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Uber lays off 435 people

techcrunch.com

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#211

Post by foldr »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #192
AgloeDreams wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was making more taxis on the road with more downtime and increasing congestion really an improvement in cities? A Recent study found that 50% of all cars in lower manhattan were rideshares. Is that really a better world? Ridesharing in cities has been absolutely proven to increase pollution rather than reduce while carpooling in rural areas helps reduce pollution. The problem with rideshares is that they are jobs bas…

There is surplus value to the customer that you aren't accounting for. Mass transit is a far worse experience than Uber.

In most of the US, probably. It's not so clear cut in London. The tube is usually faster and more pleasant. (London's air quality is pretty bad, and many Uber drivers have an annoying habit of driving through heavy traffic with the windows open.)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#212

Post by goatinaboat »

csb6 wrote: post #138
edw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the difference is that Han came around at the end of A New Hope , joined the Rebellion, and saved Luke’s ass, which lead to the Death Star’s destruction. This proved he wasn’t a complete scoundrel and had good within him. Uber’s corporate culture was ugly and toxic from the start. And it never got better or “came around” to a good cause. A better analogy would be Anakin moving from small-time massacres of Sand Pe…

The Old Republic was OK with slavery and left Anakin’s mother to die. Any one of us would have done the same in his place.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#215

Post by ceejayoz »

balls187 wrote: post #202
ceejayoz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who aren't critical to the core product, or whose projects aren't big revenue generators. They might be high performers while being technically unprofitable.

> They might be high performers while being technically unprofitable. Why would you do that vs moving the high performers to the business critical projects?

Any number of reasons. They might be high performers in skill sets not needed in those business critical projects. You might be leery of the time needed to get up to speed on something completely different.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#216

Post by balls187 »

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…

> It strikes me that if Uber is laying off software engineers, their company outlook must be very, very dire

I doubt that. Uber's place in the market is very much theirs to lose. It's more reasonable to think that this is the market for software engineers in SV/SF starting to correct itself.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#217

Post by goatinaboat »

bagacrap wrote: post #44
paulddraper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know it might be an unpopular opinion, but I think his leadership and vision were really instrumental to Uber's early success. I don't think that's an unpopular opinion at all. Never heard someone say otherwise. EDIT: From the the downvotes I can tell I am wrong. Please help educate me: Honest question: Who or what was "really instrumental to Uber's early success"?

> 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.

Don’t forget the industrial scale tax evasion

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#218

Post by zelly »

sparkling wrote: post #27

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.

Because otherwise they're not ``growing''. A company with just enough people to maintain what they already have can't promise to take over the world or whatever.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#219

Post by netfl0 »

netfl0 wrote: post #13

I’d like the see HN consider layoffs in other verticals as well. Particularly manufacturing.

To clarify, since I can no longer edit my comment, HN should be aware of other layoffs as well, especially layoffs due to automation...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#220

Post by seax »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #106

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.

Agreed, I'm curious what they are actually working on with a team like that. Although they do have a not unsubstantial physical data center presence so I think a fair number of engineers are in support of that and not software engineers.
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