- Makes me sad to read it as an ex-Elastic employee.
AI is used to justify the redundancies, and the company still expects to grow in this fiscal year. In the SEC filling the specifically mention more “head count” in “go-to-market” roles [1].
> a reduction of approximately 7% of our workforce
> Advances in AI, automation, and technology are reshaping how work gets done, and we're changing with them. (…) That's what this reorganization is for: a simpler structure, with fewer layers, less complexity, and less friction.
> The changes we announced today are a sign of confidence in the business, not a retreat from it. We continue to invest in key growth areas and expect total headcount to grow year-over-year this fiscal year [the SEC filling says “ The Company plans to continue hiring in key strategic areas and locations, including continuing to grow headcount in
customer-facing go-to-market functions, and expects total headcount to grow this fiscal year compared to last fiscal year, as it continues to invest in future
growth opportunities”]
[1]: https://ir.elastic.co/financials/sec-filings/sec-filings-det...
by nozzlegear
3 subcomments
- This announcement spends remarkably few words talking about the what (7% of the company's workforce was laid off), and a great deal of words talking about how bright the future of the company is and how they're going to hire more people.
by SaucyWrong
1 subcomments
- Funny, so many words used but my brain only hears, “I am currently mismanaging this company,” every time one of these layoffs occurs.
by monicasarbu
0 subcomment
- Ex-Elastic here. At Xata, we've built a company with many of the things we loved about Elastic's culture, and several former Elasticians are already on the team. We're currently hiring Backend Engineers, a Product Marketing Lead, and a Head of Product. If you're interested (or know someone who might be), send us a message!
by tracerbulletx
9 subcomments
- Before the 1980s layoffs were seen as a massive failure of the company and almost never happened to tenured employees unless the company was collapsing. Before we are all made to think this is normal and unavoidable behavior.
- It's interesting to contrast this announcement with a similar post from the CEO in 2022 [1]: those past layoffs had much more of a victim-of-circumstances tone as ZIRP was beginning to dry up, but apparently those "bad times" versus "good times" during AI mania just accounts for a delta of +6% additional layoffs.
Another commenter questioned what size bucket Elastic falls into these days; in April 2025 their SEC filing [2] cited about 3,500 employees. So not a startup any more but definitely not fully-fledged FAANG-sized.
(not sure whether it even applies here; but full disclosure, I left Elastic in 2022.)
[1]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/ceo-ash-kulkarni-email-to-elasti...
[2]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000170775325...
- This just reaffirms my view is that big companies will lose headcount because of AI, but small and medium companies will (or at least have the potential to) leverage AI to do bigger and better things. This is because big companies could always spend big money on getting what they want made while small companies always have to tradeoff what they can realistically do with the resources they have.
- I wonder if some of these CEOs are anticipating a big crash and trying to lay people off now, so that (1) they can raise/hoard cash while the money-go-round is spinning and (2) their eng organization is already lean and used to it if/when the money-go-round stops.
“Because of AI” indeed.
- I recommended an elastic demo for a client that would be well served by Elasticsearch. The Elastic sales folks completely torpedoed the presentation by trying to focus on their AI “capabilities” and not on the recommended talking points. This was 2 years ago.
- Here's my translation of this announcement: https://layofftranslator.com/layoffs/2026-06-24-elastic/
- I wonder how much of the layoffs were caused by their license change in 2021.
They lost a lot of goodwill back then. Some of their potential customers migrated to OpenSearch and never looked back, even after they backed down and went open-source again under AGPL.
- Why even bother with such a small layoff? Is there a reason to not just dial up your attrition for a while?
- Unfortunately Elastic lost -60.54% market value in the last 5 years. Negative net income every year since going public.
The underlying message is a lot clear - they are a public company. They have to do this and more show to net positive income to keep the market value from falling further.
Companies can keep the employees with market value drop but it gets hard with negative income. Salesforce also lost ~37% value in last 5 years but they still print billions in net income every year.
The same story with companies like Gitlab. They lost 75% market value and negative income since going public.
by nipperkinfeet
0 subcomment
- Bloated POS software. Kill it off.
- > Customer expectations are increasing and evolving faster than ever before
Wouldn't that suggest you need those workers more?
by dirtbag__dad
1 subcomments
- > in some areas, especially customer-facing sales, we expect to keep adding to our teams to support future growth
Can someone help me understand why sales is immune to this strategy and still is employing the “more bodies” approach. I thought we were working smarter in 2026?
- For the good of the company we are reducing force by 7% even though those people we fired were instrumental in helping us grow. Insensitive PR tripe.
by SpyCoder77
0 subcomment
- Saying 7% in this scenario is the wrong choice. It diminishes the absolute number of ~281 people who just had their lives shaken up by this.
by vismit2000
0 subcomment
- They should layoff everybody, close down the company, and just use postrgres full text search
by moron4hire
1 subcomments
- Looks like Elastic has a lazy CEO
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/nvidias-jensen-hu...
by Bombthecat
1 subcomments
- Seven percent sounds about right what AI can replace
- No mention of any details of the severance packages.
What's normal in USA for this size of company?
- I'm sure now that they've right-sized the org, the leftover engineers + AI are really gonna grind out the best features. We should be seeing 10x any day now.
- Sad but you unfortunately need to make a profit as a public company at some point. In 8 years since going public, they've had essentially one marginally profitable year surrounded by lots of losses while growing to 4000 employees. Easy to blame AI when the fault is really poor leadership.
by enraged_camel
1 subcomments
- So how many people? I can't find this info anywhere.
- Why are these decisions never easy?
by qwertyuiop_
1 subcomments
- We're in an outstanding position and well-equipped for the future. I'm excited about the opportunities ahead and focused on making sure Elastic is positioned to lead in this next phase of innovation. - Ash Kulkarni"
If they are in an outstanding position why did he make 7% of the employees lives miserable with a stroke of a pen.
- I blame the hyperscalers not AI.
I think open source is important and fair use is important, but I’m skeptical of the business model of gutting open source by hosting it and reselling it wholesale with a few modifications.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft are getting rich just reselling hosted open source and actively competing with and gutting companies like Elastic.
- this should we do this or no this is not right
by aussieguy1234
0 subcomment
- > The industry is changing. Advances in AI, automation, and technology are reshaping how work gets done, and we're changing with them
It's never AI. In almost every case, companies that claim it's AI are doing so because reducing headcount due to "automating with AI" sounds better than the real reason, often over hiring, financial troubles and other reasons that might scare investors away.
The correct term is usually AI Washing.
More info: https://www.thehrdigest.com/what-is-ai-washing-and-why-has-i...
by iwontberude
0 subcomment
- lol everyone quit using elasticsearch for opensearch. Elastic use to be pretty cool but that was over ten years ago.
by elzbardico
0 subcomment
- Right now if you're a open company, you have to keep a constant flow of layoffs in order to satisfy the wall street vampires.
I don't even blame the CEOs anymore, very few of them have the fortitude or the luxury of even being able to say: "Shut up stupid monkeys, I won't do layoffs to satisfy your urges this quarter, I don't want to fuck the long term value creation ability of this company just because you want a quick orgasm now".
by sergiotapia
0 subcomment
- > this requires us to move faster and operate leaner than we have before
:laughing:
> To do it, we're shifting our pace of innovation, simplifying how we operate, and investing in new skills. That's what this reorganization is for: a simpler structure, with fewer layers, less complexity, and less friction.
Translation: We're going to run the remaining people ragged.
> That means fewer layers, broader ownership, clearer accountability, and a sharper focus on the skills we believe matter most for what's ahead.
Yeah the people remaining are cooked.
It's never "we're going to hire more people to build lots of cool stuff" it's always giving fewer people quadruple the responsibility expectation.
by variety8675
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by gaiagraphia
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- [flagged]
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