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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#121

Post by txcwpalpha »

dmode wrote: post #114
txcwpalpha wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this isn't some company with an existing footprint in a city saying "hey we're gonna hire some more people for our office here". In both the case of Chicago and especially Dallas, Uber is making significant real estate commitments to go along with these hiring plans. You don't buy up an entire skyscraper office building (and several plots of land around it) and open an entirely new office unles…

I don't believe Uber is buying a building, rather leasing out space, which can always be re-negotiated. There have many examples of companies promising a certain number of jobs and never fulfilling them, because who is looking. For example, Foxcon. Also, Uber once committed to build a HQ in Oakland and signed a huge lease. Soon after, they abandoned that plan and started building a brand new HQ in SF

The current deal that I've read for Uber's Dallas expansion is that they currently are leasing about 1/3rd of a brand new skyscraper that was just built, have plans to lease 90% of a brand new skyscraper that is currently being built, and also outright purchased several plots of land where they are planning on building office building that they will own.

edit: After reading a few different articles it seems like every article says a different story about how much space Uber is committing to, so maybe you're right, it does sound a little wishy-washy.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#122

Post by simonrobb »

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.

+1 Appreciate you avoiding the usual "it's just a little smartphone app"

I'm not going to try and give an exhaustive list, but as a rough explanation: things get really, really hard when you're operating at Uber scale (hundreds of thousands of riders on trip at any one time, each demanding low latency and reliability):

- Product: native clients for each side of the marketplace in each vertical (rides, eats, freight, atg, et al), maps, localization for every country with a presence (not just language, but tax, legal, hundreds of region-specific modes e.g.: tuk tuks)

- Infrastructure: hardware teams to build on-prem DCs (cloud can get very expensive at scale), software networking to deal with said low-latency traffic, storage to optimize for reliability/latency/cost, observability (metrics, logging, alerting, tracing), security, et al

- Data: insights, operational support, routing, et al

- ATG

Hope that gives a better idea.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#123

Post by blackflame7000 »

inimino wrote: post #94
blackflame7000 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> not that far away [Citation needed]

https://waymo.com/

I wasn't referring to Uber's technology specifically, only that self-driving cars are what is required to make Uber as successful as they hope to be.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#126

Post by cameronbrown »

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.

This is untrue. It doesn't take into account the fact Uber has externalised a bunch of stuff like maintenance onto its drivers. Bringing it in house would sink them imo, human capital or not.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#127

Post by dangus »

Barrin92 wrote: post #93
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.

>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

But of course, when you just oversimplify what the app actually does it sounds like it should be so darn easy to make and maintain.

It's like saying Microsoft Office is "just an app that writes documents" or that GMail is "just an email client."

Uber and Lyft do a whole lot more than what you described on the scale of millions of concurrent users in dozens of countries.

Your comparison to a taxi isn't really a great one because you see taxis sitting around on curbs and driving around empty looking for a passengers all the time. A lot of the cost of a taxi is you paying for idle time.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#128

Post by simonrobb »

theincredulousk wrote: post #71

Probably some reality shaking out. Uber's engineering team puts out some impressive stuff, often as OSS. Their engineering blogs are regularly on HN. I've been genuinely surprised that they churn out some of these things and release them for free given their relatively extreme financial situation. In contrast to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc. that have mountains of their own money to burn (rathe…

It doesn't really cost anything to open source something though. These are all projects which are developed for a reason: the commercial version might be prohibitively expensive at Uber scale, or not technically capable of operating at Uber scale, or just plain doesn't exist yet. At that point you can engage with the tech community and offer it as OSS (not to mention make your engineers happy), or you can keep it to yourself and eventually lose that opportunity to somebody else.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#129

Post by blackflame7000 »

cameronbrown wrote: post #126
blackflame7000 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is untrue. It doesn't take into account the fact Uber has externalised a bunch of stuff like maintenance onto its drivers. Bringing it in house would sink them imo, human capital or not.

If the maintenance of cars out weighted the profitability for the driver there would be no Uber drivers at all.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#130

Post by OBLIQUE_PILLAR »

repomies691 wrote: post #51
AgloeDreams wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean resistance to his ideals and methods are based on his relative carelessness towards anything but his and the company's goals. Incredible leader, amazing CEO with the raw ability to move mountains for the company's growth. Remarkably bad at human and helping humankind. If burning the Amazon rainforest helped Uber's goals he would have it torched in the most efficient and rapid method possible by morning light.…

> 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…

When most people talk about "Mass transit" I think they mean trains... subways... buses...

I hope!

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