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Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

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41–50 of 595 posts

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#41

There was a person in the Uber thread yesterday who predicted this. I wonder if they’ll go back to hiring if this is over or they’re using as an opportunity to get rid of people they shouldn’t have hired in the first place.

My guess is both, they’re doing some cleanup and will go back to hiring.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#43

There was a person in the Uber thread yesterday who predicted this. I wonder if they’ll go back to hiring if this is over or they’re using as an opportunity to get rid of people they shouldn’t have hired in the first place.

Some companies should be billion dollar companies with 30 employees, like when Instagram was bought out in 2012. Headcount is mutually exclusive from how much the enterprise makes and can return to shareholders.

If headcount is not directly helping that then it should not be an indefinite relationship.

Also, I'm available for hire as a CFO or board member if you think your company has challenges with adopting this market-relevant predilection and needs to make "the hard decisions".

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, though the stock went up after this news, Google and Amazon could have acted faster.

That's because there is at least 17% less share dilution than there was a day before, let alone the runway being marginally extended. So speculators don't get dumped on by employees with RSUs all day every day, and the business prospects are not adversely impacted any more than they already were. Thats when you pay more for shares. Layoffs are proactive for investors, not an omen for investors, don't get that confuse…

The distribution of RSUs at all major tech companies is very uneven. Most job titles don't get any, or just a token amount. Only executives and software engineers can negotiate for the large grants.

I'd guess less than 10% of employees probably hold more than 90% of RSUs everywhere (not that different from the stock market as a whole, where 10% of Americans own over 80% of the market).

So a 17% layoff might not touch the RSU-rich employees very much at all.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, though the stock went up after this news, Google and Amazon could have acted faster.

That's because there is at least 17% less share dilution than there was a day before, let alone the runway being marginally extended. So speculators don't get dumped on by employees with RSUs all day every day, and the business prospects are not adversely impacted any more than they already were. Thats when you pay more for shares. Layoffs are proactive for investors, not an omen for investors, don't get that confuse…

Won't this create more share dilution in the short term? Don't layoffs trigger options/RSUs to be executed some time window after the layoff?

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying people in stock and performance bonuses is ideal during a downturn. It doesn't cost the company anything to pay people in stock, since it just siphons off value from all existing stock, and nobody's getting their performance bonus!

> anything to pay people in stock, since it just siphons off value from all existing stock wait what?

Let’s say I have 1000 outstanding shares all worth $10. I need to pay someone a $5000 bonus. I’ll just issue 500 shares of stock to them instead because, well, that’s about $5000.

Hypothetically the per share price goes down by 1/3 here and is now worth $6.67 (but the company’s still worth $10,000 total it’s just 1500 * $6.67 instead of $1000 * $10).

Generally though bonuses like this come out of a pool that’s already been allocated years ago and there’s no change to stock price

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#47
post #37

Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona. With google also slowing hiring, are the engineers laid off all going to be absorbed by facebook?

Facebook is surely in a similar ad dollars crunch as Google. I can't imagine they're full speed.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#48
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything to pay people in stock, since it just siphons off value from all existing stock wait what?

Let’s say I have 1000 outstanding shares all worth $10. I need to pay someone a $5000 bonus. I’ll just issue 500 shares of stock to them instead because, well, that’s about $5000. Hypothetically the per share price goes down by 1/3 here and is now worth $6.67 (but the company’s still worth $10,000 total it’s just 1500 * $6.67 instead of $1000 * $10). Generally though bonuses like this come out of a pool that’s alread…

Even if the pool is allocated years ago, it's still effectively dilution (as before shareholders effectively owned a fraction of the unallocated sharepool).

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#49
post #37

Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona. With google also slowing hiring, are the engineers laid off all going to be absorbed by facebook?

I'm not sure that's the case, as they never made it into the FANG acronym. Even Twitter doesn't quite fit up there.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#50
post #17

Lyft is up 5% today, but the market (S&P 500) is generally up 2.94%.

Both uber and lyft are flying today. Most people see cutting jobs as a bad thing, market probably sees it as a cost savings and great business decision.

Lyft and Uber are disproportionately impacted by coronavirus news, and the remdesivir drug trial seems to have been a success, so Lyft and Uber are up more than the rest of the market.
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