What about Elevate? Seems non-core but couldn't have been cheap.
Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
301–310 of 689 posts
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#302It 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…
Sounds more like the playbook of being a real business, meaning to take in more money than they spend....
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#303Developers 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…
I'm at Airbnb (opinions strictly are my own). The number of engineers working on tooling for us is actually not that large. The vast, vast majority are product engineers and with our most recent layoffs the majority of the cuts were for those types of engineers. My own opinion is that we simply had way too many product engineers for the amount of actual output we got from them.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Meh, that's a completely arbitrary measure and flippant at best. He has no control over what his successors do, or their strategy. I, and many many others, prefer to judge him by how he handled the company when he actually had control over it.
When you read his book he portrays himself as a teacher and mentor to the next generation of managers. GE was supposed to crank out high quality managers. He maybe did a good job himself (or was lucky with this timing) but he totally failed at preparing the company for a time after him.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet Uber/Lyft enable single car ownership for lots of couples, and is nothing like a luxury good. Things like people who carpool, but need a backup when that falls through. Or the ability to get to a doctor (or any location) poorly served by public transit. I mean, it's not a luxury good in the sense that you can buy a car, but I suspect many folks have made difficult or expensive to unwind decisions that make car…
So a luxury that you can normally get by without? You seem to be strengthening my argument that it's not essential. I think my point is being missed though and that is that using Uber as your daily commute is certainly not cheaper than owning a car. I think that's perfectly reasonable to say. Also I don't mean to imply that Uber is a luxury in the same way Lois Vuitton is a luxury. In my examples in other comments us…
Using Uber alone for all transportation may be a luxury, but if you're in a situation where you rely heavily public transportation, Uber is a nearly essential addition to it.
Transporting large items, or groceries for an entire family are extremely difficult if not impossible over public transportation. Transporting a group of people (3+) can be approximately the same price on public transportation and Uber without potentially sacrificing comfort, safety, time and effort, many of which can be essential depending on your circumstances.
The cost of using Uber and Public transportation also requires a lot less upfront cost which is necessary for people living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to spend around $2k on a car, as well as deal with it's maintenance time and cost.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ation from the I have a ton of money, can work fr is uber cheaper than cabs/public transpo w/o the VC subsidy? 15 years ago there was no uber and people were able to get by using public transpo.
Centuries ago, people got by with horses. Does that mean that cars aren't essential? Ridesharing services allow for an unprecedented level of mobility for those who don't already own cars.
You could say the same for taxis. If uber cost 100$/ride you wouldn't be claiming it is unprecedented. It will die because no one wants to pay for it with the real cost: livable wage + proper car insurance.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years. That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics -…
> show urgency I call this "artificial panic". That term came to mind when I joined a FMCG around Y2K, and on my first weeks I noticed people were running around stressed, like headless chicken. When I asked "what's on fire" and the answer was "nothing". https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-07-15 The "Minimalists" say on their podcast that "most emergencies, aren't". When I see panic setting camp in a company's mentality,…
Reminds me of Douglas Adam's "Crisis Inducer" :)
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
That's what business leaders think. Then you get to the critical component where you fire the lead architect/programmer and then it keeps working fine for few weeks, but you find more bugs and you need to upgrade/fix it. Only to find out the documentation if they exist don't help at all and the first 2 tries builds fine so you put it in production only to see everything destroyed. And after 1 year of back and forth y…
I bet the number of developers that are working on the business critical stuff is very low. Years ago I talked a lot to people at Oracle and Apple and it was always amazing how small the core development teams for the big products were.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ation from the I have a ton of money, can work fr is uber cheaper than cabs/public transpo w/o the VC subsidy? 15 years ago there was no uber and people were able to get by using public transpo.
the idea that uber loses money on rides because of "VC" needs to die. uber is not VC funded anymore and hasn't been for a long time now. uber loses money on every ride because uber loses money overall because it spends a lot of money on other projects, not because the marginal cost/benefit of each ride is negative.
If they spin off the ride sharing part of the company how much are they earning? do you know?
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years. That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics -…
> "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. Never worked for a unicorn, but everything from big corp to startup to government. "Urgent" provokes no reaction from me anymore because of this.
>"Urgent"
,"Critically Important", etc. is the most recent whatever caught the attention of a typical S/E/VP with the attention span of a ferret long enough for him/her to be able to utter it in the words. If you're able to highly visibly jump and demonstrate activity during exact that moment - a great talent leading to advancements/promotions - there is no point to react as the next new "critical" directive/change of course/etc. is coming very soon. Of course if your manager is one of those aspiring "talented jumpers", he/she will try to make you jump with him/her - it is a real PITA to have such a manager who instead of filtering and protecting the team from would amplify all that stuff flowing down.