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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#521

Post by fergie »

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…

"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees.

Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), it could actually be a pretty sensible decision- especially when you take into account the tax and stock-price benefits of capital expenditure.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#522

Post by johnnyfaehell »

greentrust wrote: post #478
buildzr wrote: post #457

Earlier 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.

Ex-uber engineer here. Uber's chat app is based on Mattermost, not built from scratch.

From my experience that kinda makes it worse because constantly people will say "X has this now this add that" and it's normally a case of "Well that's a ton of work to do because we did Y".

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#523

Post by icebraining »

desertrider12 wrote: post #465
chrisweekly wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron gets a lot of hate on HN. I get it. But IMHO the existence of VSC (Visual Studio Code) -- as an extraordinarily useful, powerful, compelling cross-platform application -- serves as the only counterexample needed to puncture the "it sucks bc it's Electron" trope.

It can absolutely still be useful, and it would make sense for an early stage startup or someone's side project to use it so they're not duplicating work porting it to .NET, Cocoa and Qt or whatever. And sure, having an identical look and feel everywhere is nice. But with all the resources that Slack and Microsoft have, they need to publish a lengthy guide for the users to deal with their performance problems [1]? Th…

"Visual Studio Code jumps to the end of the file quickly, but then takes many seconds for the highlighting to complete."

I'm quite fine with that, frankly. Highlighting correctly requires actually parsing the file. I use vim and the colors get wonky way too many times, because it tries to "keep it fast".

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#524

Post by tozeur »

siddarthd2919 wrote: post #333
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/

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

The post says they used an open source chat core called Mattermost.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#525

Post by goatinaboat »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #403
goatinaboat wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Old Republic was OK with slavery and left Anakin’s mother to die. Any one of us would have done the same in his place.

Unfortunately many people lose close family members, even parents, in tragic, horrible, unfair circumstances that never see justice all the time. Most of them - I would wager almost absolutely all of them - do not commit mass murder afterwards. I vehemently disagree with your opinion about what I would have done in his place and register my unease with how you raise it as an obvious general norm.

Vader moved fast and broke things sure, but he succeeded in disrupting the Old Republic. That’s why he’s the real hero of Star Wars, and a role model for the tech community in general.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#526

Post by Piskvorrr »

fergie wrote: post #521
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…

"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees. Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), i…

Unless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't require building from scratch.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#527

Post by Piskvorrr »

jholloway7 wrote: post #515
22c wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's not pretend that hosting an OSS chat server is a walk in the park for every enterprise just because you personally got one up and running in a weekend.

Let's not pretend that building one from scratch isn't at least an order of magnitude harder, either.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#528

Post by thecleaner »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #526
fergie wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees. Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), i…

Unless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't require building from scratch.

+1 for mattermost. Works out of box for most applications. But I think people will find it surprising how quickly one starts to run out of space. People can be very chatty.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#529

Post by robryan »

reallydude wrote: post #419
CydeWeys wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're paying 26 cents per ride on all compute resources across their entire company? That doesn't really sound that bad, considering that rides can easily cost dozens of dollars. Just about any other non-tech business would kill for such low overhead.

> 26 cents per ride That's terrible. Other non-tech businesses, hell EVERY business that I've ever worked in that used AWS did better per transaction - healthcare, digital advertising, virtual office tooling, gaming. If you can't do better than a credit card processing fee per paid customer interaction across the company on AWS, you might as well be selling retail goods...and depending on age, your company might be s…

Even if it is terrible, is the business such than a 26 cent overhead on rides is going to make or break it?

Companies like Lyft are doing a lot more than updating a few fields for each ride. They would be processing massive amounts of location data and they are building out models to eventually use for self driving cars.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#530

Post by thecleaner »

piyushpr134 wrote: post #510
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…

It cannot be shittier than slack. My slack desktop app consumes like 20% of my macbook's ram and phone app misses important notifications

I have found the over-consumption problem with electron based apps in general. However I didn't really miss notifications.
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