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Comment by fdgsdfogijq | Hacker News Reader

Stock based compensation is a huge drag on their expenses, to the degree that it has hurt their future. "Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers", whats the bench mark for this? Good looking syntax in a clean code base isnt a top engineer. Delivering business value through technology is

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Seems like that lends more credence to the idea that product strategy was the problem then no? How does a company decide to hire angineers and the products they'll be working on? It's true that engineering roles across the industry were overpaid in a way we're probably never going to see again, but isolated, that was just a symptom of the general amount of money sloshing around the tech ecosystem and doesn't really have anything to do with the reasons Lyft may or may not fail. The business model as it exists (at current pricing levels) is unsustainable. Even Uber is only achieving profitability because of its investments.

Don't think that's the main reason the stock is down. Uber is barely down this past year but Lyft's stock has tanked like 70%.

Lyft screwed up by not getting into delivery and people normalized using Uber for rideshare plus delivery and stopped finding a reason to use Lyft.

Its disingenuous to claim that these engineers werent delivering business value. James Gosling worked on Java at Sun and Sun failed, would you say that Gosling isnt a good engineer ?

Engineering can only work in the bounds of the problems set to it. If the leadership doesnt want to diversify streams , get into delivery for example there is nothing engineering can do there. In the end you need both good business acumen to succeed and engineering is just a multiplier and facilitator there.

Engineers can be passive recipients of assignments from business leaders. Or they can find ways to influence without authority and drive the initiatives that they know are needed. Everyone has that opportunity to some extent, but in some companies it's not worth the effort to break through all the obstacles.

Isn’t using James Gosling example as a question a fallacy in argument (i.e., loaded question)?

Also, some folks may dislike Java and this example may also convey why Sun failed in their minds.

> Isn’t using James Gosling example as a question a fallacy in argument (i.e., loaded question)?

No, it's a clear way to refute the absurd argument that a company struggling or even failing automatically means all their engineers are incompetent morons.

It's pathetic how there are people in this thread throwing blanket accusations of incompetence at engineers being laid off, primarily because they were far better paid and had far better jobs than them. It reeks of envy, and complete lack of empathy.

Every company claims they have the best and the smartest engineers. Have you seen any company claiming otherwise?

I talk about this when I do hiring. Our process isn't designed to find the best person for the job. We want to hire the first person who passes our bar for hiring. We just don't have the need or budget for the best and smartest people. But we often hire very excellent and very smart people!

It's kind of like the high jump. You get the same result whether you're an inch over the bar or a foot.

Sure, that's internal messaging. I am talking about what any company publicly claims.

No, I mean I tell people that straight up who I'm interviewing.

Company?

Just due to the law of large numbers, any company at or above the size of Lyft is going to have mostly very average engineers. There just aren't many "10×" engineers out there in the market regardless of how much you pay. The key to effective management is figuring out how to obtain extraordinary value from average people: this can be done but it's largely a matter of organizational culture.

Very average? How do you figure that? If you're paying top dollar, which Lyft did for most of its existence, you're going to picking from a pool of the top few percent. Even 1% of all software developers is many times more than Lyft's headcount.

I'm curious, who do you think is hiring the 10th percentile engineers? What are those people doing?

That's not how it works in the real world. There are a bunch of other companies also targeting the top few percent. Mathematically it isn't possible for them all to succeed in that goal regardless of their hiring process or compensation levels. If you actually talk to those engineers it's clear that beyond ability to solve "leetcode" type problems they are mostly pretty average.

Why not claim you have engineers that deliver the best value to shareholders? Employing the smartest people in the world to make an app to skim money off taxi going from point A to point B can't possibly be a judicious good value use of human resources, especially in the context of the extreme premium those at the absolute top demand.

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