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Uber is laying off 10% of staff

uber.com

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Re: Uber is laying off 10% of staff

#21

Post by mhitza »

RestlessMind wrote: post #16
garbawarb wrote: post #3

> We are also asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office, and going forward, only ~1% of employees will be remote. If you believe in return-to-office as a soft layoff, even more than 10% will be leaving.

“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.” 100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. Th…

When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure.

But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.

Re: Uber is laying off 10% of staff

#22

Post by Synthetic7346 »

Artgor wrote: post #2

"In Pulse surveys and conversations with many of you, we’ve heard that too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear. I’m sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time “aligning” rather than building, shipping, or serving customers. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the c…

"Complain about coordination, get laid off" is what this reads like

Re: Uber is laying off 10% of staff

#27

Post by nitwit005 »

Artgor wrote: post #2

"In Pulse surveys and conversations with many of you, we’ve heard that too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear. I’m sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time “aligning” rather than building, shipping, or serving customers. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the c…

It's logical if you view them as unsuccessful.

But if "decision-making rights are unclear" is listed, it seems unlikely those people were the problem.

Re: Uber is laying off 10% of staff

#28

Post by throwforfeds »

RestlessMind wrote: post #16
garbawarb wrote: post #3

> We are also asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office, and going forward, only ~1% of employees will be remote. If you believe in return-to-office as a soft layoff, even more than 10% will be leaving.

“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.” 100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. Th…

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience.

Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.

Re: Uber is laying off 10% of staff

#30

Post by paimapi »

sidcool wrote: post #19
slantedview wrote: post #12

Revenue is up massively, so we'll be getting rid of the people that helped that happen. Genius move.

This is a common strategy nowadays. Not sure of the rationale

I thought it was common knowledge that

1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring

2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...

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