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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#361

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

iamleppert wrote: post #355
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…

How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The real issue here is a lack of vision at the top. The current CEO needs to step down for the health of the company. He has a clear lack of vision for the company, as evidenced by his statement of "do your divisions look like what they should if we had to start over?" Who says that? Something so vague that is basically grasping at stra…

In Amazon’s defense, there wasn’t anything as useful to their needs as AWS before AWS.

If a different company had dominated the on-demand computing space before Amazon’s peak load issues became too big a problem, they very may as well have gone with that and not made AWS.

Almost nobody needs to write their own chat app. Slack is fine.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#362

Post by otterley »

iamleppert wrote: post #355
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…

How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The real issue here is a lack of vision at the top. The current CEO needs to step down for the health of the company. He has a clear lack of vision for the company, as evidenced by his statement of "do your divisions look like what they should if we had to start over?" Who says that? Something so vague that is basically grasping at stra…

> How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet.

The first AWS service was launched over 15 years after Amazon.com started selling books on the Internet. It wasn’t even a separate brand until after Amazon S3, SQS and EC2 were launched.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#363

Post by a13n »

siddarthd2919 wrote: post #333
r29vzg2 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is Slack not suing Uber for uChat? The images on the link look like an exact copy.

On what grounds would they sue? Not only is it completely legal to copy a competitor's design (in most cases), Uber isn't selling this to other companies.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#365

Post by drblast »

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?

While not a "tiny amount of data" Uber's problem seems like one of those embarrassingly parallel ones where partitioning by location is trivial, and accuracy of all the data isn't as important as knowing everyone's location right now. I'd guess any relatively popular MMO deals with similar things under much tighter latency constraints.

Data heavy to me means terabytes of data with potentially multiple dimensions, like Google or Facebook.

Not to say that Uber's problem isn't challenging, but I don't expect that the amount of data is necessarily the problem.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#366

Post by cle »

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."

At big companies, this is often the preferable alternative. Making and releasing quick bug fixes on internal projects is way faster than open source and public projects. Ownership and control is critical.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#368

Post by theincredulousk »

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?

Can't speak for OP, but I'd imagine most of the data in the system is metadata - i.e. very tiny. Sure they're moving a lot of packets, but an entire ride's data could probably fit in 100KB. If they have a million drivers active, what data do they actually need on them? Profile, GPS location, type? Few KB. Keeping the log of all rides probably takes up the most, but still, relatively small. In any case they essentially deal with small, highly compressible metadata.

Think of that vs. a company like Instragram where people are uploading probably terabytes of media content every day, and they have to maintain/host all that content to be served on-demand basically forever. This is probably a low-key reason for pushing "stories" - they get a reprieve by only having to store that for 24 hours. In any case, you're looking at orders of magnitude larger data usage in all aspects.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#369

Post by kryptiskt »

bigzyg33k wrote: post #222
paulcole wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Be the first with self-driving taxis This is thrown out all the time. How exactly does this save them? Are they going to spend billions to purchase and maintain a fleet of their own taxis? Are they going to be paying people to "borrow" their self-driving cabs? Something else? I just don't see how this suddenly changes the equation in a meaningful way. People aren't going to spend more for a self-driving ride and th…

Because self driving cars, while expensive, are still significantly cheaper that employing drivers. Furthermore, it could be argued that you need less self driving cars than cars with drivers, as they never need to take breaks, and can work all hours of the day. It would also drastically decrease ubers cost of entering new cities - previously they relied on driver incentives, this flattens the variation in cost great…

But they're not paying for cars now. Buying a fleet of self-driving cars to cover all the cities they are in will require many billions of capital investment.

> It would also drastically decrease ubers cost of entering new cities

Entering a new market will require buying hundreds of cars + investing in facilities to maintain those cars.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#370

Post by aj7 »

This is an unsustainable business model. If you draw a Gaussian surface around it, the end result is that Uber/Lyft will destroy the taxi industry (which was execrable, but put a fair amount of kids through college) and replace it with pauperized “contractors” too naive to calculate depreciation. And at the same ultimate fares, but with less share for the drivers.

Enjoy it while you can, I guess.

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