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Uber is also planning to open an office for 3k employees in Dallas. "...create 3,000 full-time jobs and pay employees an average salary of at least $100,000..." Considering the lower cost to operate in TX it would make sense to move IT roles to that area. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2019/08/09/ub...
I've always wondered if uber were to abandon their ongoing development efforts and focus on support and maintenance, would they would actually be profitable? It seems to me they would need a fraction of the tech workers they currently support.
No. Their quarterly losses are more than double their entire R&D spend.
Now take away the one-time IPO expense of $3.9B, and we're not even close to being true. Further take away the $300M "IPO driver appreciation award" and you end up with a $1B loss for three months ending June 2019. In other words, the quarterly R&D spend is over three times the size of the quarterly loss.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
Serious question: what does Uber need 27k employees for? 1k people to run the show in the main headquarters + some small-ish ~50-100 people regional offices should be enough to keep the company running.
Uber is in 85 countries and each one needs ops, legal, marketing, driver interaction teams and etc. There are only 4000 engineers.
I still feel like this is a ridiculous amount of workers when one takes into account that the product they're offering is essentially a smartphone app with a backend service that pairs drivers and customers, which regular cab markets do without almost a single person.
To me Uber feels like some sort of soviet-era experiment of replacing a market with someone micromanaging cars
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean one company prints money, and the other has some of the biggest losses in tech industry. What do you expect? If anything, Uber has invested in too much tech for the sake of being tech heavy, which may not be best suited for their business (outside self-driving, which needs heavy tech investment).
Yea but self-driving would instantly turn Uber into a cash cow and it's not that far away. Edit: By not that far away I'm talking 5-15 years. I'm not talking next week. Amazon burned cash for at least 20 years.
[Citation needed]
Related, but Uber is said to be hiring 2,00 for it's new Chicago office next year [1]. A mix of engineering and operations. My understanding this would be under their freight team, which according to this Techcrunch article, was unaffected by this layoff. [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-hiring-o...
I really take all this "will hire xx people in y location" with a grain of salt. This is all marketing speak intended for the tax handout. I don't really believe they will hire that many people if their business tanks
With Uber, it could be either one, but I certainly don't think it's just run-of-the-mill 'marketing speak'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean one company prints money, and the other has some of the biggest losses in tech industry. What do you expect? If anything, Uber has invested in too much tech for the sake of being tech heavy, which may not be best suited for their business (outside self-driving, which needs heavy tech investment).
Yea but self-driving would instantly turn Uber into a cash cow and it's not that far away. Edit: By not that far away I'm talking 5-15 years. I'm not talking next week. Amazon burned cash for at least 20 years.
That's a pretty optimistic view; many people don't seem to share it.
Related, but Uber is said to be hiring 2,00 for it's new Chicago office next year [1]. A mix of engineering and operations. My understanding this would be under their freight team, which according to this Techcrunch article, was unaffected by this layoff. [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-hiring-o...
Maybe they are shifting headcount away from the Bay Area?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean one company prints money, and the other has some of the biggest losses in tech industry. What do you expect? If anything, Uber has invested in too much tech for the sake of being tech heavy, which may not be best suited for their business (outside self-driving, which needs heavy tech investment).
Yea but self-driving would instantly turn Uber into a cash cow and it's not that far away. Edit: By not that far away I'm talking 5-15 years. I'm not talking next week. Amazon burned cash for at least 20 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless Travis could have pulled off a miracle with self driving cars, Uber would be in exactly the same place it is today. If anything the company is executing better than it did under his leadership. It just cannot win the battle against basic economics, which everyone saw coming.
I don’t get why Uber isn’t profitable. Their marginal cost is only higher than zero because they choose to lose money. Their fixed costs are servers and engineering. If they set their prices higher than what drivers are willing to accept they should make money. I don’t see how “basic economics” is the enemy. Their enemy is setting expectations too high. If they were happy with a profit of $100M a year they would be s…
Uber will see their margin squeezed down to nothing because they add nothing of value to the transaction: Any random cab company can buy a dispatch app.
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> Honest question: Who or what was "really instrumental to Uber's early success"? Using VC funding to bankroll an unprofitable business model, undercutting existing industry players who didn't have multiple billion dollar rocket boosters, mostly. Ignoring laws and other unethical practices no doubt helped.
To be fair, most people wouldn’t be able to pull all of that off but Travis did.