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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

#271

Post by ghaff »

khazhoux wrote: post #256
ghaff wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn't a point in time. I was laid off a couple weeks after 9/11--and there were many subsequent layoffs at many companies through ensuing weeks and months. It probably began around Spring of 2000. I was at an analyst conference around that time when Cisco reported down-earnings.

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

#272

Post by cabbagesauce »

cowuser666 wrote: post #259
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?

Layoff to save rep among other things?

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

#273

Post by matwood »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #264
jonathankoren wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish fuckedcompany.com was still around because it cataloged the implosion of the insanity. Kozmo was the GOAT in the dead pool. Blows my mind that Kozma's failed business model is back and bigger than ever, but with the same fundamental profitability problems.

Amazon Prime is Kozmo with a profitable version of the business model.

Talk of Kozmo has made me want to peruse failed .com companies and see if any of the models could work today.

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

#274

Post by jonathankoren »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #264
jonathankoren wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish fuckedcompany.com was still around because it cataloged the implosion of the insanity. Kozmo was the GOAT in the dead pool. Blows my mind that Kozma's failed business model is back and bigger than ever, but with the same fundamental profitability problems.

Amazon Prime is Kozmo with a profitable version of the business model.

I always think of it as more of a DoorDash thing. There was that whole partnership with Starbucks immediately before the implosion.

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

#275

Post by acdha »

watwut wrote: post #267
SkyPuncher wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally cannot name a single person like this in my entire career. Yes, less than ideal performs, but nobody that's utterly useless or spending all day on side projects.

I knew an utterly useless guy. He was good at making impression of a good programmer - read right blogs and had correct opinions. Probably reads HN and definitely knows all the fads. It is just that, he never produced anything. I worked with him twice. They moved him between teams and both times he got absurd amount of benefit of doubt (one of the companies was firing people quickly, but not him). Anyway based on wha…

In 3 decades I think I’ve met a couple of programmers like that, but about a dozen managers and at least half of the consultants. It’s pretty hard to pull off in a position which usually has some kind of directly-measurable product.

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

#276

Post by acdha »

kerbs wrote: post #196
bcrosby95 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The housing crash was obvious - talk to anyone trying to buy a house in 2004 or even 2003. By 2005 or so I had friends that were getting cold called with offers of nodoc nodown interest only loans.

Was it obvious Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers would collapse? That Morgan Stanley would need a bailout? The crisis with the housing criss wasn't that housing collapsed, it's that the world economy went along with it.

It wasn’t necessarily obvious that specific banks would fail but it was obvious that the big guys were playing high-risk games and were going to be left with a lot of foreclosures or writing off a lot of paper value. This was known to basically everyone in the industry, too - I briefly considered buying in New Haven in 2008 and got mortgage pre-approvals from a few banks. I had an interesting conversation with an older loan officer at a Connecticut state bank, who was the only one who didn’t approve me for WAY more than I thought reasonable and explained why very matter of factly, and noted that since his bank didn’t resell the mortgages as CDOs they had to be more careful about risk.

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

#277

Post by sn_master »

ulchar wrote: post #217
fny wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all pretty standard culling. They're just trying to scare people into recession think (i.e. don't try to negotiate a raise) and rehire cheaper outsourced or--get ready for this buzz word--"insourced" labor. Remember, the big tech cos also increased their work force sizes dramatically during COVID, so a more aggressive reduction push is understandable.

What would "insourced" mean exactly? Cheap remote domestic hires?

The term "insourcing" was used in the movie "The Campaign" to refer to bringing cheap Chinese labor to the US and paying them similar wages and offer same working conditions as in China to save on shipping costs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLwdvvzKJqs&t=32s

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

#278

Post by PragmaticPulp »

fny wrote: post #242
ulchar wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would "insourced" mean exactly? Cheap remote domestic hires?

Yes. They hire devs from the Midwest instead of major metro areas. The term was coined during the Obama era[0] and I've seen it shopped around by a few US dev shops recently. It's also called "near shoring" or "rural outsourcing." [0]: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/01/11/everyth...

> Yes. They hire devs from the Midwest instead of major metro areas.

Which is great, IMO. It's time we opened the doors to more talented developers across the country rather than requiring everyone to move to a few big cities to get the best jobs.

Yes, compensation will come down relative to those big cities, but it will still be coming up for those devs outside of major metro areas (otherwise they wouldn't be taking the jobs, obviously)

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

#279

Post by acdha »

matwood wrote: post #273
WillPostForFood wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon Prime is Kozmo with a profitable version of the business model.

Talk of Kozmo has made me want to peruse failed .com companies and see if any of the models could work today.

A ton of them do exist but run by grownups. For example, I worked for a web development company which had Petco as a client. The pets.com people were trying to get purchased and they asked us to talk with them. It was obvious that they were running way too much overhead - we’d talk with their technical team on the phone & people would outright volunteer that they didn’t have much to do and were mostly waiting for the IPO lotto tickets - so they failed but today just about everyone buys pet supplies online.

The idea was fine but they didn’t understand they were in a low-margin industry. That pattern showed up a lot, especially where things like shipping were key chokepoints. Cement.com memorably failed but you can easily order building supplies in many places because the real value is proximity and there wasn’t a high-margin business as a middleman.

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

#280

Post by tyingq »

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?

There will also be companies that take advantage of the current buzz around recession and use the opportunity to do a rank/yank disguised as a layoff. Then go and rehire the same amount of people.
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