Before the pandemic, they laid off a decent chunk of ppl. Should engineers be worried about layoffs?#tech #cruise #waymo #argoai
I believe we have enough cash for at least two years runway and we will start making money soon so I don’t believe we will have layoffs. But you never know. There are no certainties in life
Layoff is not based on how much cash your company has.
No AV company is making noticeable revenue right now anyways, so it’s probably more dependent on Cruise’s cash reserves/burndown rate, time to launch, ability to raise more capital from investors, and whether an engineer is on a team required to make it to MVP (which is probably most of them). It’s hard to hire for autonomy teams and cutting them will only make it more difficult to launch a self-driving product. Could be different for certain GTM teams.
Doubt it for cruise, I think their biggest hiring spree came before the pandemic and they already trimmed the fat and have demonstrated technical progress. They are extremely well capitalized and slowing down would hurt their business prospects. Would be worried about layoffs at all smaller AV startups though. There is a huge gap between Waymo/Cruise and the rest. Investors will need to be compensated for that risk, hence higher cost of capital, hence need for lower expenses. Especially the public ones, imagine buying Ask Jeeves (public) stock in 2001 when Google was still private. Same deal here.
Cruise made the bet of short term investment for product launch and velocity, aka throwing L+1 money at candidates knowing their tenure was 2 years vs traditional 4. Similar to nba teams mortgaging future for titles now
Why 2 years?
No idea without seeing the company's balance sheet. Is Cruise making money? Still hiring? If layoffs do happen, the closer you are to revenue generating products and services the better off you are.