Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber laying off several hundred people is not a signal for a market recession. How is your comment relevant?
I didn't say that it was.
Okay. How is your comment relevant to Uber layoffs?
Uber lays off 435 people
471–480 of 611 posts
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ok, so now those s/SWEs/operations/ folks had nothing better to do than reinvent the wheel.
It takes 1 person a few percent of their time to manage something like that for internal use only. And you still get the gains of keeping secrets internal and cost savings on licensing costs which might actually pay for a good chunk of the effort in the case of running an existing service.
Compare with a small development team for a significant percentage of their time to build a halfway decent chat tool.
Miles of difference.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#473Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The first AWS service was launched over 15 years after Amazon.com started selling books on the Internet. It wasn’t even a separate brand until after Amazon S3, SQS and EC2 were launched.
> The first AWS service was launched over 15 years after Amazon.com started selling books on the Internet.
Close. It was roughly 11 years. I've been using Amazon AWS since early 2007; I believe it launched to the public in the form we know today in early 2006. They started selling books online to the public in mid 1995.
If you go back to the very first AWS services - 2002 - it's closer to being only seven years.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At least a year and a half ago, Android notifications weren't at all reliable, even when on wi-fi. You'd have to start the app most of the time to get them. I can't remember if it was Rocket.Chat or Mattermost that also was taking 15% of the CPU while idling on macOS, but I think it was Mattermost.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#476Hello 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…
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Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#477Hello 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…
Is there any "chat app" that is really better than github/gitlab and a good IRC or XMPP server? I am constantly disappointed by slack. I wish google waves was still around...
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Ex-uber engineer here. Uber's chat app is based on Mattermost, not built from scratch.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#479Earlier 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.
You think Slack came up with that design? Hah.
Re: Uber lays off 435 people
#480Hello 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…
I recently worked with a ex-uber engineer, hired by a ex-uber engineer manager. We were piloting use of launchdarkly, and he suggested we just build it ourselves as he has already done it few times and would take him only few months to build.