I don't claim to be very good at predicting the future, but I'd say the chances are low for Bird, and any scooters being used at all a year later. Maybe in a few very limited places, but no where near the levels they are now.
They seem to be quite popular some places. But other places they seem like a fad. There were quite a few when they first came out and almost nowhere to be seen 6 months later.
I'm not understanding why you're thinking scooters would disappear entirely. Here's what I'm seeing.
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.
I'd assume he meant sharing scooters. I totally agree that these scooters can be a really nice way to get from A to B and if you actually own them, they're probably way cleaner than the alternatives (maybe except for cycling). But the sharing system has so many flaws, I'd assume its very unlikely that they'll survive this crisis.
- 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.
one additional problem (which I guess is a corollary of your first point): they are too expensive for the end user. in my area at least, renting a scooter to go a short distance is 50-75% as much money as an uber/lyft, and you might have already walked a quarter of the way there before finding one with a decent charge. over longer distances, the scooter is a lot cheaper, but also much slower. they only make sense for a narrow range of medium-length trips that are too long to walk, but still short enough to get there in a reasonable amount of time at 15mph.
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.
The economics of scooters really suffers from being dockless. I can see the appeal from a VC-funded startup perspective, because you can get a lot of them out there quickly without having to build any infrastructure, but the ongoing daily costs of charging them all (and replacing losses) makes them expensive to operate, hence the high cost. A dockless model would allow them to be much more affordable; in NYC, for example, you can do unlimited rides on docked rideshare for an annualized cost of under 50 cents per day. There's no reason in principle that a docked scooter system, with scooters charging from docks and prevented from theft while not in use, couldn't have costs come down to a roughly similar amount.
There's a comment as an answer to yours from moooo99 that explains exactly what I am thinking. Not scooters, but the companies, and not entirely, just from most of the places you find them operating now. For some people they're great!
Makes sense. I could possibly see the scooters survive in some kind of docked model, where the docks charge the scooters thus eliminating most of the overnight labor, but nobody's gone that route yet and at this rate it may well be that no company survives long enough to get there.
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.
Probably zero. Their rates are already higher than competitors with deeper pockets and more diverse income streams, and my scooter commuting peers actively avoid them as a consequence.
I'm a retired developer, successfully avoiding management through my career. This is sooo bad, and I can come up with several things to do better, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what would have been a _good_ way to do this.
You have to lay off hundreds of employees, ideally all at the same time to avoid rumors & backchannels, and do it remotely. How do you pull that off?
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.
My fantasy response would be to invert the company's 80/20 hours and let everyone who wants to stay on for 25% of their former hours and 40% of their former pay. Then only lay off people who didn't take that offer to make up the difference.
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.
You wouldn't have to let go everyone who doesn't take the deal if some people did. But everyone who doesn't would be taking the risk that they're not as valuable as they thought. I'm sure some of the 40% who were let go would have been valuable to keep around for their talent, even if their actual job disappeared with the customers.
It's so weird to me that you can dismiss people 'at will' but not offer them reduced responsibilities and pay to stay on.
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.
I'm not a manager. But I've been in organisations where staff were being laid off. They've all started by telling _everyone_ that the layoffs were coming, then holding individual meetings with everyone who might possibly be affected to discuss what that means in practice.
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.
That is absolutely the worst possible way to do that. Your workers will become paranoid and anxious. They will "go to ground" as is the natural instinct of any prey animal. All of this makes the lay-off process much, much worse for those affected, it also hurts the morale and productivity of those who remain.
Let's say you trust one employee a lot maybe with a 1 in 1,000 chance of defecting. The formula is 1-(1-1/1000)^n, so if you're sacking 1,000 people that's a 63% chance of at least one defection.
If you're firing 1000 employees and 1 "defecting" (war time vocabulary you're using there, referring to treason, by the way...) and your business is in trouble, then your foundation is very shaky.
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.
That doesn't make sense as a concern. Layoffs are a loss cutting measure. If you are doing layoffs of things they produce then essentially by definition what you have isn't all that economically valueable to be worth stealing. It shouldn't be something they could "sell".
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.
as opposed to....what? You're going to have that response regardless of how you handle it. At least by being open and transparent about it, your employees can take some solace in the fact that they can actually trust their employer.
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.
The method you appear to be endorsing is, in my view, the opposite of open and transparent.
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.
>The method you appear to be endorsing is, in my view, the opposite of open and transparent.
> 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.
So at this point, what should the leadership do, in your opinion?
> 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.
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.
> The method you appear to be endorsing is, in my view, the opposite of open and transparent.
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.
Have you experienced this or are you imagining this could happen? My company closed a production line and people were told 12 months before. The whole process was very transparent . People took it really well and things kept moving along.
12 months is a long time to line up another job. Announcing the same day, or even the same week, will cause a good deal of disruption. I've survived layoffs of a much smaller scale, and can confirm that productivity goes way down once word gets out until the process is completed.
It sounds like in that case there was clarity about who was being laid off, as well as plenty of advance notice.
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.
Why not just call an all-hands, during the all-hands announce that there are layoffs and why, and how they're handled… announce it too the whole team. Say that during the all-hands notifications have gone out via email (scripted to go out at the same time you announce) about who's affected and at what terms. Seems sensible.
I was part of this exact scenario once. Unsurprisingly, people still thought it was a terrible way to do it. Personally, I agree with you and this strategy though.
There's no great way to do this. Your job is to effectively to create anxiety, misery, and/or sadness for a large portion of your people. Anything you do is not going to generate great reactions.
But while there isn't a "great" way, there are many "bad" and "worse" ways. The story in this post is one of them.
Start with an all hands video call (raises no early suspicions) to explain the company's situation and the need for layoffs. As soon as the need for layoffs is explained send an email to every employee notifying them of whether they are being laid off or not.
Because Bird is big a enough company that the people calling the shots feel responsible to the organization, not responsible for the organization and it can be argued that "preventing rumors and back-channels" is good for the company. This kind of change in thinking happens to almost all organizations as they grow and takes a lot of effort to avoid, it's not unique to VC funded startups though that environment certainly makes it harder to prevent.
Edit: Just to be clear I'm not defending Bird or absolving them of blame, I'm just describing how these things can happen.
It's insane that companies become "big" when their whole product and business model is unsustainable to begin with. And at least if you're operating at a loss you'd think that you would do everything in your power to stay small and not spend even more money on lots of employees unless absolutely necessary.
Large-scale corporate change has a natural dichotomy.
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...
This reminds me of a story about a top investment bank in Copenhagen (told to me by a long time employee but don't know the level of embellishment), one day there was a big company meeting down in the very expensive lovely cafeteria they had.
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."
I’ve heard similar anecdotes of a sales force arriving for a central meeting and similarly being allocated to one of two groups. The two groups were then directed to different meeting rooms; one group was given the bad news.
Also reminds me a of a story I had heard when I lived in a major city 15+ years ago. A major airline was laying off a bunch of staff. Called an all hands meeting and during the meeting pink slips were placed on peoples desks so they wouldn't know if they were on "the list" until they got back to their desk. Heard this from a friend so not sure how accurate it was.
One of my previous companies handled it this way: We knew layoffs were coming, and that they would happen on a certain day. On that day, you got invited to one of two meetings - one on the 6th floor, and one on the 7th floor. One meeting was for everyone getting laid off, the other one was for people staying.
You didn't know which meeting was which until you got there, of course. It was awful.
One of my previous companies did this same thing, but the meeting where people were being laid off (myself included in that group) was held in the large break room. Everyone was crammed in there while a rep from an outside firm retained to actually do the layoffs read a pre-prepared statement. What made it super-awkward was the vending machine guy was there restocking the Coke machine and no one asked him to leave.
My observation is that it's relatively easy (not actually easy though!) to appear to be a good manager when things are going well. And that can last long enough for someone to be promoted several times.
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.
I personally don't think laying people off during a zoom meeting is that bad in itself; like, there are limited other options and all of them could go horribly wrong in their own way. I think that it's really the execution issues that has gotten Bird all the negative press.
This was exceptionally immaturely handled on multiple fronts:
> 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.
Remember when Solyndra stole $700 million dollars from the taxpayers by accepting a loan/grant from the Obama administration, then paid out a shit ton of bonuses to execs, then killed everyones accounts one night and people just showed up to work the next day to find the doors lock and all their accounts disabled?
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.
I see several reasons why this was flagged. From the HN guidelines[0]:
> 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.
It's a stretch to call this political. The mentioning of the Obama grant, which is barely relevant to GP's point, is a far cry from flamebait. What are the other reasons for the flagging?
The point of calling out the grant, is that the US just created a two trillion dollar stimuls package - ostensibly to help small businesses and others from laying people off - yet we have the highest unemployment ever, millions laud off in a week and tons of businesses closing.
Whre is that 2 trillion follars going?
Funny you should ask - they pushed for no oversight.
Is it that bad? I mean, it looks bad, but no matter how they put it they're still getting fired. And if they don't like it, too bad. They don't work there anymore.
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.
"You're all still here for a reason. Eighty percent of this floor was just sent home. For ever. We have spent the last hour saying our goodbyes. They were good people, and they were good at their jobs, but you were better. Now they are gone. They are not to be thought of again. [...] I've been at this place for 34 years and I can tell you this is not be the last time you're going to go through this. But you all are survivors. And that is how this firm over 107 years has continued to grow stronger. So keep your heads high, get back to work."
I think if I was told something like this verbally or in email, my internal alarm bells would be going off. Or, being lionized for not being laid off after my coworkers were doesn't give me a sense of pride being at the company.
As context, I work in the video game industry, where developers have a bit of a history of doing unrealistic working schedules for "passion". When someone starts telling me how great I am with all this hardship in their company, I immediately get skeptical.
Recruiting and retaining employees is quite expensive. Creating a reputation as a place that doesn't treat it's workers well only increases that cost. Not to mention the reputation risk with your customer base.
I was laid off from Akamai about 17 years ago. It was traumatic, but it was handled reasonably well and in a manner which made it clear that it was not what the company wanted to do, but what it had to do to survive.
The company did survive.
Four or five times since then, a friend or acquaintance has asked me if Akamai would be a good place for them to work. In all cases, I have told them to go ahead.
Can you see anyone from Bird having that opinion about the company in the future?
That’s a very disheartening attitude to have. These are still people with lives and feelings. We should expect humans to use the compassion and empathy that so very few other animals are capable of.
Stop saying "single, atomic operation" like the humans being laid off are some database transaction, for God's sake.
These people being laid off spent a portion of their lives working for the company. They might have some personal contacts they'd like to get from their former colleagues, additional information since our healthcare is absurdly tied to our employment, as well as some level of understanding as to why they're being let go.
To appeal to your purely non-empathetical side, it also is negative PR for the company and might be a deterrent for future prospective employees to know that this company likes to handle mass layoffs in a "single, atomic operation."
But none of that is needed. They don't work for the company, and the company has no reason to waste thousands of dollars per employee on this.
We're now entering a recession with mass unemployment, so any company, no matter how shitty, will be able to pick up the cream of the crop for pennies on the dollar.
Blocking someone’s laptop right now saves you 0 money.
As a matter of fact it puts you in a position where everyone you just fucked over is willing to take extra steps to make every little bit of communication harder and less efficient.
I would not be surprised that half of these people are going to start replying to their messages at literally the end of the time specified by the contract.
Even if you elect to "rip off the band aid" there are about thousand ways you could go about this in a more mature and professional way. A couple of things come to mind:
- 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.
>- Deliver your message with empathy and context as to why the decision has to be made for the survival of the company. //
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.
Are you saying that it's literally impossible for the CEO of a company to care about the well-being of people that are being fired to keep the company from going bankrupt?
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.
But they're not their employees anymore. There's no point to doing any of this. The purpose of having a webinar was, presumably, that it should be atomic.
The rest of the things you're describing all cost money. Why spend money when you don't have to?
While I would agree that most people don't think this way, the relatively few people that occupy executive level positions certainly do. Haven't you ever wondered why sociopaths are over-represented in positions of power and authority?
Stop saying "atomic" for Christ's sake. Unless the company is literally going under companies usually take the time to have a 1:1 chat with the person being laid off.
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.
But taking a week to do it costs money. People won't work productively if they might get laid off any second. By laying them off atomically without any advance warning, they can get back to work quicker.
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 a good calculation. Now compare that with the PR fall-out from their chosen approach.
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 never care about that. Case in point, my computer presumably contains all sorts of rare minerals mined by slave labour in the third world. Is it regrettable? Yes. Does it mean I stop using computers? No, it's a price I'm willing to pay.
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.
I don't get your point. If you're going to lay off someone, what's wrong with leaving a paper trail about it? It's not like you have to include everything you never liked about each employee.
Sorry, are you saying it's impossible to have a Linux laptop configured such that a corporation retains control & not the user?
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?
but until now, unless you have remote ssh enabled and you know your worker's laptop's IP, there's no service for Linux to remote wipe the laptop, like in Mac.
In the Bay Area at least, scooter-rental companies have become the latest fad the past few years. In some places you couldn't walk 2 blocks without seeing at least one discarded scooter splayed out on the sidewalk or grassy median, perhaps kindly tilted against an alcove or tree. I live on a side street to a side street, and once every blue moon I'd see an abandoned rental scooter -- and I can't even tell you where the nearest docking station is.
I wonder where in the Bay Area this is (downtown SF?). I never see scooters in Mountain View and I don't really recall seeing them all over the place in Downtown San Jose either. The only place I've ever encountered them en masse was on a weekend trip to San Diego last year.
I live in Campbell, which is surrounded by San Jose on three sides and Los Gatos is to the south. I've seen abandoned scooters downtown San Jose and along Lite Rail stops. And yes, off and on when I visited San Francisco.
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.
Revoking permissions is a normal part of the SysAdmin routine. People come and go all the time. In fact, it would be incredibly stupid not to have a script like this.
Grow fast and don't care about your employees. How employees can stay loyal after company does this at the time their employees need them most?
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.
Suzuki and other Japanese companies well known for how they treat employments as long-term relationships. And American companies are known for the opposite.
It would be interesting to see how Japan recovers economically relatively to the US post Corona crisis.
> Suzuki and other Japanese companies well known for how they treat employments as long-term relationships.
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.
I don't know if we can draw a parallel between great japanese automobile companies with their software counterparts; But thinking about how japanese motorcycles are known for its longetivity and less maintanence compared to other country made motorcycles, I feel like there is a correlation here and the way companies like suzuki treats their employees is imbued in their DNA for delivering motorcycles that emphasize on longetivity ...
You've got it correct -- that is Japanese culture. Perhaps there are exceptions, it wouldn't surprise me if they exist -- but the norm is what you wrote.
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?
This happened because deep inside he was really a jerk. Maybe he thought this was neat stunt.
"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.
> How employees can stay loyal after company does this at the time their employees need them most?
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.
> 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.
That's more of a Japanese cultural thing though -- lifetime employment but also lifetime service.
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.
Corporate employees don't do that. They have "juicers". Gig economy workers who pick the scooters late at night, in rented vans or their personal pick-up trucks. They charge the scooters and then re-distribute them early in the morning.
I was once laid off as part of a massive layoff in the late 90s and was not laid off but was around for a massive layoff in the early 2000s. At each company the layoffs were done by having employees join a conference call where a HR rep read off a script letting everyone know they had been laid off. This is just business as usual but with the modern replacement for the conference call being used. It sucks but is it news worthy?
You can request a refund though the app; Bird Support tells me that they will make this refund. This is especially important given that they require an up-front minimum payment rather than accepting payment as needed.
Agreed. Their utility was overstated. For roughly the same price I could get an uber to go a short distance, or just take a bus. Plus I live in Canada, so they're only a thing for a few months during the summer/fall.
A significant part of the technology industry is a big bubble that was going to pop sooner or later - the pandemic just slightly accelerated the process and we're seeing the results now - the market is finally adjusting itself.
This company was never viable to begin with, and the same applies for the majority of current startups.
Why does it matter? If they're fired, they stop being the company's problem. As long as they don't have to pay their salary, any method works.
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.
It's a consultation period. The idea is that as much effort as possible should go into avoiding it, such as providing an opportunity for people to take voluntary redundancy, search for positions elsewhere in the company, and so on. While also making sure that people have been selected on a fair basis.
It’s painful and sad sad for those subjected to such poor leadership. However in the end things have a way of working themselves out.
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.
At first I thought this was a "how-to" brag from bird themselves. Based on what they actually did, would you have been surprised?
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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadI'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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
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.
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.
Geniuses at the helm it seems. This is abysmal and shows how disconnected some SV executives can be from real life.
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.
> 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.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
Reminder: You can fire and lay people off while still conveying a sense of respect and dignity.
This was absolutely not that. This is why people hate tech startups. They are pieces of shit in most cases.
I swear Hacker News becomes more autistic by the day.
Sam Rogers, Margin Call
As context, I work in the video game industry, where developers have a bit of a history of doing unrealistic working schedules for "passion". When someone starts telling me how great I am with all this hardship in their company, I immediately get skeptical.
The company did survive.
Four or five times since then, a friend or acquaintance has asked me if Akamai would be a good place for them to work. In all cases, I have told them to go ahead.
Can you see anyone from Bird having that opinion about the company in the future?
These people being laid off spent a portion of their lives working for the company. They might have some personal contacts they'd like to get from their former colleagues, additional information since our healthcare is absurdly tied to our employment, as well as some level of understanding as to why they're being let go.
To appeal to your purely non-empathetical side, it also is negative PR for the company and might be a deterrent for future prospective employees to know that this company likes to handle mass layoffs in a "single, atomic operation."
We're now entering a recession with mass unemployment, so any company, no matter how shitty, will be able to pick up the cream of the crop for pennies on the dollar.
As a matter of fact it puts you in a position where everyone you just fucked over is willing to take extra steps to make every little bit of communication harder and less efficient.
I would not be surprised that half of these people are going to start replying to their messages at literally the end of the time specified by the contract.
Good luck getting those laptops back
- 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?
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.
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.
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.
The excessive headcount in these VC funded start-ups is truly mind boggling.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faql1idkAcA
This would have required a minimum 45 days statutory consultation period.
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.
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.