Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by aksss » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #143

frontiersummit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This puts it mildly. Paul Volcker has been (perhaps unfairly) called the Father of the Rustbelt, due to how rising interest rates broke the back of manufacturing in the American Midwest during the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Cooling" the economy means layoffs and plant closures, often concentrated in specific geographic regions. The only question is: what firms and employees get sacrificed to placate the inflation G…

Rising interest rates & a strong dollar Ironically, you can generally have your financial house in order as a country or be globally manufacturing-competitive, but not both*. * Exceptions Germany, Japan, et al., but as you go up the value chain you gain enough profit leeway to paper over the general rule.

We should not ignore that for countries like Japan and Germany, they have an enormous advantage in not having to spend realistically on a defense budget relative to their risk-prone geography, living as they do under an umbrella.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/19...

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

#172

Post by dilyevsky » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

mountainofdeath wrote: post #155

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.

I was a freshmen in 2004 it was already widely believed CS career was reliable source of middle class income. Nothing we see here is new

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

#173

Post by rchaud » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

programmertote wrote: post #152

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…

> 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 ne…

Some of these questions won't be answered in Economics class, but may be in Management Science class (that's what they called in back in my day).

Regarding your #2:

Companies cannot adjust headcount in real-time. Economics is a 'social science' as a result; you cannot create experiments in controlled environments with randomly selected populations like you can with the natural sciences. Experiments of this kind happen do happen, but for small-scale things like behavioural finance among neighborhoods, rather than between billion-dollar companies.

Layoffs are a human decision. As such, the logic behind them, and the timing of them, can't fully be explained by economic theory.

One reason why workers are sacked even when demand remains the same, can simply be because there is a surplus of labour available at that time, and the company is betting that they can fire them and rehire at lower wages.

Another reason is simply 'fitting in' with what everyone else is doing to meet Wall St expectations (or VC expectations). Look at the job cuts today: Stripe 14%, Lyft 13%, Mollie 15%. Why are they all the same? Because they are all in the 'tech' industry and valued by the same set of metrics.

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

#174

Post by ghaff » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:56 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #90

granshaw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

2001 crash primarily affected tech and finance. Everyone else that worked in physical atoms just got on with it and did their job. 2008 crash was different. Literally everyone was over-leveraged and swimming debt. This feels more like the 2001 crash coming than the 2008 crash. Most of the economy will trundle along while those running on VC money will fade away.

To be sure the 2001 crash was also mixed in with 9/11 and its aftereffects. But, in general, I agree. 2001 was catastrophic for a lot of people in the broad tech domain--as in not even a sniff of work and, for many, just got a job any job doing something else. I was really lucky to get a related job at the small company someone who I had been a client of in a prior role ran. Things still got difficult over the following year but I had not so much as a nibble otherwise.

Offers were withdrawn, tons of companies went under, even the big firms like Cisco had massive layoffs.

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

#175

Post by bluedino » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

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…

>> Quiet quitting isn't people refusing to work on the job. It's to merely work hard enough to "meet expectations".

Office Space came out in 1999 so this isn't anything new.

That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

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

#176

Post by snapcaster » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 7:00 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #38

4gotunameagain wrote: post #11

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

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

dangerous? come on man get a grip

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

#177

Post by jylam » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 7:00 PM UTC

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?

Weird to put that on the employees if you ask me. It's not like there is exactly 13% of bad employees. Or 25% of bad employees but they decide to just fire 13% for some reason.

To me, it seems quite evident, they need to reduce the spending for any reason, so they reduce the workforce. Nothing to do with useless employees. You can be shit at your job or very good, they will have a metric threshold telling them you need to go. Same at Twitter, Meta, Google, whatever.

Stop putting that on the employee who spent 3 months to get a job just to be told they wasn't useful. That's 'bad' managing all the way down, nothing to do with the employee, at all.

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

#178

Post by mabbo » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #3

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

An interesting time, imho.

The costs to explore a startup are pretty low these days. You can live anywhere (move somewhere with relative low COL), you can develop just about anything cheaply (open source, plus easy frameworks). You can work with like-minded people all over the world easily (remote work for '20-'21 made big inroads in that department).

And we may suddenly have a few tens of thousands of talented developers looking for work- maybe they'll make a startup, or maybe they'll join one where they get paid mostly in equity.

Interest rates are high, which means that investors into startups will want a bigger cut, but still have their money that they want to invest.

Overall, it sounds to me like a great time to be investing in startups.

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

#179

Post by bluedino » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

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?

Back in the 90's my step-father worked in a factory, and he and his buddies always joked about a guy there that never did a single lick of work.

He took a VHS camcorder in one day, and recorded the guy flipping a piece of metal over on a table a couple times, then moving the piece of metal to a new table. Repeating this over and over throughout a 10/12 hour day.

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

#180

Post by aksss » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

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…

Wage inflation, interesting that the whole "fight for $15" thing literally died overnight at some point. But when you're at 40-year high for inflation, rates rise, part of what the Fed is trying to do is raise unemployment. Here you are.

https://thehill.com/policy/3658981-why-the-fed-is-pushing-un...