Live data from Hacker News

Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

wsj.com

221–230 of 689 posts

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#221

I was let go today from Uber. If anyone is looking for a Frontend/Fullstack with 7yoe. I'm here :) Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-lawrence-b77400b8/

You should add your email address or website to your profile, so people can contact you.

Honestly don’t understand why people don’t have their email address public. Spam filtering is so good these days that this is all upside and no downside.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#222
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>have a car mental model. I suspect buying a reasonable used compact car is much more financially prudent than using Uber as you means of transportation. Maybe the calculus flips in a dense city like NYC but there's no way people who commute every day with Uber are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.

> there's no way people who commute every day are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car. Yes there is: Public transportation (bus, metro, train). Millions of people get to work using it every day. Just having a car sit on the street would cost me at least 100$ per month in taxes, insurance, parking and other misc costs. I spend much less on public transportation. Most people live in dense cities so these se…

I should have specified, my point was that Uber is not the same as public transportation and is essentially a luxury good.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#223

It looks like Dara is executing the Jack Welch & General Electric playbook [1]. Essentially, it comes down to "Be the #1 or #2 company in the market or exit" You can debate whether it was successful at GE. The criticism of Jack Welch was that his approach improved short-term financials, but he left a hollowed-out company to his successor that became irrelevant and lost value relative to the S&P. The way I see this pl…

> I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.

The scooter division was bikes & scooters

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>have a car mental model. I suspect buying a reasonable used compact car is much more financially prudent than using Uber as you means of transportation. Maybe the calculus flips in a dense city like NYC but there's no way people who commute every day with Uber are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.

This discounts the difficulties in buying a car when credit is bad or nonexistent. I was in this situation, the only people who will give you a vehicle are loan sharks and scammers. Partially this was my own ignorance (see: awful credit). Partially it was my own bad credit itself. It also discounts the horrible stress that adding a known monthly bill can cause, when Uber is more flexible, pay-what-you-need. And I was…

So you're saying Uber is a luxury. So it's not essential.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#225

Hard to let go of that many people without losing critical knowledge, Uber will come out of this a diminished company in many ways. Best of luck to those laid off.

Not so sure about that. The company was notorious for having teams constantly rollout competing internal libraries/tools and rewrite them over and over, obviously not having enough bottom-line work to keep everyone busy. A smaller workforce may be able to focus on the work that matters, it doesn't have to imply a lower productivity.

Even if a tool should not have been written, the ability to troubleshoot it is still critical to its consumers. And making hundreds of dependent teams spend a month migrating is easily more expensive than 3 headcount to maintain it.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#226

Whoever is still being recruited by uber or close to an offer better make sure they have a solid severance clause written into their contract! Nothing less than 1 to 2 years of pay.

Surely no offers can be made during this period redundancies and consultation.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Short-term"? He was CEO for 20 years, and made it one of the most successful companies during that time. One would be very hardpressed to call GE of 2001 a hollowed-out company.

Jack Welch retired in 2001 after twenty years as CEO. "Upon his retirement from GE, Welch had stated that his effectiveness as its CEO for two decades would be measured by the company's performance for a comparable period under his successors" If we use the long-term yardstick that Jack Welch suggested we use, he does not come out looking good. We are now at roughly the two-decade mark and GE is trading at the same p…

To read that quote differently:

1981 • Jack Welch becomes CEO • $1.29 2001 • Jack Welch retires • $37.20 (down from its peak of near $60.00 in mid 2000) 2020 • Nearly 20 years post Jack Welch • $6.28.

20 years of Jack Welch - +2,800% increase 20 years after Jack Welch - -83% decrease

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#228

Hmm wonder why they announced it on a Monday instead of a Friday?

Friday in San Francisco is Saturday in Asia which means there's probably a layoff on Monday in Asia.

However a Monday layoff in San Francisco means a Tuesday layoff in Asia which won't be separated by a weekend.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#229

Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers work…

Worth pointing out that Uber is no longer a unicorn. It is a large publicly traded corporation with a market cap of $58B. I suppose you're asking your question about large tech companies generally, not so much unicorns? Most unicorns are still quite small (revenue and employee count-wise) relative to large publicly traded corporations like Uber and the FANGs.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the firings are waves. Is this a logistics thing, or a morale thing somehow? Because it seems like it would negatively impact morale, more than anything. In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.

For the layoffs last year I'm pretty sure they were trying to stay under the 500-employee threshold of the WARN Act.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN