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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#101

Post by the_watcher »

landryraccoon wrote: post #65
paxys wrote: post #31

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…

The basic economics argument assumes that there are not price points that are both higher than what drivers accept and that consumers are willing to pay. The existence of Lyft plays a role here, but both are in the same boat - they either need a new product line with better margins to take off that has some synergies with the ride-sharing business, or the unit economics of ride-sharing need to get bad enough for both concurrently to decide to raise prices.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#102

Post by dmode »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #87
dmode wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dallas office is an administrative office and will not have eng roles. Also, these are all "promises", we really have to see how it plays out. Promises are cheap. Remember how Foxcon was going to hire 10k people in Wisconsin

That isn't what the article in the parent comment says: >The office would include engineers, finance executives, salespeople and other roles across Uber's business.

Here https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-new-offices-chicago-dal...

This directly quoted an Uber exec saying that it will be focused on HR, sales, and ops

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#103

Post by rand0mthought »

landryraccoon wrote: post #65
paxys wrote: post #31

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…

If they raise prices the ridership will drop. It is not clear if they will be able to increase revenue by raising prices.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#104

Post by [deleted] »

nyrulez wrote: post #66
choppaface wrote: post #29

Google is pretty well-known for maintaining a very deep bench-- if an engineer isn't effective in some role, they'll just move them to some other team. Heck, a lot of hires (especially 3rd/last attempt) go directly to the bench. This strategy pays off well when a new competitor (like Facebook or Uber) comes along and snatches up people in the lead roles, or if the company feels the need to pivot to something really f…

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).

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#105

Post by paxys »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #85
nyrulez wrote: post #66

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.

True self driving (no driver, no steering wheel) is far enough away that we don't know for sure if it will ever actually happen.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#106

Post by mytailorisrich »

Uber's core business is a taxi app and I get that there are some clever algorithms involved, but I still don't really understand how they justify the size of their engineering team.

I read that they had 2,000 engineers out of 6,000 employees in 2016, though I don't know the numbers now. That seems gigantic.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#107

Post by kaikai »

keehun wrote: post #73
fardin1368 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is in 85 countries and each one needs ops, legal, marketing, driver interaction teams and etc. There are only 4000 engineers.

Perhaps the next question is, what do 4000 engineers do? Not aimed as a troll-y question: an informed idea of what the breakdown of that many engineers do would be enlightening. For example, there were about 200 iOS engineers the last I heard. Assuming similar levels for Android, that leaves 3,500-3,600 engineers.

Uber doesn't just make apps for phones. They also have an entire self-driving car division (computer vision, etc), car routing, maps folks, payments, the separate driver apps, etc. A company that size and complexity has plenty of work for engineers.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#108

Post by edw »

jobu wrote: post #62
dvt wrote: post #20

Uber was actively poaching from our team when I was at Edmunds.com a few years ago; hope my ex-teammates that jumped ship are doing alright. Uber is in a precarious position and I can't help but wonder what would be different if Travis Kalanick were still in charge. I know it might be an unpopular opinion, but I think his leadership and vision were really instrumental to Uber's early success.

He was absolutely instrumental to the early success. In some places they were actively breaking the law just to operate there, and Kalanick was able disrupt the system and make Uber important enough to change the laws. However, that doesn't mean he should still be CEO. Kalanick also created a company culture that became more and more toxic as it grew larger. Lyft was arguably on the ropes and might've failed without…

You've reminded me of an observation I made recently about Star Wars: the behavior of Han Solo (pre-Greedo-shoots-first-bs) and Darth Vader aren't that different. It's the context that matters. If you're small and scrappy, antisocial behavior makes you a charming scoundrel. If you're big, the same behavior makes you evil.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#109

Post by bonestamp2 »

hendzen wrote: post #42
choppaface wrote: post #29

Google is pretty well-known for maintaining a very deep bench-- if an engineer isn't effective in some role, they'll just move them to some other team. Heck, a lot of hires (especially 3rd/last attempt) go directly to the bench. This strategy pays off well when a new competitor (like Facebook or Uber) comes along and snatches up people in the lead roles, or if the company feels the need to pivot to something really f…

This strategy works very well if you have a gigantic money printing machine, which Google does. Uber has a gigantic money incinerating machine. They don't have the ability to just have engineers spinning their wheels on non-business critical projects like Google does.

Especially with the outlook that thousands of contractors might become full time employees by law soon.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#110

Post by sabujp »

miohtama wrote: post #64
repomies691 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remarkably bad at human and helping humankind. I would say that the way how Uber aggressively expanded throughout the world has massively helped humankind. Because of Uber, many countries have changed their taxi laws, and many local competitors have sprouted up. More efficient taxi and ride-sharing services help save the environment and make cities nicer. Of course this is quite theoretical but I believe Uber was t…

Uber and Lyft are not necessarily efficient. This SF study claims increased pollution levels https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670 (More empty cars cruising around)

more electric cars would help, but wouldn't decrease congestion
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