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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

How is it a company that rents scooter needed 1,387 employees?!?

I’m pretty sure this 30% figure also doesn’t take into account their legions of gig workers recharging the scooters.

The economy hasn't made sense at all over the past 10 years. Companies have been hiring people just for show. Startups are all about putting up smoke and mirrors to appeal to a bunch of dumb investors. Snap never made a profit in almost a decade yet its market cap is $17 billion. Uber hasn't made a profit in over a decade, market cap is $50 billion.

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.

Sounds like a pyramid scheme: invest in a startup first so that you find other investors for a subsequent round so that you can IPO and sell it all off to the next suckers who are hoping to do the same. Just don’t be the one left holding the bag.

And the worst part is that all these people who were hired were misused for bureaucratic purposes and so their practical skillsets have atrophied. Then when the big burst arrives and these people are collectively fired, they will be totally unprepared and incapable to adapt their skills to the economic reality that they were shielded from by their previous employers.

I agree that there seems to be deep economic rot somewhere, but I'm not sure Snap and Uber are particularly near the center.

I haven't looked at their 10-Ks in awhile, but aren't at least one of them cash flow positive already?

>> 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.

This.

Yet, all my highly educated friends think Federal Reserve has been doing a great job at "stabilizing the economy".

Ignorance is strength, after all.

Usually companies just hire on people at that stage to show growth, so that they’ll get more money.

Look at AirBnb - they don’t need thousands to operate their business, but they have them and they continue to hire

I wonder what they do all day. Sounds like it might be the ultimate retirement plan: get paid 150+k and not do much all day because there just isn’t that much work to go around.

Probably not, at least not if the generalized version of Parkinson’s law holds. The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).

Possibly, but in my experience the less real work there is the more politics and thought leadership tends to crop up.

AirBnB at least seems to keep churning out loads and loads of perhaps marginally-useful open source software https://airbnb.io/projects/

Maybe those engineers keep busy with these hobby projects, and then that makes for good PR to recruit more devs?