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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#391

Post by dahart »

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…

> Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' [...]

Like I completely agree with your overall point about reckless overengineering, but you also just listed three true and really good reasons to avoid integrating Slack.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#392

Post by GauntletWizard »

rrix2 wrote: post #384
spookthesunset wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defaul…

The fact that that number was "7 days" tells you everything you need to know about Uber's internal culture.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#393

Post by spiznnx »

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.

uChat is a fork of Mattermost, which looks like an exact copy too.

https://mattermost.com/

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#394

Post by theamk »

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 don’t think this is an advantage? Work account can be accessed by your IT department, locked out when you leave, investigated for any reason. I certainly don’t want to have any links to my personal stuff at all!

As for github.com, our official IT recommendation that people don’t use their personal accounts, but create one just for work. This way there is no worries about personal data there.

(This is at a subsidiary of a large international company. I can believe small startups use a simpler methods)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#395

Post by delfinom »

spookthesunset wrote: post #347
mv4 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

What? You are crazy. At a certain scale, it is cheaper to run your own DC. But that scale is reached by a very limited few.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#396

Post by kerng »

jdsully wrote: post #89
Zenst wrote: post #76

I wonder about Uber, they have spent lots of money branding and getting everything in place, that they overshot the whole making money aspect and now playing catchup. Problem is, will they reach that balance before they bleed beyond the point that they become vulture targets for another large company to step in, cherry pick what they want and discard the rest. With all that said, I wonder if maybe Amazon or some self…

Uber was very profitable when they just had Uber Black. The problem is they were disrupted themselves by Lyft and had to launch UberX (give Travis credit for launching this before Lyft even though it was their idea).

Nah, that is about Uber Pool, not UberX.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#398

Post by liveoneggs »

andylei wrote: post #352
derefr wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is exactly what they did https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

they wrote that fancy blog post but couldn't scale ejabberd to 50k users? Whatsapp managed to scale ejabberd into whatsapp so..

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#399

Post by braythwayt »

mynegation wrote: post #326
braythwayt wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, the colloquial understanding of a “layoff” is that it is not based on underperformers, but based on changing business conditions.

For example, closing a plant, or getting out of a line of business. If Uber decides not to have anything more to do with self-driving vehicles, they might lay off everyone in its division.

That would have nothing to do with poor performance on the part of individuals.

On the other hand, there is “These people are underperformers,” which is part of Uber’s allegation as they throw their former employees under the bus rather than take responsibility for their management choices.

I contend that if people are underperformers, a constant trickle of letting such people go is not bad for morale. It’s perfectly normal.

“Did you hear they let Dave go?” “Yeah. What took them so long?” That’s the usual talk.

Whereas, “Did you hear that they shut down ML?” “Yeah, and it was half the database tuning group last month, who’ll be next?” “I dunno, but I’m not hanging around to find out...” is the thing you are describing.

Long story short, I agree that a trickle of layoffs is not good, but I suggest that this is true when the people being let go are not thought of as holding the company back.

I disagree that it doesn’t matter who it is. If they are underperforming in the sense of being bottom 10% but still carrying their costs, I agree with you about trickle, but then we can’t claim that letting them go makes the company stronger.

But if they are underperforming to the extent that letting them go makes the engineering group more effective, then management should have identified them earlier, done everything in its power to make them perform, and let them go if they didn’t improve.

Ignoring net negative employees, or being blind to whether they are net negative, or keeping them around even though they are known to be net negative is bad for the company’s bottom line and bad for its morale.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#400

Post by sdan »

segmondy wrote: post #351
spookthesunset wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

They might have to pivot into a chat company

"Uber Chat -- because that's one thing you didn't know you needed!"
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