Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just FYI, you're shadowbanned.
There's usually a pretty good reason for that. Notifying the person starts the process over.
I like to undermine the regime.
Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
61–70 of 595 posts
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So many companies are disproportionately affected to varying degrees. Not all up. If you are referring to this news (1), take it with a grain of salt. Look at the % recovery, look at those N's, look at those p values. Gilead is pumping today, but imo this isn't a smoking gun study. The drug needs to be administered to more patients to get more statistical power and draw meaningful conclusions on efficacy.
Then again, wall street doesn't know their N's and p's. Gilead could have put out anything today and the stock would be flying on speculation due to none of the hungover 24 year olds moving millions at goldman sachs actually reading the study, much less interpreting it. Of course, this is just my take. Maybe you are right and this does explain the pump, I guess we will read about it this evening.
1. https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press-relea...
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#63Uber/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?
This will play our more like the dotcom burst than the 2008 crisis.
For most younger people here this may come as a shock but tech jobs can disappear, for years.
The job market in 2019 felt a lot like the job market in 1999, people rushing to get upskilled so that they could get into software and make ridiculous money. After the dotcom burst huge number of people left tech, or at least left the world of software development. Salaries also went way down for nearly a decade.
A common comment here on HN with layoffs is "well they're just getting rid of superfluous employees, so this is no big deal". This assumption is both ridiculously callous about real people losing job, it also underestimates how much work is superfluous in SV.
It is very possible that tech will take a serious hit this time, and that the total number of software engineers, data scientists, dev ops people etc will go do... for years. And likewise salaries will also drop (TC automatically does this thanks to the magic of RSUs).
Certainly people will need software and software engineers, just likely not nearly as much as they do now. Once FAANG realizes there's no longer a need to keep talent off the market, expect salaries to take a dive.
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#64This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft. Amazon could bundle rides with package deliveries and get the pre-existing driver and passenger network from Lyft. Lyft was actually telling drivers to work with Amazon when the pandemic started (1). Waymo could take Lyft’s aggregated rider demand. They already have a partnership to transfer autonomous rides from Waymo to Lyft during bad weather situation…
This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft
Or maybe Apple.
Apple has been pouring millions into improving its street views in Apple Maps. It should buy Lyft. Pay the drivers an extra $x/mile to clamp the Apple Maps image gathering device to the roofs of their cars.
The drivers win because they get a bump in income in an industry that's already hurting.
Apple wins because it gets up-to-date information about the places where people go most.
Even better: Apple could pay them $x/mile to drive to specific areas where the data is stale or missing.
As a former Uber/Lyft driver, I'd be all over this like Oprah on a baked ham.
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#65Uber/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.
AFAIK, the FANG acronym was meant to represent the FAANG stocks, not the perceived quality of engineering within the industry.
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I found out that a bunch of my coworkers had been laid off in a video meeting, I’d be bummed because they got laid off, but I’d understand that companies have to make hard decisions sometimes. If I learned that the accidentally visible filename of the PowerPoint in that meeting was “EjectorSeat.pptx”, I’d be some combination of angry and alarmed about management’s attitude. That would be a definite “update my resu…
According to SlateStarCodex, Triplebyte (YC '15) ignored the stay-at-home warnings about the virus and had employees come in to the office to get their notice of layoffs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
He (mostly) retracted this a week later:
"Last links post I included tech company Triplebyte in the shame list for refusing to let employees switch to work-from-home, then firing them. A representative of Triplebyte contacted me and asked me to explain their perspective, which is that they took the pandemic seriously and went all-remote around the same time as everyone else. The reluctance to let employees switch to work-from-home applied only to a few employees in early March, before the scale of the crisis was widely appreciated, and they say that they would have tried to make accommodations if they had understood the seriousness of the requests. They had been planning the downsizing for a while, it was really unlucky that it ended up in the middle of a pandemic, and they tried to make it as painless as possible by offering good severance pay, etc. I’m relaying their statement because I’m realizing it was probably unfair of me to single them out in particular – my hearing a lot about this was downstream of my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte, and my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte was downstream of them being a great company doing important work which all my friends wanted to work for. I continue to generally respect them and their vision (see here for more), and you don’t need to give them any more grief over it than they’re already getting."
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#67This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft. Amazon could bundle rides with package deliveries and get the pre-existing driver and passenger network from Lyft. Lyft was actually telling drivers to work with Amazon when the pandemic started (1). Waymo could take Lyft’s aggregated rider demand. They already have a partnership to transfer autonomous rides from Waymo to Lyft during bad weather situation…
This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft Or maybe Apple. Apple has been pouring millions into improving its street views in Apple Maps. It should buy Lyft. Pay the drivers an extra $x/mile to clamp the Apple Maps image gathering device to the roofs of their cars. The drivers win because they get a bump in income in an industry that's already hurting. Apple wins because it gets up-to-date informat…
Apple seem to have already done the job without Lyft’s help.
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always some related piece of news about the way the company went about the layoffs. This one seems especially reaching. Really, a meeting invite?!
If I found out that a bunch of my coworkers had been laid off in a video meeting, I’d be bummed because they got laid off, but I’d understand that companies have to make hard decisions sometimes. If I learned that the accidentally visible filename of the PowerPoint in that meeting was “EjectorSeat.pptx”, I’d be some combination of angry and alarmed about management’s attitude. That would be a definite “update my resu…
>I think people reasonably expect that when a company makes a serious decision that affects hundreds of people’s livelihoods, that they effect a pretty somber tone.
This case sounds like an unfortunate mistake, I’m sure they intended to present the material in a somber manner. That said, it begs the question on if what should be expected behind closed doors.
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#69[deleted]
Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
#70Crap, I was scheduled to go on internship with them this summer, but I feel like that might quickly no longer be an option..
I would reach out to them to verify, and simultaneously begin looking for a backup (which will be difficult in the current market, but there definitely are still companies hiring).