Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber Lays Off 400

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 310 posts

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#261

Post by BigJono »

UberIsAnnoying wrote: post #161

I hope it included the people responsible for sending me the most abusive SPAM campaigns I have had in years. 1) I never subscribed to these e-mails 2) The e-mails contain a link to unsubscribe in this format: click.uber.com/f/a/ 3) You get redirected to uber.com/unsubscribe 4) They make you manually fill your e-mail 5) When you press unsubscribe: - It makes a request to uber.com/api/unsubscribe?email= &et_job_id=&et…

Uber's engineering is dodgy across the board.

There was a good year or so period where I ran into 4 or 5 critical bugs that stopped me using the service entirely for days or weeks at a time. One of the dumbest was being unable to enter a credit card because the form required a field that wasn't being rendered. 6 months later I switch credit cards and again can't use the app for weeks because it wants a 5 digit postcode even after setting the country to 'Australia', but the server side check was still working and 86'd any combination of bs 5-digit code that was working.

Several times I've had something go wrong with the ordering system itself (on the UberEats side). Once an order was put through twice and two meals showed up on my doorstep. Another time I copped a cryptic error message followed by a Javascript crash and my card was charged but no order was logged upon refreshing the page (which indicates to me that something wasn't properly atomic and maybe some business logic was happening on the front end that shouldn't be? Presumably fixed now, I hope)

Even right now, as I type this, there's a bug on UberEats introduced in the last few days or weeks that's leaking variable names through to the front-end. I've got 'components.BadgeSoldOut.message' and 'components.CartItemCustomization.upTo' all over the place. I'm sure when that gets fixed another one will crop up next week.

404s and broken systems seem par for the course.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#262

Post by muks »

UberIsAnnoying wrote: post #161

I hope it included the people responsible for sending me the most abusive SPAM campaigns I have had in years. 1) I never subscribed to these e-mails 2) The e-mails contain a link to unsubscribe in this format: click.uber.com/f/a/ 3) You get redirected to uber.com/unsubscribe 4) They make you manually fill your e-mail 5) When you press unsubscribe: - It makes a request to uber.com/api/unsubscribe?email= &et_job_id=&et…

Here's an example of the quality of Uber's customer support: https://twitter.com/muks/status/1137237193657868289

This was after I reported that my 72 year old mother was asked to get out of the car by the driver after sitting in it, because he learned of the destination after starting the trip and did not want to take her there. Uber does not show the destination to the driver before starting the trip.

I was probably speaking to a bot, or nobody had the patience to fix the problem.

Edit: I haven't used Uber since that incident.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#263

Post by rainyMammoth »

williamDafoe wrote: post #226
MiroF wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally cannot profitably transport people at the prices they're offering. Uber is just one big bet that the price point of transportation will fall significantly with the advent of self driving and they'll be there to make the money off that margin.

I think this is utter BS. the reason Lyft and Uber are not profitable is that they keep fighting a war for customers with each other! The last time I compared a taxi to a Lyft it was $17 versus $34. Lyft could easily charge 50% more except Uber is trying to kill them by wasting investor money!

I think it's completely right.

I virtually completely stopped using Lyft//Uber since they increased prices in SF. I know a lot of other people that stop using them also. Most rides are above 15$ which is above what I'm ready to pay to get somewhere in the city. I walk, use my bike or drive whenever possible. The new price point simply doesn't make sense anymore.

And in most places, customers are way more price sensitive than I am.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#264

Post by amelius »

amiga_500 wrote: post #210
resters wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a shareholder, but I think market share is the short term goal. The incentives can be phased out as prices increase a bit after competition cools off.

> market share is the short term goal. Creating a monopoly then jacking up the price. Not doubt shafting drivers and their customers.

But Uber's business model doesn't have lock-in potential. So if a price change happens, people (drivers and customers) will just switch to a different app.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#265

Post by tallanvor »

bduerst wrote: post #119
mevile wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pizza delivery is profitable. Pizza comes in a shape easy for transportation, the size and value of the delivery is economical for a delivery business and there's an established culture around ordering pizza for delivery. The food delivery companies just need to figure out these problems, which a hard, for non-pizza foods.

Is it though? Most pizza delivery is an ancillary service to the restaurant itself. Are there very many profitable pizza-delivery only businesses? Also you could argue that for the genre of restaurants where delivery is profitable as an ancillary service (pizza, chinese, etc.), they already offer delivery and there isn't any profitable market for the restaurants where they didn't have it before.

Domino's and Little Caesars are the second and third largest pizza chains in the US. Some of them may have space for a few people to eat there, but their entire business structure is based on delivering pizzas. Sure, they have pick-up options as well, but I wouldn't say that changes them from being developed around the idea of delivering the pizzas.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#266

Post by hef19898 »

kiwidrew wrote: post #213
aresant wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBER masks this real number across many of their general line items. EG they put ~$300,000,000 of the "Driver Incentive" cost into "Cost of Revenue" line item that represents: - "Any amount paid to a driver that exceeds the revenue earned by that driver (for instance, if a driver’s earnings from a trip exceed the fare for that trip). Excess driver incentives jumped by about $300 million in 2018 from the previous year…

In terms of unit economics, UberX is still (mostly) sound -- the rider is paying a fare based roughly on time/distance, and the driver is paid a fare that's also based roughly on time/distance; it's very rare to see a rider paying less than what a driver gets paid. (Even after taking into account the various driver incentives.) Where the unit economics get completely messed up is Uber Eats. In my local market (Wellin…

Back the day I had a short stint at a bus charter business. There we also tried to reduce costs by bundling travel group's individual itenaries and match that against available busses to reduce empty rides. The result would have been that groups might have different busses on different days. Nice idea, in theory.

Turned out that avoiding empty trips in transportation is hugely dependant on volume by time and region. It is also a very hard problem to solve as you need to match availability data from busses (which needs to be collected in a scaleable way), trips (which need to be in the correct regions and times) and then simply come up with an optimization algorithm to sort it all out. Peace of cake... Not. Especially if you want to link that to your pricing already during customer booking instead of after-the-fact discounts.

One might suspect that the transportation industry which has the volumes and the cost pain of empty trips might already have solved it if it woupd have been that easy.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#267

Post by Ntrails »

MegaButts wrote: post #57
cj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, except I'd probably frame it a bit differently: > Need more users pre IPO to juice the growth story Or, "VCs tell us we need to spend their investment quickly in whatever areas will generate a hockey stick growth in valuation. We can always fix our business model when we're ready to." > Cut costs post IPO Or, "We no longer answer to our VCs. Now we answer to the public market who cares a lot more abou…

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think there is a more cynical take that Uber exemplifies. The VCs do everything they can to drive up the valuation, except make money. They then sell their shares to the public markets for an incredible profit and let them deal with the problem of actually making money. I fear venture capital (and Silicon Valley) is much more about value extraction than value creation t…

> The VCs do everything they can to drive up the valuation, except make money. They then sell their shares to the public markets for an incredible profit...

The VCs are still locked in and haven't been able to sell afaik? The public markets have 6 months to figure out fair price before they get theirs

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#268

Post by Traster »

itchyouch wrote: post #5

400 people at say 40k salaries or around 80k with benefits is around 32 million. Definitely a significant chunk of change, but barely scratching the surface for offsetting 1B in losses.

It's probably more along the lines of "Each employee was on average earning $100k and was responsible for an advertising spend of $5m"

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#269

Post by mruts »

williamDafoe wrote: post #224
wp381640 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lookup the stock of Domino's[0] - they've been on a years long tear by scaling delivery and adopting tech In theory this could work better for some food delivery companies as they charge the restaurant rather than produce themselves and run the overhead of stores, etc. [0] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:DPZ

I think it's pretty obvious that nobody buys a Domino's Pizza because it tastes good! They buy it because someone shows up at your door and gives you food!

I mean, they’re not terrible. I think I prefer them to other Pizza chains. And they have a dope app.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#270

Post by VRay »

ddalex wrote: post #258
sprafa wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In London Uber is unravelling already. Here Citymapper is the default transit app and Uber is just one of the options listed. The transfer cost for a customer changing app is 0. We keep saying we’re “not sure” whether Uber will have customer retention... no, of course it won’t! Unless they change their model, they’re the biggest VC folly in recent times. Just proves how overheated the market become when F/A/G acquire…

no VC money anylonger, now it's stock market money, i.e. our pension funds

Wait, you guys get pension funds?
Post reply on HN