A friend of mine convinced me this was the FB strategy to get people to resign instead of needing to fire them (a costly, legal.minefield).
As a founder, the act of paralizying the company to effectively "bleed the fat off the bone" while cost effective, is insane. Because nothing gets done during those low morale months. I refused to believe this could be a valid strategy.
Then I was countered with: this org is already not shipping features or anything customers want anyway, so its not like it has any productivity to lose. Then proceeded to name Twitter as exhibit A of the argument.
> A friend of mine convinced me this was the FB strategy to get people to resign instead of needing to fire them (a costly, legal.minefield).
It's a major pet peeve of mine when people's conspiracy theories don't even make sense even if you accept the theory at face value:
1. If you want to fire people for performance or other reasons, it's true that a great time to do it is during layoffs - there doesn't need to be any rationale given, and there is nothing to sue over when a hundred other people are also being let go for non-performance reasons. So if you're already having layoffs, why again are you hoping for some people to resign??
2. Why on Earth does your friend think having multiple rounds of layoffs will convince poor performers to resign? That doesn't make any sense. If anything, it's usually the crappiest people who are OK stocking around when a company becomes paralyzed during layoffs season - it's top performers who see the writing on the wall and go elsewhere.
>2. Why on Earth does your friend think having multiple rounds of layoffs will convince poor performers to resign?
for the sake of playing devil's advocate, i'd like to remind that poor performers may not see that same image when they look in the mirror.
it's likely that they too will experience the same dread and despair as anyone else might when they are confronted by the very real future prospect of unemployment.
You're absolutely right, but it's also likely that they will have a harder time finding new jobs. I know there are exceptions, but generally you'd expect the high performers to have the most options.
> If anything, it's usually the crappiest people who are OK stocking around when a company becomes paralyzed...
Don't assume that.
Not everyone can just hop into a new job. Some top performers, who are deep into their career, need to invest a lot of time in their job searches.
If finding a new job takes someone 160+ hours, it's impractical to do that while doing honest work for their employer. People have families and other things to do outside of work.
That's why negotiating a severance package is a thing.
User serf already covered, but I'll go into detail.
1 - because even during a mass layoff, theres always a threat of a lawsuit. Sure, it may not go anywhere, but as already mentioned, defending is costly. An employee that decides to leave on their own volition is no risk. Plus, laying off people has in some states some remuneration and compliance requisites. Unemployment hearings that tie up senior staff and can be a time drain. Then theres fringe benefits. And of course, there's morale, reputation, and other intangible costs like IP loss and making an unwanted enemy or even encouraging a scrappy conpetitor. Its infinitely cheaper and desirable to get someone to leave vs termination.
2 - Please see serf's post. In addition - High performers can also be those that actively prevent product from actually shipping, ensnaring the org in turf wars, and similar (typical) large org roadblocks.
To be clear, my worldview was that this premise was insane. I still think it is strange -based own personal experience- but im far less certain of its invalidity, and I am forced to acknowledge that the CEO has better information than I have. Perhaps I need to reconsider my position.
But your number 1 still makes absolutely 0 sense with this particular conspiracy theory, which premises that the goal is to get people to resign by having multiple rounds of layoffs.
That is, the conspiracy theory presupposes that the company is already going to have lots of layoffs. So you're saying it's arguing that companies want to avoid the negative consequences of layoffs - by having a lot of layoffs???
I may not be expressing myself well. Sorry. I'll try again.
If the layoff announcement is t0, and every layoff round is t1, t2 ...t(n), the company is banking on:
-employees do not know n
-employees only have standing to sue (AND benefits) at T(n+1)
-employee anxiety level will not tolerate waiting to T(n)
- notice that even if n = 1, it still has the same effect as n=5 since (n) is unknown to employee.
Therefore, Opco announces layoffs, but to lower the t0 cost of terminations, it moves terminations to (n). Note t0 is most expensive scenario for the employer. This is the hard thing to accept because its counterintuitive, and does not generalize (I.e. cutting the cord now,and moving on).
Folks that believe in the insane complexity of this have never been in management in my opinion. People really just don't put that much devious thought into that kind of plan.
Besides, it still doesn't make any sense. Having been at a company previously that had many layoffs over a series of years, a very common opinion was that it would be crazy to quit, and get no severance. Better to just hope you'd get laid off with a fat severance package, especially since most of the packages at the big tech companies over the past year and a half have been extremely generous.
The personal traits required to find a job are different from that to perform well at a particular company & role. That's the sad truth. So, people voluntarily leaving won't be correlated with performance low or high. Also, people who were selected for layoff by management will also not be correlated to low performance well. In fact, in most layoffs, they are planned in closed rooms with only VP+ people who have little context of who does what work well or not, and with flawed performance calibration data. So, you will always be shocked to find that the people /you/ thought were high-performers were let go.
> If anything, it's usually the crappiest people who are OK stocking around when a company becomes paralyzed during layoffs season - it's top performers who see the writing on the wall and go elsewhere.
I'd like to amend that - it's not the lowest performers who stick around and the top performers who leave.
It's more, the poor-at-interviewing people who stick around and the good-at-interviewing people who leave.
I've worked with a shmuck who took two years to deliver a basic CRUD system that fell over at 10 req/sec [1], and then got hired at a another place as an architect (or team lead - I forget which).
[1] I did a similar one in about 3 months, and it handled more than 4 req/sec, without weird crashes.
From my past experience, when an org could not build what people wanted, there were usually (i.e. almost always) specific reasons why. The things I’ve seen have included: inability of product to capitalize on ideas that did not come from them, directors who blocked/stifled work at odds with their interests (i.e. empire building), culture that was good at one thing (and not the other things they needed to succeed), absolutely psycho top management resulting in fear throughout the org, engineers who cared more about technical thing X than shipping product, management that did not grasp the technical aspects enough to manage the engineering effort, management that is simply spiteful and shoots itself in the foot, toxic culture that spends more time on intra-company competition than actual work.
Funny thing is, I think I can pin the problem on the rank-and-file at just one company. The reality is that most of the front-line just do whatever they’re told. When you have e.g. toxic culture, that comes from top down, or is at least given a free pass by the folks at the top.
There will be rare exceptions here and there. I’ve seen a company that made something that people wanted, but they simply did not have the marketing, money, and focus to acquire enough users to break even, and lost to a competitor that had an inferior product but went gonzo on their marketing. But maybe you could say that that was a fault of marketing, product, and senior leadership, not the org making the product.
So anyway, my retort is that if you do not know what exactly is broken in your org, then you have bleeped up royally. There is practically always a very specific reason, and you don’t address a specific problem with a blind sledgehammer.
It's a dumb strategy because the talent that can get a job anywhere will be the first to jump ship, and they're the ones you want to retain.
Meanwhile the talent that can't get a job elsewhere easily will be hanging on for a payout.
You basically alienate your teams, throw timelines off anyway and frankly it's a dick move.
I think if this is the case, it's because it's mismanaged to the point that no one knows who should go, so you put the feelers out as opposed to restructure solidly going forward.
Also if you just fire someone, you get to pick who you fire. If people leave because of low morale, you don't get to pick who leaves. It will probably be those most desirable to the outside market, though, which is exactly the opposite effect you want on your company.
It does hurt to let people go, and I understand why people don't want to put themselves in that position. But to some extent, that's why you get paid the big bucks. If it was all sunshine and rainbows, you'd just do it for free! (I finally canceled my cable last week after 5 months of procrastinating. So don't put me in charge of your Fortune 500. But there's someone that can get the job done, probably. ;)
I am also unsure that laying people off during a high interest rate period makes a lot of sense. The article smugly points out that "other bets" made 200 million while losing 800 million. If you only care that every venture makes money, then you probably won't ever hit the next big thing. Look at ChatGPT vs. Bard, for example, and remind me which company pioneered consumer AI products. Stop investing, and it's all gone in a flash.
Staff that failed to make random idea #32 work might very well make random idea #33 work. If you take a failed project and wait to start assembling a brand new team after you think of random idea #33, you're already years behind. What if your competitor just kept the team and moved right on to random idea #33? You're done! Scary! (But at some point, money doesn't matter, and I think most of the founders / execs at these big companies are more than finished. If they go out with a whimper instead of a bang, it doesn't really change their life. So, sell that stock today I guess!)
This doesn't make sense to me. It's "bleed the bone off the fat", on top of the morale issues you mentioned, and if they have no interest in the goal and they're just losing money why keep on funding it at all? Just sell it.
I mean, I imagine the risks from insider threats (selling or dumping secrets etc) would be heightened in this environment. Especially if two layoffs already happened.
They'd need to have a bulletproof insider threat program, one they're not laying anyone off from to mitigate the risk of their own team becoming a threat.
---
Tldr: once you've had two layoffs back to back, the risk isn't low morale, it's animosity.
Given the long term lack of success of the firm and the rapid incremental success of other tech lineages, what secrets would be worth dumping? Here’s not how do it?
That could actually be valuable information. If the competitor can avoid the costs involved with wasting development time on something that's already known by someone else to not work, that's money that can be spent on a different direction.
My CEO just announced this strategy. Layoffs are to begin...soonish? Maybe next week? Up to the end of 2024. Need to chop $$$X from the budget.
Which is to say, assuming you are not actively looking for the exit door, why even bother to do your job? At-will employment and all that, but it is an entirely different thing if the company has announced they have a fixed dollar expense target to hit.
Layoffs have always had a random component to them (I know brilliant people shown the door, yet worthless mouth-breathers who can dodge any bullet). Now we are told to potentially hang on for a year, knowing the axes could strike at anytime to make sure management hits their blood quota?
Needless to say, I expect productivity to be astounding for the foreseeable future.
> Which is to say, assuming you are not actively looking for the exit door, why even bother to do your job
There’s one reason - from experience, it’s a lot easier to find a job if you are currently employed. So if you think you will likely be a target in round 2 or 3, the rational thing to do is to try to stay employed as long as possible and switch jobs quickly. Also, the severance tends to get worse with each round. I saw one job where round one got 3 months severance plus a week per year, with insurance, round 2 got a month, and round 3 got 2 weeks. I found new employment between rounds 2 and 3.
It seems like there are quite a few people here who have never experienced a tight labor market.
Really? Seems like the people most likely to get cut in round 1 are those who are identified as coasters. If you can avoid that label, your odds of sticking around until round 2, 3, or beyond are much better.
Sorry, implied inflection on the internet. I expect productivity will be astoundingly low.
The entire company has been told they could lose their job anytime in the next 14 months. People with options will start looking to leave, those without alternatives will live in fear.
But if you're in the MANGAsphere, and they're all doing layoffs, the fear is a big motivator because it's not trivial for you to just pick up another job that pays as well.
Every time you all drive prices of stocks down, layoffs happen. Think twice before you drive the prices of a stock down again, you're part of the cause. Consider selling at a higher price than you bought the stock for.
If you drive stock prices down three times a year, layoffs will happen three times a year.
If you drive stock prices up, they'll go on a hiring spree. It's that simple.
It's a shame that companies that are actually creating great tech and solving difficult problems are shrinking while some vaporware nonsense raises a billion:
Is there a conclusion that the taxi service kind of works and just needs to fix a few minor issues around the edges fixed to work in limited city use in many cities, or is it so far away it's not even close?
I was down in San Francisco a month ago and my friend has access so we took Waymo's everywhere. We took about 10 over the weekend and never had any issue, even when other cars were doing weird things. From my limited experience I felt like they're pretty solid in the city.
The only hiccup I can remember was being in an intersection (past the crosswalk) to make an unprotected left and while we were waiting the light turned yellow. A human driver would likely wait for the light to go red and then make the turn, but the Waymo gave up almost immediately and instead decided to circle the block to make the left (three rights). A little odd, but I never felt unsafe.
If we had Waymo where I live I'd take it everywhere. It's slightly cheaper than an Uber, a nicer car, a better driver than some Uber's I've been in, and there's something nice about not having to interact with a real person.
I don't mind interacting with people, but the vast majority of my interactions with ride share drivers are not meaningful interactions. I get in the car, say "hi" and then pull out my phone. A large portion of the time my drivers are on the phone or have airpods in.
I would gladly trade the 1% of rides where I had a decent conversation with the driver to remove the 99% where I we both try to make forced small talk or we both awkwardly sit in silence. Plus, not having to worry about me and my friends annoying our driver when we're drunkly coming back from the bars at 2am is such a win.
> A human driver would likely wait for the light to go red and then make the turn, but the Waymo gave up almost immediately and instead decided to circle the block to make the left (three rights)
I totaled two cars when I was newer to driving because I did exactly that (waited for the light to turn red and then went), only to collide with people running the red.
Insurance faults the person who was making the left, so I can understand why the Waymo would want to be more cautious
It definitely works. I was in one just yesterday for over a half hour and it’s a pretty smooth thing, and in some ways better than a human driver (e.g., always yields to pedestrians entering a crosswalk, never exceeds speed limit,etc.)
But both Waymo and Cruise lose money on every ride. All the sensors and on-board compute are expensive, and also the R&D, and the 3D maps. Both services rely on detailed 3D maps of the areas they service, and are geofenced to that.
So right now, it does not scale yet until they can bring down the costs, and/or reduce reliance on those maps, which take a long time to make.
>All the sensors and on-board compute are expensive, and also the R&D, and the 3D maps. Both services rely on detailed 3D maps of the areas they service, and are geofenced to that.
I think we need to split this into fixed vs variable costs. It's hard for me to believe that the sensors+compute is more expensive than a human. Those sound like the variable costs. I'd be surprised if selling an additional ride causes e.g. Cruise to lose a bit of money, but I'd love to be corrected.
I have been told it loses money by Google employees. Not just sensors+compute. R&D and the map-making are substantial costs. Waymo is reported in “Other Bets” which had $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022 and $6.1 billion in operating losses.
But that's largely a sunk cost that (in SF anyway) has already been spent, right? It's not like that cost goes up on a per-ride basis.
For places where that's already done, you only need to account for the cost of sensors/compute/maintenance of the vehicle themselves, which seem (intuitively) like they would be lower than the expense to users. Which would mean that a ride is net positive.
Maybe it's the case that configuring and maintaining the cars is incredibly expensive. That would be the only way I could envision actually losing money on a "per ride" basis.
> But that's largely a sunk cost that (in SF anyway) has already been spent, right?
For mapping, no.
Waymo maps the city constantly with every car, and they have a mapping team that reviews those changes before they go to the other cars. So ongoing cost of the human side is a thing (for now?).
They also have a team of "remote operators" that watch the fleet in real time in case they have a panic attack over something, so more ongoing cost that's not just sensors/cars.
There are substantial non-cash costs that go into cost-of-revenue. These come from amortizing assets like patents and the maps, and depreciation on all the equipment, including whatever backend servers there are. Share-based compensation is typically also a big one. They are "sunk costs" as far as pure cash accounting goes, but that’s not how GAAP accounting works.
Translation: "limited city use in [selected] cities" seems to mean:
- no driving on freeway with passengers (that alone is a huge limitation. You couldn't get to most major airports (in any sensible time) under that limitation. Add in trucks, rush-hour, ripple congestion, lane-splitting motorcyclists.) But presumably also, Waymo and Cruise don't want to pick an all-out war with human drivers working for Uber. Not yet.
- if a driverless car gets confused or can't handle a situation on a city street, it can slow and stop completely and block traffic (and wait for emergency responders to intervene, or wait minutes/hours for remote human driver to override), which is "merely" an annoyance to locals. Whereas doing that on a freeway could injure or kill large numbers of people.
- "selected cities" seems to currently only be southwestern and southern US (SF, PHX, LA, AUS), warm and mostly clear skies, nothing regularly getting near a bad freeze or with bad rain/ snow/ slush/ storms/ gusts/ visibility/ unpredictable ice and skidding [0].
- only cities with well-maintained signage, roads, road markings which can be imaged reliably etc. This is an implicit limit on the locality's income and tax base.
- the recent Cruise secondary incident (near-fatality from a hit-and-run caused by a human-driven car) in SF and other incidents with pedestrians, cyclists and human drivers. "Just fix a few minor issues around the edges" will have a different meaning if you're a pedestrian, cyclist or transit user near a high-traffic street. This could easily become a political issue in some localities. Or maybe driverless will only be allowed in bus lanes or certain lanes of certain streets, or at certain times of day, or not near school pickup/dropoff, or through residential areas (like in 2011 when there were deaths of pedestrians in East Palo Alto residential areas due to drivers rat-running, exacerbated by the rush-hour to Facebook and on 101[1]).
And with all these restrictions on something as simple as intra-city transport, keep in mind the massive investment in autonomous vehicles 5-10 years ago was toward the ultimate goal of replacing humans in long-haul trucking and related logistics. Even if Waymo could place fully autonomous taxis into every city in America, that consolation prize wouldn't nearly make up for the shortfall of not taking over the logistics industry as was hoped.
City-bound autonomous vehicles are still far away for the reasons you point out, but autonomous long-haul trucking is back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point.
I haven't been following autonomous long-haul trucking, why is it "back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point"? Again, is that primarily a technology vs safety story, or is it a political issue due to organized pushback from sections that oppose it?
(also does anyone have current data on the viable market size of driverless rideshare vs driverless delivery vs drone delivery vs helicopter taxis vs autonomous long-haul trucking)?
> "Even if Waymo could place fully autonomous taxis into every city in America, that consolation prize wouldn't nearly make up for the shortfall of not taking over the logistics industry as was hoped."
I want to decouple discussion to what's actually technically and politically achievable (within say 5 yrs), versus whatever story Waymo was telling its shareholders 5-10 yrs ago.
> I haven't been following autonomous long-haul trucking, why is it "back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point"? Again, is that primarily a technology vs safety story, or is it a political issue due to organized pushback from sections that oppose it?
I think it's a mix.
Waymo cancelled their self driving truck division recently to focus on ride share[0].
They're most likely feeling push back from someone over self driving trucks, but I wonder if the bigger thing is liability and dangers around the weight it would be hauling. They already have had one of their trucks be ran off the road by another semi already and haven't released ANY statements about it.[1]
> goal of replacing humans in long-haul trucking and related logistics
I am wondering if it is reasonable goal, what share driver's payroll takes from total logistics expenses(vehicle + maintenance cost, gasoline, last mile logistics: loading/unloading truck and storage, delivering package to final recipient).
Why is long-haul a pipe dream now. It seems to me that long-haul is a simpler problem than city driving. Did some insurmountable problem pop up that I haven't heard about?
I was at first too. I'd like to update it to reflect the actual region, rather than merely highlighting all the states that contain parts of the region, but sadly don't have any kind of mapping tools to do so...
Impression I get is that the fundamentals work okay -- which is a huge accomplishment in and of itself -- but there are still enough edge cases that scaling up is hard, and opening up a new city takes substantial effort.
Videos that show up on the r/self drivingcars subredddit show increasing fluency/confidence in driving from Waymo. But there's always going to be socially weird situations in cities where the answer is to benignly break the law, and it's not clear how well SDC's will ever do with those.
I’ve taken 60+ Waymo trips in SF and much prefer them over Uber. There are rough edges but I love playing music I like, the smooth and consistent driving, the same model car each time. I’m an early adopter kind of person and can live with the occasional “why pick me up over there?” Like stuff.
I’m not affiliated with Waymo. Just someone who got early access by joining the waitlist.
Seems to be the legacy taxi industry fighting back with somewhat ride-share-like pricing ("avoid surge pricing"), "professional drivers, more thorough background checks and vehicle inspections", "price shown in app will still be an estimate, not upfront pricing". Currently in NYC, CHI, DC, PHL, MIA, FLL, LA.
To anyone following this space, this was inevitable. Also, What is going on at google these days, I don't see them having a competitive advantage in any industry after this decade..
In some sense, everything that has happened was inevitable. We colloquially speak of the “possible but didn’t happen” as if it’s very different from and the “impossible” but in fact those things which didn’t happen were impossible in retrospect. Maybe there is only the “actual”.
* They dropped the ball with VR/AR - mark my words, apple's vision pro is going to be incredibly successful. Apple doesn't miss, they manage to fully execute on ideas like the ipod, iphone, etc. that other companies know people want but can't fully deliver.
* Now they're going to drop the ball on potentially dominating the transportation market.
Just goes to show that even Google over-leveraged on hiring and is shutting down products left, right and center. The AI race to zero is not helping them at all as well as the anti-trust trial of the decade.
They will survive, but broken up.
So more layoffs to come, unfortunately from the correction of the zero interest rate phenomenon with decades long QE all coming to an end.
> Waymo employed around 2,500 employees at the start of the year, according to reports. More than 200 were axed in the two layoff rounds earlier this year, but the number of remaining Waymo staffers following this cut is unclear.
Layoffs are not an unintended side effect or overshoot, they are part of the goal: slow down the economy. Inflation has been ticking back up for the last few months, so don't expect a cut anytime soon.
If the problem was just that, the CEOs would be super happy. The bigger problem is that most big techs can't hold their absurdly huge revenue (with their crap services), much less grow it. At first they can cut costs to keep the profit high but then they are losing morale, revenue gets impacted more, brand gets affected. It is a downward spiral. It will only get worse when the fines start to come from every country they have operations.
There is no clear path for growth. We have already written software for about every common need. The industry is finally somewhat mature, and it is hard to see how it is sustainable at this scale.
> Then why do we need this kind of company? I don’t know.
Why bother doing anything at all with this attitude?
Let's freeze in place and wait until the sun dies out. I don't know.
To me, Waymo is exciting because it could unlock a next step function of capabilities, patterns, and economics. Everything we take for granted in transportation -- highways, traffic signals, parking, traffic itself -- we could potentially get to reevaluate a lot of previously-held assumptions. The second- and third-order effects could be wild.
Maybe it'll all go bust. It's worth a shot, though. The rewards, if they succeed, will be tremendous.
waymo is 14 years old, maybe it is enough for a shot and time to move on something more proven? Like poor billions into smarter public transportation for example.
At some point in history there were 100 single-celled organisms (or protocellular organisms?) presumably around some hydrothermal vent. Not a lot of promise there, either.
I get the self-driving car skepticism. I'm a skeptic. But the expected value is insanely positive and warrants our attention.
what is the point of this comment? if i need to get to an appointment im not going to go take the bart, risking missing the interval or delays + walk a mile to get to my destination
theres obvious value in last mile transportation that trains will never provide. please go outside
I come from a place that has in the last 13 years more than 500K people died, in almost 28% of the cases it happened roads/highways due to illegal overtaking and over-speeding.
I would like to have in my lifetime a car that had some sort of technology that could prevent some of those accidents, and autonomous cars could help on it.
Waymo is scaling back its self-driving truck ambitions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36886514 (July 26, 2023 — 3 points, 1 comments)
Alphabet’s Waymo cuts more than 100 jobs in second round of layoffs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988618 (March 1, 2023 — 37 points, 7 comments)