Tech IndustryOct 26, 2019
Canvasmatthewdad

Engineers beware of Fair.com

Yesterday Fair.com laid off 40% of their people with no notice. They acquired Canvas a SF company a month ago and laid off half their team at that time and then laid off the rest with a significently less severence package. Factors leading to the layoffs: — WeWork debacle leading to decreased fundraising efforts needed to sustain the business since the company sets money in fire. — Bad asset management! Until a month ago, they did not know where ~90% of cars were located. They continue to manage hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cars on google sheets. — The company spends incredible sums on parties at the CEOs house. — They continue to add new Vendors when they have account in collections as they haven’t paid their existing vendors in a year. Reasons why to not work at Fair: — They hire contractors on as vendors as a way to not pay them. Currently there are a handful of employees waiting to still be paid and its been 2-3 months. — Leading up to the layoffs they slowed doen hiring in the sense that they did not put out offers and recind existing offers that were not approved or hand budgets to be funded. Ex: There was a candidate who transfered their H1B visa over to Fair only to have his offer and visa transfer recinded. — The culture is sexist at best: the coding training challenge was to code a service which calculated an age floor for the youngest women you can date legally.

The Future of Car Ownership is Fair.
The Future of Car Ownership is Fair.
Fair
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Amazon weeeeeeee Oct 26, 2019

“The culture is sexist at best: the coding training challenge was to code a service which calculated an age floor for the youngest women you can date legally.” That’s sexist?

UnitedHealth HFbG06 Oct 26, 2019

Yes

New
lHpK84 Oct 26, 2019

I agree idk that sexist is the right word but it's definitely not appropriate code challenge topic

Amazon TiCi Oct 26, 2019

The service would require the parsing of headers in the request such as the requester’s age and jurisdiction, making an assumption that every jurisdiction makes laws only based on age of the requester. Then a conditional logic is required in the server to return the appropriate value. But then there needs to be information stored that can most likely be hard coded in the service code if we assume a very micro scale of users, let’s say max 50 tps. We can use a static hash map that maps a jurisdiction to a lambda that takes in a requester’s age and spits out the response. With increased scaling, a static hardcoded hash map would no longer be sufficient and depending on scale a solution using DynamoDB and Lambda for the hash map replacement, and ECS Fargate for the service itself may be necessary.

Facebook dogmilk Oct 26, 2019

Man why did you make three posts on the same stuff

Expedia Group produxtBrah Oct 26, 2019

standard tech eco-system shenanigans.. valuations are far too high tbh

EY rs999 Oct 26, 2019

Wait Canvas is the university course/document management system company?? How can they let go everyone? It’s doing pretty well, no?

Getaround PVaz71 Oct 27, 2019

Canvas is a car subscription startup

Microsoft Caezure Oct 26, 2019

Seems like the fall of wework is the first reckoning of worthless startups.

Uber crbn Oct 26, 2019

Don't give them all the credit. #SuperPumped

Credit Karma Bathroom Oct 28, 2019

This is fascinating. How’s the consumer business doing, anyway? Vs. business with Uber, OP.

Canvas matthewdad OP Oct 30, 2019

They essentially closed the consumer side by raising prices 4x. Start payments went from $500 to up to $4000.

Credit Karma Señor SWE Oct 30, 2019

That’s interesting... Terrible. Right, it used to be 3x monthly payment...