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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#381

Post by ahelwer »

dcolkitt wrote: post #208
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…

> that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') I totally agree with everything you're saying. But I'm going to quibble with your phrasing. Apple's cash reserves belong to the shareholders just as much as Uber's funding rounds. Too many CEOs operate under the mistaken belief that retained earnings is "play money" in the way that paid-in-capital is not. For investors, retained earnings are su…

Alternatively, management could be inclined to not give piles of wealth to people who had zero hand in its creation (shareholders, modulo some employees who also own shares [rounding error]) and use it to pay engineers to do interesting things.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#382

Post by ThrustVectoring »

paulcole wrote: post #191
mrich wrote: post #184

They are in a race: Be the first with self-driving taxis and go for the monopoly, or run out of cash. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but my bet is on the latter. It's just such a hard problem, especially in cities. I just hope there won't be a kind of AI winter when some of these startups run out of money.

> 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…

>Are they going to spend billions to purchase and maintain a fleet of their own taxis?

They'll likely lease them, obviating much of the start-up cost involved.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#383

Post by johnvanommen »

eternalny1 wrote: post #180
txcwpalpha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also recently announced plans to hire 3,000+ in Dallas [1] at a brand new massive office. I'm sure the hiring and layoffs are from different business units, but it does seem strange that there's been multiple several-hundred-people-layoff stories form Uber recently at the same time they're announcing otherwise massive hiring expansion. I would at least figure that they would prefer to transfer engineers between…

Interesting if this is a way to get out from under crushing Bay Area tech salaries. I still see zero reason a company like Uber should be based in San Francisco. We landed a man on the moon with parts built all over the United States, so it's not "that's where the talent is".

> I still see zero reason a company like Uber should be based in San Francisco. We landed a man on the moon with parts built all over the United States, so it's not "that's where the talent is".

It's exceptionally difficult to get investment money if a tech company isn't located in the Bay Area or Seattle.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#384

Post by rrix2 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #321
tmh79 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decis…

> 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!

the general counsel and thus the entire legal org required for any company approved comms system a way to automatically by default destroy chat logs after 7 days (and to turn that off for folks who were on legal holds). slack in 2016 did not have that capability.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#385

Post by aloknnikhil »

mv4 wrote: post #380
spookthesunset wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice. What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet only handles 1M rides per day.

I don't see the analogy here. This is Lyft's core business. Of course they'll go all in. On the other hand chat is not Uber's core business. They didn't have to reinvent the wheel for an internal tool.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#386

Post by nighthawk648 »

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…

> Learn to plan better and prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done.

I often wonder how accurate the roadmap prioritization can be. I do agree it’s pretty silly to build a lot of infrastructure that will never effect your clients.

If you have for instance a billing process that needs to be automated, custom infrastructure is needed. Manual approvals of all transactions is a lot even for banks. Operations can always benefit from something that cuts their overhead time down a significant chunk. Operations approval on transactions seems like an operations problem but clients having to wait for approval means now the problem is shifted.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#387

Post by johnvanommen »

paulcole wrote: post #191
mrich wrote: post #184

They are in a race: Be the first with self-driving taxis and go for the monopoly, or run out of cash. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but my bet is on the latter. It's just such a hard problem, especially in cities. I just hope there won't be a kind of AI winter when some of these startups run out of money.

> 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…

> This is thrown out all the time. How exactly does this save them?

I agree 100%.

There's a lot of evidence that self-driving cars will be MORE expensive that paying people to drive their own cars. Particularly since the R&D costs are just prohibitive.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#388

Post by desertrider12 »

derefr wrote: post #377
fennecfoxen wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, let's just do all our business on an app that doesn't have SSO and instead anyone with the link who can sneak in has access. I'm sure that's not sketchy at all and your IT department will be thrilled.

> and instead anyone with the link who can sneak in has access You don't have to make those links (and you can turn off, per server, the ability to create those links.) You can invite specific users. The user already has to have a Discord account, though. And that's the thing; Discord has a different accounts model. Which is part of what I was referring to when I said they had a more solid tech base: when you're sign…

I always thought of Electron as a way to kick out a minimum viable product quickly before writing native versions. But nope, I guess give a $16 billion company 4 years and 1600 employees and that's still not feasible.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#389

Post by ilaksh »

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…

That line about do they look as they should is just first line of the marketing spin they put on their layoffs. Obviously there was a clear order to cut a lot of staff to reduce payroll costs. And people here are saying there were way more staff than necessary.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#390

Post by tbyehl »

tolmasky wrote: post #358
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…

Heh, this is the story of how Slack got built. Slack was built as an internal tool while building Glitch, an online game. From Wikipedia: > Slack began as an internal tool for Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck during the development of Glitch, a defunct online game.[13][14] "Slack" is an acronym for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.

Some day, Stewart Butterfield will launch a gaming company that is successful in the gaming space instead of becoming the inspiration for an entirely unrelated startup.
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