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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#541

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

I take it you mean Uber? I find it hard to believe Slack has 27000 employees.

Anyway, as another commenter pointed out, on an enterprise scale I'm sure you can get a good deal. I can also imagine however that at that scale you'll want multiple Slack servers / instances - which would add cost given how slack charges per person, per server.

So there's a few alternatives then; self-hosted (some parties will offer enterprise customers the option to host an instance of their application on the customers' internal hardware), or rebuild it yourself. The latter one however takes a bit of math - how much is it going to cost to build, maintain and run it? It's easily underestimated.

And yet, it's also easy for people working in an engineering culture with nearly limitless engineering capacity to just build it themselves - motivations being "how hard can it be", and "I need something more challenging than tweaking this button for my employer to earn 0.1% more money on this particular feature". I've seen it happen far too often.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#542

Post by federicotdn »

aj7 wrote: post #371
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…

This guy thinks he’s safe.

He isn't?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#543

Post by happppy »

Maybe Uber should focus on fixing their main app first. Driver can't get rides even after being online for hours sometimes. Card payments are being delayed and now I know why they are decreasing bonuses day by day, due to over hiring, because they have to pay over hired engineers a shit amount of money thus decreasing drivers bonuses!

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#544

Post by Jelo »

I hope the 435 people laid off by Uber find the strength, the vibes and the zeal to push forth with life. I hope they don't see this as a setback but as a stepping stone to greater heights. I pray they find peace within.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#545

Post by happppy »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #106

Uber's core business is a taxi app and I get that there are some clever algorithms involved, but I still don't really understand how they justify the size of their engineering team. I read that they had 2,000 engineers out of 6,000 employees in 2016, though I don't know the numbers now. That seems gigantic.

I read Uber engineering blogs and there's a new blog every other day. IMO they are just over-engineering things thus justifying the size of engineers?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#546

Post by danpalmer »

shaklee3 wrote: post #484
uber_throwawa12 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has only recently been possible. For a long time Slack was capped at 5k per workspace, then later a similar number per channel.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#548

Post by LaGrange »

ecnahc515 wrote: post #405
LaGrange wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same in Slovenia, yeah. Call, wait 15 minutes, cab shows up... or not ...I had that happen _once_, and: > at least they tell you immediately if the driver cancels. ...exactly that happened. Amazing, it's like they ask you for your phone number for a reason. This wasn't much of a problem pretty much since cell phones became a mainstay. I am not sure how Uber improves on that, guesses from the travel path that the dr…

An Uber can't pick up a new passenger without cancelling their current pickup or picking up their current passenger and finishing the ride. Either way, the passenger both can see if they're coming to pick them up, and are made aware immediately if the driver cancels. With cabs, you're expecting a cabby to call to dispatch that they're not picking you up. A cabby can easily be on the way to pick you up, find someone o…

> A cabby can easily be on the way to pick you up, find someone on the way and never let you know.

...what? That sounds really unlikely.

> cabbies never let you know if they're not coming in my experience.

Well, that's opposite of mine.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#549

Post by yitchelle »

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.

Only companies with mega deep pockets (to pay the real winners ie the lawyers) would engage in these type of tom foolery.

I am talking about Samsung and Apple here..

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#550

Post by a_t48 »

mucholove wrote: post #532
Piskvorrr wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You're totally right that the weekend is valuable, but some people enjoy doing this sort of thing with their free time. It's not anyone's place to decide what anyone else does for entertainment or self improvement. That is to say - what is not valuable to you might be valuable to someone else.
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