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Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

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Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#71

Post by BoorishBears »

datalopers wrote: post #56
bombcar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't know who the useless colleague is, it's probably you! Not entirely true, but I think most people can (if they're being honest) get 70% or more correct when guessing who will be laid off. The only wildcard usually is when entire teams are let go, and sometimes those are predictable, sometimes surprising.

> get 70% or more correct when guessing who will be laid off. What happens when it's the managers themselves who are useless, overpaid, and can't evaluate the team for actual efficacy?

One comment in the Stripe layoff thread was someone who's manager didn't get to put any input into the process.

Honestly its funny reading threads like this with people beating their chest about useless coworkers. Instead of thinking of useless coworkers and colleagues, think about what percent of the entire industry that's working on things with no hard output, no interest in profitability, banking on free money that's drying up...

If you're working somewhere with so many incompetent colleagues you think 13% layoffs is not trimming anyone useful, odds are your entire unit is in trouble.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#72

Post by stingrae »

andrekandre wrote: post #50
im-a-baby wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powell has previously said that he wants higher unemployment. He believes this is the only way to decrease demand and bring down prices. > The labor market continues to be out of balance, with demand for workers substantially exceeding the supply of available workers. The labor force participation rate showed a welcome uptick in August but is little changed since the beginning of the year. FOMC participants expect su…

> He's absolutely determined to increase unemployment via rate hikes. either i'm deluded or there has to a better way to run an economy than this...

Their goal is to reduce inflation. Increasing unemployment, is a side effect of rate hikes but ultimately, reduces demand for consumer goods thus reducing inflation.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#73

Post by AnimalMuppet »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #49
im-a-baby wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave you direct quotes from Powell's September Press Conference. https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon... He goes on to say that supply and demand for workers needs to be brought into balance. The goal of raising interest rates is to reduce demand for labor. He says that directly. This isn't a conspiracy theory.

> goal of raising interest rates is to reduce demand for labor. He says that directly None of your quotes say that.

Exactly. The quotes say that the Fed's goal is to control inflation, and that reduced demand for labor is going to be collateral damage. But reducing demand for labor is not the goal; controlling inflation is. The quotes do not say what im-a-baby claims they say.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#75

Post by superfrank »

datalopers wrote: post #18
jstx1 wrote: post #3

Where are we heading if every company drop 10-20% of their staff?

All these companies have vastly overhired. Think of your own peers and colleagues. How many are a) utterly useless or b) competent but don't have anything to do so they spend time working on mostly pointless projects to improve their CV?

No idea if it's true, but in my mental model, remote work plays into this as well. Pre-covid, large companies were restricted to hiring the talent in their area. If there weren't enough talented people near the company, they would often end up hiring people who were under qualified, just to fill seats. Remote work made the talent pool bigger which means more qualified candidates. These layoffs are allowing large companies to lay off some of those under qualified local hires.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#76

Post by lovich »

jstx1 wrote: post #3

Where are we heading if every company drop 10-20% of their staff?

Might get absorbed by other companies but at lower rates. The faangs, and especially meta and google, have been starving a lot of startups and less efficient companies of talent.

If your business model wasn’t profitable enough to handle all your engineers having over 250k tc it’s been a bit of a difficult market to hire and retain people in the past few years

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#77

Post by bombcar »

datalopers wrote: post #56
bombcar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't know who the useless colleague is, it's probably you! Not entirely true, but I think most people can (if they're being honest) get 70% or more correct when guessing who will be laid off. The only wildcard usually is when entire teams are let go, and sometimes those are predictable, sometimes surprising.

> get 70% or more correct when guessing who will be laid off. What happens when it's the managers themselves who are useless, overpaid, and can't evaluate the team for actual efficacy?

That's when you start seeing teams get axed, though you will often have a "reorg" instead, where managers are shuffled around and then a layoff event where the ones they don't want are let go.

Unfortunately the useless and overpaid managers are often the best at brown nosing.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#78

Post by seanmcdirmid »

stingrae wrote: post #72
andrekandre wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's absolutely determined to increase unemployment via rate hikes. either i'm deluded or there has to a better way to run an economy than this...

Their goal is to reduce inflation. Increasing unemployment, is a side effect of rate hikes but ultimately, reduces demand for consumer goods thus reducing inflation.

Their goal is to keep inflation steady at a manageable rate, and to prevent any deflation at all. Since inflation indicators haven't been too reliable in the last 20 years, they were caught horribly off guard. But ideally, they would make small changes one way or the other to maintain a nice equilibrium that would keep employment levels relatively stable.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#79

Post by kerbs »

granshaw wrote: post #39
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #32

Anyone that was around for the "Turn of the Century Crash" may find this familiar. With all the massive scaleups, companies were becoming bloated as hell. They also became fairly sloppy with their money. Time to pay the piper. But unlike some bubbles, there's a real industry, here (like in the 'oughts). It's a return to a [still pretty decent] baseline, as opposed to an implosion to nothing. In the early Web days, th…

I was too young then, but did that crash have the same "everyone and their mother sees it coming and have been talking about it months before" feeling? Cause this "crash" is surely like that – it has to be the most "expected and talked about" one in modern times...

I was young too, but I think the .com bust was far more obvious than the housing crash which snuck up on a lot of people.

Re: Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts

#80

Post by colechristensen »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #11

Ask HN: Isn't recession just mass hysteria ? Layoffs leading to more layoffs leading to the entire economy slowing down ?

Yes, but so was the bubble that preceded it, in the opposite direction.

If you have a whole economy ignoring signs and pretending growth goes forever you get bigger, harder crashes.

We can hope that this downturn is going to be a short wave just in response to the post covid overhype. But really there are still big problems with real estate valuation with lots of things going to be literally under water in decades and everything overpriced as a result of bad policy with low interest and too many people having enormous loans for most of their working lives.

Housing as investment needs to be drug out into the street and shot, but there isn’t really any way to do that which doesn’t cause a huge economic shock.

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