Bird lays off hundreds via Zoom call
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Edit: more: https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685675137781762?...
> According to a source, Bird’s balance sheet is strong but it needed to reduce burn in order to extend its runway into 2021.
I would not describe a ~9 month runway as "strong".
Though perhaps they are/were on the “don’t worry about the burn we can always get more” plan. In that case 9 months does sound perilous....though perhaps many people who couldn’t make car payments will become customers?
(Not to mention that Bird is specifically a startup, which is a company meant to run on investments at this stage.)
I’m pretty sure this 30% figure also doesn’t take into account their legions of gig workers recharging the scooters.
Look at AirBnb - they don’t need thousands to operate their business, but they have them and they continue to hire
Maybe those engineers keep busy with these hobby projects, and then that makes for good PR to recruit more devs?
If you want to understand why things are like this, just look at how the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is constantly injecting new fiat money into the economy and you will have all the answers.
I haven't looked at their 10-Ks in awhile, but aren't at least one of them cash flow positive already?
They're all cash flow positive if you count the constant stream of cash coming in from investors and bank loans.
But at the end of the day, anyone, doing just about anything can take $10 and turn it into $9.
Yet, all my highly educated friends think Federal Reserve has been doing a great job at "stabilizing the economy".
Ignorance is strength, after all.
Anec-data: one of my relatives brokered a post lockdown lease in a large _redacted_ city for one of the two large ride sharing companies. It was for scooter storage.
No business projects revenue dropping by almost 100% overnight.
Well, they’re being demonised because they’re pushing heavily for a government bailout that will avoid them going bankrupt.
Because some people may not realize/forget the source of these billions, these billions are either taxpayer money, OR these are new/fresh money (which means diluting the value of the currency for everyone).
Do note that the buybacks last time were enabled by government loans. So that is a bit suspect on the governments part for not leveraging the power they did have.
But yes overall these silly critiques of strawmen I think just diffuse anger that should be directed at real things. No good.
The new meta is "if we all do the same stupid shit we'll get bailed out when the crunch comes"
The penalty for a bailout should be bankruptcy and nationalization. Taxpayers should profit, not lose.
There is no world where an airline/hotel or any business could have possibly saved enough cash to fight a 90%+ drop in revenue for months and still remain competitive in the market.
The point is, it’s hard to predict the future. Who knows if the future will bring a fatal bug in your software, a pandemic, or both. But regardless, we all know tough times will always happen, and to therefore be prepared.
For example, a hotel owner can choose to squirrel away cash to protect the hotel and its employees for months of no income. A competing hotel will instead choose to renovate the hotel. Which hotel will customers choose to stay at?
The job of management is to find a profitable way to deploy capital. If management are returning capital to shareholders, outside of expected dividends of course, it’s because they are bereft of ideas. What would I have done? Invested a large portion of that money in long term R&D and careful strategic acquisitions. It’s the same over at IBM. The current generation of managers have inherited cash flows set up by their predecessors but have no idea what to do with them.
The businesses in years past made money, invested some of it, spent some on R&D, and distributed some to shareholders (via buybacks). What other option was there?
So let them all hang.
The only solution in my eyes for this dilemma is, that the government should do bail outs, but at the price of shares. For any money paid, which isn't just credits, the government should get company shares, which are sold off, as soon as the market stabilizes.
but that's not even the craziest thing in your comment. it's that you are probably a salaried worker making excuses for the boss. it's a crazy crazy world.
What dollar figure should be put on the potential demise of the company versus "saving earns you next to nothing"?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
Has Bird ever been profitable? Even excluding the cost of buying the scooters (e.g. only considering op. ex.)?
Reading between the lines, "startups" (they are companies and thus eligible anyway based on standard conditions) refers to companies relying completely on external funding in the pursuit of positive cash flow and profitability further down the line. Looks a lot like a covered bailout for VCs and other investors. Because if a company was profitable before Corona, meaning banks would have provided credit already, the government is making it a lot easier and cheaper to get additional credit lines.
Not to minimize the impact on companies and people who are seeing drastically reduced demand, but it's a serious overstatement to say that all companies and people are.
So people who are still employed, but can't (or shouldn't) leave their homes still have some money, probably more than usual.
But the primary answer to that question is the same as it's been for the past couple decades: the people with the money are, well, the people hoarding all the money. The owners, the (big) employers, the people at the top.
As has been reported various places, just as an example, the airline industry spent the last decade spending something like 80-90% of every dollar they made buying back stock to enrich their executives. That's why they don't have anything saved for a crisis like this, and that's who has all the money now.
Banks manage money but that’s not the same as having that money on their own balance sheet. Banks can and do go bankrupt.
I sympathize and wish all the best to its employees, however.
I'm no fan of cars but the idea that a company can just dump junk like this all over public spaces as an intrinsic part of its business model is bizarre to me.
If you take on a leadership position, don't be a coward like this. Even if the layoff is due to things beyond your control.
The same rules apply to taking remote workers on.
Slow and gradual onboarding with care and nurture to take them on.
Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
It's hard to do and doesn't positively impact bottom line initially but it avoids resentment in the vertical(market) which is super important for long term growth.
This doesn't work when you need to make large changes to an org.
I've seen first hand how different styles of this work.
When it's done 'carefully and individually', and keeps happening over days (because that's what it takes) - everyone else in the company starts wondering if they're impacted, and it becomes this slow-moving horror show. Another person gets tapped on the shoulder, called into a room and let go. Meanwhile the business expects things to continue as normal, but it doesn't and even normal meetings become a source of anxiety.
While it's never pleasant to be told you're being let go - at least if you can do it in larger groups and get it over and done with as soon as possible you reduce the level of anxiety and uncertainty.
Not to say that a pre-recorded video, voice mail or text message is the way to go, but still.
I've been in an office during an in-person layoff situation (surprisingly only once during my 15+ year career), and they were definitely taking advantage of it being done in person.
Every manager called every single worker personally to relay the news, for a general well-being check in, and to answer any questions about UI benefit filing. Each manager has also personally checked in once a week to see how things are going, and to provide updates, and said they will continue to do so for the next 5 weeks they plan to be closed.
... and that's a non-union, publicly traded company.
I've been an employer for 20 years. They come and go and quite right too. I encourage my troops that if they are looking elsewhere then we'll give them time off for interviews and assistance in how to interview effectively. I really am not joking. If you think you own someone completely then your name is Satan! I just want a decent day of work out of you, when you want to work for me. If you no longer want to work for me then I want to get rid of you as efficiently and as fairly as possible ...
A) stay on and help integrate an external team for up to 16 weeks (reduced hours, freedom to interview and apply elsewhere) B) stay on and wrap up the current sprint and tidy up some documentation for up to 8 weeks C) finish out the week and receive 6 weeks separation pay. All options also allowed me to keep insurance until I found a new position as well as keep my company provided tech. It really made me appreciate the people at the company overall, minus the person who was making the changes (which has since been canned and some of the engineering efforts at the company have stalled which is sad)
Everyone I hired I hired remotely, without ever meeting in person. In the two instances I had to let people go I did it remotely. The same way I hired them, the same way I’ve had people quit.
Based on other countries, it looks like the real way to cleanse us of these companies would involve moving our country towards more progressive policies.
Getting a lot of downvotes by people on my above comment, but oddly enough no one wants to engage and say why they disagree. I feel like this platform would work better if people could only upvote. It would force them to comment / explain their own position if they really disagree with folks. Flagging should of course still exist though.
You can tell a well made building vs a poorly made building by what's still standing after an earthquake. But no building is built to withstand an atomic blast.
When talent is rare you can artificially widen the availability of talent by lowering the barrier of entry. Lower qualified job candidates are dependent on the crutches that allowed them entry, though, which comes at a cost of lost innovation potential and productivity overhead. The cliche don't reinvent the wheel is completely about developers distancing themselves from innovation. When talent is suddenly and explosively available to the job market there isn't a valid business reason to do that especially as companies have smaller budgets for hiring fewer developers and more developers are competing for fewer available positions.
> there isn't a valid business reason to do that
This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer, not the junior developer. Carrying it out to extremes (leftpad) being another beast, usually junior developers will be the ones wanting to build something that already exists, generally for the purpose of testing their ability.
But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if possible, and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is typically the road to knowledge siloing.
I am not a C++ developer and I have no experience writing in that language. I know that Boost is a template system for C++. I know this because for a long time I maintained a multi-language parsing utility and was considering extending support to C++. I never extended that support to C++ in my utility but C++ developers who introduced me to Boost were absolutely confident that parsing Boost logic from a C++ code sample would be next to impossible. Its trivial. If you have experience with embedded languages that sort of multi-dimensional parsing is not as hard as it sounds. A more elegant example is JSX which is a pseudo-XML construct embedded in JavaScript that can recursively contain JavaScript in various ways which then can contain more pseudo-XML islands and so forth. There was also a jQuery template scheme that introduced psuedo-HTML into script tags of actual HTML.
Typically the goal is to make systems that are more simple opposed to more easy. Easy is a disorganized pile of spaghetti code because it took less effort to write with no prior planning. Cleaner and more organized code takes greater effort with fewer interesting parts. Easier is generally preferrable to entry level employees who don't yet have the experience to differentiate easy from simple.
> This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer
I absolutely disagree. This is what I call an experienced beginner. That is somebody who has been doing the job for a couple of years and has gained confidence with certain techniques and conventions, but has never grown to a level of sophistication or problem solving that most businesses would consider valuable enough for senior level responsibilities. This is the kind of thing that most people would refer to as Dunning-Kruger, because the expertise is limited to something designed for engaging beginners and that expertise is confused with excellence.
> But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if possible, and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is typically the road to knowledge siloing.
There are all kinds of justifications for avoiding writing original logic and most of them are pretty weak. If it cannot be expressed in terms of project risk or financial harm the justification is generally a form of bike shedding. That means the developer is framing the conversation in a way their limits their uncertainty exposure without consideration for the product.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect