How Bird Laid Off 406 People in Two Minutes via Zoom
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> Thinking there were technical difficulties, some employees logged-off and were never able to return to the meeting. [...] Others tried in vain to join the webinar and got a message saying it was full, likely because Bird's webinar license didn't accommodate enough attendees.
> For the next five minutes, employees stared at a sparse slide with a dark grey background that said only "COVID-19." [...] A robotic-sounding, disembodied voice came on the line. The woman began by acknowledging "this is a suboptimal way to deliver this message."
> As the voice on the line was speaking, employees stared at their computer and began to take in the news that they were losing their jobs. Then their screens suddenly went dark and their company issued MacBooks restarted. By 10:40 a.m, everyone was locked out, just as employees were frantically trying to exchange personal numbers and emails on Slack and take screenshots of their contacts.
> It did not help that many managers were included in the layoffs and had no idea who on their team had been cut. Some resorted to messaging their reports on LinkedIn to see if they still worked at the company.
> [The person who gave the announcement] was not VanderZanden or a top executive. "It was a cowardly move," said a Bird manager. "Travis did not want to deliver the news."
> Workers were told they would be receiving three months of healthcare benefits but when they looked into it, they discovered the company is actually only providing coverage until April 30th.
The CIO took multiple ~$75,000 bonus days and weeks before the closure.
The IT manager got a ~$25,000 bonus days before locking all accounts and killing exchange.
Anyway, I do remember the Solyndra scandal, but I’d wager most don’t. I mostly recall the sparse media attention given at the time.
Agreed, that was one of the sloppiest and mishandled lay-offs I can think of. That should be a case study of exactly how not to fold a company.
I suppose because it's a political tangent.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Whre is that 2 trillion follars going?
Funny you should ask - they pushed for no oversight.
This is the biggest theft of wealth in history.
It's sort of ripping off a band-aid: it's better to have it done all at once, than dragging it out over the course of a few weeks.
- Deliver your message with empathy and context as to why the decision has to be made for the survival of the company.
- Deliver the message in a way that scales. There's almost no point in having a webinar if there's not going to be a discussion anyway.
- Offer assistance to those being laid off to lessen the blow: paid leave, coaching, extended health benefits etc.
- Preface your message with the good stuff (point above) and explain why the company has taken any type of measure to lessen the impact of this sad but unavoidable news.
- Set up a way for ex-employees to keep in touch instead of locking them out completely. Protecting corporate assets is understandable, treating people like disposable trash is not.
Clearly the people in charge don't care about the employees. When they're just using the employees to make them money, IMO, it is worse to lie and pretend otherwise.
I'm not saying that they should lie about caring, having empathy for someone costs nothing and doesn't require you to solve their problems.
Occam's ghost is whispering "sociopath" to me.
Let employees have a way to contact each other for a while, so they can network for their next job, or at least say goodbye.
The rest of the things you're describing all cost money. Why spend money when you don't have to?
Your post is getting downvoted because it displays a tremendous lack of empathy, and because the company in question displayed a tremendous lack of professionalism.
> It's sort of ripping off a band-aid: it's better to have it done all at once, than dragging it out over the course of a few weeks.
It could have been done in a week, and in a way that 1) maintained security/access in a reasonable way, and 2) that allowed people to get their shit in order.
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: It takes a week to lay them off. During this week, productivity will be down 50%. You have 654 employees (ex-post). Say they each cost $200k/year (taxes, office space, etc), that gives (1/52) * 0.5 * 200k = $1.92k/employee in lost productivity, or almost $1.3 million in total.
That’s not how people work.
What are the future losses from not being able to hire top candidates (and maybe even loss of business if customers start boycotting it), since obviously Bird is a shitshow of an employer?
Customers don't stop using Facebook over the clear and present erosion of their freedom it presents, so thinking they would be concerned with how a company treats its employees is absurd.
As for prospective employees, it's going to be a buyer's market from here on out. Universities have been pumping out CS grads en masse, and the startups have been hiring them. With the startups going bankrupt, there will be a glut of unemployed programmers.
This the worst fuck up ever
I.e., such that They have root & You don't?
And if both Macs & Linux can be configured such that the You are subject to Them, and both can configured such that only You have control, what is the difference you're getting at?
I saw a Polish meme recently:
During candidate interview:
Interviewer: So... is there any question you would like to ask us?
Candidate: Yeah, how did you treat your employees during coronavirus?
Interviewer: Uhmm...
I hope people take notice and will stay away from companies that have nice words and "loyalty" for their employees only when it suits them.
Recently I red how Suzuki did not laid anybody due to 2008 financial crisis and instead cut whatever they could (like R&D, participation in sporting events, etc.) just to ensure employees have jobs.
It would be interesting to see how Japan recovers economically relatively to the US post Corona crisis.
There are many, many contexts and scenarios where this exact same sentence can be said in a highly negative way. In this instance it is great, but I can assure you that many Japanese workers experience the dark side of this mindset (e.g., stay in the office as long as possible; don't "shirk duties" by taking time for yourself; god help you if you're a woman; etc.).
I have no doubt this is not everyone's experience, but it's also not uncommon.
What we can do is to learn how companies solve the problem.
Was the layoff necessary? Was the form of the layoff necessary?
Probably not. Probably with all those billions of investments you could have made choices that will leave you with more than paper thin margins or maybe you could beg your investors for more to keep the company afloat.
This could have easily be a formative experience for the company bringing everybody together and motivating for years.
At a previous company, we were all called in for a mandatory employee meeting. As we sat around in the office "living room", the CEO talk about how we were going to pivot, and went around the room telling everyone what their new role would be.
He skipped a few people.
When he finished, he thanked the "extra" people for their help but told them that this was their last day at work. Then he went around the room and gave each of them a chance to say what their time at the company had meant to them, so we got to see our freshly fired friends stammer out stuff like "I thank you for this wonderful learning opportunity, and, uh, can I have a reference?" through choked-back tears.
The rest of us started looking for jobs that same day. The CEO was shocked and offended that we'd walk out on him when he needed us the most. Well, if we're not treated with respect and loyalty, what would you expect?
"Normal" people consciously or subconsciously understand that people have modus operandi and however they treat other people can happen to you in a similar situation.
"Jerk" has no empathy by definition and that's what might be explaining their surprise to how people reacted even though to a normal person this is all completely logical. It just did not occur this might be a problem because their system of value does not recognize it as a problem (unless they are being fired) and at the same time their system of value is not concerned with people who might find it an issue but are no threat.
If I witnessed something like this I would be looking for backdoor exit, too.
People there have joined a company that was founded just 3 years ago. The fastest company ever to reach unicorn status. This company is extreme by any metric you look at. No one there has had any "career" there. Even for the founder the time spent at bird is "short" when you look at it form a professional point of view. So expecting that kind of company to have a paternal view on their employees, like an industrial giant will have for their worker who spent 30 years working there, is just strange.
If you join a rocket ship, you should definitely expect turbulences during the journey. Account for that or join a more establish company, none of those fired 30% of their workforce overnight because of covid.
This company is not a rocket ship. They have an app and drop a bunch of scooters on the sidewalk.
Nowhere this type of business requires to have paper thin margins and disposable people unless you make it so as an owner/investor of the company.
That's more of a Japanese cultural thing though -- lifetime employment but also lifetime service.
Granted I knew it was coming, but it didn't make anyone feel better when the drone hired to give us the details grabbed the conference room camera off the wall and pointed it at the ground after they gave their 3rd or 4th conflicting answer to questions, and had backtracked a bit on who would receive what payout.
The irony of staring at a dirty carpet with some spots of trash was not lost on anyone.
Layoffs sometimes seem to get passed to the last folks who can't refuse to actually present the layoff... and they're often not very good at it.
When people came in they looked up their names and gave them either a red or blue card. At the end of everyone coming in the person in charge stood up and said "as you arrived you received a red or blue card, the ones who received a red card have been let go, please get your things and exit the building."
Employees either instructed to go to the Convention Centre (to get fired), or a fancy hotel (for a planning meeting):
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/07/12/laid-off-sears-c...
You didn't know which meeting was which until you got there, of course. It was awful.
Orchestrating 400ish one on ones via Zoom wouldn't have been that much effort. I assume they could have spread it across several leaders.
Edit: From their careers page..."while prioritizing a culture that celebrates diversity, inclusion, and integrity"
Work everyone hard until that last day. Do it on the last day of the month so they have no health insurance the next day.
Been there.
440 people. Take ten senior people, CEO included, and divide the list into groups of five. News is delivered to bunches of five at a time, calls capped at five minutes, with one-on-one follow-up calls to be scheduled for later in the week.
After forty-five minutes, you’d be done. Those forty-five minutes will be mayhem, and you probably want to disable company services at the start of that process, but it would be better than this. (Next up, do the same thing at the team level to reassure those staying.)
This is one of the costs of a flat hierarchy, by the way. You don’t have managers who can work in parallel.
But having to actually lay hundreds of people off? TBH I'd probably outsource it to a group of specialists. I could see myself delivering bad news to a handful of people but that many... I'd be useless a few hours into the first day.
I get that we don't want people doing the professional equivalent of being an awful partner until your S.O. initiates the breakup, but surely it would be useful to let firms get creative when drastic measures are genuinely needed.
You avoid the rumours by being transparent about what's going on. It's not like it's not going to be public in a few hours anyway.
Plus if I were your competitor I could probably head hunt 5-10 of your key lay offs and probably have them recreate your IP just based on their collective memory, anyway.
This paranoia should stop. It's covered by NDAs and such, anyway.
I was using it in reference to the cooperate/defect choice in the prisoner's dilemma. It's a term of art in game theory.
If it is of value then why are you letting them go instead of producing something else of value in a follow up? Layoffs would be a squandering.
All the reactions you described would happen no matter what type of delivery mechanism the company uses, and it is very likely that the response will be worse if you aren't up-front and honest about it.
If I was working at Bird right now, I'd be brushing up my resume and jumping ship at the first opportunity available, since they clearly don't care about their employees' peace of mind.
Let's say my company is going through rough times. We all know something is coming. Anxiety levels are up.
Let's say my leadership knows many of us are going to be laid off. They know I am going to be laid off. They give some vague heads up to us all so they can pat themselves on the back about how honest they are, but they won't tell us if we're on the chopping block. No, instead we will have individual meetings with our leadership over the next several days.
That's several days of my leadership knowing and not telling me. Several days of spiking blood pressure every time my boss wants to talk, wondering - is this it? Several days of not knowing what to tell my wife. Several days of not knowing what financial plans to make. Several days of trying to decipher facial expressions of the people around me.
Reasonable people can disagree. I can't tell you that you're wrong. But I can tell you that a vague announcement followed by days of waiting to see if the other shoe will drop does not strike me, personally, as open and transparent.
So at this point, what should the leadership do, in your opinion?
Alternatively, that's several days for you to start making contingency plans. Anxiety and negative feelings are entirely unavoidable in mass layoffs. You have to do it one way or the other.
Really needs to be same day, and really should be possible to be same day.
Also, at least in the UK, there's a process to go through and once you realise you're going to have to make redundancies, you _have_ to tell everyone affected that their jobs are at risk. I know such things are anathema to much of the US.
I don't agree. With an ahead-of-time announcement like that, it gives employees time to prepare for the possibility of being laid off. I.e. working on resume, reducing home budget, etc.
I don't disagree that people are capable of taking risk mitigation steps in the absence of open and transparent information.
But that doesn't mean the absence of open and transparent information is somehow rendered open and transparent.
Overall my point is this: if I'm going to be laid off, the open and transparent thing to do is to tell me as soon as practicable, not to withhold that information just to facilitate a one on one conversation that may or may not meet an unspoken emotional need. There may be reasons for doing the latter, but I view openness and transparency as being antithetical to the withholding of important information.
I think people are objecting to announcing "Layoffs are coming" and then having to wait some period of time to find out who is included.
The timing is also important, what's being discussed isn't "in 12 months" but immediately given the quick turn in cash flow for many of these companies due to a big external event.
But while there isn't a "great" way, there are many "bad" and "worse" ways. The story in this post is one of them.
Edit: Just to be clear I'm not defending Bird or absolving them of blame, I'm just describing how these things can happen.
If news gets out before all the details are finalised, so no-one is blindsided by the announcement when it happens, some people will have lots of time to have sleepless nights and complain about how they're not being told whether they still have a job; and people you hoped to retain will start sending out CVs.
If news is kept secret until you know every last precise detail, people will be upset this problem has come out of nowhere without them being warned, and that they weren't trusted with secrets, and that they weren't consulted on who in their team would be fired.
And of course, in an announcement to 400 people, you'll have at least one person who'd have preferred the other option...
If it leaks and you have a mutiny that's a disaster.
Really, it's very lose-losel
People will feel betrayed no matter what.
Granted it seems to have calmed down the past year or so but 2 years ago I was seeing what folks were complaining about on other social media.
The excessive headcount in these VC funded start-ups is truly mind boggling.
I'm in NYC. We don't have any scooter share companies, so the only scooters you see on the streets are privately owned. And I've seen an explosion of them over the past year. A lot more people are getting around using them, and I don't see why that would be affected one whit by the scooter share companies (which don't even operate here) shutting down. When those companies shut down, I'd just expect a lot of people who were formerly using them to switch to privately owned ones as well. That's the nice thing about these scooters; they're small and light enough that you can own your own even if you live in a tiny apartment.
- The scooters are subject to vandalism everywhere, this reduces their lifetime and makes them incredible expensive to maintain
- They are cluttering the sidewalks, rules are basically impossible to enforce
- They are driven recklessly by a lot of users. While there are technical solutions to this like geofencing and speed limits, they are not applied
Lots of people (at least here in Germany) don't like them at all. In major cities I've been to, basically all sharing scooters are used by tourists. While thats certainly a market, its nowhere near the mobility revolution they claim. Basically all of these companies are surviving on VC money, very few cities are actually profitable. Since tourism is completely gone and most people are on WFH, I doubt there are any users for these scooters right now. I think its unlikely that they'll be able to sustain their buisness if lockdown lasts more than a month.
I do enjoy using them sometimes when I'm feeling lazy but still want to get some fresh air, but it's not really an economical means of transportation.
Anecdotally, a lot of the people using them are people who would otherwise have started biking. The scooters are less effort (helps prevent sweating in summer) and smaller. E-bikes are also growing in popularity.
But it's hard to tell whether someone is _actually_ a good manager until you've observed their reactions in times of stress. If they've reached senior levels already then it probably doesn't matter whether the managers under them are any good or not: it's not going to go well.
This would have required a minimum 45 days statutory consultation period.
Well, there's nowhere to hide. These things will be remembered. They will have a very hard time hiring people back. And as this make its rounds people will be less likely to use their service.
I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that is handling this all exceptionally well with a great deal of compassion for the employees, their families, the customers, and the community around the offices - even when that hurts the short-term bottom line. We will also use some of this time for trainings.
That is both compassionate and smart!
When all of this is over we will have happy customers and motivated employees and will hit the ground running.
Bird will not. Short term thinking and unprofessional behavior like this story never pays off in the long term.
Now. Maybe there's a backstory we do not know. Perhaps this was the only way to keep the company going for the rest of the employees. Still, the way it was handled was just terrible.
I'm reminded of this example with the same message delivered with compassion: https://twitter.com/marriottintl/status/1240639160148529160
(I do not work for Marriott)
Geniuses at the helm it seems. This is abysmal and shows how disconnected some SV executives can be from real life.
Everything about the Silicon Valley VC-fueled startup culture is against the goals of humanity.
Startup culture: ignores and continues to destroy lives and planet for the profit of a few individuals who will later inevitably go on to develop mental health problems and commit suicide
"A month earlier, someone in Bird's IT department had been tasked by his superiors to write a script that would allow the company to instantly shut down all of a user's accounts – computer, email, Slack – with the click of a single button, according to an employee. He was told the script would be used for general off-boarding rather than the mass layoff that he ended up being included in. Last Friday, the script seems to have been activated early."
Please put a little conscious effort into reminding yourself that the way people perform in difficult times is how we should judge character. This doesn't mean not doing hard things, it means a focus on compassion, empathy and aspects outside your own immediate environment. The simple act of truly giving a sh!t gets you a long way towards the ideal.
I loathe these polluters anyway, can't walk the streets without tripping over abandoned scooters. Good riddance to the company, pity for the employees. Trying to imagine how the company will survive this but this is about as toxic as it gets and I assume that those that still work there will be looking for alternatives real-soon-now to avoid getting caught when the next wave of lay-offs hits due to Corona.
Companies with leadership teams that are this poor tend to get washed out in the long run. Those let go just get a head start on moving onto what’s next. There are exceptions but the market does a decent job of dealing with this sort of behavior... eventually.
This company was never viable to begin with, and the same applies for the majority of current startups.
In fact, it would have been more efficient to simply turn off their computers without any warning and then send them a text informing them about their situation. That way, the 'time-in-flight' is just a few minutes.