
Bird lays off hundreds via Zoom call - benatkin
https://twitter.com/mjnblack/status/1243641637420453889
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benatkin
Maybe it was heavily rehearsed rather than prerecorded
[https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685748957564928?...](https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685748957564928?s=19)

Edit: more:
[https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685675137781762?...](https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685675137781762?s=19)

~~~
JansjoFromIkea
Kinda think that they couldn't put a face to it (specifically the CEO) is way
worse than it being (possibly) prerecorded

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kevindong
TechCrunch has a lot more details: [https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/27/bird-
lays-off-about-30-of-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/27/bird-lays-off-
about-30-of-workforce-amid-covid-19-pandemic/)

> According to a source, Bird’s balance sheet is strong but it needed to
> reduce burn in order to extend its runway into 2021.

I would not describe a ~9 month runway as "strong".

~~~
paxys
Well compared to all the companies that claim they cannot last through the
lockdown it is.

~~~
gumby
For the first couple of years of my first bootstrapped company I tried to keep
“cash in the bank” in excess of 3 months. Everybody knew. The one time (after
the first six months of transient jitter) it dipped down close to two months
everybody knew, and nobody quit (headcount at that point was about 60). So 9
months seems pretty good.

Though perhaps they are/were on the “don’t worry about the burn we can always
get more” plan. In that case 9 months does sound perilous....though perhaps
many people who couldn’t make car payments will become customers?

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sudoaza
Market was already on the brink, COVID is going to be the excuse for many
companies that are over the head with debt/investors money and still are
running losses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chirau
Wasn't this company already facing of running out of cash and other financial
issues before COVID? I feel that, like many other companies, Bird is gonna use
this pandemic as an excuse, when they had other big problems to deal with
already

~~~
Rebelgecko
Isn't that business as usual for Unicorns? Lyft and Uber are the same way

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dillondoyle
I wondered if the scooter only companies would be better off than ride sharing
companies with small scooter revenue.

Anec-data: one of my relatives brokered a post lockdown lease in a large
_redacted_ city for one of the two large ride sharing companies. It was for
scooter storage.

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nostromo
There are many major American companies that will be bankrupt in a few months
if quarantine continues.

No business projects revenue dropping by almost 100% overnight.

~~~
sergiotapia
So if people are broke, landlords are broke, stores are broke, companies are
broke -- just who exactly has the keys to the kingdom here? Who isn't broke?
Just banks?

~~~
hpliferaft
Any company that sells to people inside their homes is doing great. Games and
content providers, video conferencing software, restaurants that do food
delivery, Amazon.

~~~
TaylorGood
Restaurants still have the hurdle of fear - is everybody in the kitchen
wearing gloves, are they all non-COVID, etc.. There are enough touchpoints in
the process to get take out delivered I'm avoidng it.

~~~
markkanof
And that is certainly your prerogative to do. My family is getting takeout a
few times a week to support our favorite local restaurants. Just providing a
counter point that there is still money going into some restaurants (although
I'm sure it is less than typical).

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ramphastidae
Bird as a company needs to fail as soon as possible. Their scooters have
totally overrun my community — they are strewn like trash on every corner.

I sympathize and wish all the best to its employees, however.

~~~
mr_toad
Unlike cars. You never see cars parked all over the place.

~~~
seanhunter
Parked being the operative word. You don't see abandoned cars littering the
pavement/sidewalks, left lying around in parks etc. (at least not in most
neighbourhoods).

I'm no fan of cars but the idea that a company can just dump junk like this
all over public spaces as an intrinsic part of its business model is bizarre
to me.

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elwell
Something similar happened this time of last year:
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/bird-lays-off-up-
to-5-of-w...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/bird-lays-off-up-to-5-of-
workforce/)

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dalacv
ah, i’m reminded of an old comedy classic
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bVBYaTwMtmY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bVBYaTwMtmY)

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whateveracct
Those at the top refuse to stare the consequences of their actions in the eye.
A tale as old as time.

If you take on a leadership position, don't be a coward like this. Even if the
layoff is due to things beyond your control.

~~~
nerfhammer
there isn't really a good way to lay off remote workers

~~~
wpietri
There's no good way to lay anybody off. But there are worse and better ways. A
one-on-one video call is much more respectful and humane than playing a
recording.

~~~
benatkin
This guarantees that a large percentage of people are going to learn about it
through other employees rather than from their managers though.

~~~
tomjakubowski
This is equally true for in-person layoffs done as individual meetings, which
happen all the time.

~~~
benatkin
True, but they can try to make both the recently laid off and soon-to-be-laid-
off employees be too busy to communicate, or they can round up the ones who
will be staying so at least they don't pass around the news to those who
aren't going to be laid off before they know they're not on the chopping
block.

~~~
hilbertseries
In a remote layoff situation? The whole company would know the moment one
person was laid off.

~~~
benatkin
No, in an in-person layoff situation. I was addressing the comment I replied
to where it said "This is equally true for in-person layoffs".

I've been in an office during an in-person layoff situation (surprisingly only
once during my 15+ year career), and they were definitely taking advantage of
it being done in person.

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DeonPenny
But they pulled all the birds off the street. Why wouldn't you at least put
them back everyone around riding lyft bikes. Does this have anything to do
with the virus.

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Nextgrid
One good result of the Coronavirus pandemic is its cleansing effect on
unprofitable and unsustainable garbage like this company.

~~~
austincheney
The same could be said of poor software practices. With so many developers out
of work why would any company hire a developer that needs a 3mb JavaScript
framework and 1000 NPM packages to write 3 lines of code? The argument against
reinventing wheels just because talent is rare just evaporated.

~~~
ironmagma
This trope is so tired, and the reason for using the NPM/Node ecosystem has
never been about talent being rare. Choosing JS at all is because you value
developer time over time chasing down suitable third party dependencies,
handling build incompatibilities, and generally dealing with the mess that is
multi-platform development.

~~~
austincheney
As somebody who has been writing in these technologies for 20 years I
disagree. The entire purpose of jQuery, for example, was exactly because
talent was rare. Keep in mind jQuery was around for years before it was
popular. It was its Sizzle engine masking the standard DOM methods that made
it popular.

When talent is rare you can artificially widen the availability of talent by
lowering the barrier of entry. Lower qualified job candidates are dependent on
the crutches that allowed them entry, though, which comes at a cost of lost
innovation potential and productivity overhead. The cliche _don 't reinvent
the wheel_ is completely about developers distancing themselves from
innovation. When talent is suddenly and explosively available to the job
market there isn't a valid business reason to do that especially as companies
have smaller budgets for hiring fewer developers and more developers are
competing for fewer available positions.

~~~
ironmagma
You're implicitly equating making development easier with lowering the barrier
to entry. If you make that assumption, then you could say that Boost does the
same thing. To avoid this, you would have to never make anything easier to
use, which is the whole point of tool development to begin with.

> there isn't a valid business reason to do that

This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is
usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer, not the junior developer.
Carrying it out to extremes (leftpad) being another beast, usually junior
developers will be the ones wanting to build something that already exists,
generally for the purpose of testing their ability.

But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have
the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if possible,
and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is typically the
road to knowledge siloing.

~~~
austincheney
The term _easier_ is highly subjective so I did not use that word on purpose
for that reason, but otherwise the connection I drew between lowering the
entry barrier and a superficial abstraction layer was pretty explicit.

I am not a C++ developer and I have no experience writing in that language. I
know that Boost is a template system for C++. I know this because for a long
time I maintained a multi-language parsing utility and was considering
extending support to C++. I never extended that support to C++ in my utility
but C++ developers who introduced me to Boost were absolutely confident that
parsing Boost logic from a C++ code sample would be next to impossible. Its
trivial. If you have experience with embedded languages that sort of multi-
dimensional parsing is not as hard as it sounds. A more elegant example is JSX
which is a pseudo-XML construct embedded in JavaScript that can recursively
contain JavaScript in various ways which then can contain more pseudo-XML
islands and so forth. There was also a jQuery template scheme that introduced
psuedo-HTML into script tags of actual HTML.

Typically the goal is to make systems that are more simple opposed to more
easy. Easy is a disorganized pile of spaghetti code because it took less
effort to write with no prior planning. Cleaner and more organized code takes
greater effort with fewer interesting parts. Easier is generally preferrable
to entry level employees who don't yet have the experience to differentiate
easy from simple.

> This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is
> usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer

I absolutely disagree. This is what I call an experienced beginner. That is
somebody who has been doing the job for a couple of years and has gained
confidence with certain techniques and conventions, but has never grown to a
level of sophistication or problem solving that most businesses would consider
valuable enough for senior level responsibilities. This is the kind of thing
that most people would refer to as _Dunning-Kruger_ , because the expertise is
limited to something designed for engaging beginners and that expertise is
confused with excellence.

> But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have
> the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if
> possible, and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is
> typically the road to knowledge siloing.

There are all kinds of justifications for avoiding writing original logic and
most of them are pretty weak. If it cannot be expressed in terms of project
risk or financial harm the justification is generally a form of _bike
shedding_. That means the developer is framing the conversation in a way their
limits their uncertainty exposure without consideration for the product.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

~~~
ironmagma
I have not much more to add, but FWIW the people espousing the "boring is
better" and "don't reinvent the wheel" mantras were experienced SV devs, 15
and 30 years experience. They said there is a business justification and it's
one of risk, namely that the more home-grown or nonstandard solutions you
have, the less likely other people on the team will know what's going on when
one of them breaks. There's also the maturity value of an existing codebase in
that it has been proven to do the thing it sets out to, whereas a new endeavor
may encounter roadblocks that require a rewrite partway through, and also lack
documentation and good error messages, don't have the same years of bugfixes,
etc.

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hc91
Wow this is bad at a totally different level - it is a new league og messed
up. These companies - and more importantly the human garbage at the upper /
top level of management of these companies - need to be remembered and when
the global situation will return to normal they will need to be given the
treatment that they deserve. BEING FIRED VIA A PRE-RECORDED MERSSAGE DURING
THE WORST GLOBAL CRISIS SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR! - talk about being kicked
when you are down, huh?

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aloukissas
Nobody's surprised

