can identify and fix failures before they end up in the news. Chaos Engineering lets you compare what you think will happen to what happens in your system.

Requirements of Chaos Engineering

It improves the resilience of the system.
You will get to know the weakness of the system.
It is proactive, as opposed to the reactive nature of traditional testing.
It exposes hidden threats and minimizes the risk.

History of Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering first became relevant at internet companies that were pioneering large scale systems. The Netflix Eng tools created Chaos Monkey in 2010. Chaos Monkey was developed as Netflix moved from physical infrastructure to cloud infrastructure provided by AWS. They wanted to make sure that a loss of an Amazon instance wouldn’t affect the Netflix streaming.

After the success of Chaos Monkey, the Netflix team created a suite of tools that supports Chaos Engineering principles, named the Simian Army. Simian Army added additional failure injection modes on top of Chaos Monkey that would allow testing of a more complete suite of failure states.

Later in 2014, Netflix decided to create a new role called the Chaos Engineer. In October 2014, Kolton Andrew’s team at Netflix announced Failure Injection Testing(FIT). It was a new tool built on the concepts of the Simian Army.

FIT gave developers more granular control over the blast radius of their failure injection. This awesome tool also gave the developers control over the scope of their failure. so, they could realize the insights of Chaos Engineering, but mitigate the potential downside.

Other popular Chaos Engineering tools are:

Latency Monkey
Doctor Monkey
Conformity Monkey
Janitor monkey
Security Monkey
Chaos Gorilla
10-18 Monkey

These Chaos Engineering tools are constantly testing the system against all kinds of failures, it helps to build a higher level of confidence in the system’s ability to survive.

Benefits of Chaos Engineering

When you stream using Netflix, and your service fails, you may switch to a Youtube video. Netflix loses money because they were unable to retain your attention. A company’s reputation decrease when their services go down.

This cost can be calculated as a dollar-per-hour metric and has become common in many company’s KPIs. Here are some of the additional benefits of Chaos Engineering.

Technical Benefit:
The Chaos experiment insights can mean a reduction in incidents, reduction in on-call burden, a better understanding of system failures, improved system design, faster mean time to detect SEVs, and reduction in repeated SEVs.
Customer Benefit:
The increased availability and durability of service lead to no outages disrupt their day-to-day lives.
Business Benefit:
Chaos Engineering will prevent huge losses in revenue & maintenance costs, which results in happier & more engaged engineers. This will also improve on-call training for engineering teams & improve the SEV management program for the entire organization.

Chaos Engineering is a strategy for discovering vulnerabilities and it allows an Admin to do the following things:

Identify the poor points in a system.
Check how a system responds to pressure in real-time.
Make the team ready for real possible failures.
Identify the bugs that are yet to cause system-wide problems.

Here is a list of wider benefits of Chaos Engineering:

Simulating high load of CPU.
It adds instructions to a program and allows fault injection.
It disrupts syncs between system clocks.
Turning a virtual machine off to check dependency reaction.
It stimulates the failure of micro-component.
It injects latency between services.
It executes a routine in driver code emulating I/O errors.
It performs function-based chaos like randomly causing functions to throw exceptions.

Chaos Engineering is more than a preventive mechanism. Chaos Engineering will make your system more resilient and will increase the confidence in the system’s capabilities.

There are a plethora of tools for Chaos Engineering you can experiment with different tools & techniques to make it more mature & useful. An organization can achieve long-term software resiliency by intentionally creating Chaos in the system.

Chaos Engineering and DevOps: How it can help DevOps?

It would be best to leverage a DevOps strategy that can work on different factors to make a system resilient to any breakdown. By testing a system with random failures, DevOps teams get to understand their system’s weaknesses. This lets the team make informed decisions around prioritising tasks to upgrade their systems.

Combining Chaos Engineering with DevOps not only detects any turbulence effectively but also helps in fixing it in a phased manner. Anyone can implement Chaos Engineering in DevOps with 5 simple steps:

Define the resilience parameters
Create a resilience strategy
Execute the resilience strategy
Compare the metrics within a group
Fix and minimize the blast radius

Conclusion

Implementing Chaos Engineering needs and thinking. At the same time, it will also evoke confidence.

In conclusion, Chaos Engineering tries to discover the failure points and identify what will happen in the case of resource or object unavailability. This is a very suitable practice in modern software development approaches like DevOps and microservices architectures.

Companies other than Netflix, who uses Chaos Engineering are Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. So, what are your thoughts on Chaos Engineering? Please share you comments below and do not forget to share the post with your network.

The post Understanding the importance of Chaos Engineering in Devops success appeared first on DevopsCurry.