43 ms·

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

381 points by WFHRenaissance 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jstx1 4y ago
Where are we heading if every company drop 10-20% of their staff?
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  2 years ago?
- seibelj 4y ago
  10-20% of their staff so far
- mamonster 4y ago
  Slowdown in inflation due to wage component of inflation falling. What, didn't you hear that the Fed was very interested in pulling on that lever? Just yesterday Powell complained about the labour market being tight, guess businesses heard him all right.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Powell complained about the labour market being tight No, he didn’t [1]. He justified a rate rise in a faltering economy by pointing to the labor market’s strength. Were the labor market weaker we’d be in stagflation and monetary policy would have no room to manoeuvre. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpresconf20221102.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...
    - im-a-baby 4y ago
      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 supply and demand conditions in the labor market to come into better balance over time, easing the upward pressure on wages and prices. The median projection in the SEP for the unemployment rate rises to 4.4 percent at the end of next year, ½ percentage point higher than in the June projections > We’re never going to say that there are too many people working, but the real point is this: Inflation—what we hear from people when we meet with them is that they really are suffering from inflation. And if we want to set ourselves up, really light the way to another period of a very strong labor market, we have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t. That is why the market goes down when low unemployment numbers are released. Powell will continue to raise rates until the labor market cools. He's not using the labor market to determine whether or not the economy can handle more rate increases. He's absolutely determined to increase unemployment via rate hikes.
      - andrekandre 4y ago
        > 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...
        bombcar 4y ago
        It's literally the mandate of the Fed and the only levers they have are rate changes and threats of future rate changes. Something something the measure becomes the means or something.
        stingrae 4y ago
        Their goal is to reduce inflation. Increasing unemployment, is a side effect of rate hikes but ultimately, reduces demand for consumer goods thus reducing inflation.
    - mamonster 4y ago
      I don't see how what you posted contradicts what I said. I guess it all depends on how you interpret what Powell says, but him saying the labour market is overheated is a signal to the market that unless the labour market stops overheating the Fed pivot is not becoming more likely(which is all that market participants care about as of today with regards to the Fed meeting, i.e when is the pivot coming).
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > him saying the labour market is overheated is a signal to the market that unless the labour market stops overheating the Fed pivot is not becoming more likely The labor market isn’t being targeted. We have had tight labor markets with low inflation before. The Fed doesn’t spike them for the sake of it. What’s targeted for reduction is inflation. Labor market tightness permits the Fed to respond to it, which is why it’s constantly talked about. If you are on a road trip and decide you can take a detour because you have ample gas, it wouldn’t be correct to say you took the detour to burn gas.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Rising discount rate hits companies with higher valuation multiples first, so tech will be hit worse than other sectors. A bit different than the GFC Lower wages in tech, higher unemployment.
- findthewords 4y ago
  Narrower "operating leverage".
- datalopers 4y ago
  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?
  - SkyPuncher 4y ago
    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.
    - boredtofears 4y ago
      Same here until my most recent job that I took just this year. The amount of brain waste is staggering.
    - watwut 4y ago
      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 what I heard, he did nothing whole his career. But like, he was definitely not a norm.
      - acdha 4y ago
        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.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    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? I hope my colleagues aren't reading this and looking at me.
- lovich 4y ago
  Might get absorbed by other companies but at lower rates. The faangs, and especially meta and google, have been starving a lot of startups and less efficient companies of talent. If your business model wasn’t profitable enough to handle all your engineers having over 250k tc it’s been a bit of a difficult market to hire and retain people in the past few years
- smileysteve 4y ago
  To completely reasonable 6% unemployment levels that will slightly shift the scales of worker supply and demand?
- mabbo 4y ago
  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.
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    > or maybe they'll join one where they get paid mostly in equity. Yup, most people who lost their jobs and are wondering how to feed their families will definitely pick to to not be paid for even longer...
  - aprdm 4y ago
    Wow people can really live in a bubble huh. Delusional stuff that I have to read
- pcurve 4y ago
  slowly returning to normal salary, along with stagnation of pays for those who were brought on high. I suspect a lot of underqualified people were able to get jobs at high salary in the past 1 year. I know this has caused grief and concerns for more tenured employees doing the same job (and better)
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  the TikTok "day in the life of a project manager" ecosystem will be devastated. People who actually get work done will be fine
  - malfist 4y ago
    Tell me you've never been laid off without telling me you've never been laid off.
- dv_dt 4y ago
  The conventional wisdom floating around financial news is that a recessionary period is/was expected lasting around a year. This is a way to smooth out gross revenues over that year as well as knock out some expectations on salary growth. That it all happens to be coordinated is an interesting thing to contemplate about self-fulfilling prophecy, or natural market reactions, or maybe spin wild conspiracy stories about.
  - dv_dt 4y ago
    *net not gross fyi
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Tech meme stocks != every company. If the Department of Defense & Amazon & Walmart start laying off 10-20% of staff - that would mean something. All of these tech layoffs don't even represent 1% of tech jobs so far. Let alone anything meaningful for the overall US economy.
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Reminds me of COVID onset tbh.
- pcurve 4y ago
  people have short memory, but that was pretty brutal.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Wow, another one? I just finish reading the thread on Stripe... I think we're going to need a Sacked-HN category.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi
- Taurenking 4y ago
- tinyhouse 4y ago
  Wait until Twitter layoffs are out today or tomorrow. Winter is coming.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    >Winter is coming. Pressing X to doubt. Many of these companies did layoffs during the pandemic (like Lyft) - which in many cases were just an excuse to cull low performers - then just continued to grow at insane paces. Even these layoffs just put them back at pandemic-level figures. Call me when companies are smaller than they were even before the pandemic, let alone crashing and burning.
4gotunameagain 4y ago
Ask HN: Isn't recession just mass hysteria ? Layoffs leading to more layoffs leading to the entire economy slowing down ?
- pjc50 4y ago
  This is definitely something considered by economists; Keynes called it "animal spirits" or more boringly "expectations". If people think the economy is likely to be bad they're likely to want to take defensive action early .. causing the economy to be worse.
- chomp 4y ago
  Macroeconomics is economics plus psychology. Broader trends in the economy have elements of human behavior affecting them. If you see cloudy skies, and the weather reports suggest "maybe hurricane, maybe not", and your neighbors are boarding up their windows, you might be driven to action as well.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    On the other hand, if you have a pizzeria, and people are talking about diets, cholesterol, unhealthy food, everyone is buying fitness gear... but you still have a line infront of the restaurant, and your take-out phone operator doesn't have time to go pee, you don't fire workers. So, internal numbers are probably showing a downwards trend too, if so many companies are laying off workers.
    - selectodude 4y ago
      On the other hand, companies use recessions to cut headcount without causing the people they want to keep to head for the exits too.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Yes! Both the bubble and the crash are almost purely psychological. It's greed and fear coming in waves. There can be technical fundamentals, but to take the example of Bitcoin, you don't need any technical fundamentals. Humans can create and destroy value on top of a very complex random number generator.
SevenNation 4y ago
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, candidates, and CS students began to view the orgy of overspending as the new normal. Now a normalization of economic conditions throws the entire thing into reverse. Too many fresh-faced candidates showing up with resume in hand, too many workers on payrolls doing little to nothing for wages 3-10x what they should be, too little revenue to continue business as usual, and a stock market that pulled the rug out from public companies using shares as a form of self-printed currency.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  CS was already a popular bet among incoming college students, but the memory of the manic 2020-21 period have fuelled a vast flight of talent to CS majors, at least in my country. Everyone is convinced that the only way to make any real money fast is to learn how to code. The expectations are absurd - most expect to make doctor-tier salaries right after graduation (source: wife teaches at university). By 2024, the steady drip of fresh CS graduates is going to turn into a flood. An entire generation of teenagers saw the tech boom, the crypto boom, and the SPAC/IPO mani. Its going to color college major choices for years. In short: downward pressure on programmer wages.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    > In short: downward pressure on programmer wages. Entry level programmers maybe - lets see how many can actually stick around past first midterm
    - nkjnlknlk 4y ago
      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.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
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, the money started to become silly, and people were thronging to the industry, despite having no qualifications, and no passion for the tech. They just wanted money. Basically, they were expensive, and they sucked (sound familiar?). Most were Web developers, or around the process of creating and maintaining Web presence. Also, some people were very, very good, and some marvelous tools came of it. This is like the Late Devonian extinction. The table needed to be cleared off, to give rise to the new. The company that I worked for, had survived being fire-bombed during the war, a major depression, and multiple recessions. They were absolute tightwads. At one point, they started making a whole lot of money, and got silly. Piper, meet company. They have basically contracted back to what they were. Everyone is writing them off, but I'll bet they come out of the scrum, OK. Same with the tech industry.
- granshaw 4y ago
  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...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - __s 4y ago
    Yes
  - kerbs 4y ago
    I was young too, but I think the .com bust was far more obvious than the housing crash which snuck up on a lot of people.
jeffbee 4y ago
Although I do think an industry downturn is here/coming, I don't think Lyft is part of the trend. Lyft, specifically, is just a bad company. It has never made an annual profit, will never make an annual profit, and is gravely overstaffed for its operations. Liabilities are approaching assets on the balance sheet. They have to cut somewhere. They already shed their useless little autonomous driving division, and I expect them to just abandon or spin off the bike share.
- silveraxe93 4y ago
  But that's the point right? The economy was flush with cash and bad companies were alive that shouldn't be. It was unsustainable. Now we're just seeing the good companies slimming down and bad ones failing.
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  I believe the bike-share is their most profitable division. Would it make sense to spin that off? It has a de facto monopoly in many markets it operates in
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    That's cool, I am just vaguely concerned about it. They seem to have tacitly abandoned it in the East Bay area.
    - shoshoshosho 4y ago
      The maintenance for Citibike is also basically nonexistent, many bikes that feel like peddling through mud
      - darkwizard42 4y ago
        Huh, I feel the opposite. Feels like more and more I get the "next-gen" e-bikes in Manhattan. The older gen e-bikes do feel like they are on their last legs.
    - 4y ago
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Tesla was one of the first big tech companies to start this cycle, announcing a 10% layoff in June. Now they're hiring at a rapid clip. https://insideevs.com/news/617007/tesla-hiring-boost-after-layoffs/ https://insideevs.com/news/617007/tesla-hiring-boost-after-l...
- xeromal 4y ago
  Didn't they layoff a lot of labelers after they felt confident in their auto labeling?
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    I’ve never heard of labeler ftes but nothing about tesla would or should surprise me at this point
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    Incidentally, those layoffs were shortly followed by a huge increase in the number of reported FSD incidents...
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      That probably has a lot more to do with the massive expansion in the FSD beta pool.
- __Parfait__ 4y ago
  Getting talent on the cheap
- fny 4y ago
  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.
tqi 4y ago
Did these companies accelerate planned layoffs because they figure Twitter layoffs on Friday would help take the spotlight off of them?
- bombcar 4y ago
  If they did they'd have pushed to Friday evening or Monday. I think once the layoffs started companies began to follow suit. There's a serious herd mentality that's hard to avoid.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  I doubt these are at all related to Twitter layoffs, we've been seeing announcements of layoffs from tech companies a few times a week for a few weeks now.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    I think the point is about the timing of the announcement. I could see it landing a little softer when people are talking about the Twitter stuff. On the other hand, big companies do this all the time and get a little bad press and then move on with their lives.
- vecter 4y ago
  There's no way that they planned a layoff within a week. They take much longer to plan and execute.
  - tqi 4y ago
    Def, I meant more moving up the timeline to get it into this new cycle.
  - gryBrd1987 4y ago
    There’s no way these people chat in a Signal chat group? It’s funny how people on a technology forum discount other normal humans also using technology I mean Musk’s Twitter texts just revealed they do exactly that.
seydor 4y ago
big tech trying to increase unemployment ... except tech is a tiny fraction of the workforce.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Twitter, Lyft, Swipe… is there a wave coming?
- xtracto 4y ago
  IMO We are in the middle of it: https://www.trueup.io/layoffs https://www.trueup.io/layoffs Hoping it doesn't get uglier than 2020.
WalterSobchak 4y ago
https://archive.ph/VKWGP https://archive.ph/VKWGP
cabbagesauce 4y ago
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-1835967 https://startup.jobs/backend-engineer-all-teams-minsk-lyft-1... [1] https://park.by/en/residents/lift-bieler/ https://park.by/en/residents/lift-bieler/
- cowuser666 4y ago
  what's the connection between having an office in a quasi-hemi-fascist state and layoffs?
  - cabbagesauce 4y ago
    Layoff to save rep among other things?
- yrgulation 4y ago
  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.
elforce002 4y ago
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.
- romski 4y ago
  Someone coming from a 350k fang job is not going to work for “35-70k” would you?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    If a significant proportion of developers end up unemployed, the faang salaries will be coming way down anyway. "Reserve Army."
    - Hermitian909 4y ago
      Depends on the quality of the developers you're looking to hire. The market for the kinds of developers that command ~$350-500k is still incredibly tight. There's a reason that even though Stripe is reducing headcount by 14% engineers are mostly unaffected.
  - TrackerFF 4y ago
    Some will have to. In the big picture, FAANG salaries are outliers. Boom and bust cycles come and go, and when it is booming again - circumstances can have changed. I worked with people in oil and gas that never came back, probably making only 25%-50% of what did they did during their best years. Finance, too. Lots of young bankers were forced out back in 08-09, and never returned. (With that said, tech is a bit more flexible on hiring, and I don’t think a 350k engineer will have to take a 300k pay cut, finding a “normal” ~100k engineering job is very possible. Or even another FAANG job if you’re willing to keep going at it. Could take weeks, months, even years - depending on how bad the market is)
mariogintili 4y ago
the staggered rollout of a recession

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jstx1 4y ago

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

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
2 years ago?
seibelj 4y ago
10-20% of their staff so far
mamonster 4y ago
Slowdown in inflation due to wage component of inflation falling. What, didn't you hear that the Fed was very interested in pulling on that lever? Just yesterday Powell complained about the labour market being tight, guess businesses heard him all right.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Powell complained about the labour market being tight No, he didn’t [1]. He justified a rate rise in a faltering economy by pointing to the labor market’s strength. Were the labor market weaker we’d be in stagflation and monetary policy would have no room to manoeuvre. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpresconf20221102.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...
  - im-a-baby 4y ago
    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 supply and demand conditions in the labor market to come into better balance over time, easing the upward pressure on wages and prices. The median projection in the SEP for the unemployment rate rises to 4.4 percent at the end of next year, ½ percentage point higher than in the June projections > We’re never going to say that there are too many people working, but the real point is this: Inflation—what we hear from people when we meet with them is that they really are suffering from inflation. And if we want to set ourselves up, really light the way to another period of a very strong labor market, we have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t. That is why the market goes down when low unemployment numbers are released. Powell will continue to raise rates until the labor market cools. He's not using the labor market to determine whether or not the economy can handle more rate increases. He's absolutely determined to increase unemployment via rate hikes.
    - andrekandre 4y ago
      > 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...
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It's literally the mandate of the Fed and the only levers they have are rate changes and threats of future rate changes. Something something the measure becomes the means or something.
      - stingrae 4y ago
        Their goal is to reduce inflation. Increasing unemployment, is a side effect of rate hikes but ultimately, reduces demand for consumer goods thus reducing inflation.
  - mamonster 4y ago
    I don't see how what you posted contradicts what I said. I guess it all depends on how you interpret what Powell says, but him saying the labour market is overheated is a signal to the market that unless the labour market stops overheating the Fed pivot is not becoming more likely(which is all that market participants care about as of today with regards to the Fed meeting, i.e when is the pivot coming).
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > him saying the labour market is overheated is a signal to the market that unless the labour market stops overheating the Fed pivot is not becoming more likely The labor market isn’t being targeted. We have had tight labor markets with low inflation before. The Fed doesn’t spike them for the sake of it. What’s targeted for reduction is inflation. Labor market tightness permits the Fed to respond to it, which is why it’s constantly talked about. If you are on a road trip and decide you can take a detour because you have ample gas, it wouldn’t be correct to say you took the detour to burn gas.
adam_arthur 4y ago
Rising discount rate hits companies with higher valuation multiples first, so tech will be hit worse than other sectors. A bit different than the GFC Lower wages in tech, higher unemployment.
findthewords 4y ago
Narrower "operating leverage".
datalopers 4y ago
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?
- SkyPuncher 4y ago
  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.
  - boredtofears 4y ago
    Same here until my most recent job that I took just this year. The amount of brain waste is staggering.
  - watwut 4y ago
    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 what I heard, he did nothing whole his career. But like, he was definitely not a norm.
    - acdha 4y ago
      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.
- onion2k 4y ago
  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? I hope my colleagues aren't reading this and looking at me.
lovich 4y ago
Might get absorbed by other companies but at lower rates. The faangs, and especially meta and google, have been starving a lot of startups and less efficient companies of talent. If your business model wasn’t profitable enough to handle all your engineers having over 250k tc it’s been a bit of a difficult market to hire and retain people in the past few years
smileysteve 4y ago
To completely reasonable 6% unemployment levels that will slightly shift the scales of worker supply and demand?
mabbo 4y ago
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.
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  > or maybe they'll join one where they get paid mostly in equity. Yup, most people who lost their jobs and are wondering how to feed their families will definitely pick to to not be paid for even longer...
- aprdm 4y ago
  Wow people can really live in a bubble huh. Delusional stuff that I have to read
pcurve 4y ago
slowly returning to normal salary, along with stagnation of pays for those who were brought on high. I suspect a lot of underqualified people were able to get jobs at high salary in the past 1 year. I know this has caused grief and concerns for more tenured employees doing the same job (and better)
ren_engineer 4y ago
the TikTok "day in the life of a project manager" ecosystem will be devastated. People who actually get work done will be fine
- malfist 4y ago
  Tell me you've never been laid off without telling me you've never been laid off.
dv_dt 4y ago
The conventional wisdom floating around financial news is that a recessionary period is/was expected lasting around a year. This is a way to smooth out gross revenues over that year as well as knock out some expectations on salary growth. That it all happens to be coordinated is an interesting thing to contemplate about self-fulfilling prophecy, or natural market reactions, or maybe spin wild conspiracy stories about.
- dv_dt 4y ago
  *net not gross fyi
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Tech meme stocks != every company. If the Department of Defense & Amazon & Walmart start laying off 10-20% of staff - that would mean something. All of these tech layoffs don't even represent 1% of tech jobs so far. Let alone anything meaningful for the overall US economy.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

Reminds me of COVID onset tbh.

pcurve 4y ago
people have short memory, but that was pretty brutal.

pelagicAustral 4y ago

Wow, another one? I just finish reading the thread on Stripe... I think we're going to need a Sacked-HN category.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 4y ago
https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi
Taurenking 4y ago
tinyhouse 4y ago
Wait until Twitter layoffs are out today or tomorrow. Winter is coming.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >Winter is coming. Pressing X to doubt. Many of these companies did layoffs during the pandemic (like Lyft) - which in many cases were just an excuse to cull low performers - then just continued to grow at insane paces. Even these layoffs just put them back at pandemic-level figures. Call me when companies are smaller than they were even before the pandemic, let alone crashing and burning.

4gotunameagain 4y ago

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

pjc50 4y ago
This is definitely something considered by economists; Keynes called it "animal spirits" or more boringly "expectations". If people think the economy is likely to be bad they're likely to want to take defensive action early .. causing the economy to be worse.
chomp 4y ago
Macroeconomics is economics plus psychology. Broader trends in the economy have elements of human behavior affecting them. If you see cloudy skies, and the weather reports suggest "maybe hurricane, maybe not", and your neighbors are boarding up their windows, you might be driven to action as well.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  On the other hand, if you have a pizzeria, and people are talking about diets, cholesterol, unhealthy food, everyone is buying fitness gear... but you still have a line infront of the restaurant, and your take-out phone operator doesn't have time to go pee, you don't fire workers. So, internal numbers are probably showing a downwards trend too, if so many companies are laying off workers.
  - selectodude 4y ago
    On the other hand, companies use recessions to cut headcount without causing the people they want to keep to head for the exits too.
dougmwne 4y ago
Yes! Both the bubble and the crash are almost purely psychological. It's greed and fear coming in waves. There can be technical fundamentals, but to take the example of Bitcoin, you don't need any technical fundamentals. Humans can create and destroy value on top of a very complex random number generator.

SevenNation 4y ago

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, candidates, and CS students began to view the orgy of overspending as the new normal. Now a normalization of economic conditions throws the entire thing into reverse. Too many fresh-faced candidates showing up with resume in hand, too many workers on payrolls doing little to nothing for wages 3-10x what they should be, too little revenue to continue business as usual, and a stock market that pulled the rug out from public companies using shares as a form of self-printed currency.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
CS was already a popular bet among incoming college students, but the memory of the manic 2020-21 period have fuelled a vast flight of talent to CS majors, at least in my country. Everyone is convinced that the only way to make any real money fast is to learn how to code. The expectations are absurd - most expect to make doctor-tier salaries right after graduation (source: wife teaches at university). By 2024, the steady drip of fresh CS graduates is going to turn into a flood. An entire generation of teenagers saw the tech boom, the crypto boom, and the SPAC/IPO mani. Its going to color college major choices for years. In short: downward pressure on programmer wages.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  > In short: downward pressure on programmer wages. Entry level programmers maybe - lets see how many can actually stick around past first midterm
  - nkjnlknlk 4y ago
    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.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

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, the money started to become silly, and people were thronging to the industry, despite having no qualifications, and no passion for the tech. They just wanted money. Basically, they were expensive, and they sucked (sound familiar?). Most were Web developers, or around the process of creating and maintaining Web presence. Also, some people were very, very good, and some marvelous tools came of it. This is like the Late Devonian extinction. The table needed to be cleared off, to give rise to the new. The company that I worked for, had survived being fire-bombed during the war, a major depression, and multiple recessions. They were absolute tightwads. At one point, they started making a whole lot of money, and got silly. Piper, meet company. They have basically contracted back to what they were. Everyone is writing them off, but I'll bet they come out of the scrum, OK. Same with the tech industry.

granshaw 4y ago
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...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- __s 4y ago
  Yes
- kerbs 4y ago
  I was young too, but I think the .com bust was far more obvious than the housing crash which snuck up on a lot of people.

jeffbee 4y ago

Although I do think an industry downturn is here/coming, I don't think Lyft is part of the trend. Lyft, specifically, is just a bad company. It has never made an annual profit, will never make an annual profit, and is gravely overstaffed for its operations. Liabilities are approaching assets on the balance sheet. They have to cut somewhere. They already shed their useless little autonomous driving division, and I expect them to just abandon or spin off the bike share.

silveraxe93 4y ago
But that's the point right? The economy was flush with cash and bad companies were alive that shouldn't be. It was unsustainable. Now we're just seeing the good companies slimming down and bad ones failing.
darkwizard42 4y ago
I believe the bike-share is their most profitable division. Would it make sense to spin that off? It has a de facto monopoly in many markets it operates in
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That's cool, I am just vaguely concerned about it. They seem to have tacitly abandoned it in the East Bay area.
  - shoshoshosho 4y ago
    The maintenance for Citibike is also basically nonexistent, many bikes that feel like peddling through mud
    - darkwizard42 4y ago
      Huh, I feel the opposite. Feels like more and more I get the "next-gen" e-bikes in Manhattan. The older gen e-bikes do feel like they are on their last legs.
  - 4y ago

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Tesla was one of the first big tech companies to start this cycle, announcing a 10% layoff in June. Now they're hiring at a rapid clip. https://insideevs.com/news/617007/tesla-hiring-boost-after-layoffs/ https://insideevs.com/news/617007/tesla-hiring-boost-after-l...

xeromal 4y ago
Didn't they layoff a lot of labelers after they felt confident in their auto labeling?
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  I’ve never heard of labeler ftes but nothing about tesla would or should surprise me at this point
- gamblor956 4y ago
  Incidentally, those layoffs were shortly followed by a huge increase in the number of reported FSD incidents...
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    That probably has a lot more to do with the massive expansion in the FSD beta pool.
__Parfait__ 4y ago
Getting talent on the cheap
fny 4y ago
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.

tqi 4y ago

Did these companies accelerate planned layoffs because they figure Twitter layoffs on Friday would help take the spotlight off of them?

bombcar 4y ago
If they did they'd have pushed to Friday evening or Monday. I think once the layoffs started companies began to follow suit. There's a serious herd mentality that's hard to avoid.
dotnet00 4y ago
I doubt these are at all related to Twitter layoffs, we've been seeing announcements of layoffs from tech companies a few times a week for a few weeks now.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  I think the point is about the timing of the announcement. I could see it landing a little softer when people are talking about the Twitter stuff. On the other hand, big companies do this all the time and get a little bad press and then move on with their lives.
vecter 4y ago
There's no way that they planned a layoff within a week. They take much longer to plan and execute.
- tqi 4y ago
  Def, I meant more moving up the timeline to get it into this new cycle.
- gryBrd1987 4y ago
  There’s no way these people chat in a Signal chat group? It’s funny how people on a technology forum discount other normal humans also using technology I mean Musk’s Twitter texts just revealed they do exactly that.

seydor 4y ago

big tech trying to increase unemployment ... except tech is a tiny fraction of the workforce.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Twitter, Lyft, Swipe… is there a wave coming?

xtracto 4y ago
IMO We are in the middle of it: https://www.trueup.io/layoffs https://www.trueup.io/layoffs Hoping it doesn't get uglier than 2020.

WalterSobchak 4y ago

https://archive.ph/VKWGP https://archive.ph/VKWGP

cabbagesauce 4y ago

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-1835967 https://startup.jobs/backend-engineer-all-teams-minsk-lyft-1... [1] https://park.by/en/residents/lift-bieler/ https://park.by/en/residents/lift-bieler/

cowuser666 4y ago
what's the connection between having an office in a quasi-hemi-fascist state and layoffs?
- cabbagesauce 4y ago
  Layoff to save rep among other things?
yrgulation 4y ago
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.

elforce002 4y ago

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.

romski 4y ago
Someone coming from a 350k fang job is not going to work for “35-70k” would you?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  If a significant proportion of developers end up unemployed, the faang salaries will be coming way down anyway. "Reserve Army."
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    Depends on the quality of the developers you're looking to hire. The market for the kinds of developers that command ~$350-500k is still incredibly tight. There's a reason that even though Stripe is reducing headcount by 14% engineers are mostly unaffected.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Some will have to. In the big picture, FAANG salaries are outliers. Boom and bust cycles come and go, and when it is booming again - circumstances can have changed. I worked with people in oil and gas that never came back, probably making only 25%-50% of what did they did during their best years. Finance, too. Lots of young bankers were forced out back in 08-09, and never returned. (With that said, tech is a bit more flexible on hiring, and I don’t think a 350k engineer will have to take a 300k pay cut, finding a “normal” ~100k engineering job is very possible. Or even another FAANG job if you’re willing to keep going at it. Could take weeks, months, even years - depending on how bad the market is)

mariogintili 4y ago

the staggered rollout of a recession