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"Khosrowshahi said the company is winding down its product incubator and artificial-intelligence lab" Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that? Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb? Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will…
"Khosrowshahi said the company is winding down its product incubator and artificial-intelligence lab" Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that? Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR
These are different efforts from ATG, the self-driving car division.
"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/uber-nabs-1-billion-self-dri...
Dara's email was really well written, and felt as compassionate as one can for a letter from a CEO announcing job cuts. The full email: Team Uber: These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly…
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
Dara's email was really well written, and felt as compassionate as one can for a letter from a CEO announcing job cuts. The full email: Team Uber: These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly…
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that but who knows.
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb? Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will…
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with equating ethical with generous. Basically it turns ethics into money, with the idea you can buy ethicalness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people "Independent contractors" working from home and using their own equipment. "Gig economy". Hope they enjoy it.
Geez, this is incredibly callous. These are real people who are losing their livelihoods.
If you were forecasting how this company in particular would deal with a downturn, it's a reasonable guess that they'll try to do the same thing to their own workforce, if they can find engineers willing to take on gig work. It's in their DNA.
To be charitable, the grandfather comment is a warning to think about the broader effects of the work we do, driven home by the possibility of a "what goes around comes around" situation.
EDIT: as many have pointed out, taxi drivers don't get benefits either (I originally said one of the margins Uber competes on is not providing benefits).
Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb? Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will…
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with equating ethical with generous. Basically it turns ethics into money, with the idea you can buy ethicalness.
Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.
The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.
We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.