Uber lays off 435 people • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#321

Post by spookthesunset » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

tmh79 wrote: post #315

spookthesunset wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were these actual concerns that were raised by the actual legal council of the company, or were they issues invented by engineers who are not lawyers but suffer from engineers disease and think that knowing to code means they are experts in everything else? 'Cause I know plenty of those!

I've worked in plenty of companies with engineers who think they are legal, privacy and security experts. If we made business decisions based on these folks, we'd never do anything. Hell, every damn text change we makes invokes a few who worry about the legal ramifications ("should we file a JIRA ticket with legal?").

Sadly without somebody stepping in, people actually listen to them instead of the actual experts employed by the company... thus you wind up wasting tons of engineering bandwidth building a feature / platform / product that has no business existing all (or worse, not building some feature / platform / product) because nobody bothered to check with the legal / privacy / security team that some concern by a engineer was actually a genuine concern.

And even then, in any good organization legal / privacy / security teams exist only to point out all the risks in any business decision... sometimes it is worth the risk despite what legal / privacy / security say. What appetite the company has for the risk depends on a lot of things that are well outside of legal/privacy/security.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#322

Post by spookthesunset » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

r29vzg2 wrote: post #303

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…

While you're not wrong about most of this. uChat is actually built by a pretty large team https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

> uChat is actually built by a pretty large team

Which is even more scary. Why isn't uber laying all these people off and paying cash money for a real chat application? What competitive advantage does uber have maintaining a chat application?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#323

Post by rocky1138 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

Elof wrote: post #49

Kinda interesting that they chose to do the layoffs during the Apple event. I wish companies would just own what's going on instead of trying to bury it.

I didn't know that there was an Apple event today.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#324

Post by mehhh » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

behringer wrote: post #318

wheels wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Matrix has been a better fit at my company, though it was a bit rough a year ago.

Bridging in Slack, Gitter, IRC and other platforms makes working with external teams a breeze, everything is in one place.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#325

Post by jkp56 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

choppaface wrote: post #82

smeyer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "3rd/last attempt"?

Google only lets candidates interview three times: https://www.quora.com/How-many-times-can-you-interview-with-... (edit: sorry, see below too)

I was told by a Google HR that on average a candidate tries 4 times before passing the interview. That's believable because when any of the 5 interviewers saying "probably not" translates to a no hire, stars really need to align even for stellar candidates.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#326

Post by mynegation » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #252

novok wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to lay off people in a cross cutting manner, who would you choose?

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…

> _Why haven't you already done that?_

With layoffs you want to apply “cut once” approach or at least as rarely as possible, in batches.

Constant trickle of layoffs is very bad for morale, no matter who is laid off. It is also bad for an external image of management.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#327

Post by fzeroracer » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

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…

Not to doubt your own experiences, but if that was honestly true then Uber should also be scaling back hiring and not be opening new major offices with large hiring sprees.

There was some earlier discussion here on why trust between employees and employers is so low now, and this is a great example. Employees being laid off while new positions open up for that exact same role so that they can hire new developers at a lower cost or avoid having to promote other employees.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#328

Post by LaGrange » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #316

LaGrange wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> Same in Slovenia, yeah. Call, wait 15 minutes, cab shows up... or not

...I had that happen _once_, and:

> at least they tell you immediately if the driver cancels.

...exactly that happened. Amazing, it's like they ask you for your phone number for a reason. This wasn't much of a problem pretty much since cell phones became a mainstay. I am not sure how Uber improves on that, guesses from the travel path that the driver gave up even if the driver decides not to report?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#329

Post by mv4 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

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…

Lyft is no better, spending $8M per month on AWS to process 1M transactions per day.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#330

Post by Marsymars » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #264

Marsymars wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a company that does kinda similar software stuff for vehicles - Uber has about two orders of magnitude more drivers than my company, but about three orders of magnitude more engineers - it's almost like they've got diseconomies of scale.

Two orders of magnitude are a lot of orders of magnitude. It could be the difference between using really easy off-the-shelf solutions to having to architect your own technology to solve scaling issues like Google has.

Yeah, two orders of magnitude are a lot. So are three orders of magnitude. ;)