Uber lays off 435 people • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#201

Post by notyourday » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #179

jacquesm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying they're ~ "culling the low performers" can be entirely true Even if it isn't they have just branded everybody with 'Uber' on their CV that is on the market a low performer. Think before you speak.

It's especially a dick move when everybody already knows they're hurting for cash, and the official position could be "we just can't afford all these people" without the company losing any face. They aren't fooling anybody by pretending it's not about the cost.

You can't be a unicorn and not be able to afford the people. This is not a story for people in the tech who know about the industry and the six figure salaries engineers at unicorns make.

This is a story for retail that will be buying stock. "We cannot afford X" can be an stock buster.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#202

Post by balls187 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #197

novok wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to lay off people in a cross cutting manner, who would you choose?

People who aren't critical to the core product, or whose projects aren't big revenue generators. They might be high performers while being technically unprofitable.

> They might be high performers while being technically unprofitable.

Why would you do that vs moving the high performers to the business critical projects?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#203

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #191

mrich wrote: post #184

They are in a race: Be the first with self-driving taxis and go for the monopoly, or run out of cash. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but my bet is on the latter. It's just such a hard problem, especially in cities. I just hope there won't be a kind of AI winter when some of these startups run out of money.

> Be the first with self-driving taxis This is thrown out all the time. How exactly does this save them? Are they going to spend billions to purchase and maintain a fleet of their own taxis? Are they going to be paying people to "borrow" their self-driving cabs? Something else? I just don't see how this suddenly changes the equation in a meaningful way. People aren't going to spend more for a self-driving ride and th…

>> Be the first with self-driving taxis

>This is thrown out all the time. How exactly does this save them?

They know that their days of paying drivers less than a living wage and no benefits are numbered. They have two options: Raise ride prices to pay drivers more, or get rid of drivers altogether. They're betting on the latter. The costs go down dramatically because buying cars is a one-time capital expense, rather than an ongoing cost of doing business. (Yes cars require maintenance but this is still cheaper than paying drivers.)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#204

Post by meddlepal » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

trenning wrote: post #88

hendzen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strategy works very well if you have a gigantic money printing machine, which Google does. Uber has a gigantic money incinerating machine. They don't have the ability to just have engineers spinning their wheels on non-business critical projects like Google does.

Or in the case of Amazon you have both, printing money with an awful culture of churning through employees. They even structured their stock vesting around it.

What is Amazon's vesting structure?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#205

Post by intuitionist » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

rubiquity wrote: post #139

Railsify wrote: post #75

I suspect when the economy takes a downturn luxury purchases like this will be the first to go. If I think I might be laid off do I spend 10 dollars to Uber home or walk the 5 blocks and have one less drink? I would personally have one less drink and walk, or take the train/bus... Those 7 dollars Starbucks venti iced white chocolate mochas with 5 shots will slow also.

One drink determines whether you can walk 5 blocks or not?

At some margin, definitely!

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#206

Post by rifung » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

simonrobb wrote: post #128

theincredulousk wrote: post #71

Probably some reality shaking out. Uber's engineering team puts out some impressive stuff, often as OSS. Their engineering blogs are regularly on HN. I've been genuinely surprised that they churn out some of these things and release them for free given their relatively extreme financial situation. In contrast to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc. that have mountains of their own money to burn (rathe…

It doesn't really cost anything to open source something though. These are all projects which are developed for a reason: the commercial version might be prohibitively expensive at Uber scale, or not technically capable of operating at Uber scale, or just plain doesn't exist yet. At that point you can engage with the tech community and offer it as OSS (not to mention make your engineers happy), or you can keep it to…

> It doesn't really cost anything to open source something though.

Yes, it costs next to nothing to just open source a project if you mean literally just putting the source on some hosting site.

However, open sourcing something properly, where you respond to issues, document things properly, and provide build/test infrastructure to external developers is much more work. Not only that but you have to be much more careful when creating APIs and be much more vigilant about keeping backwards compatibility.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#207

Post by seax » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

txcwpalpha wrote: post #87

dmode wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dallas office is an administrative office and will not have eng roles. Also, these are all "promises", we really have to see how it plays out. Promises are cheap. Remember how Foxcon was going to hire 10k people in Wisconsin

That isn't what the article in the parent comment says: >The office would include engineers, finance executives, salespeople and other roles across Uber's business.

"engineers" is a pretty nebulous term these days though.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#208

Post by dcolkitt » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

theincredulousk wrote: post #71

Probably some reality shaking out. Uber's engineering team puts out some impressive stuff, often as OSS. Their engineering blogs are regularly on HN. I've been genuinely surprised that they churn out some of these things and release them for free given their relatively extreme financial situation. In contrast to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc. that have mountains of their own money to burn (rathe…

> that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors')

I totally agree with everything you're saying. But I'm going to quibble with your phrasing. Apple's cash reserves belong to the shareholders just as much as Uber's funding rounds.

Too many CEOs operate under the mistaken belief that retained earnings is "play money" in the way that paid-in-capital is not. For investors, retained earnings are subject to the same opportunity cost of capital as funds raised by equity or debt.

Its management's responsibility to deliver returns exceeding the firm's weighted-average cost of capital. If they can't do that, then they should return capital to the shareholders, who can then use it an alternative higher-returning venture.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#209

Post by bgilroy26 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

jdro wrote: post #161

landryraccoon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get why Uber isn’t profitable. Their marginal cost is only higher than zero because they choose to lose money. Their fixed costs are servers and engineering. If they set their prices higher than what drivers are willing to accept they should make money. I don’t see how “basic economics” is the enemy. Their enemy is setting expectations too high. If they were happy with a profit of $100M a year they would be s…

This is a worthwhile writeup of how Uber's operating costs are generally higher than the industry it "disrupted" without actually solving the structural problems that industry had found an equilibrium around: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-des...

That was a great read, thank you!

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#210

Post by steve_adams_86 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

sparkling wrote: post #27

Serious question: what does Uber need 27k employees for? 1k people to run the show in the main headquarters + some small-ish ~50-100 people regional offices should be enough to keep the company running.

This strikes me as a sort of "Uber? I could build that over a weekend" kind of comment.

27k does sound like a lot, but your figures seem arbitrary if you've never looked at their internal software, operations, what's being developed that we don't know about, etc.