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?
Well it's strong until it's not. Tons of businesses run on 1-month commercial paper and other stuff that they just plan to roll over and roll over until one day things change and they're completely fucked.
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.
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.
Probably not, at least not if the generalized version of Parkinson’s law holds.
The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).
The economy hasn't made sense at all over the past 10 years. Companies have been hiring people just for show. Startups are all about putting up smoke and mirrors to appeal to a bunch of dumb investors.
Snap never made a profit in almost a decade yet its market cap is $17 billion. Uber hasn't made a profit in over a decade, market cap is $50 billion.
If you want to understand why things are like this, just look at how the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is constantly injecting new fiat money into the economy and you will have all the answers.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme: invest in a startup first so that you find other investors for a subsequent round so that you can IPO and sell it all off to the next suckers who are hoping to do the same. Just don’t be the one left holding the bag.
And the worst part is that all these people who were hired were misused for bureaucratic purposes and so their practical skillsets have atrophied.
Then when the big burst arrives and these people are collectively fired, they will be totally unprepared and incapable to adapt their skills to the economic reality that they were shielded from by their previous employers.
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
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.
Especially because a lot of those major American companies have spent the past decade loading up on debt and buying back their shares at historically high prices.
Isn't a stock buyback exactly the same as paying a dividend, but taxed at a lower rate? I don't see why these companies are being demonized, the government should just let them go bankrupt and let the public buy their assets for pennies on the dollar.
They are being demonized because the government isn't letting them go bankrupt or letting the public buy up their assets. Instead the government is rewarding their greed and poor business practices by bailing them out and letting them keep all of the money they made.
Because some people may not realize/forget the source of these billions, these billions are either taxpayer money, OR these are new/fresh money (which means diluting the value of the currency for everyone).
Yes to all that. No tears, no bailout. Nationalize out of bankruptcy instead.
Do note that the buybacks last time were enabled by government loans. So that is a bit suspect on the governments part for not leveraging the power they did have.
But yes overall these silly critiques of strawmen I think just diffuse anger that should be directed at real things. No good.
That's not the way it works. For instance, over the last 10 years, Boeing spent 45 B$ in buyback out of its 60 B$ profit. Now that the situation looks grim, Boeing does not have enough cash to live through the crisis. But it won't go bankrupt, it will get 60 B$ of cash from today's federal government bill, and probably more later on.
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?
There is no world where an airline/hotel or any business could have possibly saved enough cash to fight a 90%+ drop in revenue for months and still remain competitive in the market.
Boeing’s crisis started long before CV19. The 737 Max debacle was already weighing heavily on their balance sheet.
The point is, it’s hard to predict the future. Who knows if the future will bring a fatal bug in your software, a pandemic, or both. But regardless, we all know tough times will always happen, and to therefore be prepared.
And my point is you can’t be prepared for months of no revenue. No consumer is going to pay the high prices needed for a business to insure itself for an extinction level event, because an alternative business won’t and will offer lower prices.
For example, a hotel owner can choose to squirrel away cash to protect the hotel and its employees for months of no income. A competing hotel will instead choose to renovate the hotel. Which hotel will customers choose to stay at?
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?
The job of management is to find a profitable way to deploy capital. If management are returning capital to shareholders, outside of expected dividends of course, it’s because they are bereft of ideas. What would I have done? Invested a large portion of that money in long term R&D and careful strategic acquisitions. It’s the same over at IBM. The current generation of managers have inherited cash flows set up by their predecessors but have no idea what to do with them.
Squandered means there was a better, evident option at the time. I have not yet been able to find a satisfactory answer to the question of what the companies should have done rather than buybacks, especially to mitigate the effects of a literal shutdown of basically entire lines of business resulting in no income.
The businesses in years past made money, invested some of it, spent some on R&D, and distributed some to shareholders (via buybacks). What other option was there?
The issue is not the stock buyback but the debt binge these companies have gone on to to buy back that stock. This has left them unprepared and exposed for any kind of a downturn. This exposure is being remedied compliments of the tax payer. "Privatize the profits but socialize the risk" seems to be their mantra. The buck only ever seems to stop at the CEO when the going is good. This is why they are being demonized.
Apart from irresponsible behavior of not reducing debt or not keeping enough money reserves, few other points to note:
- CEO and the executive board gets pay rise based on stock price increase which is a silly math because the total market cap does not increase..
- Share buyback gives a quick boost to share prices, and often, the executives have found to be selling shares immediately after share buyback. It's almost like they pre-plan the buyback and following stock sale. There are many studies showing this to be a more common practice.
Agreed. Or an additional option is to let businesses fail. The value of a viable business doesn't instantly go away just because they are insolvent. Let another better managed company buy up the failed company.
This is a difficult call to make. Of course, the government shouldn't be the automatic fall-back solution for incompetent/greedy management. On the other side, large companies failing do have a network effect, that is why the government does bailouts in the first place. There are arguments that the 2008 crisis could have been avoided, if the government had bailed out Lehman. Lehman failing caused the crisis and in the end many more companies needed and got a bail out and still a huge economic damage was done.
The only solution in my eyes for this dilemma is, that the government should do bail outs, but at the price of shares. For any money paid, which isn't just credits, the government should get company shares, which are sold off, as soon as the market stabilizes.
no. the government merely needs to look like it will be a tough debate next time that might not go through, by having a tough debate this time that spooks businesses
To be fair, for many businesses it's government mandates that has forced them to shut down. Yes business was down, but there was some business. With shelter in place there is no business. If the government mandates something that causes total loss of business, it's fair for them to be on the hook to help out with the problems caused by their mandate.
by your logic everyone should have been living pay check to paycheck when interest rates get low.
but that's not even the craziest thing in your comment. it's that you are probably a salaried worker making excuses for the boss. it's a crazy crazy world.
Somewhere out there must be a few firms with massive cash positions. Every time a company buys back stock, they're giving cash to the investor who sold the stock. Assuming the government doesn't inflate the currency to nothing, those firms are going to absolutely clean up now, with so much cash to deploy while everyone else is getting force-liquidated.
Sure but the fun part about these insanely well funded moonshot startups that lose money on every transaction is that all these shutdowns improve their gross margins and cashflow positions.
But many American companies wouldn't have an issue borrowing money (at a reasonable interest rate) to continue operations since they're presumably profitable or at least approach break even.
Has Bird ever been profitable? Even excluding the cost of buying the scooters (e.g. only considering op. ex.)?
Plenty of companies will have trouble borrowing money, it's a financial crisis. Money market rates and rates on corporate paper were through the roof triggering a liquidity crisis. Looks like the fed is really stepping in agressively, and hopefully they'll succeed, but we already saw credit markets almost lock up. Doesn't matter if you're profitable if nobody is willing to lend.
Lenders and credit investors are still very liquid at the moment; it's not a financial crisis and it's not at all the case that noone is willing to lend. But noone will lend to/invest in the credit of a non viable prospect and there will be more scrutiny about what's viable in current circumstances. The price of money has also gone up (despite central banks' best efforts) so there will be more discrimination between strong lending/investment propositions and weak ones, and the cost will be higher for everyone.
At the same time startups in Germany are heavily lobbying for additional provisions in the economic relief programs to cover startups as well.
Reading between the lines, "startups" (they are companies and thus eligible anyway based on standard conditions) refers to companies relying completely on external funding in the pursuit of positive cash flow and profitability further down the line. Looks a lot like a covered bailout for VCs and other investors. Because if a company was profitable before Corona, meaning banks would have provided credit already, the government is making it a lot easier and cheaper to get additional credit lines.
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?
All the essentials who don't get locked and people are stocking on: health, supermarkets and their providers. Also those who are online or can be easily adapted: streaming, communication, online markets, education, soft development.
Not all of any of these are broke. Many companies have plenty of demand. Many companies have much greater than usual demand, or are shifting production to meet changed demand (for example, it looks like GM is going to be manufacturing ventilators). Those companies and their employees aren't broke--far from it.
Not to minimize the impact on companies and people who are seeing drastically reduced demand, but it's a serious overstatement to say that all companies and people are.
Well, right now, we have a serious problem with cash flow—that is, there isn't much cash flowing through the economy, because people are staying in their homes.
So people who are still employed, but can't (or shouldn't) leave their homes still have some money, probably more than usual.
But the primary answer to that question is the same as it's been for the past couple decades: the people with the money are, well, the people hoarding all the money. The owners, the (big) employers, the people at the top.
As has been reported various places, just as an example, the airline industry spent the last decade spending something like 80-90% of every dollar they made buying back stock to enrich their executives. That's why they don't have anything saved for a crisis like this, and that's who has all the money now.
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.
Anecdote: just talked to my neighbor who owns a delivery takeout quick service restaurant and they estimate business is down 70%... maybe the bigger chains are ok but small business likely not
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.
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).
Companies with large capital reserves, e.g. Apple, Google, Berkshire Hathaway. With startup valuations low, those three could go on a discounted M&A spree.
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.
That's an important point. As much as I'd like my manager to look me in the eye as they tell me I'm laid off, I'd be super pissed if they flew me to San Francisco just to lay me off then left me stewing the whole flight home.
Slow and gradual onboarding with care and nurture to take them on.
Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
It's hard to do and doesn't positively impact bottom line initially but it avoids resentment in the vertical(market) which is super important for long term growth.
> Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
This doesn't work when you need to make large changes to an org.
I've seen first hand how different styles of this work.
When it's done 'carefully and individually', and keeps happening over days (because that's what it takes) - everyone else in the company starts wondering if they're impacted, and it becomes this slow-moving horror show. Another person gets tapped on the shoulder, called into a room and let go. Meanwhile the business expects things to continue as normal, but it doesn't and even normal meetings become a source of anxiety.
While it's never pleasant to be told you're being let go - at least if you can do it in larger groups and get it over and done with as soon as possible you reduce the level of anxiety and uncertainty.
Not to say that a pre-recorded video, voice mail or text message is the way to go, but still.
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.
Not necessarily. A humane call with, "Please don't discuss this until 4 pm, as I want to tell people personally" would go a long way. And if people do talk about it, you can still have the rest of the discussion, which is not just about revealing facts.
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.
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.
That's noble, but seven doesn't really scale to "hundreds" especially if you are wanting the news to break more or less uniformly across the group you are laying off.
If a company only has one manager for "hundreds" of employees, this has to be very low on the scale of the ways the company is doing badly for its workers.
Every manager called every single worker personally to relay the news, for a general well-being check in, and to answer any questions about UI benefit filing. Each manager has also personally checked in once a week to see how things are going, and to provide updates, and said they will continue to do so for the next 5 weeks they plan to be closed.
... and that's a non-union, publicly traded company.
The only way is face to face. If you can't do that then you are shit. Video? Really?
I've been an employer for 20 years. They come and go and quite right too. I encourage my troops that if they are looking elsewhere then we'll give them time off for interviews and assistance in how to interview effectively. I really am not joking. If you think you own someone completely then your name is Satan! I just want a decent day of work out of you, when you want to work for me. If you no longer want to work for me then I want to get rid of you as efficiently and as fairly as possible ...
Reminder: The world has a bad case of pandemic. The reason for layoffs is the extreme measures society has been taking to avoid unnecessary face-to-face interactions. One thing that would piss me off more than being fired is catching a disease from the person firing me.
I was really appreciative of the way the first company I worked for handled my departure. Things were changing at the company so I was looking to leave anyway but then they decided to change their structure and I was given a few options in person (lived ~2000 miles from main office) all of which were mutually beneficial from my point of view.
A) stay on and help integrate an external team for up to 16 weeks (reduced hours, freedom to interview and apply elsewhere) B) stay on and wrap up the current sprint and tidy up some documentation for up to 8 weeks C) finish out the week and receive 6 weeks separation pay. All options also allowed me to keep insurance until I found a new position as well as keep my company provided tech. It really made me appreciate the people at the company overall, minus the person who was making the changes (which has since been canned and some of the engineering efforts at the company have stalled which is sad)
How so? I worked at an all remote company. We were remote from the day of founding.
Everyone I hired I hired remotely, without ever meeting in person. In the two instances I had to let people go I did it remotely. The same way I hired them, the same way I’ve had people quit.
Could it be that nobody in their right mind would take a leadership position at this trainwreck of a company (when they can probably find a much better one), so the only ones left are the cowards?
Maybe. But there are way too many companies and leaders like this. They expect two week notice when an employee leaves, but have no problem firing people at 5 pm on Friday via email/text whatever.
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.
Not sure if it will really cleanse us of companies like this. We've been through terrible depressions before, and sociopath companies seem to always make a comeback.
Based on other countries, it looks like the real way to cleanse us of these companies would involve moving our country towards more progressive policies.
Investors have traditionally not taken this sort of thing into account, focusing only on the profits. Although, I have read articles saying new generations refuse to invest in certain sectors, such as the military industrial complex (companies like Lockheed Martin). So perhaps it'll change over time. See https://www.upworthy.com/millennials-are-making-money-by-inv... for an example of one of the articles.
Getting a lot of downvotes by people on my above comment, but oddly enough no one wants to engage and say why they disagree. I feel like this platform would work better if people could only upvote. It would force them to comment / explain their own position if they really disagree with folks. Flagging should of course still exist though.
Perhaps, but it will also clear out potentially strong companies that still require substantial investment to get to market simply because they're early in their lifecycle.
You can tell a well made building vs a poorly made building by what's still standing after an earthquake. But no building is built to withstand an atomic blast.
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.
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.
I think Javascript/NPM was just an example and that he was complaining about overengineering. There are examples of this in every specialisation (not just front-end) like the companies using Kubernetes when their entire workload could fit on a single machine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is kind of (really) weird to be happy that the whole sector will be overflooded with unemployed devs, causing a drop in salaries, simply because you dislike NPM/node. I'm all for good software practices but I still prefer good working conditions and compensation.
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?
Maybe it was heavily rehearsed rather than prerecorded https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685748957564928?...
Edit: more: https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685675137781762?...
Kinda think that they couldn't put a face to it (specifically the CEO) is way worse than it being (possibly) prerecorded
Ok, since the point is disputed, I guess we'll take the prerecorded message out of the title above.
TechCrunch has a lot more details: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/27/bird-lays-off-about-30-of-...
> 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".
Well compared to all the companies that claim they cannot last through the lockdown it is.
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?
Well it's strong until it's not. Tons of businesses run on 1-month commercial paper and other stuff that they just plan to roll over and roll over until one day things change and they're completely fucked.
9 months of runway with 0 income is a lot, especially for a company that size.
In the email he says “end on 2021” which is 21 months.
What would you describe as strong? How much money should companies be hoarding in everyday situations?
(Not to mention that Bird is specifically a startup, which is a company meant to run on investments at this stage.)
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.
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.
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
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.
Probably not, at least not if the generalized version of Parkinson’s law holds. The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).
Possibly, but in my experience the less real work there is the more politics and thought leadership tends to crop up.
AirBnB at least seems to keep churning out loads and loads of perhaps marginally-useful open source software https://airbnb.io/projects/
Maybe those engineers keep busy with these hobby projects, and then that makes for good PR to recruit more devs?
TPS reports, probably.
Not anymore they don’t
Airbnb needs support staff? Thousands sounds ok to me
No they don’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707365
The economy hasn't made sense at all over the past 10 years. Companies have been hiring people just for show. Startups are all about putting up smoke and mirrors to appeal to a bunch of dumb investors. Snap never made a profit in almost a decade yet its market cap is $17 billion. Uber hasn't made a profit in over a decade, market cap is $50 billion.
If you want to understand why things are like this, just look at how the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is constantly injecting new fiat money into the economy and you will have all the answers.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme: invest in a startup first so that you find other investors for a subsequent round so that you can IPO and sell it all off to the next suckers who are hoping to do the same. Just don’t be the one left holding the bag.
And the worst part is that all these people who were hired were misused for bureaucratic purposes and so their practical skillsets have atrophied. Then when the big burst arrives and these people are collectively fired, they will be totally unprepared and incapable to adapt their skills to the economic reality that they were shielded from by their previous employers.
I agree that there seems to be deep economic rot somewhere, but I'm not sure Snap and Uber are particularly near the center.
I haven't looked at their 10-Ks in awhile, but aren't at least one of them cash flow positive already?
>> but aren't at least one of them cash flow positive already
They're all cash flow positive if you count the constant stream of cash coming in from investors and bank loans.
But at the end of the day, anyone, doing just about anything can take $10 and turn it into $9.
This.
Yet, all my highly educated friends think Federal Reserve has been doing a great job at "stabilizing the economy".
Ignorance is strength, after all.
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
Isn't that business as usual for Unicorns? Lyft and Uber are the same way
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.
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.
Especially because a lot of those major American companies have spent the past decade loading up on debt and buying back their shares at historically high prices.
Isn't a stock buyback exactly the same as paying a dividend, but taxed at a lower rate? I don't see why these companies are being demonized, the government should just let them go bankrupt and let the public buy their assets for pennies on the dollar.
> I don't see why these companies are being demonized, the government should just let them go bankrupt
Well, they’re being demonised because they’re pushing heavily for a government bailout that will avoid them going bankrupt.
They only need the bailout from the government because the government forced businesses to shut down. How exactly is that the business's fault?
They are being demonized because the government isn't letting them go bankrupt or letting the public buy up their assets. Instead the government is rewarding their greed and poor business practices by bailing them out and letting them keep all of the money they made.
> ..bailing them..
Because some people may not realize/forget the source of these billions, these billions are either taxpayer money, OR these are new/fresh money (which means diluting the value of the currency for everyone).
Yes to all that. No tears, no bailout. Nationalize out of bankruptcy instead.
Do note that the buybacks last time were enabled by government loans. So that is a bit suspect on the governments part for not leveraging the power they did have.
But yes overall these silly critiques of strawmen I think just diffuse anger that should be directed at real things. No good.
The problem is when they all do it it becomes systemic risk.
The new meta is "if we all do the same stupid shit we'll get bailed out when the crunch comes"
The penalty for a bailout should be bankruptcy and nationalization. Taxpayers should profit, not lose.
That's not the way it works. For instance, over the last 10 years, Boeing spent 45 B$ in buyback out of its 60 B$ profit. Now that the situation looks grim, Boeing does not have enough cash to live through the crisis. But it won't go bankrupt, it will get 60 B$ of cash from today's federal government bill, and probably more later on.
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?
There is no world where an airline/hotel or any business could have possibly saved enough cash to fight a 90%+ drop in revenue for months and still remain competitive in the market.
Apple and google have large cash reserves. They also could have paid off all their debt with the profits.
I thought that for them it was just better to keep borrowing than to move around their money?
Apple and google are uniquely extremely high margin businesses, and even they would be shaken after a few months of no income.
Especially because they know that if they go under, the Federal government will have their back. It's win-win, baby! What's a moral hazard?
Boeing’s crisis started long before CV19. The 737 Max debacle was already weighing heavily on their balance sheet.
The point is, it’s hard to predict the future. Who knows if the future will bring a fatal bug in your software, a pandemic, or both. But regardless, we all know tough times will always happen, and to therefore be prepared.
And my point is you can’t be prepared for months of no revenue. No consumer is going to pay the high prices needed for a business to insure itself for an extinction level event, because an alternative business won’t and will offer lower prices.
For example, a hotel owner can choose to squirrel away cash to protect the hotel and its employees for months of no income. A competing hotel will instead choose to renovate the hotel. Which hotel will customers choose to stay at?
The “prepper” hotel could instead take out a loan (using their savings as collateral) to renovate.
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?
The job of management is to find a profitable way to deploy capital. If management are returning capital to shareholders, outside of expected dividends of course, it’s because they are bereft of ideas. What would I have done? Invested a large portion of that money in long term R&D and careful strategic acquisitions. It’s the same over at IBM. The current generation of managers have inherited cash flows set up by their predecessors but have no idea what to do with them.
What R&D would pay the airlines’ and hotels’ employees for the next few months?
OP’s question was about Boeing, but it’s true that the airlines also squandered their capital on share buybacks.
Squandered means there was a better, evident option at the time. I have not yet been able to find a satisfactory answer to the question of what the companies should have done rather than buybacks, especially to mitigate the effects of a literal shutdown of basically entire lines of business resulting in no income.
The businesses in years past made money, invested some of it, spent some on R&D, and distributed some to shareholders (via buybacks). What other option was there?
The issue is not the stock buyback but the debt binge these companies have gone on to to buy back that stock. This has left them unprepared and exposed for any kind of a downturn. This exposure is being remedied compliments of the tax payer. "Privatize the profits but socialize the risk" seems to be their mantra. The buck only ever seems to stop at the CEO when the going is good. This is why they are being demonized.
Apart from irresponsible behavior of not reducing debt or not keeping enough money reserves, few other points to note: - CEO and the executive board gets pay rise based on stock price increase which is a silly math because the total market cap does not increase.. - Share buyback gives a quick boost to share prices, and often, the executives have found to be selling shares immediately after share buyback. It's almost like they pre-plan the buyback and following stock sale. There are many studies showing this to be a more common practice.
Bird doesn't have any shares; they are on series D.
right, why save when you can buy back your stock.
Makes perfect sense when interest rates are near zero. Borrowing is practically free and saving earns you next to nothing.
Until a black swan event happens...and now they need to beg the government to save their short sighted asses.
If the government is almost guaranteed to bail them out, it makes sense that they would prioritize other things.
Then the Government needs to not bail them out.
Obviously, but it's hard to call a company's management short-sighted for taking advantage of a corrupt government.
But they are also the ones corrupting the government, at least in part.
So let them all hang.
Sure, they're the ones corrupting the government. The accusation, then, should be malice, not stupidity.
But then the economy goes down the tubes.
There is a third way: bailouts are conditioned on the public or workers getting ownership stakes.
Agreed. Or an additional option is to let businesses fail. The value of a viable business doesn't instantly go away just because they are insolvent. Let another better managed company buy up the failed company.
This is a difficult call to make. Of course, the government shouldn't be the automatic fall-back solution for incompetent/greedy management. On the other side, large companies failing do have a network effect, that is why the government does bailouts in the first place. There are arguments that the 2008 crisis could have been avoided, if the government had bailed out Lehman. Lehman failing caused the crisis and in the end many more companies needed and got a bail out and still a huge economic damage was done.
The only solution in my eyes for this dilemma is, that the government should do bail outs, but at the price of shares. For any money paid, which isn't just credits, the government should get company shares, which are sold off, as soon as the market stabilizes.
no. the government merely needs to look like it will be a tough debate next time that might not go through, by having a tough debate this time that spooks businesses
To be fair, for many businesses it's government mandates that has forced them to shut down. Yes business was down, but there was some business. With shelter in place there is no business. If the government mandates something that causes total loss of business, it's fair for them to be on the hook to help out with the problems caused by their mandate.
by your logic everyone should have been living pay check to paycheck when interest rates get low.
but that's not even the craziest thing in your comment. it's that you are probably a salaried worker making excuses for the boss. it's a crazy crazy world.
That's true only if you're unwilling to put a price on risk.
What dollar figure should be put on the potential demise of the company versus "saving earns you next to nothing"?
Somewhere out there must be a few firms with massive cash positions. Every time a company buys back stock, they're giving cash to the investor who sold the stock. Assuming the government doesn't inflate the currency to nothing, those firms are going to absolutely clean up now, with so much cash to deploy while everyone else is getting force-liquidated.
Well Apple just got into credit card business maybe they can use their massive cash reserves and enter the banking business.
Berkshire comes to mind. Buffet has been saying he's itching for an elephant sized aquisition for a while now. Here's their chance.
As Matt Levine explains, it was the optimal thing to do.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
Sure but the fun part about these insanely well funded moonshot startups that lose money on every transaction is that all these shutdowns improve their gross margins and cashflow positions.
But many American companies wouldn't have an issue borrowing money (at a reasonable interest rate) to continue operations since they're presumably profitable or at least approach break even.
Has Bird ever been profitable? Even excluding the cost of buying the scooters (e.g. only considering op. ex.)?
Plenty of companies will have trouble borrowing money, it's a financial crisis. Money market rates and rates on corporate paper were through the roof triggering a liquidity crisis. Looks like the fed is really stepping in agressively, and hopefully they'll succeed, but we already saw credit markets almost lock up. Doesn't matter if you're profitable if nobody is willing to lend.
Lenders and credit investors are still very liquid at the moment; it's not a financial crisis and it's not at all the case that noone is willing to lend. But noone will lend to/invest in the credit of a non viable prospect and there will be more scrutiny about what's viable in current circumstances. The price of money has also gone up (despite central banks' best efforts) so there will be more discrimination between strong lending/investment propositions and weak ones, and the cost will be higher for everyone.
At the same time startups in Germany are heavily lobbying for additional provisions in the economic relief programs to cover startups as well.
Reading between the lines, "startups" (they are companies and thus eligible anyway based on standard conditions) refers to companies relying completely on external funding in the pursuit of positive cash flow and profitability further down the line. Looks a lot like a covered bailout for VCs and other investors. Because if a company was profitable before Corona, meaning banks would have provided credit already, the government is making it a lot easier and cheaper to get additional credit lines.
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?
Who is servicing their debt this month? No one. The banks are just as fucked as everyone else.
All the essentials who don't get locked and people are stocking on: health, supermarkets and their providers. Also those who are online or can be easily adapted: streaming, communication, online markets, education, soft development.
Not all of any of these are broke. Many companies have plenty of demand. Many companies have much greater than usual demand, or are shifting production to meet changed demand (for example, it looks like GM is going to be manufacturing ventilators). Those companies and their employees aren't broke--far from it.
Not to minimize the impact on companies and people who are seeing drastically reduced demand, but it's a serious overstatement to say that all companies and people are.
Well, right now, we have a serious problem with cash flow—that is, there isn't much cash flowing through the economy, because people are staying in their homes.
So people who are still employed, but can't (or shouldn't) leave their homes still have some money, probably more than usual.
But the primary answer to that question is the same as it's been for the past couple decades: the people with the money are, well, the people hoarding all the money. The owners, the (big) employers, the people at the top.
As has been reported various places, just as an example, the airline industry spent the last decade spending something like 80-90% of every dollar they made buying back stock to enrich their executives. That's why they don't have anything saved for a crisis like this, and that's who has all the money now.
What if those executives invested the cash into other equity?
The fed and congress. hence stimulus.
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.
Anecdote: just talked to my neighbor who owns a delivery takeout quick service restaurant and they estimate business is down 70%... maybe the bigger chains are ok but small business likely not
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.
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).
Yup. For every loss of a dollar there is a gain of a buck in a short position somewhere.
This is definitely not true. Value can be added to the economy and value can be lost from the economy. The size of the pie is not fixed.
Specifically, when a substantial portion of the economy is not doing anything at all you can’t just magically come up with the difference.
Companies with large capital reserves, e.g. Apple, Google, Berkshire Hathaway. With startup valuations low, those three could go on a discounted M&A spree.
Who isn't broke? Just banks?
Banks manage money but that’s not the same as having that money on their own balance sheet. Banks can and do go bankrupt.
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.
I'm surprized they haven't ended up in dumpsters.
No need to be wasteful, explore the exciting world of scooter hacking with a clear conscience. https://hackaday.com/2018/12/07/liberating-birds-for-a-cheap...
Unlike cars. You never see cars parked all over the place.
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.
Dumping cars in public spaces shouldn't be allowed either.
Something similar happened this time of last year: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/bird-lays-off-up-to-5-of-w...
ah, i’m reminded of an old comedy classic https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bVBYaTwMtmY
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.
there isn't really a good way to lay off remote workers
That's an important point. As much as I'd like my manager to look me in the eye as they tell me I'm laid off, I'd be super pissed if they flew me to San Francisco just to lay me off then left me stewing the whole flight home.
...especially right now.
I disagree.
The same rules apply to taking remote workers on.
Slow and gradual onboarding with care and nurture to take them on.
Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
It's hard to do and doesn't positively impact bottom line initially but it avoids resentment in the vertical(market) which is super important for long term growth.
> Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
This doesn't work when you need to make large changes to an org.
I've seen first hand how different styles of this work.
When it's done 'carefully and individually', and keeps happening over days (because that's what it takes) - everyone else in the company starts wondering if they're impacted, and it becomes this slow-moving horror show. Another person gets tapped on the shoulder, called into a room and let go. Meanwhile the business expects things to continue as normal, but it doesn't and even normal meetings become a source of anxiety.
While it's never pleasant to be told you're being let go - at least if you can do it in larger groups and get it over and done with as soon as possible you reduce the level of anxiety and uncertainty.
Not to say that a pre-recorded video, voice mail or text message is the way to go, but still.
I agree. For large layoffs, do it quickly and in one shot. Managers can then follow up with individuals over time if time and schedules allow.
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.
This guarantees that a large percentage of people are going to learn about it through other employees rather than from their managers though.
What potential problems could this cause?
Maybe a disgruntled employee takes down your database or copies confidential info onto their personal computer
Your notion is that nobody who has ever been laid off had a idea it was coming? And you want to build your security with that foundation?
No.
In that case I don't think your previous comment makes much sense.
Not necessarily. A humane call with, "Please don't discuss this until 4 pm, as I want to tell people personally" would go a long way. And if people do talk about it, you can still have the rest of the discussion, which is not just about revealing facts.
This is equally true for in-person layoffs done as individual meetings, which happen all the time.
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.
In a remote layoff situation? The whole company would know the moment one person was laid off.
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.
I layed of 7 employees (mandated closure of non-essential business) and we called them each individually over FaceTime to do it.
That's noble, but seven doesn't really scale to "hundreds" especially if you are wanting the news to break more or less uniformly across the group you are laying off.
If a company only has one manager for "hundreds" of employees, this has to be very low on the scale of the ways the company is doing badly for its workers.
Father was furloughed along with 900 others.
Every manager called every single worker personally to relay the news, for a general well-being check in, and to answer any questions about UI benefit filing. Each manager has also personally checked in once a week to see how things are going, and to provide updates, and said they will continue to do so for the next 5 weeks they plan to be closed.
... and that's a non-union, publicly traded company.
The only way is face to face. If you can't do that then you are shit. Video? Really?
I've been an employer for 20 years. They come and go and quite right too. I encourage my troops that if they are looking elsewhere then we'll give them time off for interviews and assistance in how to interview effectively. I really am not joking. If you think you own someone completely then your name is Satan! I just want a decent day of work out of you, when you want to work for me. If you no longer want to work for me then I want to get rid of you as efficiently and as fairly as possible ...
Reminder: The world has a bad case of pandemic. The reason for layoffs is the extreme measures society has been taking to avoid unnecessary face-to-face interactions. One thing that would piss me off more than being fired is catching a disease from the person firing me.
I was really appreciative of the way the first company I worked for handled my departure. Things were changing at the company so I was looking to leave anyway but then they decided to change their structure and I was given a few options in person (lived ~2000 miles from main office) all of which were mutually beneficial from my point of view.
A) stay on and help integrate an external team for up to 16 weeks (reduced hours, freedom to interview and apply elsewhere) B) stay on and wrap up the current sprint and tidy up some documentation for up to 8 weeks C) finish out the week and receive 6 weeks separation pay. All options also allowed me to keep insurance until I found a new position as well as keep my company provided tech. It really made me appreciate the people at the company overall, minus the person who was making the changes (which has since been canned and some of the engineering efforts at the company have stalled which is sad)
How so? I worked at an all remote company. We were remote from the day of founding.
Everyone I hired I hired remotely, without ever meeting in person. In the two instances I had to let people go I did it remotely. The same way I hired them, the same way I’ve had people quit.
Could it be that nobody in their right mind would take a leadership position at this trainwreck of a company (when they can probably find a much better one), so the only ones left are the cowards?
Maybe. But there are way too many companies and leaders like this. They expect two week notice when an employee leaves, but have no problem firing people at 5 pm on Friday via email/text whatever.
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.
One good result of the Coronavirus pandemic is its cleansing effect on unprofitable and unsustainable garbage like this company.
Not sure if it will really cleanse us of companies like this. We've been through terrible depressions before, and sociopath companies seem to always make a comeback.
Based on other countries, it looks like the real way to cleanse us of these companies would involve moving our country towards more progressive policies.
Will investors also do the right thing and not subsidize these types of startups?
Investors have traditionally not taken this sort of thing into account, focusing only on the profits. Although, I have read articles saying new generations refuse to invest in certain sectors, such as the military industrial complex (companies like Lockheed Martin). So perhaps it'll change over time. See https://www.upworthy.com/millennials-are-making-money-by-inv... for an example of one of the articles.
Getting a lot of downvotes by people on my above comment, but oddly enough no one wants to engage and say why they disagree. I feel like this platform would work better if people could only upvote. It would force them to comment / explain their own position if they really disagree with folks. Flagging should of course still exist though.
Perhaps, but it will also clear out potentially strong companies that still require substantial investment to get to market simply because they're early in their lifecycle.
You can tell a well made building vs a poorly made building by what's still standing after an earthquake. But no building is built to withstand an atomic blast.
Is that really going to be the case with all coranavirus aid packages going around?
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.
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.
I think Javascript/NPM was just an example and that he was complaining about overengineering. There are examples of this in every specialisation (not just front-end) like the companies using Kubernetes when their entire workload could fit on a single machine.
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.
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.
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/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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.
It is kind of (really) weird to be happy that the whole sector will be overflooded with unemployed devs, causing a drop in salaries, simply because you dislike NPM/node. I'm all for good software practices but I still prefer good working conditions and compensation.
I absolutely love working with Node. As a JavaScript developer I love it more than working in the browser.
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?
Nobody's surprised