Thread regarding F5 Networks Inc. layoffs

@vfs Nope. - she driven all of them out.

@vfs I’m genuinely curious about what happened to the founders. One left, one is probing into a lot of things but does not lead to anything, and one is just walking on a treadmill (if you ever met him in a Zoom meeting).

@vb6 Right? Blame the founders.

@vdc are there even any execs left other than Kara?

It's a fascinating slow-motion train wreck to observe from the inside. Most of us have faded into the bushes like Homer, collecting our paychecks waiting for the ship to sink

@vb6 Those who continue to suffer from her at H1

@var who gives a f about kara anymore?

@txb Mark my words, Kara is going to move more jobs to India. It won’t stop with EPD, Triage etc. either. Finance, even People team will follow. The European and US teams will still exist, but mostly as a facade.

EPD will soon become mostly India-based, and somehow, “magically,” more and more senior hires will come through intra-company transfers and need L-1 visa sponsorship from this tiny company to relocate to US. That part is not hard to understand either, because for Indian nationals the normal EB-2 and EB-3 green card backlog is so long that L-1 can look like a much more attractive path than waiting in those lines for years.

At the same time, the work still won’t get done on time. So instead of fixing the real execution problems, Indian managers hiring more Indian in US, and of course more people in India, and then even bring in some third-party agency and contractors to do the work on top of that.

Same thing has happened at so many US companies. Same tired consulting playbook every time. Dress it up as strategy, efficiency, or scale, but it leaves so many blank spaces that other people end up writing their own version of the playbook as they go.

I was once at a FAANG company. Once, an org had some work related to the U.S. government, and the entire org couldn’t find a single U.S. citizen to pull some numbers and had to come to our org to borrow one.

At another F500 company (which is no longer F500, lol), we once had Indian contractors with Teradata access, while employees did not. Consequently, all data pull had to be facilitated through them.

That was incredibly absurd, and that’s the direction HackerOne is headed.

@txb “ But the platform quality is declining.” yeah, and what are we doing? Pushing to use it as f5 security research platform.

@OP You all seem to have forgotten another "masterpiece" by Kara Sprague. HackerOne has recently imposed notable price increases on renewals

AI slop flooding HackerOne.
Real Researchers leaving.
Companies closing programs.

Board: Why are we not growing?
McKinsey sis (Kara) : We should focus on enterprise accounts.

Board: But revenue is down.
McKinsey sis (Kara): Then we increase the price.

Board: But customers are leaving.
McKinsey sis (Kara): Exactly. We increase the price for the enterprise tier.

Board: But the platform quality is declining.
McKinsey sis (Kara): You’re thinking about product. We’re thinking about strategy.

Problem solved.

https://bottomline.seattle.gov/2026/02/26/one-glass-at-a-time-abc-program-helps-werise-wines-build-connections-with-underrepresented-winemakers/

@s7x heard about reorganisation

@s4y resource deprivation happened at F5 too

@sa2 that happens with Dictatorship

@s7x we have no idea, all discussion channels are no longer active.

People fear to address jiāngshī by name

@s51 Sounds like F5 now....

@s51 another unpublished layoff just now?

There can never be a comparison between Marten and today’s horror show of executive leadership. There was a time where HackerOne truly cared about what it was doing, its employees, its community! Now it’s all about pleasing a select few leaders and their stupid ideas. Wasting time on projects that have no cost benefit to the business but don’t worry it stops Kara being confused. The layoffs were personal, every single person that was laid off had a voice and had used it. The company is now ran on one value: be a sheep and follow along. All the amazing talent that has either walked or been pushed out of their company is just insanity. I once loved this company and what it stood for. Now I just have a really bad taste in my mouth. Layoffs are a natural part of business but let’s be clear on this, this was no regular lay off.

@s4a Thanks for sharing this.

Kara Sprague spends a lot of time engaging in these kind of “hacker” vs “researcher,” “region” vs “theater,” or “bi--hing” about some metrics, yet simultaneously deprives that team of resources.

I still recall Mårten’s (the previous CEO) last AMA session. I was relatively new at the time, I could sense that people genuinely admired and respected him. There was a clear upward trajectory under his leadership, but things started to crack after Kara Sprague joined in the second quarter.

Mårten did laid off, but he owned it up, we can still google what happened, what he said about it.

The real problem is indeed Kara. To be clear, Hackerone has gone through a layoff before her, but the then CEO (Marten Mickos) took full responsibility for his actions, was very transparent, encouraged spicy AMA questions, and understood when to avoid sugarcoating.

The current leadership - brought in by kara with impressive sounding resumes full of “cross-functional team leadership” - does not have a clue what the hacker community really is. There’s no meaningful cybersecurity expert at the top, domain experts are leaving because they feel unheard and irrelevant in decisions that affect their own discipline. Here’s a small example to reflect what’s changing: Kara and her leadership instructed employees to refrain from the word “hacker” in public communications and use “researchers” instead because it’s “less scary”. The company is literally called “HackerOne”, you d-mb bi--h. It’s built on embracing the hacker identity. This should be enough to prove that leaders don’t understand what they are leading.

Hackerone hasn’t fully collapsed yet, and might continue to make profits in the short term - only because the previous leaders have built a very strong base. But, the foundation can only absorb so much, I have no doubts this company will be doomed long term under Kara. Leadership that doesn't understand the community it serves will never turn things around. It just runs out the clock on someone else's legacy.

@rqa I dont know the real problem with Hacker One that you refer too - enlighten me please as I thought it was Kara

it doesn't matter, they all come and go

@rqa Do you mean Pawan Agarwal?

At HackerOne, AI = Actually India

@rqa the real problem is Kara

@rqa the guy hired Kara Sprague?
I’m genuinely curious. I understand that the past wasn’t perfect, but the difference since Kara Sprague has been like day and night.

We all know who the real problem with HackerOne is and it's not Kara, as bad as she is

@ra6 “ Strong leaders build strong teams. Insecure leaders eliminate them.” 100% , it’s a bit of stretch to call insecure people “leaders”. Plenty of them in the middle management layers. Poor bast…ds and a.. lickers. Yes Sir, No Sir. Tremendous failure on all fronts. Never seen such a thing before. Not good folks, not great.

@r9a it’s a fu--ing purge at HackerOne.

In less than a year:
All C-levels gone.
Respected operators gone.
A lot of good people pushed out or quietly cycled through rolling layoffs.
Culture? Gutted.

Since Kara Sprague stepped in, it’s felt less like leadership and more like a takeover. Clear the room. Remove dissent. Surround yourself with people who won’t challenge you. Call it “alignment.”

And what’s left? A senior team allergic to disagreement. No spine. No real friction — including the two founders still there. Just polished talking points while institutional knowledge walks out the door.

Strong leaders build strong teams. Insecure leaders eliminate them.

For the C-levels who were pushed out or chose to leave, I still have respect. Walking away from something you can’t stand behind takes integrity.

The ones who stayed? Hard to tell whether it’s fear or opportunism. But silence at that level isn’t neutrality — it’s endorsement.

And let’s talk about the hypocrisy.

You set aggressive quarterly goals. You push teams to grind, stretch, and overdeliver. You demand urgency. Loyalty. Results.

Then after the new year, you label those same people “redundant.”

If the team you just pushed to hit critical goals is suddenly unnecessary, then either leadership had no idea what the business actually needed — or those people were used until they weren’t convenient anymore.

Either way, the redundancy isn’t at the bottom.

It’s at the top.

Still baffles me how HackerOne's brilliant founders handed the keys to Kara as CEO. Of all fu--ing people. I feel sorry for everyone who has to work for her, that woman has no business being a leader. If there's ever a company that you absolutely hate to the core, apply for a leadership role there and start behaving like Kara, you'd absolutely enjoy burning the company down.

@r5f I would not - don't tell me what I would or would not do you troll.

@r5f "Businesses don't run on emotions" yet here you are, emotionally defending this system. Instagram tried to go full-TikTok in 2022, Kylie Jenner posted "make Instagram Instagram again," and they reversed it within a week. Unity tried to charge developers per game install in 2023, devs lost their minds, and Unity's CEO "retired" while they walked back the entire policy. Starbucks announced they were banning Pride decorations in some stores in 2023, got absolutely destroyed by their own baristas and customers online, and immediately backtracked saying "actually we fully support Pride" because turns out your latte-sipping base will emotionally boycott you into oblivion.

Businesses absolutely run on emotions; they just pretend they don't until the angry mob with Twitter accounts shows up at their door.

I honestly don't understand the hate with outsourcing. I get it that it's bad for the American workers but businesses do not run on emotions. If you had your own business, you'd 100% consider outsourcing for more profits as well. Every country has its own set of unfair advantages. Cope better.

@r0n good one! Just look at the company structure and see the faces.

link found on another board that I believe to be relevant to F5 and Hackerone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5fXrPMGM5E

@qm1 meanwhile management is outsourcing security research to H1. Tremendous job like never before!

looks like they're cutting out the hackers https://x.com/Hacker0x01/status/2021931129863852250 https://www.hackerone.com/blog/agentic-penetration-testing-as-a-service with some executive in full damage control mode stating that "they're only using everyone's data to for ML purposes, not AI" and that "it's been in their ToS for 10 years". jfc

@q8k don't forget that HackerOne 2.0 already happened about 5 years ago, and she just doesn't seem to know or care about that. She's literally retreading the same ground in a worse way with marketing lingo that already failed. A mindless figurehead. Doesn't know what she doesn't know. The biggest failure here is in whatever devils bargain the founders took to allow their company to fade into nothing. They pretty much created their own best competitor with their own tools, called Xbow, and then failed to acquire or capitalize on that bot company's success. The company deserves to fail if they can't even capitalize on their own creations. Xbow was just a hackbot that they allowed to happen, then acted surprised when it out performs them. Visionaries those 3 guys are not.

@q8k Supreme ----> Dictator