COVID, Bird Scooters, Layoffs, and Relationships
On Friday morning at about 9:30am Pacific Time, myself, along with roughly 400 other people I worked with at Bird had a meeting placed on their calendar called something along the lines of “COVID Update.” This meeting was to take place in an hour. We’re all working remotely and have been for the past two weeks, so it was a Zoom meeting. At 10:30, we all logged in and within a few seconds were confused. Two of my closer colleagues and I messaged back and forth on Slack: Is there audio? Why can’t I hear anything? Did you need to login too? That was weird. And, we should’ve been thrown off by the fact that you couldn’t view the participants list like usual, or that the presenter’s identity was obscured. We viewed a title slide that had the name of the meeting written in Arial on an olive grey background (not our brand color or font, which frankly was unsettling in a way I couldn’t articulate). At about 10:35, a voice came over. I don’t want to add to the notion that it was pre-recorded, as I have no proof, but that is what many of my colleagues believe. The voice (who didn’t belong to our manager’s) gave some version of, “COVID has impacted our friends, families, and businesses in unprecedented ways. If you are on this call, it’s because your role at Bird is being impacted and your last day will be April 3rd. Please direct all questions to HR.”
I’m paraphrasing there, but the whole thing was over in about 90 seconds (and that’s generous). The Zoom meeting auto-ended, and the internal data team channel on Slack was blowing up with people dropping in their personal emails and phone numbers. I Facetimed the two colleagues I’d been messaging earlier, and we just laughed in disbelief: Did we really just get laid off over a one-way Zoom? What the fuck just happened? And then, we all watched as our computers began to shut down, our Slack accounts deactivate in front of our eyes, locking us out immediately. It was 10:40am. Do you guys have our manager’s number? I want to say bye at least.
Of our data team that consisted of ~50 people, about 45 were let go. I reached out to my friend in engineering, who had also been dropped. From his gathering, most of the engineering team was gone as well. It was impossible to quantify the impact at the time, and I felt like I was reaching for threads of camaraderie in a time of people working alone from their kitchen tables and makeshift desks.
I feel fortunate to have left Los Angeles before things there got particularly bad. What was only going to be a 10-day trip to visit my out-of-state boyfriend has turned into a who knows how long it’s going to be like this situation. Though I am grateful to be here and not grappling with the traumatic change of circumstance alone in my apartment, it feels very serious in a way our still-early relationship isn’t prepared for. We’re doing great, to be perfectly honest, but it’s difficult to not be able to do the things that 20-somethings in the honeymoon phase of their relationship usually get to do. It’s tough enough to lose your job and make a partnership work after years of marriage; doing this so early on feels strange, but we’re using the butterflies we still get to hold this relationship up. We’re both paddlers, so we’ve been comparing the whole situation to a set of unprecedented rapids. We’re scouting the best we can, we’re reading the water, we’re trying not to get thrown.
I find a lot of the actions that took place on Friday horrendous. For starters, the TechCrunch article was published before we received our emails on offboarding FAQs. And, like many tech companies, plenty of our engineers and data team members don’t even come into work until their daily standups, usually taking place at 11am or even 12pm. So, many people missed the Zoom invite and meeting, piecing things together when they realized they were locked out of their computers. I called one of my colleagues that I know comes in late. He was confused, and without being able to access Slack to see the aftermath, I delivered the summary to him. I did eventually get in touch with my manager, who was as blindsided by this as we were. As far as I know, the folks that are left from my immediate team consist of all men, most of whom are white. I’m not saying it should be me over on that side, but I am saying that when your C-Suite looks the way Bird’s does (the way many do, in tech and otherwise) and your data team follows suit, you cannot best serve the communities you pretend to care about. In a world of COVID where micromobility is an essential service, how dare you not take that into consideration? If you’d rather me put it in “business terms,” I’d say it more selfishly: A diverse group helps your bottom line — this has been shown time and time again. Furthermore, though I am hesitant to establish motive, it did seem a rather ungraceful ending — as though the folks in charge were in the mindset of, Well we’re all working remotely and one-on-ones with everyone’s manager would take too long, so fuck it, let’s do this at once. I’ve never been a fan of the “move-fast, break things” mentality in startups and in tech at large, and damn it hurt to have that applied directly at me and so many people that I care about.
The thing is, I still do believe in the product. I think micromobility is here to stay and I’m optimistic about that. I believe that scooters & bikes mark a little truth against the notion that Americans want to be isolated in cars. I believe in the very real bike lanes that didn’t exist before these companies started popping up, and I am hopeful that other things I didn’t get to complete work on will continue onward — sidewalk infrastructure, equity programs, and pushing to get more women and non-binary folks out of cars. I want these things, and I think micromobility has the potential to establish a lot of them. As far as Bird goes though, I’m unsure if I believe in the brand anymore.
