Lyft to Cut at Least 1,200 Jobs in New Round of Layoffs to Reduce Costs

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyft-to-cut-at-least-1-200-jobs-in-new-round-of-layoffs-to-reduce-costs-da423e53

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

154 182 3 years ago

wsj.com

avrionov3• 3 years ago

The cuts are huge:

- The latest cuts could impact 30% or more of Lyft’s more than 4,000 employees

- The cuts could help Lyft slash 50% of its costs

keeptrying2• 3 years ago

Dead company walking.

Can't expect to cut 30% of a struggling company's workforce and expect growth to keep happening.

Seems like a last ditch effort at shoring things up. Or cutting enough to look good enough to sell.

Retric3• 3 years ago

Lyft seems like the kind of company that would be more successful run extremely lean than trying to focus on growth. There simply isn’t that many major metro areas after all.

radicaldreamer3• 3 years ago

They never expanded globally like Uber did though so there is potential there, but with any marketplace, you need a lot of money to expand into a market initially because you need both riders and drivers and incentivizing use when you're new is expensive.

Sohcahtoa822• 3 years ago

"growth"

I'm starting to think that many companies seem to define "growth" in terms of headcount, rather than revenue or marketshare, and that they overhire based on a perception of needing to grow the company whether they need the people or not.

keeptrying2• 3 years ago

Can't run lean. Its a 40% GPM business.

avrionov3• 3 years ago

They may survive, but it will be hard. A bug cut like this will destroy the morale in the company. What works in their favor is that the entire tech industry is cutting jobs right now and they don't look like an exception.

If the cuts are done well, they'll cut the most of the future projects and focus on a few key areas. Still it is a high risk for them and they may not survive.

treis5• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what y'all are talking about. They're half of a duopoly with 5 billion in revenue a year. They're going to be just fine.

This is mostly recognizing that they were feature complete like 5 years ago. They're now in the "keep the lights on and rake in the money while it lasts" phase of a company.

arbuge• 3 years ago

Can't expect to cut 30% of a struggling company's workforce and expect growth to keep happening.

It's quite possible actually if those 30% were not the ones contributing anything to said growth.

I'm not saying this is or is not the case at Lyft.

heywhatupboys• 3 years ago

the redundancies are not distributed equally.

adam_arthur• 3 years ago

There is 0 need for a large development team for Lyft or Uber once the core tech is built out. In fact its a liability at that point

The marginal cost to provide a ride is all that matters to their business in the end. Any meaningful improvements to this via software has likely already been achieved

ains• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/xu5P4

heyoni• 3 years ago

Thank you!

game_the0ry2• 3 years ago

Lyft hasn't been profitable since it went public. There are a number of brand-name, silicon valley tech companies in this situation.

pcurve• 3 years ago

I'm looking for a job currently, and I'm surprised at the number of Series A and B companies still hiring. I wonder when the funding grim reapers will come home to roost.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

Those companies were doing layoffs a year ago. It sort of started there and has moved its way up. Many A/B companies are starting to pick it back up now and there’s actually a nice pool of talent available.

htrp• 3 years ago

confirm the roles are still actually open.

Sometimes companies just leave thise positions open for months.

danpalmer• 3 years ago

A lot of these companies might have millions in funding in the bank, no need to show quarterly returns to the public, and a load of experienced tech workers have just hit the market who may be able to be snapped up for less than before. I think it makes sense.

notch898c2• 3 years ago

How in the hell does one not make a profit when literally all they do is skim off the top of unlicensed taxi drivers, using an already fairly functional product?

endisneigh• 3 years ago

Subsidizing the rides

mikeryan• 3 years ago

They went public in March 2019 so they basically only had a year as a public company before COVID hit and dropped revenues off a cliff.

They were probably assuming that by now they’d be back to a pre-COVID level of ridership by now.

The landscape has changed dramatically since they IPO’d and unlike Uber they don’t do food delivery which probably softened the blow to Uber.

potatolicious2• 3 years ago

By having comically large back-of-house operations.

In a more reasonable scheme the technology portion of a cab company is a small part of their overall expenses, commensurate with the degree of value it brings to the business.

This is true in some white-labeled cab dispatching apps (see: Curb), but not true for ones that chased sky-high valuations with assumptions of pure-software margins (see: Uber, Lyft).

You can afford to pay a huge number of top-dollar engineers and product people when your margins justify it. Being the tech layer on top of cabs turns out to not be in this category of business.

munificent• 3 years ago

For the system to function, you've got roughly five variables:

A: Drivers need to get paid enough to want to do it.

B: Riders need the rides to be cheap enough to choose it.

C: The quantity of drivers generally available needs to be consistently high enough that riders can find the rides they need when they want with little wait time.

D: The quantity of riders generally available needs to be consistently high enough that drivers are willing to sign on and wait to accept rides.

E: The overhead of running the business.

Profit comes from the spread between A and B minus E. But A is dependent on D: if there aren't enough riders seeking rides then drivers get fewer of them and need to make more per ride to it to be worth signing on. Likewise B is dependent on C: If they have to wait longer for rides or risk not having a driver available, they won't pay as much or choose to use the service.

The company has knobs they can turn by controlling how much they charge riders and how much they pay drivers. But because of the connections through C and D, they can't turn one without affecting the others.

And it may be that depending on their overhead and the natural density of an area, there may be no valid pricing solution that doesn't lead to the system collapsing from disuse. They have been able to avoid that up until now by infusing the system with "free" investor money, but that doesn't last forever.

spaceman_20203• 3 years ago

Has Uber made a profit yet?

Last I checked, their profits were from selling a stake in another startup, not operations.

arberx• 3 years ago

Coming to a company near you.

spaceman_20203• 3 years ago

The entire promise of Uber and Lyft was profitability through scale.

But now, they all want to scale down to be profitable.

A small scale Uber or Lyft is just a cab company with an automated dispatch agent. It should be valued like a cab company, not a tech company.

DebtDeflation• 3 years ago

No, the entire promise was to eventually have a fleet of autonomous vehicles doing the driving. The human driver phase was just to 1) drive adoption of the app and grow share and 2) generate training data for the self-driving AI models while waiting for the fully autonomous capability to arrive. Scale is irrelevant as long as you are paying humans to drive cars, because that's not a model that can ever scale and will always just be a cab company regardless of size.

rossdavidh• 3 years ago

Well, that was their initial idea, but I think they figured out a few years ago that it wasn't going to happen in time, and tried to find a different way. In theory, software cost scales less than linearly with customer count, so increasing in scale would reduce it as a % of revenue.

Although, maybe not if all your money goes to AWS anyway...

dougmwne• 3 years ago

I’m not sure if I ever believed that hogwash. I think it was a fantasy meant to try to justify ludicrous stock prices on unprofitable companies. After 14 years of serious investment, it’s not clear if self driving cars are ever going to become mainstream, and certainly not soon enough to keep Uber and Lyft afloat.

jjulius• 3 years ago

No, the entire promise was to eventually have a fleet of autonomous vehicles doing the driving.

No, to the best of my knowledge, the push towards autonomy came after they realized that they would struggle to get profitability through scale. Just look at their first pitch deck[1] from 2008, there's no mention of autonomy. They didn't really start pursuing autonomy until around 2015, when they finally started hiring researchers for that[2].

[1]https://techcrunch.com/gallery/here-is-ubers-first-pitch-dec...

[2]https://archive.is/pklu6

leodriesch• 3 years ago

Is Uber genuinely gathering driver data? They're only managing a fleet, and it seems unlikely that each vehicle has cameras installed. Wouldn't the autonomous driving tech actually come from collaborating companies instead of Uber directly?

ericmay• 3 years ago

A small scale Uber or Lyft is just a cab company with an automated dispatch agent. It should be valued like a cab company, not a tech company.

IMO the lines are a little fuzzy and the definition of "tech company" seems to be shifting pretty often to fit a specific narrative.

Like why is Netflix considered a tech company instead of a media company (like Disney or whoever owns Discovery +, AMC, or similar) when all they're doing is producing video content on a streaming service but Uber has to be valued as a taxi company when they produce an app that coordinates movement of people, products, and other things?

I guess part of the problem is everything is "tech" so the term is starting to lose meaning except when we want to No True Scotsman something (not that I'm accusing you of doing that here).

prepend2• 3 years ago

Because when streaming started the tech was new. So the differentiator was the technology. Now they’ll morph into just a media company.

It’s funny that CBS and stuff was a tech company 100 years ago.

Similar is the morph of Google into just a clear channel or other ad company. Search and adtech was hard years ago so they were a tech company. Now they sell ads and data.

wpietri5• 3 years ago

I think the issue is that "tech" is a shifting label that requires novelty.

My great-grandfather came over from France to work as an "engineer" in the mines of Minnesota. I suspect that for him as for me, the novel technology created an opportunity for quick-on-the-uptake people to make a decent living figuring out the new thing and making it go. But eventually the technology becomes settled and boring, so it's a different thing both in terms of skill and economically.

If you're interested, you might look at Wardley mapping, one axis of which involves technology moving along this axis: Genesis -> Custom Built -> Product -> Utility/Commodity. Also relevant is the technology adoption lifecycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

com2kid• 3 years ago

Like why is Netflix considered a tech company instead of a media company

Before they started making their own content, Netflix was a pure tech company. They pioneered a lot of the streaming technology we now take for granted, and they were the first to solve some very difficult challenges.

Recently the market re-priced Netflix stock to be more like a media company, so reality has caught up.

tempsy3• 3 years ago

Uber's stock is flat YoY

Lyft's stock is down like 70-80%.

So you could argue Uber is actually on the path to achieving that vision and Lyft failed, not that neither should be "valued like a tech company".

flavius29663• 3 years ago

In other countries there are automated dispatch agents pretty similar to Uber/Lyft. There isn't that much difference between them.

qbasic_forever3• 3 years ago

It's so funny because a decade ago on this very website the rhetoric was the exact opposite in comments. People would bloviate many paragraphs about how disruptive Uber, etc. were and how they were going to revolutionize transportation. People around the world in mass would sell their cars and move into the city and just Uber everywhere etc etc. Uber would pioneer self driving cars and then robots would drive us everywhere and deliver us to a fully automated capitalism future. There was much hype about how only a company like Uber or Lyft could do this and that the old cab companies were complete dinosaurs that would be dead in a decade.

Anyone who dared to suggest that the new ride share companies were actually just cab companies feeding off a pump of VC funding were down voted and shouted down into oblivion. Turns out those people were exactly right though...

bigtex2• 3 years ago

Not sure why all the downvotes but your statement is accurate. Replacing drivers with mechanics doesn't sound very disruptive.

nanidin• 3 years ago

Uber did revolutionize transportation in a lot of cities. Cabs in my city were unreliable, untrustworthy, and expensive. Now I can reliably get a ride within a few minutes.

aeyes• 3 years ago

They are scaling down the workforce which is different from scaling down the operation. This might come next because as a business you obviously don't want to operate in a small market where the economies of scale don't work out.

anthomtb• 3 years ago

The entire promise of Uber and Lyft was profitability through scale.
But now, they all want to scale down to be profitable.

I am a bit confused by these two statements. In the first, it sounds like you are using "scale" to describe the customer reach and sales volume of the company. In the second, it sounds like you are using "scale" to describe the number of employees.

I agree that Lyft and Uber should not be valued like Google or Meta. Wall Street agrees, as you have surely noticed. But both are much more valuable than a traditional cab company. It is the "automated dispatch agent" you mention which makes them that way and which also requires innovative use of silicon and development of software.

As an aside, were there ever nationwide, publicly traded cab companies in the United States of America? I cannot think of any.

spaceman_20203• 3 years ago

I meant a general trend for these companies to pull away from markets, not just scaling down employee count. Uber is only present in three markets now, and there are some credible rumors that they're considering pulling out from one of them (India) too.

kpw94• 3 years ago

Funny how you use 2 definitions of "scale" to make your argument.

The entire promise of Uber and Lyft was profitability through scale.

Here "scale" means scaling to the entire country/planet. Which, as far as I know, they still are.

But now, they all want to scale down to be profitable.

Here "scale down" means trimming on employee count where there are inefficiencies.

A small scale Uber or Lyft is just a cab company with an automated dispatch agent. It should be valued like a cab company, not a tech company.

Here somehow you went back to your first meaning of "scale", but used the layoff = "scale down" to imply they want to scale down to a local cab company. I've yet to see a local cab company has an app that's usable in an entire country instead of just one city.

By the same logic, if Airbnb has layoffs, we should suddenly compare their market valuation to a small local vacation property group that only rents beach houses in Maui or something...

game_the0ry2• 3 years ago

A small scale Uber or Lyft is just a cab company with an automated dispatch agent. It should be valued like a cab company, not a tech company.

You, sir, are an absolute savage...and correct.

It also doesn't help that Lyft has not been profitable since going public, so if it were valued as a taxi cab company, it would probably have negative enterprise value.

fdgsdfogijq2• 3 years ago

Lyft was paying engineers 300-450k a year, sometimes with just 2-4 years of experience. This was true even pre 2020. The interviews were just leetcode hards, with an instant reject on not getting the problem right. I feel like a parrot repeating the same thing, but none of these companies hired the talent they thought they were hiring.

EDIT:

For reference I work at a company that requires leetcode medium/hard perfection and am appalled at the money we pay for the engineers relative to the value they bring

One more point: Startups are confused about the role engineers play. A completely divorced product management and engineering workforce will kill new ideas. Engineers actually building the product have insights into what else can be built that product does not. By hiring engineers with zero product sense and treating them like robots, you get no innovation. This doesnt matter at a behemoth like amazon or google, but it does at a smaller company. Clean syntax != good engineer

makestuff• 3 years ago

I hope this downturn gets rid of leetcode. I really have no desire to grind leetcode whenever I need a new job. I am more than happy to do system design and practical coding questions (ex: integrate with some API like Stripe does), but the leetcode stuff is ridiculous for mid-senior+ level engineers.

jmole• 3 years ago

I don't think it will be the downturn that eliminates it, so much as it will be LLM-accelerated coding, and the normalization and incorporation of these tools into standard development workflows.

If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. A team of 10 tomorrow can probably replace a team of 50 today.

So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour."

rcme5• 3 years ago

I detest leetcode-style questions, but system design questions are even worse. At least leetcode-style questions have some type of objective evaluation criteria. System design questions are entirely subjective and whether or not you're successful generally comes down to whether or not your first impression of a problem matches the expectations of your interviewer.

At my last company, we stopped doing system design entirely because we found it was completely uncorrelated to whether or not a candidate did well on the job.

qbasic_forever3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately it will likely get worse in the short term. With a huge pool of laid off people fighting for a small number of open positions (especially at the senior level and above) companies can be as demanding and stupid as they want with hiring. Leet code prowess is just another screening that whittles down the work they have to do to hire--only people that study and learn those interviews will pass them so the company has to worry less about actually figuring out if someone is a good fit for the position.

diehunde2• 3 years ago

The problem is that you and the other hundreds of senior engineers would perform the same if it were all design and the other example you gave. There's just not a good solution for companies that must evaluate the number of candidates these big companies get daily.

time_to_smile• 3 years ago

Leetcode is also just an awful signal. It would be fine if it was only problems with false negatives, but the false positive rate is through the roof.

I'm consistently shocked by coworkers I've had, who I knew had to pass challenging leetcode interviews, who seem to not only know nothing about building real world software, but don't really have a firm grasp on algorithms.

Yes they can process a leetcode question requiring dynamic programming in record time, but when mapping a real world problem to a dp (or any other similar solution) are completely at a loss.

lumost2• 3 years ago

It’s a balance, an LC medium isn’t to hard to do offhand. If your business is hard tech, it’s a reasonable filter.

I see diminishing returns from LC hards and greater other than as a guardrail to block management from hiring senior people who are practically no better than the junior people.

lovecg• 3 years ago

If you think of Leetcode and similar filters as just veiled IQ tests it makes way more sense - of course those problems don’t have much to do with actual day to day engineering. If companies could just administer IQ tests they would happily do that. Since that’s illegal, they rely on Leetcode.

myth_drannon• 3 years ago

From reading recent interview experiences on Reddit, the thing got way worse now that you have thousands of unemployed engineers competing for scarce positions. Now it's leetcode hards AND takeaway assignment.

cwilkes• 3 years ago

How would the downturn get rid of leetcode? If anything it will dramatically increase its use as now there’s 100k more programmers on the market all applying for the same reduced pool of jobs.

Somehow companies are going to have to now filter through a lot more candidates to fill positions, and for right now leetcode-like tests are the quickest way to get a gauge of an engineer’s performance (on leetcode).

Don’t get me wrong: I think leetcode hiring depending on how it is done doesn’t result in getting the best talent.

matrix_overload• 3 years ago

They didn't care. They needed to show investors a plausibly looking story how they "hire the best" by having a process with >90% rejection rate, and they did.

tempsy3• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "even pre 2020".

High comp did not just start with covid. This had been the case for many years before the pandemic.

herval• 3 years ago

there was a crazy spike in hiring and salaries during the pandemic, with many companies hiring whoever they could find, as fast as possible (hence with higher salaries). I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to

wpietri5• 3 years ago

And one of the puzzling things to me here is what all those engineers are doing. I mean, if you're making bad hiring decisions, engineers can happily create work for one another and themselves, so I get where the labor could be going. But it does not look to me like Lyft and Uber are particularly feature-filled.

I suspect that if rideshare companies ever get to being profitable, we'll see the emergence of white-label rideshare software that gets made for a tiny fraction of the cost of what Lyft and Uber spend. Because that'll be an organization with a real incentive to keep costs down.

iLoveOncall• 3 years ago

As always with large companies, what you see as a consumer is only the tip of the iceberg. For every user-facing line of code you have a hundred or a thousand lines of code made internal-only services, for interacting with partners, for variations due to local restrictions, etc.

disgruntledphd22• 3 years ago

This already happened it was called Hailo and they got destroyed by Uber et al burning cash on incentives.

diehunde2• 3 years ago

Do you think the lack of talent is what's preventing the company's success?

kgp73• 3 years ago

This seems to be a common trope at HN where the failure of a company must be because of their hiring practice. Your comment also implies that the current failure has been engineering. This couldnt be further from the truth, Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers. Lyft paid as well as they did because of the risk these engineers took in moving on from Google/Meta/Twitter what have you. FWIW, I found Lyfts interviews to be the easiest of the companies I interviewed at. The companies current downturn stems from the combined blow of COVID and focusing only on rideshare at the expense of not diversifying their revenue streams and their hiring or engineering has had very little to do with it.

fdgsdfogijq2• 3 years ago

Stock based compensation is a huge drag on their expenses, to the degree that it has hurt their future. "Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers", whats the bench mark for this? Good looking syntax in a clean code base isnt a top engineer. Delivering business value through technology is

dzonga• 3 years ago

Your comment also implies that the current failure has been engineering.

Well to an extent it's failure of engineering.

The best engineers are not code monkeys. But people who can map the business domain to code perfectly.

Given this is HN, we've all seen engineers who make business impact. some had degrees, some didn't. And we've seen engineers - who complicate matters while not actually shipping usable features , but doing things the GRRM martin way of plucking weeds. \

maybe step away from the mega corps and notice impact engineers have on a tech company's business direction.

seizethecheese• 3 years ago

You’re probably right. Devils advocate though:

When a company’s engineers ship quality code fast, they end up with more bandwidth. Then the company does more shit. What new has Lyft really built? It could be a symptom of slow engineering.

ramraj073• 3 years ago

OP says they don’t think the engineers hired by doing leetcode hard problems (and screening out the folks who can’t) does not engender a good future for the org.

Your argument is “I found the interview easy, and hence it’s not that bad.” Just pointing out that perhaps OP thinks the culture you’re part of is not a good one. I’m not taking sides here but curious what this clarification means to you.

Your point about engineering not being part of the problem is another. It’s partly true - unless your technology is true main selling point (like openai or maybe google search), then sure engineering makes or breaks the future of the company. So in one way you yourself point out the commodity nature of what companies like Lyft do - given how many companies around the world do it as well now that is. Then the question becomes what exactly are you paying top dollar to these engineers for? Create 4 more unnecessary open source projects to make sure the engineers feel like they’re getting exposure?

Airbnb is the epitome of this. Like dudes, you rent out rooms, what are you trying to do creating open source ecosystems in data engineering for?

Elons original thesis of Twitters problems was absolutely correct, why you needed 8000 people to run that org (or whatever the number is for Lyft especially on the engineering side) is beyond me. Overengineered is absolutely the correct term in these cases I think.

Tanjreeve• 3 years ago

I mean sure it's more complex than "hurrdurr bad engineers, not enough Rust etc etc" but to succeed a company needs products of a suitable quality level delivered in a suitable time scale to meet the needs of their customers. The failure to do that the buck stops at the engineering group.

sagarkamat• 3 years ago

Lyft actually did try and create many different revenue streams. Besides ridesharing, they own the bikeshares and scooters in pretty much every major city in US, got into their own car rental business and tried to become a one stop shop for transit. It's not that they didn't try, its that they didn't seem to have taken any of them to be profitable revenue streams.

Also, wouldn't the very high salaries paid to a lot of engineers contribute it Lyft having unsustainable economics?

dymk• 3 years ago

Wow, I would hate to work with you. Blaming the failure oof the company on engineering of all departments. And imagine being your coworker and not know the animosity you have towards them and the compensation they negotiated. Or maybe you do show it?

PragmaticPulp• 3 years ago

The interviews were just leetcode hards,

I doubt the interview was literally just Leetcode. They're screening resumes and making judgment calls about who even gets to interview. They also evaluate the candidate's experience and so on.

Leetcode is a gate, but it's not the only gate.

qbasic_forever3• 3 years ago

It's the big gate though. No amount of experience, resume high points, etc. will overcome a failed tech screen or interview. It has stopped every single interview loop immediately that I've seen and been a part of the process. As soon as there's a "no hire" voice in the loop it's over, and the fastest way to get there is not figuring out an interviewer's tech screen question to their satisfaction.

pb72• 3 years ago

The Lyft service is rock solid, it's just not a very profitable business. That has nothing to do with engineering talent.

Engineers need to stop being bitter about others making more money than them and start roasting the business people that fail to make the company profitable. Even if they make 1/3 of what engineers do, they fail at their primary job function and need to be let go.

disgruntledphd22• 3 years ago

Taking a high salary from a structurally unprofitable company is a massive risk. This has been hidden by the endless amounts of cheap money in the last decade but it's always worth thinking about.

I realised in 2016 that Uber/Lyft were never gonna print cash so I didn't work for them.

hitekker2• 3 years ago

the business people that fail to make the company profitable

people who own the failure will have more luck developing their skills and becoming more marketable, than people who run away from failure and play the blame game. woe be to the contributor, manager or otherwise, who believes their little bubble of excellence will never pop.

blululu3• 3 years ago

If you think that's bad wait till you see how much people a rung or two above that in management are getting paid without even being grilled on how to solve difficult puzzles.

paxys2• 3 years ago

The problem isn't the engineering, it's the business. Changing the interview process isn't going to make their competition disappear or make them profitable.

MuffinFlavored• 3 years ago

In my experience, you usually have about 5-10 engineers on a team, reporting to a manager. Manager might report to a director who manages about 5-10 managers. Then VPs managing 5-10 directions, an SVP managing 5-10 VPs, CTO managing 5-10 SVPs, then CEO.

Let's say each project touched about 20-40 people.

What projects were they working on that leadership deemed 1200 employees now useless? Was it... 30 growth projects they shouldn't have been working on? 50? 100? 20? 10? Was there just not enough work going around?

subsubzero2• 3 years ago

Why is the "bar" for hiring designed around code puzzles(leetcode). Maybe that is not a good signal for hiring at all. You are optimizing for people who just grind away at these silly puzzles vs. having domain experts who have both depth and breadth across a technology stack. I have worked with many a engineer who aced these exercises who imho was entirely unfit for working at a large tech company, their communication was absolutely terrible, and their thinking was quite flawed from a variety of perspectives when it came to systems design and operational rigor. I think we will look back on this time and think what a mistake it was to optimize for employees who were good at solving leetcode.

boshalfoshal• 3 years ago

I mean, the more senior you get the more focus you have on the stuff you describe - system design interviews, leadership interviews, etc. I know a few people that interviewed at Meta E6 for example, and they were explicitly told the leetcode interviews don't really matter as much and they are just there to make sure you can actually code.

Imo Leetcode is fine for younger hires since at that point you are just looking for aptitude and/or someone who has the work ethic to grind.

With that being said, Lyfts hiring practices is probably NOT why they are laying people off. This is a business issue. No amount of infrastructure or hackernews-style idealistic interviews would be able to fundamentally change their position in their business segment, especially if its just for hiring ICs. The people at lyft are plenty talented, contrary to what OP is saying.

asdff3• 3 years ago

These companies are too large and have to rely on hiring managers versus people who might be domain experts for the actual project (who are probably too busy with said project themselves to take time to vet 500 candidates). It's an unsolvable problem I think for a large company. For much smaller companies, maybe you'd get a lot fewer applicants and it would actually be realistic for a team member to take a week to do some hiring for their team. Of course as small companies get successful, they tend to grow, then they lose this hiring relevancy advantage.

asdff3• 3 years ago

I think theres a point of compensation that you reach where you just stop caring about the work or the company. If I was being payed that much a year, I'd be thinking about retiring early and trying to leave the working stiff life in as short of time as possible since with that compensation, its actually realistic to become a feudal lord in a few years especially buying into the market in a recession and riding the wave in the following years. 2-4 years of experience tells me they are right out of college too, so if you are fine with that standard of living you could realistically be living off 20k a year or less and the rest is just banked. Then in the back of your head you think if you ever do get laid off, you now have a title that was compensated at that much on your resume and new doors open for you, which you can take time opening with your massive nest egg.

mapme• 3 years ago

Living off 20k a year in a Hcol, where these salaries primarily occur, is next to impossible. Rent alone anywhere in SF area, for example San Jose, is 2k at a bare minimum for a 1BR, or 3k for a 2BR split between a roommate at 1.5k each. That means rent is 18k-24k, not to mention other living expenses (car, utilities, food, travel to visit family, etc.)

sangnoir2• 3 years ago

For reference I work at a company that requires leetcode medium/hard perfection and am appalled at the money we pay for the engineers relative to the value they bring

Have you tried not paying that much and checking how much value you'll get in return?

Anyone who can write code can learn to leetcode (artificial time-pressuee aside). There's nothing that sets aside leetcoders from the rest of the engineering talent pool except that they put in the time (or have a competitive programming hobby). I haven't seen any evidence that leetcoders are worse in executing, compared to those that will not (or can not) put in the time.

Are companies laying off people people's they could not execute at the expected level? Or is it because of leadership strategic errors (over hiring)? Even if your assertion that engineers are overpaid is true - that is a failure of leadership. However, I don't see heads rolling in the C-suites, it's the fault of "macro-economic headwinds" they failed to see coming.

the_overseer• 3 years ago

You just said that you see no difference between people that take leetcode and those who don't So why the hell use leetcode as a filter if it doesn't filter for anything?

gofreddygo• 3 years ago

And companies won't learn! For how quickly most small companies seem to (or be forced to) learn on other facets, they've learned nothing about attracting and hiring the kind of engineers you want and how to keep them happy.

I still see the same mistakes, the same mindset, the same process and the same result with very very few exceptions.

spacemadness2• 3 years ago

Anecdotal and mostly useless comment warning: I took a Lyft for the first time in years in the Bay a few months ago to the airport. Unprompted, the Lyft driver did nothing but complain about Lyft’s pay. He waxed nostalgic over the golden years of Lyft and talked about how they trick drivers into loaning vehicles from them at high rates. Then on my return trip, another Lyft driver did the exact same thing. I can’t imagine having a bunch of drivers complaining about their pay and being sold a bill of goods is a win for your company.

medellin2• 3 years ago

Lyft was trying to attract a certain type of person to work for them with their branding and marketing… looks like that is finally starting to backfire like I thought it would.

Im sure uber drivers do similar but i have taken over 1200 and only had this happen once or twice

gundmc• 3 years ago

Lyft was trying to attract a certain type of person to work for them with their branding and marketing…

Could you expand on this a bit? I'm not familiar with reputational differences between the two (beyond the early days corporate culture exposès).

prepend2• 3 years ago

Did you ever ask a ny cabbie about the pay? Unless you had an extremely rare owner operator, everyone hated it.

At least with Lyft the id of the complainer matches the registered id.

spacemadness2• 3 years ago

In either case, I didn’t ask.

buryat• 3 years ago

I started taking Uber Black or Lyft Black because of this, better have a completely silent trip than a driver that's constantly complaining and making the passenger the bad guy

shmatt• 3 years ago

If it was a net negative (or even significantly lower than minimum wage) they would stay home, most rent their cars weekly and not locked in for 3 years. It's a popular tactic for them to try to extract tips. This type of complaining will trigger a large tip from some types

If one ever visits /r/uberdrivers its just constant discussion on what tips they got and how to extract more tips from people

sosodev3• 3 years ago

Surely they're trying to squeeze customers for tips because the base pay just isn't satisfactory, right?

thedrbrian• 3 years ago

On the other hand Uber is still subsidised by VCs so they can afford to blow money on the drivers

paxys2• 3 years ago

Uber is still subsidised by VCs

Uber went public 4 years ago.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

The move comes days after a new chief executive officially took control...A Lyft spokeswoman said its new CEO “has made clear to the company that his focus is on creating a great and affordable experience for riders and improving drivers’ earnings....”

If the new CEO took over "days" ago, to what extent was this his decision? I'd think it would take weeks for a longtime CEO to cut this many roles, and a new CEO has to get up-to-speed on all aspects of the business before being able to do anything major. Perhaps he spent 6 months vetting the company during the courtship phase, and was planning this all during that time?

rexreed• 3 years ago

I think Elon Musk would tell you otherwise

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

IIRC he had pretty fine-grained data during the months-long acquisition process, which would have enabled him to make decisions like this soon after officially taking over. I don't know how much data is shared with a potential CEO hire (versus a new owner).

jy1• 3 years ago

FWIW He was a Lyft board member for a long time before he was CEO.

yalogin2• 3 years ago

Why do Lyft and Uber incur so much costs when they operate on a global scale? Forget global, let's take just the US, if Uber is the default ride app across the US, the cost to create the app, run the service should reduce drastically over time. It's been more than 10yrs and by now they should be doing really well. Same for Lyft. But from everything I hear, they are not. Am I wrong?

rcme5• 3 years ago

Because the margins suck. Yes, Uber facilitates a lot of rides. But those rides cost a lot of money. In addition to the trip itself, the driver needs to drive to you, wait for you to get in the car, and then wait after the trip for the next fare. That's a lot of time that they need to be compensated for. There is also a lot of competition. If Uber is too expensive, it's trivially easy to take a Lyft.

yalogin2• 3 years ago

Wait, are you saying Uber compensates for the drive to the pick up location? Doesn’t make any sense, if there are enough drivers the algorithm should automatically pick the closest. Even then isn’t it the expectation that the driver ears that cost and the ride fee will compensate for that?

cco2• 3 years ago

My "bull" case for Lyft is being acquired by Cruise. Perhaps in an acquisition Lyft could restructure enough to survive and Cruise gets a ready-install base of millions of riders (and human drivers for all the markets/conditions they can't automate).

peanuty1• 3 years ago

Can Cruise afford to acquire Lyft?

cco2• 3 years ago

Perhaps? I think they've raised something like 13B, Lyft is at ~3B or so. Its within the realm of reasonable at some price/structure, but I have no insight into that other than it seems like a decent partnership.

Lyft to Cut at Least 1,200 Jobs in New Round of Layoffs to Reduce Costs

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