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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have to pivot into a chat company

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

Group chats all ready are:

You can take your hands off completely, even go and do something else, read a book, write an email, book some flights, and the chat will drive itself ... somewhere.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventing engineers who are working on it from working at the competition?

That's pretty stupid. If this was truly their strategy, they're just raising everyone's costs. They can't out-compete Google at this game.

Google has a chat app?

What's it called this week?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#443

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.

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#444
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-trademark…

It only matters for product you sell (hence the reference to consumer confusion). Ubers chat sounds like it's solely for internal use.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#445

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.

Constrained solution space > all chat apps look the same.

Except Snapchat, I still can't work out what that's about.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#446

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…

Decision to build a chat app might seem wrong now in hindsight but this could have been a strategic move (as hinted in original comment).

Look at their competitors in Asia (all-in-one services like WeChat, GoJek etc. where search, chat, ride hailing, banking etc. are all built in one app) and it would make sense for them to have an engineering team building a chat app.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#447
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Are you sure? In the recent book about Uber written by Mike Isaac,the author stated that Lyft was the first to launch a low cost ride service with non professional drivers and Uber rushed to copy them.

Sidecar launched the driver brings their car model.

Zimride (lyft) started the first rideshare site. Unless you count craigslist ads.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#448
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.

> How many Uber drivers are there?

None, they're all independent contractors.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#450
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The story I heard was that the team in charge of building uchat whitelabeled mattermost and tried to pass it off as a custom job.

Perhaps the memo didn't make it around to everyone.

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