Waymo Layoffs (opens in new tab)

> 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.

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.

You don’t get to pick who leaves too, I gotta think the proactive self starter types are more likely to leave.

Folks resigned to whatever / want to be laid off stay.

Heck I was the latter once, stayed for a while waiting for my payout.

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.

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Tldr: once you've had two layoffs back to back, the risk isn't low morale, it's animosity.

Tbf I still don’t see any improvements to twitter. The messaging experience is still absolute horsesh

Sounds like an urban legend. Doesn’t make any sense.

> 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.

>Which is to say, assuming you are not actively looking for the exit door, why even bother to do your job?

There's certainly no incentive to "go the extra mile" and be a high performer.

Astoundingly high or astoundingly low?

They unleash a lot of undesirable and uncontrollable behaviors in the organization. It’s incompetence and hubris to think otherwise.

Motivators to start updating your resume, maybe.

For internal politicking and risk aversion sure

This simplistic, wrong (and juvenile) reasoning is the caricature of the tech bubble bursting again.

> you all

Who all? This isn’t exactly a short-selling subreddit.

Usually I instinctively want to upvote anything that's gotten such a beatdown.

In this case, though, it's deserved. Nobody can "drive the price down." That's a futile pursuit, and would be illegal if it worked.

Unless you are the CEO it's hard to personally drive down a stock.

Apes together strong!

> and there's something nice about not having to interact with a real person

This is the end-goal, I guess? Not just avoiding a taxi/Uber driver, but avoiding as much human interaction as possible.

Is it surprising that technology is (collectively) being evolved to isolate humans from each other?

AFAICT, we can't have our cake and eat it too -- a completely frictionless life is a zero human-interaction life, which would be very sad.

Edit: I fall into this trap too, but I'm aware that every time I choose convenience over friction, I'm losing a tiny bit of my Human-ness.

> 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

>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.

If they could 100x the number of cars and trips in SF then the cost of maps per ride would be significantly lower.

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.

> southwestern and southern US (SF, ...)

I never considered SF as southwestern, but Wikipedia says you're correct

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.

What's Curb relative to Uber/Lyft or legacy taxis?

interesting framing for evaluating claims of free will

VR/AR has been a disaster for every single company that’s gone anywhere near it. A bit too soon to claim that Apple cracked it.

That's talking about rounds earlier in the year. TFA mentions the numbers for this one are unclear.

Of course, but the question was getting at how long before the fed blinks.

My understanding is that lower rates are good for economic growth, except when they cause inflation. Is that wrong?

They over hired during the pandemic.

> It's worth a shot, though.

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.

Mandatory speed governors would help.

Except it does not.