I’m always amused by public company statements about layoffs, especially if they sound like everything is fine when it clearly isn’t. Elastic announced a layoff of 7% of their workforce yesterday and the reactions have included predictable themes of ‘it’s because of AI’, ‘they should have stayed open source’ and ‘it’s not the same as it was when I worked there many moons ago’. Market data shows a significant drop in stock value over the last year, down to $58.71 from a January peak of around $78 (it was over $90 in November).
I’m obviously not a market analyst nor close enough to Elastic’s management to know what’s really going on, but I do have a good understanding of the search engine sector – and of course more generally, it’s not a new story that tech companies (and others) are reducing headcount in the face of the AI revolution. For some organisations, it may be that they are cutting staff just because others are doing it, and to go against the tide may be seen as ignoring what’s happening. I wouldn’t be surprised by a bounce in the stock price as the markets acknowledge that Something Has Been Done. Whether this was the right thing to do won’t matter until we find out whether the rush to AI is indeed a good or bad thing.
From my perspective as a search expert however there are two other things to consider – what happens to those laid off and how Elastic is competing against other platforms.
What ex-Elasticians might do next
Elastic is of course a very widely used technology, so there will be plenty of options for those with Elasticsearch experience. Most of the end-user clients I work with struggle to hire good people. The one wrinkle is that if you’ve mainly worked on the log metrics/observability side of Elasticsearch you may not have the right experience to work on the search side, and vice versa. Getting your CV (resumé) polished and out there with recruitment consultants is the obvious next step.
Move into consulting
If you don’t fancy working for an end user, there are several consultancy companies in the Elasticsearch space and I know some of them have been hiring recently. Consulting requires a somewhat different skill set however – you need to be adaptable, able to think outside the box, teach rather than do and be creative in coming up with ideas. Good consulting companies can help you learn these skills, the worse ones might parachute you into a client engagement as an expert with a high day rate and expect you to learn on the job. If you interview, ask what the consulting company’s approach is to helping you find your feet.
Help a host
Another option is those companies providing hosted Elasticsearch – from the giant AWS to smaller ones like Bonsai. They’ll need people to build and maintain their hosted offering and help clients onboard – often the skills required are in operations.
Use the community
There’s also the search community itself, where you might find a position directly rather than via a recruitment consultant or advertised position. Sadly you’ve just missed the spring conference season (there were a few people at Berlin Buzzwords looking for work, but probably no Elasticians as there was an all-hands meeting in Madrid that week) but there’s other things you can try before the autumn conference season kicks off (here’s my list of upcoming search events):
- Relevance Slack, which has over 5,500 members, is free to join and has #jobs and #jobs-eu channels where you can advertise your skills and experience
- Search Meetups – find one on your local area on my world map. Meetups are a great informal way to network, present something you’ve done and learn about the wider world of search
- There are Slack groups, forums and mailing lists for other engines like OpenSearch, Solr and Vespa (see my last point below) that often have #jobs channels
- There are lots of supportive posts on LinkedIn and other channels (and a few critical of Elastic’s decision) – use and build your networks, reach out to ex-colleagues
- Have you done something cool with Elastic or in search generally? Write about it! Blogging or a video presentation is a better way to showcase your skills than a line in your resumé/CV and a great thing to share on the aforementioned forums and Slack channels
Transferable search skills
My last point is very important – you don’t have to look for positions just covering Elasticsearch. I joke that most search engines are basically the same under the hood, which is of course an oversimplification – but many of the concepts and skills are transferable to another platform. OpenSearch is the closest to Elasticsearch, but many search experts happily move between engines and not just the Lucene-based ones. You’ll recognise lots of similar features and capabilities in Solr, Vespa and commercial options like Algolia and Coveo. Perhaps it’s also time to familiarise yourself with the non-Elastic options.
Does the Elastic layoff mean you should move to another platform?
End users and those watching the sector will be considering what this means for those considering adopting or migrating to a particular platform. It’s important to be sure you have good reasons for migrating, not just FOMO or fear about where the markets are going – Elasticsearch is still the market leader with a solid company behind it that is constantly innovating. Migrations are risky, always take longer than you think and in themselves won’t guarantee an improvement in end user search result quality.
If you do decide based on this news that Elastic isn’t for you, the shortest migration path is to OpenSearch, which is and always has been open source, has a healthy and growing community and is after all based on a fork of Elasticsearch so will seem very familiar.
Another option is Vespa, which is very different to Lucene-based engines but is very powerful and scalable. The community is still growing but there are already stories (both public and those I’ve heard privately) of successful migrations, often on cost grounds.
Solr remains in use at some very big companies, and continues to evolve with cutting-edge vector search features appearing in the recent 10.x release. Some might say that Solr is dropping down the rankings and has been outstripped by Elasticsearch, OpenSearch & Vespa – but it’s not going away any time soon.
Vector search companies like Qdrant are also very visible (although Weaviate has also laid people off over the last few months) and have attracted ex-Elastic people. There’s also companies like Hornet focused on new AI agentic applications and hiring.
It’s not all doom and gloom
Lastly, it’s important to stay positive. Search has seen a renaissance as we’ve understood that retrieval will be the backbone of AI applications – but there’s also still a huge need for accurate and performant search for traditional use cases like e-commerce, enterprise and site search. AI won’t replace search wholesale, although it makes some things easier (as we discussed in the panel I hosted at Buzzwords).
If you’re still at Elastic or looking for more opportunities there’s still much to be done. Equally, if you’re now worried about the future of Elasticsearch, don’t jump until you understand what this will mean.
If you need help understanding the changing search market, or how to make and implement your technology choice, talk to me.