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Comment by cracker_jacks | Hacker News Reader

Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller...

Does it make sense to cut the salaries of the lowest-paid, zero equity groups? The same group of people you'll be competing to hire from when they graduate.

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I think it would be smarter to not have an internship program right now.

Very little of the work from internships contributes to active product roadmap, and you'd better be served by retention than new hiring. Especially of junior engineers.

Although it's a generalization, interns are as a group probably better equipped to handle sudden loss of salary. Those with children, mortgages, and healthcare needs are less so.

It sucks for interns to be affected, but all things considered it's the lesser amongst many evils.

It seems as if they want to cancel, but put the onus on interns to make the proper decision.

If you were negotiating a job offer, and right as it came time to sign the paperwork, would you take a 50% salary cut? You'd move on to the next company.

In our case, we already signed our offers (and most of us turned down many other Big N offers). It makes me wonder about the future of hiring; both sides (talent and employers) will certainly be more selective and wary going forward.

These are crazy times. Most companies are cancelling their intern programs outright, or switching to more limited, remote work options.

Finding a summer internship right now is going to be really difficult.

People need internship experience to get fulltime jobs. Cancelling internships is a terrible move for the future workforce.

How true is this outside SoCal?

Must one work for peanuts, or free, before being seriously considered for entry-level work?

I’m not saying the internships need to be for free, but personally I think it’s reasonable to expect college students to have spent some time interning, paid, in the field they would like a full time job in during the summer

I seem to recall that Lyft had some of the most insanely overpaid listings in the SF area in terms of raw compensation - maybe shave 3% off those salaries above 200k instead of half what the interns make.

Edit, found it: https://www.levels.fyi/2019/

They did that too, search for "10 percent"

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241351/lyft-layoff-furl...

10% cut across the board, 20% for VP+ and 30% for executives. No cut on equity. Lyft has left no stone unturned to save money where it makes sense.

source: news + work at Lyft

I find these “total compensation” member-measurement rankings very misleading because much of these reported sums is actually in stock.

Someone who was hired by Lyft in 2019 got RSUs at double today’s stock price. A quarter or more of their total compensation has vanished.

Going the other way, someone who joined Amazon in 2017 got stock at 1/3rd of today’s price. Their total compensation has probably doubled as a result.

I guess sites such as Levels.fyi like to report total compensation numbers without context because most of their viewers come there to gawk tabloid-style rather than for actual information.

It's an imperfect measurement but I'm not sure there's a better alternative. Some people like to include stock appreciation when discussing compensation, which seems even more misleading since that isn't what was written on the offer.

Recipients have to play investor to price in the risk and volatility of the stock (ie. if Lyft and Google both gave the same offer, Google's is far less risky but with potentially lower returns).

Breakdowns are available on the rest of our site (check out http://levels.fyi/comp.html). We just used total packages for our end of the year report to deliver more focus to the totals since that's the main objective of using a median value (ie the median total package isn't guaranteed to reflect the middle stock package or median base salary. That said, total compensation is what candidates look at when switching companies and what recruiters have to match if they really want to attract a candidate. This along with the bull run stock market is what has led to such an increase in comp over last few years.

as a graduate, you'd be extremely lucky to have any job at all, let alone a job at a tech company, let alone one as well known as Lyft. Let's face it, with the current vast oversupply of labor, employers have a lot more bargaining power.

Back in my day, after the Tech bubble burst, I was a coder with little experience, and I worked for any start up that would let me, just so i could get more experience. One place, I got paid 0$, with just a thank you and a slice of pizza (1 slice, not 2).

And it was uphill in the snow, both ways!

Most software companies aren't hurting - especially those still in the startup phase that may have 0 revenue today but also had 0 revenue before the pandemic.

Additionally, the job market is already insanely skewed toward employers with extremely weak unionizing laws throughout most of the US - while the software market is more balanced than most other markets the value extracted form employees still far outweighs their compensation.

Employees should value their time and labour and I'm sorry you decided to work for no money since, either your labour was worthless or someone made free money off your back.

well, at the time, worthless labor was all there was, especially if you had less than 3 years experience. It was a different time. You had senior software engineers commiting suicide because they couldn't ever imagine getting work again. for people in tech, it was truely a hopeless time.

i think a lot of young people haven't ever experienced that, and assume that the "more balanced than most other markets" conditions will continue in the tech industry forever. But, there's nothing that says it needs to continue. There's no regulations in place that prevent more and more workers from entering the software industry (unlike say doctors who have regulations in place to prevent more medical students than a certain number each year). So, in SE, over the next decade, the supply of workers can continue to increase more and more

Once you have a big name on your resume, you'll get all the interviews you want when you go to look for a full time job.

I'm not sure if Lyft is a big enough name, but I know having Google or Facebook on your resume as an intern is enough to have your choice in full time jobs as long as you can pass interviews.

Lyft will get hurt big time from this when these interns go to find full time jobs.

Tech companies aren’t about to hire Joe Bartender from the local Hooters.

There’s not a massive pool of unemployed software engineers out there quite yet.

They’re not going to be competing to hire anybody in the near future. A more sensible move would probably be to lay them all off. Internships makes sense for companies when you have labor shortages. During an economic crisis, when unemployment is so high, they’re more of an unnecessary expense.

Probably better to hire a competent intern than some random applicant, even if he comes with an internal recommendation.

Interns are somehow superior candidates to experienced engineers all of a sudden?

Thanks for the refreshing perspective. I don't think they made this pay cut decision lightly, meaning that the situation is most likely grave. Overall, it really brings doubt into my mind about the future of Lyft and whether it will survive

If you want a company that has more chances of "surviving", apply/work for a company that can generate positive cashflow from operations. Life will be more stable, your salary will reflect the company's ability to make a profit (aka "lower") but you won't get the possible upside of a "hot" startup - you can't have it both ways. Anecdotally, unless you are the first 10 in the startup, it is probably not going to be a lot of windfall for you. For pre-IPO companies, sometimes it even goes the other way (you pay taxes on earnings that may never happen)

I remember the answer to a drunk question I asked a friend. Which was how did she manage to get tenure. Her answer was you have to a) never take a non-tenure track job. b) keep applying till you get one. I think doesn't matter, startup, not startup you need to be careful about the job and what opportunities come with it.

Nobody will be hiring when they graduate.

Beats cutting the salaries of full employees, no? And who says Lyft will still be hiring?

According to layoffs.fyi, Lyft laid of 17% of full time workers yesterday.

So not just pennies.

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