This seems to be a common trope at HN where the failure of a company must be because of their …

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

> Your comment also implies that the current failure has been engineering. Well to an extent it's failure of engineering. The best engineers are not code monkeys. But people who can map the business domain to code perfectly. Given this is HN, we've all seen engineers who make business impact. some had degrees, some didn't. And we've seen engineers - who complicate matters while not actually shipping usable features , but doing things the GRRM martin way of plucking weeds. \ maybe step away from the mega corps and notice impact engineers have on a tech company's business direction.

You’re probably right. Devils advocate though: When a company’s engineers ship quality code fast, they end up with more bandwidth. Then the company does more shit. What new has Lyft really built? It could be a symptom of slow engineering.

OP says they don’t think the engineers hired by doing leetcode hard problems (and screening out the folks who can’t) does not engender a good future for the org. Your argument is “I found the interview easy, and hence it’s not that bad.” Just pointing out that perhaps OP thinks the culture you’re part of is not a good one. I’m not taking sides here but curious what this clarification means to you. Your point about engineering not being part of the problem is another. It’s partly true - unless your technology is true main selling point (like openai or maybe google search), then sure engineering makes or breaks the future of the company. So in one way you yourself point out the commodity nature of what companies like Lyft do - given how many companies around the world do it as well now that is. Then the question becomes what exactly are you paying top dollar to these engineers for? Create …

I mean sure it's more complex than "hurrdurr bad engineers, not enough Rust etc etc" but to succeed a company needs products of a suitable quality level delivered in a suitable time scale to meet the needs of their customers. The failure to do that the buck stops at the engineering group.

Lyft actually did try and create many different revenue streams. Besides ridesharing, they own the bikeshares and scooters in pretty much every major city in US, got into their own car rental business and tried to become a one stop shop for transit. It's not that they didn't try, its that they didn't seem to have taken any of them to be profitable revenue streams. Also, wouldn't the very high salaries paid to a lot of engineers contribute it Lyft having unsustainable economics?