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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

#251

Post by hef19898 »

bombcar wrote: post #82
BoorishBears wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Yeah, I should have clarified - useless doesn't necessarily mean the employee sucks at the job they're doing; it could also mean they're an expert at doing a useless job, even if the skillset could be utilized quite valuably. I feel there's a lot of this in crypto, where you have absolutely amazing developers doing amazing code for no point.

I consider myself to be rather decent at what I do. I also know that, all things considered, I am mostly useless as an employee right know. Wjy? Because in reality my skill set is simply noy needed at the moment, nor will it be for quite some time to come. Things changed since I was hired, lucky for me current management doesn't have the stomach to announce a x % layoff, even if they should IMHO. Not that I complain so, for now.

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

#252

Post by hef19898 »

anonymoushn wrote: post #114
datalopers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

sir the promo criteria say to do complex things that require coordinating a lot of people

You have promotion criteria?

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

#253

Post by baq »

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...

the economy runs itself, mostly. rates are one of the very few direct knobs anyone has that are sort of predictable.

well you can also commit fiscal suicide like the recent has-been-a-PM of UK showed, but in that case the economy runs you quite explicitly.

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

#254

Post by drc500free »

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…

Tech jobs are somewhat decoupled from true demand. They are usually inherently an indirect investment, not a direct cost. But when they and their activities go away, you lose the B2B demand that they had to accomplish their jobs and the B2C demand they had from spending their salaries.

For example, my last 3 product jobs have been a business travel offering, an HR learning management tool, and a Predictive analytics tool for data scientists working in marketing. A lot of the users who paid the bills were some form of tech worker that were executing on projects that were future investments.

Investors have been handed a truly mind-boggling amount of cash since 2008, but there hasn't been a lot of stimulus to the actual day-to-day economy. Valuations had to go up to accommodate this cash, and without a corresponding increase in consumer spending there's really only one lever in the financial model that drastically impacts valuation without seriously changing the core business: year-on-year growth.

Most growth stories are laughably improbable, and the investors need plausibility to play the game. Fundraising turned into a story-telling competition of who could spin the most plausible growth story that is hard to verify and hasn't been disproved. That story is some form of "we will completely dominate market X, by building software that enables hyper-scaling with minimal unit costs, and that also includes AI/ML/Optimization (to be developed) that solves the inherently hard problems in this industry."

That story is used for both VC-style external fundraising and internal project pitches, and it has crowded out most other approaches. A side-effect of that story has been a massive bubble in the jobs that can deliver on it - software engineers, designers, data scientists, product managers, etc. The game at most firms has been to keep kicking the outcomes down the road and claim that the hockey stick growth is right around the corner.

That worked until interest rates went up and far-future cash became much less valuable. The CFO and the Fund now need to show results in the very near term, and the knives are being sharpened for departments and companies who can't deliver on that. Those departments and companies remove demand when they fold, and there isn't a clear immediate activity that returns quick cash to replace them.

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

#255

Post by dfxm12 »

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...

There are a ton of levers (not all under the Fed's purview). This is just how capitalism works though, others must suffer at the expense of capital. It's bad enough when the government doing the bare minimum, like trying to put a bunch of people to work to replace our crumbling infrastructure, gets decried as "socialism". Those voters must not understand (or simply not care) that voting for the same corporate interests over and over again will just lead to the working man sacrificing more to big business.

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

#256

Post by khazhoux »

ghaff wrote: post #174
yardie wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 follow…

> To be sure the 2001 crash was also mixed in with 9/11 and its aftereffects

The dot-com crash was in the Spring of 2000.

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

#258

Post by baq »

delecti wrote: post #211
nkjnlknlk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making these doomer claims since 00s to my memory and all that has been proven since then is we don't have enough software engineers.

I almost feel like coding is currently what typing was 60 years ago. "Typist" isn't really a job anymore, but stenographer and transcriptionist are. Likewise, I think that coding needs to become something basically everyone can do a tiny bit of, but only a relatively smaller group do as their entire job.

almost anybody can be a coder but software engineering is super freakin' hard - and I only say this because I'm soon wrapping up my second decade of doing it. the amount of things you can't efficiently learn at school is staggering. I see young promising people focusing on 'tech stacks', 'deep learning', etc. hence missing the forest from the trees and think that it simply isn't possible to exit school as a competent software engineer. you have to really try to be one to become one and no school makes you do that. it's you.

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

#259

Post by cowuser666 »

cabbagesauce wrote: post #245

Given Lyft have (had?) an office in semi-fascist state of Republic of Belarus, there's no wonder they are laying off someone. I double checked, the evidence of Minsk office is washed from their career portal. Yet, the old listings are there[0]. UPD. One more link was located[1] [0] https://startup.jobs/backend-engineer-all-teams-minsk-lyft-1... [1] https://park.by/en/residents/lift-bieler/

what's the connection between having an office in a quasi-hemi-fascist state and layoffs?

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

#260

Post by robotnikman »

delecti wrote: post #211
nkjnlknlk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making these doomer claims since 00s to my memory and all that has been proven since then is we don't have enough software engineers.

I almost feel like coding is currently what typing was 60 years ago. "Typist" isn't really a job anymore, but stenographer and transcriptionist are. Likewise, I think that coding needs to become something basically everyone can do a tiny bit of, but only a relatively smaller group do as their entire job.

On the other hand, it seems like technical proficiency might be going down with newer generations. Many were raised on smartphones and tablets where you just tap something and it does the thing. Devices nowadays abstract a lot of the underlying system away from the users, even to the point where apparently the newer generation struggles with the concept of files and directories.
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