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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

#281

Post by potatolicious »

daxfohl wrote: post #133
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...

Plenty of people prognosticating a crash every year since 2009 but it never came. Most of us expected a long term crash in 2020 but it was a quick rebound. This year seemed like something was off but maybe just temporary due to supply chains and Ukraine, since spending and employment was still strong. I'd not say a crash is written in stone yet.

> This year seemed like something was off

I feel like the elephant in the room here is crypto? There was some frothiness between 2009 and now, particularly around businesses with intensely negative unit economics (see: Uber, WeWork) and their sustainability. A lot of the prognostications around a crash then was specifically skepticism about these companies commanding sky-high valuations without line of sight to profitability, but at least there was some fundamental value there.

Then we started going even frothier and abandoning even the pretense of fundamentals with the crypto and NFT fad. That was a lot harder of a bubble to keep going.

My read is that the crypto bubble burst (as it very well had to) and it (along with rate hikes) triggered a general re-evaluation of tech that included all of the perennially unprofitable companies, and taking them down several pegs.

Unclear where we go from here - but IMO the skeptics from 2009 were right on their merits (even if spectacularly off on the timing), and it took an even dumber, even bigger bubble built on top of it to cause the industry to fall over.

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

#282

Post by retinaros »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #261
jylam wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

GP said they have overhired, which is definitely bad managing, or that employee aren't productive, and if >5-10% employees are non-productive that is a managing or interviewing problem as well. But saying it has nothing to do with employee is also not correct. If someone is signing up for a company that does not manage its finance sustainably, they should expect this. And company would only overpay if they aren't foc…

what are you saying exactly? most of the companies that fire people now are seeing their highest revenue ever in their history.

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

#283

Post by elforce002 »

Here's an interesting thing: there are other fields too. People tend to forget we need Civil Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Electronic Engineers, etc... This is not the end of the world. STEM professionals were switching careers because of the money and other amenities tech companies were offering (See "a day in x-company" trend on social media).

The way I see it (cynical take) is that there has been a push to get lots of people in this field just to have a bigger pool of workers and lower SWE/Dev Salaries. Heck, small companies can't compete on salary + benefits when trying to pouch SWEs/Devs. For these companies, this scenario will be a God send since they could offer lower salaries (45k ~ 70k) but with the added value of WFH. My prediction: We'll see everything ramping up again in 2024 (Prob. Q1). On the other side, tech companies will start lowering salaries, taking advantage of the uncertainty. Basically win-win for companies.

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

#284

Post by yrgulation »

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/

Issue is that most of those people have been likely opposing the government. Now they are out of their only source of income and wont be able to finance change.

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

#285

Post by ketzo »

drc500free wrote: post #247
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…

Critically, tech workers are compensated highly because they are working on investments. We're not laying bricks where it's easy to measure what we accomplished in a given day, we are usually building products and tech stacks that are projected to bring in FUTURE cash. When interest rates were held low, the planning horizon was very long and we got a huge expansion in future-looking projects. Now that horizon is shri…

This is a really good take, and I wanna expand it further: when interest rates are lower and planning horizons are longer, valuations get bigger.

If you think of a company’s market capitalization as a rough measure of its future cash flows, that valuation is gonna be a lot higher when those future cash flows don’t have to fight much future interest.

Higher future valuations means it’s worth paying more NOW to capture a slice of that valuation.

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

#286

Post by WillPostForFood »

jonathankoren wrote: post #274
WillPostForFood wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right that DoorDash might be closer to Kosmo (and may also go under). I meant that Amazon Prime showed that a scaled up, same day delivery service could be viable and profitable

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

#287

Post by hintymad »

elforce002 wrote: post #283

Here's an interesting thing: there are other fields too. People tend to forget we need Civil Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Electronic Engineers, etc... This is not the end of the world. STEM professionals were switching careers because of the money and other amenities tech companies were offering (See "a day in x-company" trend on social media). The way I see it (cynical take) is that there h…

And worse, it's really hard to find good teachers, nurses, or doctors in the bay area. Frances Allen used to be a teacher because teaching was a decent profession in the 60s. Feynman's teacher can recommend amazing books about integrals, while nowadays many teachers could factor a^3 - b^3 correctly, and the physics teacher of the NASA director's son ask questions like "which is heavier, a pound or a kg" in 9th grader's physics class.

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

#288

Post by supertrope »

robotnikman wrote: post #260
delecti wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using a computer as a consumer is an entirely different skill set from making them. Just as most car owners barely know how their machine works besides stepping on an accelerator pedal and occasionally inserting a fuel nozzle.

Even before the smartphone revolution brought computing to global masses of all income levels, most users were not makers.

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

#289

Post by drc500free »

ketzo wrote: post #285
drc500free wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critically, tech workers are compensated highly because they are working on investments. We're not laying bricks where it's easy to measure what we accomplished in a given day, we are usually building products and tech stacks that are projected to bring in FUTURE cash. When interest rates were held low, the planning horizon was very long and we got a huge expansion in future-looking projects. Now that horizon is shri…

This is a really good take, and I wanna expand it further: when interest rates are lower and planning horizons are longer, valuations get bigger . If you think of a company’s market capitalization as a rough measure of its future cash flows, that valuation is gonna be a lot higher when those future cash flows don’t have to fight much future interest. Higher future valuations means it’s worth paying more NOW to captur…

The cynic in me would say that the valuations were driven more from the cash-supply side, which allowed a lot of people to play "VC investor" or "VP with a sexy R&D portfolio."

No one really leads with a low-level analyst's DCF model in real life, it's backfitted to justify an investment that feels right at the multiple that has comps.

I think this is going to be less about the academic economics, and more of a baseball card bubble bursting around software products that promised free growth at 100% unit margins. The cash is still there, and still wants to be invested, but everyone's a little timid and doesn't want to look irresponsible.

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

#290

Post by romski »

elforce002 wrote: post #283

Here's an interesting thing: there are other fields too. People tend to forget we need Civil Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Electronic Engineers, etc... This is not the end of the world. STEM professionals were switching careers because of the money and other amenities tech companies were offering (See "a day in x-company" trend on social media). The way I see it (cynical take) is that there h…

Someone coming from a 350k fang job is not going to work for “35-70k” would you?
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