251–260 of 611 posts
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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.
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It's especially a dick move when everybody already knows they're hurting for cash, and the official position could be "we just can't afford all these people" without the company losing any face. They aren't fooling anybody by pretending it's not about the cost.
If you're going to lay off people in a cross cutting manner, who would you choose?
_Why haven't you already done that?_
Nobody likes low-performers, even when you're flush with cash. Fixing their mistakes is demoralizing for your high-performers. The word gets around that you have low standards, and it's hard to recruit.
The only way to get your money's worth from them is to put them in death marches and grind them down until they burn out and quit.
I am always extremely suspicious of claims that a company is going to lay off its poor performers and magically be better. If they're telling the truth, they are actually saying that their existing managers are incompetent.
There's a reason that all tech companies try to brag that they only hire the top performers.
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Two relevant excerpts from that article on cost and structural problems: ===== On Cost: The cost structure of any urban car service company has four components: vehicle costs (typically 18 percent of total, including acquisition, financing, maintenance, and licensing), corporate costs (15 percent, including dispatching, advertising, overhead functions such as IT and legal, and returns to shareholders), fuel (9 percen…
The only point that sounds even remotely correct here is "companies can afford cheaper financing to buy cars than individuals" - although Uber could easily take care of that by buying vehicles and leasing them to drivers. Otherwise, yeah, Uber did fundamentally improve both productivity and service quality vs. traditional cab companies. Mobile apps are an obvious service quality improvement (predictable waiting times…
This was true when they started and not really true today. There are many taxi companies with proper licenses and full time employees using the same app model as Uber. Taxify (nowadays Bolt) is one example.
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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.)
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.
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…
I have said this before but they seem to have a strong "must be built here" culture. You typically see this in highly political environments where engineers are trying to create projects as a career highlight and as a justification for promotion.
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It's especially a dick move when everybody already knows they're hurting for cash, and the official position could be "we just can't afford all these people" without the company losing any face. They aren't fooling anybody by pretending it's not about the cost.
Uber's stock has been going down the drain. Why would they give more reason's for investors to cash out?
They are in a race: Be the first with self-driving taxis and go for the monopoly, or run out of cash. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but my bet is on the latter. It's just such a hard problem, especially in cities. I just hope there won't be a kind of AI winter when some of these startups run out of money.
> Be the first with self-driving taxis This is thrown out all the time. How exactly does this save them? Are they going to spend billions to purchase and maintain a fleet of their own taxis? Are they going to be paying people to "borrow" their self-driving cabs? Something else? I just don't see how this suddenly changes the equation in a meaningful way. People aren't going to spend more for a self-driving ride and th…
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…
> Saying they're ~ "culling the low performers" can be entirely true Even if it isn't they have just branded everybody with 'Uber' on their CV that is on the market a low performer. Think before you speak.
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…
Airbnb seems to do similar things, but has a better business model to support it. I kind of get it from a recruiting standpoint and they probably did need to build some customized software given the scale they have. My guess is they spent far more money trying to conquer rideshare in multiple countries, self driving, and side businesses. At the same time, they did look like they were also developing some pretty low l…
Airbnb is a business innovation with a shiny website frontend. But I really don't get all the hype around Airbnb engineering.