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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#411

Post by CydeWeys »

sbarre wrote: post #135
simonrobb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really cost anything to open source something though. These are all projects which are developed for a reason: the commercial version might be prohibitively expensive at Uber scale, or not technically capable of operating at Uber scale, or just plain doesn't exist yet. At that point you can engage with the tech community and offer it as OSS (not to mention make your engineers happy), or you can keep it to…

That's not true. It costs quite a bit to open source a product if you're a commercial entity.. It needs to be reviewed (by legal, security, engineering, etc) and approved.. You're not just flipping the public/private flag on the repo.

We open sourced my team's project a few years ago ( https://nomulus.foo ) and it was a substantial amount of work. There's everything you're saying plus a fair amount of engineering to get the darn thing working externally; we were built/hosted within the Google monorepo which is obviously not externalizable. And you end up spending lots of time writing documentation that you hadn't ever gotten around to when it was just a project being worked on by a handful of engineers all sharing adjacent desks.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#412

Post by CydeWeys »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #192
AgloeDreams wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was making more taxis on the road with more downtime and increasing congestion really an improvement in cities? A Recent study found that 50% of all cars in lower manhattan were rideshares. Is that really a better world? Ridesharing in cities has been absolutely proven to increase pollution rather than reduce while carpooling in rural areas helps reduce pollution. The problem with rideshares is that they are jobs bas…

There is surplus value to the customer that you aren't accounting for. Mass transit is a far worse experience than Uber.

And the negative externalities of all those additional cars on the road are far worse than if you just have more people using the existing subway, too.

If you're going to do a full accounting of all the costs of all those additional cars on the road, and all that additional congestion, then rideshare doesn't come out looking so rosy.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#413

Post by theincredulousk »

StreamBright wrote: post #247
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…

>> In contrast to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc. that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') on research and OSS side-projects You are assuming that these companies are letting engineers to do side-projects that are unrelated to their day to day work? As far as I know the OSS projects these companies put out are in line what they use internally for day to day work and…

A side-project isn't by definition irrelevant, and of course by sheer probability the engineers at those companies are, on average, going to create things that are within their area of expertise which is usually related to what the company they work at does :).

The motivations for making software OSS are varied and often strategic. For example software is often open sourced to:

* deliberately commoditize it - to eliminate competition and differentiation in that area / stack layer * leverage additional (free) testing and development. * Drive ecosystem / platform adoption * Literally free up customer budgets to be spent with them, rather than on licensing 3rd party software * Intangible benefits like community image, employee satisfaction, etc. * Some combination of above when the software is useful internally, but simply not in a market that the company wants to compete in, or a market worth their time

In any case, the point was that they are "side-projects" from a business perspective in that they cost money but don't generate revenue - the benefits are hard to quantify. Successful, stable companies have much more breathing room for strategic and the "hard to quantify" ROIs than does a company on a trajectory towards bankruptcy. It is kind of like an individual out-of-work engineer with a month's expenses left in the bank choosing to contribute to OSS instead of seeking out paid work. It is not that contributing to OSS is wrong, it is that the priorities in that situation are backwards.

RE: "Nobody is forcing Uber to employ people in California." That is entirely true, but I'm not sure what your point is. My comment is a post-mortem on what led to the layoffs. It is a priori that nobody has forced Uber to do anything that it did...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#414

Post by dannyw »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #260
pmart123 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airbnb seems to do similar things, but has a better business model to support it. I kind of get it from a recruiting standpoint and they probably did need to build some customized software given the scale they have. My guess is they spent far more money trying to conquer rideshare in multiple countries, self driving, and side businesses. At the same time, they did look like they were also developing some pretty low l…

Can someone explain to me what are the technical challenges at Airbnb? They need to handle less requests than the top airlines or hotel booking websites. Airbnb is a business innovation with a shiny website frontend. But I really don't get all the hype around Airbnb engineering.

You don't need immensely challenging technical problems to make hiring good engineers worthwhile.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#415

Post by shagie »

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…

> Self driving cars are a case of when, not if as so much being done in the field, progress has become a hot competition and slowly getting there.

My skepticism of self driving vehicles in general is in desert climates. I really want to see a self driving taxi the day after a blizzard in Chicago (or elsewhere in the upper midwest... or even NYC when there's a good storm) where on some streets two lanes in each direction become one, and intersections can become "well, I'm not stoping because the car isn't stoping, thankfully the other drivers understand this and aren't asserting right of way when things are slippery". Some roads are closed and the smart drivers are happily driving 20 under the speed limit on the highway behind a snow plow.

Until then, self driving really strikes me as more of a California or summer time thing.

They say they're working on it ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/alphabet-... )

> Snowy conditions are a serious challenge for the laser-based Lidar and other sensors that self-driving cars use to see objects in their path. Waymo said it’ll start working to overcome weather issues in Detroit’s notoriously tough winter months.

but I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#416

Post by erghoe »

theincredulousk wrote: post #368
tln wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 essentiall…

FWIW, Instagram stores Stories, privately to the user, in its "Archive" feature indefinitely.

https://instagram-press.com/blog/2017/12/05/introducing-stor...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#417

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

theincredulousk wrote: post #342
jacquesm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't understand where people are getting that they said they are "culling low performers". I didn't see that anywhere in the article.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#419

Post by reallydude »

CydeWeys wrote: post #410
mv4 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they're paying 26 cents per ride on all compute resources across their entire company? That doesn't really sound that bad, considering that rides can easily cost dozens of dollars. Just about any other non-tech business would kill for such low overhead.

> 26 cents per ride That's terrible.

Other non-tech businesses, hell EVERY business that I've ever worked in that used AWS did better per transaction - healthcare, digital advertising, virtual office tooling, gaming. If you can't do better than a credit card processing fee per paid customer interaction across the company on AWS, you might as well be selling retail goods...and depending on age, your company might be soon.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#420

Post by _2d30 »

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…

Uber didn't make their own chat app. They just use Mattermost. It was a comical sham internally perpetuated by the team that rolled it out that it was "built in-house".
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