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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#291

Post by nabakin »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #288
spookthesunset wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…

I love how the solution to this is always: "Let's build our own thing!" instead of: "Let's just use something free and/or open source."

Engineers like to build haha

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#292

Post by 205guy »

the_watcher wrote: post #230
landryraccoon wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that taxi cabs existed for decades and were profitable means that this price point exists. That was the whole reason lyft and uber entered the market in the first place.

Taxis are an extremely bad example as they did not operate in an open market, essentially behaving as a government-sanctioned cartel.

It all goes in a circle though: why did city governments sanction taxi cartels (by issuing a fixed number of medallions)?

Because if anyone can be a taxi anytime (aka open market), then you get a race to the bottom, both in quality and availability. Then there isn't a steady supply and a lot of collateral problems (accidents, crime, etc). The solution a century ago was to regulate: limited number of taxis and minimum driver qualifications. In the days before apps and routing, it meant that there were taxis available most of the time, except for maybe at peak times.

My point is that taxis are an extremely good example of why you need regulation. Uber and Lyft will succeed to the point they can replace that regulation (cheap enough fares, good enough cars and drivers).

You could also argue that Uber and Lyft are controlling the taxi market because they don't let drivers set their own fare. From the point of view of the driver, taxi-driving is an Uber-Lyft-sanctioned cartel right now.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#293

Post by this_user »

spookthesunset wrote: post #285
fpoijasw wrote: post #278

Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team ha…

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…

> God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?"

And even then they could have just used Matrix, which ticks all of those boxes.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#294

Post by braythwayt »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #275
braythwayt wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could chose low performers, lay them off, and be more focused and higher productivity with the remaining people... _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…

>If you could chose low performers, lay them off ... _Why haven't you already done that?_ There's a reason that all tech companies try to brag that they only hire the top performers. Performance of an engineer is relative to his environment. I was a top performer on some teams/projects and a low performer on others. Even if they ace your hiring process, you still can't know how they'll fit with the team long term.

Fine, but laying off people who don’t work out is an ongoing process in all companies. If people haven’t already been let go as a part of the company’s existing management review process, what changed suddenly that the company can suddenly lay off a bunch of people in one go and “improve?”

Another way to think about it is that everyone has some productivity, some contribution to the company’s net progress. If someone’s contribution is negative, they should already have been let go.

If their contribution is less than others, maybe “bottom 10%,” but it is still positive, you may be letting go a relatively poor performer in a round of layoffs, but you’re still shedding a person with a positive contribution.

You are going to be worse off, no matter how you sugar-coat it.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#295

Post by simonrobb »

fpoijasw wrote: post #278

Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team ha…

Yes and no. I would love to use Slack over uChat, don't get me wrong, but uChat is a skin/integration of an enterprise chat app not a greenfield build.

Look familiar? https://mattermost.com/

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#296

Post by uber_throwawa12 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #285
fpoijasw wrote: post #278

Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team ha…

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…

Slack was evaluated a few times. The reason it was initially rejected when we first considered it is because it wasn't able to handle our scale at the time and the team over at Slack was not interested in prioritizing scaling for us over other things on their product roadmap.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#297

Post by bihnkim »

secfirstmd wrote: post #289
spookthesunset wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…

Dam. I could have saved them a fortune by recommending Mattermost. Maybe even got Uber to make some e2e encryption commits also :)

Interestingly, your comment reminded me that I wanted to look into Mattermost and they have the Uber logo listed on their front page...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#299

Post by rhizome »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #274
whateveracct wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs are always a failure of leadership, but leadership will always choose to dodge blame if given an out. Hence, "low performers."

> Layoffs are always a failure of leadership I completely disagree. Which would you rather have: (a) Business is booming, but leadership holds off on hiring because they believe the boom won't last forever. (b) Business is booming, so leadership hires to support the boom. The boom eventually subsides, so leadership decides to lay off as the business is no longer there. Fortunately, even as an employee, I'd much rathe…

(c) Robot cars were a mistake.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#300

Post by r29vzg2 »

secfirstmd wrote: post #289
spookthesunset wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…

Dam. I could have saved them a fortune by recommending Mattermost. Maybe even got Uber to make some e2e encryption commits also :)

uChat is actually built on top of Mattermost.

https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

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