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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

#151

Post by ISL »

DocTomoe wrote: post #127
4gotunameagain wrote: post #11

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

Worse: Money is an illusion. We mistake a unit of measurement (like grams, or gallons) for wealth. In a recession, workers come to a construction site - material is still there, so is electricity and power tools ... but work can't continue and they will be fired because the boss has run out of inches. (Thought stolen from Alan Watts)

Money isn't an illusion. It is a useful abstraction of human effort/potential.

The workers will be fired because the boss has run out of societal-effort credits.

The only "illusion" is the collective understanding that these "made-up" credits can be redeemed with other counterparties for human effort in the future. So long as we all approximately believe that idea, it works.

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

#152

Post by programmertote »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #68
4gotunameagain wrote: post #11

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

In this case, rising interest rates have a very direct negative impact on new investments. As new investments contract, demand shrinks for services across the industry. As demand shrinks, fewer employees are needed and companies need to reduce headcount to avoid overspending relative to revenues. There is a cascading effect, but it would be a mistake to attribute it all to a big psychological mistake. When demand goe…

> As new investments contract, demand shrinks for services across the industry. As demand shrinks, fewer employees are needed and companies need to reduce headcount to avoid overspending relative to revenues.

As someone who has only taken Econ 101 in college, can you explain

1) why the demand shrinks when there's not enough new investments? Shouldn't demand at least be the same overall (I mean I can see that fewer new houses are built, so the demand for timber might shrink. But that only explains the housing sector. I'd imagine the demand might stay constant for some industry such as transportation)?

2) Related to #2, if demand does not shrink by much, shouldn't the same number of workers be kept employed to fulfill the demand for goods?

If it's true that the contraction of new investments causes shrinkage of demand, it means the economy is heavily reliant on industries/sectors which relies on new investments (aka growth)?

Thank you in advance for elaborating your answer!

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

#153

Post by Spivak »

nunez wrote: post #99
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, rising interest rates have a very direct negative impact on new investments. As new investments contract, demand shrinks for services across the industry. As demand shrinks, fewer employees are needed and companies need to reduce headcount to avoid overspending relative to revenues. There is a cascading effect, but it would be a mistake to attribute it all to a big psychological mistake. When demand goe…

Adding context: the US Fed raised the interest rate benchmark this week to 4%, with the expectation that it will be raised higher. Credit's getting a lot more expensive.

Yep, don't even look at mortgages until housing prices drop in response to the rate increases. Because the amount of total money paid in interest over a 30 loan increased more than 2x over the last year.

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

#154

Post by matwood »

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...

The .com crash was obvious it was going to happen, but when was the problem [1]. Companies were IPOing with no business model and no clear path to one. Imagine if the majority of the nasdaq was SPACs and crypto...yeah. I wish fuckedcompany.com was still around because it cataloged the implosion of the insanity.

[1] The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

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

#155

Post by mountainofdeath »

SevenNation wrote: post #26

This is what the other side of a hiring blitz looks like. On the ascent, company after company speculatively hired extremely expensive workers - because the surface economic signals were misleading people who should have known better. There was so much money to throw at employees that offers were being extended just to keep candidates away from competitors. This went on so long and with such fury that employees, cand…

This has been happening for at least the second half of the prior decade. I graduated in 2014 and that was the second year EE/CS had a significant uptick in enrollments. When I started in 2010, it was mostly the "runs Linux on the desktop" hacker-types.

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

#156

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

freshfunk wrote: post #142
tqi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh awesome, would love to ask a few questions about your experience: 1. What did it feel like day to day as a person working in the industry during that time, and did it differ from the "bubble" period prior or more "normal" period immediately following? 2. How long after the bottom before the recovery felt "real" to you, and did you see companies / people change their behavior?

Not OP but first off I'd say that while some things feel similar, I don't think we're close to how bad it was back then if you look at the magnitude of the fall out. So take these answers understanding that things were worse back then. 1. It felt like a nuclear winter for tech jobs between 2000/2001 and 2004/2005. Jobs were available but it was way more competitive to get them and you were a lot less likely to get th…

That's a fairly good explanation.

My company made imaging peripherals, and were very conservative, so they weren't on a bandwagon. Our jobs were OK.

I feel like the .com crash was pretty telegraphed. People who could spell "HTTP" were being hired as Chief In Charge Of Everything Web Gods, and they were spending company money like candy.

It cleared the way for companies like Google and MySpace (which met its end, not long after).

My company got fat on consumer cameras, which were destroyed in about 2010, after the smartphone revolution started to really get going. The next seven years were kind of a mad scramble for market share, while the managers kept doing everything but admitting that they really screwed the pooch, by not anticipating the rise of cellphone cameras.

Come to think of it, there is a lot of that "Nobody saw it coming" language, here, as well.

I am very fiscally conservative, and my indicator of a coming reckoning, was watching all the Scrooge McDucks, diving into their piles of money. That doesn't end well (see: 1929).

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

#157

Post by hammock »

andreilys wrote: post #98
hammock wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What recession? We are not in a recession. Unemployment data and the broader economy are still strong. Saying otherwise is dangerous, to be honest

The definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, which we've had. We're waking up from a a long night of heavy drinking (free money via zero interest rate, unrestrained QE, etc.), the bill is due and you're plugging your ears and yelling that the party must go on.

Yeah, that sounds like MAGA speech. Aka the greatest threat to our democracy right now

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

#159

Post by foobarian »

3pt14159 wrote: post #141
UncleOxidant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current environment has a similar feeling to the early part of the dot com bubble-burst. In that early part of the burst we had the feeling that it could get bad, but we also were sort of deluding ourselves into thinking that it wouldn't be that bad. ...also HN today kind of looking like fuckedcompany[1] back in those days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

I agree that there are similarities, but many of the web businesses these days are legit with happy customers. The challenge seems to be more widespread across the economy and there are a few not-so-black-swan-anymore looking things on the horizon (e.g., a Sino war) that could dramatically change the picture for the whole industry. My take away is that we may have a mild recession, but the likelihood of a massive rec…

I have a hard time imagining the analog of Nortel or Lucent today. They simply vanished.

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

#160

Post by bsimpson »

spamizbad wrote: post #131
dcolkitt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this be explained by the "quiet quitting" hypothesis? If 10-20% of the employees in an org pretty much stop working completely, then it's pretty natural that the remaining 80-90% are going to feel overworked making up the slack. Also explains why companies are laying off the dead weight resuming hiring almost immediately (like Tesla).

Quiet quitting isn't people refusing to work on the job. It's to merely work hard enough to "meet expectations". So rather than trying to be a straight-A student you only work hard enough to get Cs and Bs. Anyway, I would say if the Quiet Quitting hypothesis is true it definitely points to a business management failure. If an employee joined your organization highly motivated and a year later feels like going above a…

> If an employee joined your organization highly motivated and a year later feels like going above and beyond is not worth it you did something wrong.

So you've also worked at Google?

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