The Scoop #50: Why are many Snap employees selling stock ASAP?
Also: analyzing job cuts at Lyft, the death of Robinhood’s remote work experiment, and an edicational Uber simulation side project that engineers can use as inspiration for their own ones.
The Scoop is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high growth startups. Have a scoop to share? Send me a message! I treat all such messages as anonymous.
Today's topics are:
Why are many Snap employees selling their stock as soon as it vests, and not a day later? Snap is a very strange publicly traded company, where shareholders have precisely zero votes. I’ve talked with engineers and discovered a surprising level of distrust within the company from those who joined around during the 2021 stock peak. Is this tied to the governance model, or something else? And what about engineers who are holding stocks? Exclusive.
Analyzing the split of cuts at Lyft. How much were software engineers impacted by ride-hailing service Lyft’s large-scale cuts? I went through data based on Lyft’s talent directory; it looks like tech functions were hit harder than other areas. Exclusive.
Robinhood is no longer a remote-first company. Few companies were as vocal about becoming a remote-first company than Robinhood. But less than 18 months later, the company has made a u-turn. What can founders and leaders take from this avoidable policy reversal? Analysis.
An educational side project. What does a great side project look like, which helps learn new technologies, but also helps stand out when looking for a new job? I analyze the ridesharing simulation project by software engineer Juraj Majerik, which gets a lot of things right, and is one that could be a good one to take inspiration for other side projects. Juraj also shares his learnings from this 6-month-long project. Exclusive.
The Scoop sometimes delivers first hand, original reporting. I’m adding an ‘Exclusive’ label to news that features original reporting direct from my sources, as distinct from analysis, opinion, and reaction to events. Of course, I also analyze what’s happening in the tech industry, citing other media sources and quoting them as I dive into trends I observe. These sections do not carry the ‘Exclusive’ mark.