231–240 of 611 posts
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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?
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Or in the case of Amazon you have both, printing money with an awful culture of churning through employees. They even structured their stock vesting around it.
What is Amazon's vesting structure?
1) open the Uber app.
2) X - price of ride with uber.
3) open the Lyft app.
4) Y = price of Lyft.
IF Y Choose Lyft. Else : Choose Uber.
Currently, Uber is around 20% more expensive. Not good.
The rest is irrelevant to 99% of the customers.
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…
> that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') I totally agree with everything you're saying. But I'm going to quibble with your phrasing. Apple's cash reserves belong to the shareholders just as much as Uber's funding rounds. Too many CEOs operate under the mistaken belief that retained earnings is "play money" in the way that paid-in-capital is not. For investors, retained earnings are su…
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> that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') I totally agree with everything you're saying. But I'm going to quibble with your phrasing. Apple's cash reserves belong to the shareholders just as much as Uber's funding rounds. Too many CEOs operate under the mistaken belief that retained earnings is "play money" in the way that paid-in-capital is not. For investors, retained earnings are su…
Why would someone whose been tasked with a job that is involved with gathering as much money as possible, be willing and able to just turn that part of their personality off and start giving money to someone else? Why would they do this just because its investor's money rather than customer's money?
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>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…
Does anyone know yet how this will affect their open source work, such as react-vis and deck.gl?