Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber lays off 435 people

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 611 posts

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#481

Post by flukus »

moate wrote: post #30
rubicon33 wrote: post #8

There's definitely a tightening of capital happening right now. Investors are pulling back as fear of recession grows. EDIT: Did I say I believe there's a recession coming? No. I said (accurately) that there are growing FEARS of one. There's definitely tightening of investments and capital happening.

I mean there's also the fact that California has pending legislation that seems ready to pass that will kick Uber (and others in the gig economy space) right in the wallet. Next 2 years should be interesting as we see what effect that has on things.

What's funny is that if they were employees then uber would be a lot harder to compete with. As it is now uber drivers will use several apps and often recommend competitors to customers, which they're entitled to do as private contractors.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#482

Post by redwall_hp »

Meekro wrote: post #335
siddarthd2919 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Slack not suing Uber for uChat? The images on the link look like an exact copy.

Check out some screenshots of Discord, that basically looks like "Slack with a dark theme."

And they all look like any generic IRC client with fatter margins and some other 2010+ fluff.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#483

Post by chrischen »

jdro wrote: post #161
landryraccoon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get why Uber isn’t profitable. Their marginal cost is only higher than zero because they choose to lose money. Their fixed costs are servers and engineering. If they set their prices higher than what drivers are willing to accept they should make money. I don’t see how “basic economics” is the enemy. Their enemy is setting expectations too high. If they were happy with a profit of $100M a year they would be s…

This is a worthwhile writeup of how Uber's operating costs are generally higher than the industry it "disrupted" without actually solving the structural problems that industry had found an equilibrium around: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-des...

I don't know if you've ever taken a taxi before but this is nearly impossible for your statement to be true, simply by considering that the shared rides are more efficient from a common sense point of view.

Even if Uber isn't operating with more efficiency right now due to R&D and global expansion, there's no reason why they can't be given that they aren't operated by a guy on a telephone manually dispatching cars.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#484

Post by shaklee3 »

uber_throwawa12 wrote: post #296
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…

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.

There's no way this is true. There are companies far, far larger than Uber that run slack with no problem.

Even the public kubernetes workspace has almost 75k people in a single channel.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#485

Post by toomanybeersies »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #430
segmondy wrote: post #351

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.

With more and more chat and email apps offering auto-generated/suggested replies (e.g. what Gmail offers) we're on our way there.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#486

Post by chrischen »

bagacrap wrote: post #44
paulddraper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know it might be an unpopular opinion, but I think his leadership and vision were really instrumental to Uber's early success. I don't think that's an unpopular opinion at all. Never heard someone say otherwise. EDIT: From the the downvotes I can tell I am wrong. Please help educate me: Honest question: Who or what was "really instrumental to Uber's early success"?

> Honest question: Who or what was "really instrumental to Uber's early success"? Using VC funding to bankroll an unprofitable business model, undercutting existing industry players who didn't have multiple billion dollar rocket boosters, mostly. Ignoring laws and other unethical practices no doubt helped.

For non techy startup nerds, it was probably the fact that the Taxi industry was almost universally loathed, expensive, and unreliable.

The on-demand rides industry (Lyft, Uber, et al) managed to not only lower pricing, but also bring Karma (bi-lateral user ratings) to the whole industry so that a driver can't just say "fuck you" to a passenger without consequence (nor could the passenger to the driver). If this didn't improve the world, I'm not sure what does.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#487

Post by shaklee3 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #347
mv4 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft is no better, spending $8M per month on AWS to process 1M transactions per day.

AWS is the opposite of homebrew. Lyft has no business maintaining its own data centers and operational overhead. There is a huge opportunity cost involved with running your own infrastructure. AWS and the like free your own teams from worrying about how to provision new systems, upgrading DB server versions, etc. Running your own data center is hard. Running your own DC is the same as building your own chat app. It i…

Running your own data center is at one extreme. Most companies lease space in a datacenter, and all of the overhead of running the data center is on a different company. You'd have an infrastructure team racking and stacking, and supporting the deployments.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#488

Post by jclulow »

jjeaff wrote: post #439
_2d30 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having used Mattermost a lot for the last few years, you'd really _want_ to make extensive modifications to at least the mobile clients if you want things to work properly.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#489

Post by [deleted] »

evancox100 wrote: post #344
fzeroracer wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to doubt your own experiences, but if that was honestly true then Uber should also be scaling back hiring and not be opening new major offices with large hiring sprees. There was some earlier discussion here on why trust between employees and employers is so low now, and this is a great example. Employees being laid off while new positions open up for that exact same role so that they can hire new developers at a…

At companies I have worked at, the employees being let go are often given the opportunity to apply for other available positions. Maybe the case here?

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#490

Post by raz32dust »

22c wrote: post #455
dahart wrote: post #391

Earlier 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.

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.

If the company relies on Mattermost, I would assume they'd need at least one maintainer per ~100 users, just to make sure that the SMTP keeps working reliably, there are backups etc. One person to maintain Mattermost would cost a company at least 150000 USD in the bay area. That's $100+ per month per user. Slack is way cheaper than that.
Post reply on HN