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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#341

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

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…

Yeah and why would anyone ever buy a tailor made suit when you can get them off the rack for cheaper?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#342

Post by theincredulousk »

jacquesm wrote: post #159
theincredulousk wrote: post #71

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.

Good point - didn't think about that at all. Did you mean think before I speak, or Uber?

In any case, yeah, in that respect it is a massively shitty and unnecessary thing to do to employees. They could have easily left it as "re-structuring" without a risk of tainting the reputation of former employees.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#343

Post by iroe0jjr »

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…

Contrarian view: not your company or resources. Management was enabling it until now.

Since when did wanting to be a software developer mean there’s “one true way” to do software dev?

Why are developers supposed to be budget babysitters for a huge company with tons of people watching budgets?

I don’t owe my employer being an expert in all contexts to the benefit of their business. I am not their servant. I write code to serve contexts they want served.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#344

Post by evancox100 »

fzeroracer wrote: post #327
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…

At companies I have worked at, the employees being let go are often given the opportunity to apply for other available positions. Maybe the case here?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#345

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#346

Post by derefr »

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.

If you were willing to use Slack after all, then I guess you were willing to consider non-FOSS alternatives? In which case, one service you don't seem to have considered: Discord.

Yes, really, for business. Look past the theming.

Discord has a much more solid tech base (and engineering team) behind it than Slack, IMHO. A better API, too; and—unlike Slack—real support for third-party clients!

I built my own niche team-collaboration app back in 2012, and I tried out a lot of things, but ended up building my whole own stack. That was back then. If I was doing it again today? I'd just make it an alternative Discord frontend.

(There are also offerings specifically designed for the "build your own custom frontend for our chat backend" use-case, like https://pusher.com/chatkit, but IMHO Discord even has these beat.)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#347

Post by spookthesunset »

mv4 wrote: post #329
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…

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

AWS is the opposite of homebrew. Lyft has no business maintaining its own data centers and operational overhead. There is a huge opportunity cost involved with running your own infrastructure. AWS and the like free your own teams from worrying about how to provision new systems, upgrading DB server versions, etc. Running your own data center is hard.

Running your own DC is the same as building your own chat app. It is almost always more expensive and almost all the people who claim they can do it cheaper inhouse aren't factoring in all the costs--both costs that are easy to measure and those that are almost impossible to measure

Examples of hard-to-quantify costs for running your own infrastructure include:

- What is the cost to the company of being three versions behind on mongo because IT doesn't have the bandwidth to upgrade? How many work-arounds do teams have to do because they couldn't use the latest features of mongo?

- What is the cost to the company when developers cannot quickly spin up new environments like they could using a service like heroku?

- How much innovation and new business (read $$$$) is not happening because the in-house IT simply doesn't have the toolset so a dev can quickly riff on an idea?

- How many engineers have good ideas and don't bother building them because spinning up an environment is too much trouble?

I'd argue by not using AWS you are holding your product teams back and stifle innovation. Unless of course you want to waste company money to build out your own half-assed provisioning tools that are lousy knock-offs of AWS's tools. But then, you might as well just use AWS...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#348

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#349

Post by mpeg »

derefr wrote: post #339
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…

The part I don't get is how > hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' gets followed up immediately (almost inevitably, in my experience) with > so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" ...rather than, say, "hey, I googled and there are a few FOSS alternatives for 'group chat with history': Zulip, for one; Mattermost, for…

But... they did, uChat is a fork of Mattermost, and they contributed the changes back to the open source project.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#350

Post by derefr »

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.

Interesting. IBM adopted Slack just fine, back in 2016. I believe they've got at least 100k employees in their Slack workspace. Not sure if it's Slack or IBM doing the hosting/scaling for it, though.
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