Scaling back on the engineering and product teams was a smart move to cut costs. The promotions in engineering have been based on rollout of new features. No one was willing to be a grown up and require the engineering team to fix actual problems with the core product, the app. That is on the VPs. Sure, fixing bugs is not as much fun as building new features but Uber needs to make its core product better. Uber also had the opportunity to use a mapping system like google maps or Tom Tom the way that Lyft has. Instead, they built their own proprietary system at huge expense, refused to scrap it after it became clear it would be advantageous to do so, and have yet to work out the bugs with turn by turn navigation. There are some brilliant people at Uber doing amazing things, there are also a lot of ridiculous side projects with engineering teams devoted to them like the flying car team. It’s unfortunate that Uber laid off so many people. Maybe if upper management had made smarter choices about how they measure and reward success internally prior to this they would not be in the situation they are in.
Uber lays off 435 people
451–460 of 611 posts
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#452Uber is also planning to open an office for 3k employees in Dallas. "...create 3,000 full-time jobs and pay employees an average salary of at least $100,000..." Considering the lower cost to operate in TX it would make sense to move IT roles to that area. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2019/08/09/ub...
I know many engineers who want to get out of the Bay Area. San Francisco is a disaster, they’re priced out of the the peninsula, and commuting one or two hours each way from the hinterlands loses its appeal real fast.
That said, getting laid off like this would be much harder to bounce back from if you were not in a tech hub.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how the solution to this is always: "Let's build our own thing!" instead of: "Let's just use something free and/or open source."
Open Source chat tools are sadly almost universally disappointing. I believe I tried just about every one of them before giving up and just using Slack. I detailed the reasons here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 I have the impression that Slack has gotten worse. We're again having problems of notifications not showing up.
We've been using mattermost internally for a year or so and his has worked flawlessly. I can't tell the difference from slack.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#454Hello 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.
Chronosphere (https://chronosphere.io/) was recently started by ex-Uber engineers to build a commercial ecosystem around M3. M3 is Uber's metrics platform and isn't going anywhere. M3DB (the TSDB built to support M3) is becoming fairly integral to Uber in its own right. I'd say the trajectory is positive.
Disclaimer: I work on the M3DB team.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#455Earlier 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…
> 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.
I setup an enterprise-grade Mattermost server in a weekend. The hardest part wasn't even Mattermost itself, but getting SMTP working reliably in the age of DKIM/SPF/DMARC policies. This could be sidestepped by using any of the well-established email providers.
No reason to use Slack when such options exist, but also no reason to write your own chat app, either.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#456Earlier 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…
How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The real issue here is a lack of vision at the top. The current CEO needs to step down for the health of the company. He has a clear lack of vision for the company, as evidenced by his statement of "do your divisions look like what they should if we had to start over?" Who says that? Something so vague that is basically grasping at stra…
Amazon wasn't even using AWS at the beginning. AWS was a new product category for them. Albeit, they were able to leverage their institutional knowledge of managing data centers and probably the extra capacity of some of their servers.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#457Earlier 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…
> 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.
Sure but like, run Mattermost or Lync or an XMPP server with apps pre-built for it... don't build your own system. Just a waste of effort.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#458Hello 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…
> because the original author left for greener pastures
Well that's the incentive for that kind of behaviour, pad your resume and get another job.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the difference is that Han came around at the end of A New Hope , joined the Rebellion, and saved Luke’s ass, which lead to the Death Star’s destruction. This proved he wasn’t a complete scoundrel and had good within him. Uber’s corporate culture was ugly and toxic from the start. And it never got better or “came around” to a good cause. A better analogy would be Anakin moving from small-time massacres of Sand Pe…
The Death Star's destruction also killed thousands and thousands of soldiers, bureaucrats, and construction workers. A lot of who is good/bad in Star Wars is perspective. The Jedi can also be seen as religious extremists that kidnap children to indoctrinate in their ways, to lead in terrorist missions that help impose their view on an entire galaxy. Darth Vader is an emperor protecting his empire from a growing threa…
By creating a weapon of mass destruction that destroys whole planets? I think the scale of that endeavor and the resulting destruction of Alderaan is justification enough for destroying the Death Star. But destroying Alderaan itself? I don't see any justification for that in the vein of him protecting his empire. They certainly didn't seem to pose a threat big enough for the planet to be destroyed.
When one side escalates to that point, and the other side takes away their weapon of escalation, it's false equivalency to try to equate the two.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#460My question is, do they forfeit the RSUs given to the laid-off workers?