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Uber lays off 435 people

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421–430 of 611 posts

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#421

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…

Can you tell me if the M3 (time series db) team is still healthy? I was planning to evaluate it soon.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#422
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many Uber drivers are there? Also, don’t forget that slack has an API so write loads can be very different regardless of user count.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: Could you explain why I might want PowerShell on MacOS or Linux, if I use those as my primary OS? (I usually only open my windows VM for checking that my websites work in IE 11).

Linux is actually half of our usage on PS Core[1], so it's a great question. A lot of folks use PowerShell inside of CI/CD pipelines, especially for cross-platform app development of .NET Core applications (having a single build/test/deploy script is often cited as vastly preferable to trying to maintain a split of .ps1/.cmd/.bat and .sh/.py/.rb). But also, lots of folks prefer an object-oriented pipeline. Many of th…

This was far more detailed than I expected. You seem very passionate for PowerShell. The rest method exploration looks very cool, I knew I might learn something cool by asking. Thanks!

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#424
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many Uber drivers are there? Also, don’t forget that slack has an API so write loads can be very different regardless of user count.

Was this chat app for external contractors as well? Highly doubt it.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#425
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Electron gets a lot of hate on HN. I get it. But IMHO the existence of VSC (Visual Studio Code) -- as an extraordinarily useful, powerful, compelling cross-platform application -- serves as the only counterexample needed to puncture the "it sucks bc it's Electron" trope.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#426
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand why the above user is getting downvoted to oblivion by people who don’t understand legalities. Trade dress[1] is a form of intellectual property. This is what prevents a company from copying a competitor down to the pixel. Apple and Samsung fought an infamous and long legal battle over this. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress

[2] https://revisionlegal.com/trademarks/lessons-trademarking-tr...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#427
post #377

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…

A dozen web sockets are not the reason for high resource usage. Web sockets take very little to maintain.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#429

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…

Can you tell me if the M3 (time series db) team is still healthy? I was planning to evaluate it soon.

Any open source project without a healthy ecosystem is always at jeopardy. Use something that doesn't require you to question NDA information from some company.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#430

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

Only profitable if they can ever find a way to make the chat self-driving.
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