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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#431

Post by ekianjo »

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…

Your rant is misinformed, Uber uses Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/customers/uber/

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#432

Post by romski »

ekianjo wrote: post #431
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…

Your rant is misinformed, Uber uses Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/customers/uber/

I work at Uber and we do use an internally built chat app.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#433

Post by habosa »

I don't know the details of this situation and Uber is far from a healthy company, but I don't like that layoffs are always a sign of a company in peril in Silicon Valley.

1) This is a public company with shareholders. If they think they can cut costs without hurting their revenue outlook that's not a bad idea!

2) We all know that interviews for engineers in SV suck ... So why can't you fire someone if you make a mistake?

3) I work at a company (Google) where the prevailing assumption is that if a team is not getting enough done it should ask for more engineers. That almost never helps. It adds communication overhead and doesn't address the problem of why the team wasn't getting to where it thought it would. Just smothers the issues. The most effective teams I've ever worked with were 3-10 people who were motivated and working in their area of expertise.

4) We all know that one bad teammate can undo the work of two good ones.

I could go on. Yes I truly have sympathy for anyone who loses their job suddenly. It sucks for them and those who depend on them. It's probably good for Uber though.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#434

Post by [deleted] »

spookthesunset wrote: post #354
tmh79 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was the privacy/legal/security types driving this strategic decision, I can't really talk about it in more depth. A lot has changed since the decision was made, and if I personally was to reassess the situation now I believe I would go with a 3rd party SAAS solution, but back then building a chat app was on balance the correct decision to make.

> it was the privacy/legal/security types driving this strategic decision Booo on legal.... like I said earlier, it's easy to armchair quarterback. Sometimes I wonder how the fuck humanity even manages to make progress with so much waste and boneheaded decision making.

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#435

Post by grandridge »

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…

Shareholders pick the board, board picks CEO. If CEO wants to spend money that his choice until the board gets rid of him. It's not some sacred pile of cash that 'belongs to investors/shareholders'

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#436

Post by earthboundkid »

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…

I get that this is the normal ideological description of firms post-70s neoliberal whatever, but if that’s true, like why not just say firms suck, we need communism? Like your description makes Pikkety look like an optimist. “The purpose of a firm is to help rich people get money faster than other rich people” logically implies that eventually a small group of rich people will have all the wealth. That’s feudalism. If that’s the goal, let’s start a revolution instead.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#438

Post by vadym909 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #322
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/

> 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?

Why doesn't Uber spend less on Engg and pay more to their drivers- which may actually help its business.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#439

Post by jjeaff »

_2d30 wrote: post #420
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…

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".

I heard about that. That the team responsible tried to pass it off as their own. However, according to the CEO of mattermost, Uber has made extensive alterations.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#440

Post by earthboundkid »

earthboundkid wrote: post #436
dcolkitt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I get that this is the normal ideological description of firms post-70s neoliberal whatever, but if that’s true, like why not just say firms suck, we need communism? Like your description makes Pikkety look like an optimist. “The purpose of a firm is to help rich people get money faster than other rich people” logically implies that eventually a small group of rich people will have all the wealth. That’s feudalism. I…

Put it this way, if the standard theory of why capitalism beat Soviet communism is that competition created better products etc. none of that requires that the goal of firms is to create better than market average returns to shareholders rather than the goal of firms being a) earn sufficient profit to continue to exist b) benefit consumers c) benefit employees d) benefit shareholders. Yes shareholder would prefer to invest in companies that prioritize them over all else, but why should we the public not say “that’s not an acceptable charter. We don’t want feudalism to happen again, so we are not allowing firms to prioritize shareholders over consumers.”
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