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Uber lays off 435 people

techcrunch.com

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#311

Post by disordinary »

tln wrote: post #265
rainyMammoth wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also been impressed by everything they are producing and I'm actually really wondering why do they need all of those new OSS projects. They need to scale but to an order of magnitude lower than most other webscales. None of their application is data heavy 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…

> None of their application is data heavy Really?? They have O(thousands) of drivers in O(hundreds) of cities with the app open, sending and receiving data approximately all day. What companies in your mind are data heavy?

Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of passengers waiting for and riding in vehicles.

The "data heavy" businesses often have the ability to cache their data in CDNs. Uber's data is realtime and dynamic, you scale that the hard way.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#312

Post by spookthesunset »

uber_throwawa12 wrote: post #296
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…

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.

What about all the other chat apps? Why wasn't the whole thing dumped into a pile of hot lava the second slack could scale to an org the size of uber?

What what does scale mean anyway? Just employees using it or employees + contractors?

It's easy to armchair quarterback on this stuff, but I find it hilarious how tech companies that employee supposedly smart people justify writing this kind of stuff. I'm sure some junior engineer did a cost/benefit that completely neglected the total cost of ownership for writing a chat app and focused on the sticker shock of having to pay tens of thousands a month for a chat app.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#313

Post by LaGrange »

tomp wrote: post #227
jdro wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> predictable waiting times, ease of finding cabs in remote locations, ease of payment

As someone who used call cabs in various Polish towns and suburbs since early 2000s, is claiming this was particularly bad is short memory or is the US bad at not just mass transit but also taxi service? I could get a cab within 15 minutes pretty much in any agglomeration, and even close suburbs. I didn't even need an app.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#314

Post by wheels »

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."

Open Source chat tools are sadly almost universally disappointing. I believe I tried just about every one of them before giving up and just using Slack. I detailed the reasons here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005

I have the impression that Slack has gotten worse. We're again having problems of notifications not showing up.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#315

Post by tmh79 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #312
uber_throwawa12 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about all the other chat apps? Why wasn't the whole thing dumped into a pile of hot lava the second slack could scale to an org the size of uber? What what does scale mean anyway? Just employees using it or employees + contractors? It's easy to armchair quarterback on this stuff, but I find it hilarious how tech companies that employee supposedly smart people justify writing this kind of stuff. I'm sure some jun…

another issue was data domiciling and retention policies around 2016 when uber was evaluating slack.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#316

Post by tomp »

LaGrange wrote: post #313
tomp wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> predictable waiting times, ease of finding cabs in remote locations, ease of payment As someone who used call cabs in various Polish towns and suburbs since early 2000s, is claiming this was particularly bad is short memory or is the US bad at not just mass transit but also taxi service? I could get a cab within 15 minutes pretty much in any agglomeration, and even close suburbs. I didn't even need an app.

Same in Slovenia, yeah. Call, wait 15 minutes, cab shows up... or not. Again, Uber / Smart Phone tech improves on that, at least they tell you immediately if the driver cancels. (Admittedly, in the old days, the drivers didn't actually cancel, just gave up when they couldn't find your house or you weren't waiting outside at the very right moment... still Uber solves that, mostly.)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#317

Post by baron_harkonnen »

ssully wrote: post #2

Related, but Uber is said to be hiring 2,00 for it's new Chicago office next year [1]. A mix of engineering and operations. My understanding this would be under their freight team, which according to this Techcrunch article, was unaffected by this layoff. [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-hiring-o...

I'm pretty sure everyone on HN has gotten an email this week from uber-freight talking about their "HYPER growth!".

It's really so tone deaf to have recruiters to be talking about their unique culture and rapid growth right after HQ lays off hundreds of people.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#318

Post by behringer »

wheels wrote: post #314
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Open Source chat tools are sadly almost universally disappointing. I believe I tried just about every one of them before giving up and just using Slack. I detailed the reasons here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 I have the impression that Slack has gotten worse. We're again having problems of notifications not showing up.

Have you tried out wire? I like it, but never used it in a work environment.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#319

Post by bowcoy »

notTyler wrote: post #19

I've always wondered if uber were to abandon their ongoing development efforts and focus on support and maintenance, would they would actually be profitable? It seems to me they would need a fraction of the tech workers they currently support.

Based on year 2018 numbers, Uber needs to grow their revenue by 9.3%, and reduce their expenses by 6% to book a 0.1B profit. Assuming an average employee expense of 230k per year, Uber letting go 435 puts them 6.66% on the way to profitable expense reduction.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#320

Post by joeyaiello »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #310
joeyaiello wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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Invoke-RestMethod [or irm] https://api.github.com/.

Store that as a variable:

$a = irm https://api.github.com

And then look at all the properties you can explore:

$a | Get-Member [or gm] $a.

Oh, and of course, one of the big reasons is "so you don't have to open a Windows VM to remote into your Windows Server boxes and manage them from a Macbook".

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it'd take a lot more time to write about every benefit and scenario here. In any case, it turns out that our user base is pretty spread out among different scenarios, but between our repo and usage numbers, we've been really happy with how excited that such a diverse group of folks really love PowerShell.

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[1] https://aka.ms/PSGitHubBI [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadlin...

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