301–310 of 611 posts
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…
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…
Often though they don't cull low performers, they give each department a budget or a head count they have to hit. A department made up of high performers will have to cull a high performer to hit budget, a department which is overloaded will become more overloaded and people will quit in response.
In a company the size of Uber a restructure is often a pretty blunt instrument.
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…
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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
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He was absolutely instrumental to the early success. In some places they were actively breaking the law just to operate there, and Kalanick was able disrupt the system and make Uber important enough to change the laws. However, that doesn't mean he should still be CEO. Kalanick also created a company culture that became more and more toxic as it grew larger. Lyft was arguably on the ropes and might've failed without…
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.
If you do the same as the director of FBI, _excuse me_, Lord of the Sith, things are quite different.
Edit: but also, Uber and Kalanick were never small fries. So that's where it breaks down.
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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
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…
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."
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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It doesn't really cost anything... Depending on context, sure this could be true. Like if you're comparing the cost of releasing some small OSS module of Uber's to Uber's annual revenue, sure, it's going to be a negligible cost. But if you compare against the cost of developing the module in the first place, it can easily be an equal expense. For example I spent several months on a BLE library for Android ( https:/…
> If it becomes at all popular then you have further ongoing overhead. THIS is the one that comes into play. All that stuff you listed before is a slog to go through when you go to open-source, but unless you're parking the thing as a proof-of-concept/end-of-life, you're now signed up for maintaining the repo. That means triaging issues, pull requests, helping out when contributors don't understand why their build is…