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.
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.
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.
Lyft is a mature product. Heck, they felt like a mature product when I used them for the first time five years ago.
So why would they need to keep hiring engineers? What new features necessitated the hiring of additional teams?
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.
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.
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.
Uber made much bigger bets than Lyft. Expanded world wide, launched stuff like eats, and burned a ton of money on self driving cars.
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