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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#531

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

Zulip is already a thing. Not to mention other floss alternatives.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#532

Post by mucholove »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #527
jholloway7 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Looking at this from Spain, you did do this over the weekend. I also work 6 days a week—but my hope is that this didn’t take the place of building a family, having a relationship, finding a relationship going for a hike in the mountains, citizen science, or making art. Your weekend is valuable!

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#533

Post by catwell »

dx034 wrote: post #496
raz32dust wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really, 50 maintainers for a 5000 user system? I'd think it scales much better, probably 2-3 people for the whole company. And in that case, it can quickly be cheaper than slack

At Uber scale, you probably already have your own SMTP servers used by all your employees, so that's not really a problem.

Moreover, email is hard and does require a dedicated team, but the order of magnitude is wrong here. 5 people is plenty.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#534

Post by dagw »

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…

I hate, hate, hate when engineers with a bad understanding of business and too much time on their hands

The equal and opposite problem is managers who don't understand the sunk cost fallacy and refuse to throw out home grown solutions. Sometimes there might have been a good idea to homebrew a thing years ago because nothing good existed. Now several better solutions exist but the company refuses to adopt them because doing so would mean "throwing away" years of work, and the managers who signed off on that work are afraid they'll look bad.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#535

Post by nikita2206 »

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…

You think a client of that size would’ve been billed using pricing designed for mere mortals?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#536

Post by arbol »

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.

Funnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com

Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#539

Post by monkeydust »

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…

Really interesting, it sounds like you overhired in engineering and underhired in product management.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#540

Post by aryamaan »

arbol wrote: post #536
Piskvorrr wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

> Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

Uber's internal chat tool is built on top of Mattermost.

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