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Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

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Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#311

Post by KptMarchewa »

economicslol wrote: post #271
KptMarchewa wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so focused on the "sole means of transportation"? Before COVID I've used Uber and the likes around twice a month - when using public transportation was unfeasible, like going to the airport with heavy luggage. Using public transportation and supplementing it with Uber was definitely most reasonable solution.

Because the Grandfather comment was about classifying Uber as an essential service when it's clearly not as demonstrated by yours and other comments. Using Uber a few times a month for extenuating circumstances is really not Essential.

The "essentialness" of an service it a pretty bad concept. Uber is definitely non essential as sole means, but it starts to be pretty essential when you feel sick and want to go to hospital (not on ambulance level tho).

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#312

Post by mv4 »

abbadadda wrote: post #274
jonluca wrote: post #9

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…

Really well written email... This seems like a smart thing to do: `We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.`

I expect this to get downvoted, but: I would say that was a smart thing to say when laying off thousands of employees. That's not necessarily what the top executives believe, or want, as it is much much harder.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#313

Post by sucrose »

0zymandias wrote: post #145

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…

In other news, GE Appliances just cut my web development contract short by 8 months. Congratulations, India.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#314

Post by wobbly_bush »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #138
jonluca wrote: post #9

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…

"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it." This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for th…

You are thinking of only US and similar countries where everyone already owns cars. In country like India, there were not much taxis before Uber came. An alternative was autorickshaw which took twice as long to go the same distance, had much worse safety features, exposed one to all the pollution all the time, not to mention the cheating of fares.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#315

Post by MattGaiser »

trhway wrote: post #310
MattGaiser wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 o…

I am shocked at how often I can just ignore an annoying email and have the issue go away...

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#316

Post by fernandopj »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #138
jonluca wrote: post #9

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…

"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it." This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for th…

> Uber is not an "essential service".

I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:

- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]

- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]

- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.

- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)

IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.

[1] https://www.jornalcruzeiro.com.br/sorocaba/locadoras-de-carr... (pt-br) [2] https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/03/23/coronavirus-s... (pt-br) [3] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/sem-servico-160-mil-mo... (pt-br) [4] https://www.uol.com.br/carros/colunas/autodata/2020/05/15/lo... (pt-br) [5] https://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2020/0... [6] https://www.blogdaslocadoras.com.br/locadoras-de-carros/reco...

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#317

Post by cellar_door »

wegs wrote: post #282
dmaskasky wrote: post #242

I was also let go today, is anyone looking for a frontend engineer with 6 years experience? My profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmaskasky/

As a suggestion, point people to a personal web page or portfolio. Especially for a front-end engineer, I would never recruit someone based on a LinkedIn profile. That's doubly-true in this market. To make it through the filter, it doesn't need to be fancy or take a lot of time, but it does need to be tasteful. Of course, fancy and playful go a very, very long ways for separating yourself from all the other people wh…

If you've worked at big companies on products with millions of users (like OP with Uber, Intuit, and Tesla), can't you just detail the specific team and components you developed?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#318

Post by lhorie »

bdcravens wrote: post #277
fermienrico wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point, can you please elaborate more? I read it twice and your comment isn't making any sense to me: 1) Are you suggesting that developers should go join a smaller company so they are less expendible? 2) Are you suggesting that developers, now that they are laid off, go work on R&D projects, tooling and open source startups? I am so confused. What is the take away?

I'm saying that large companies in tech tend to have a large developer headcount, often working on projects outside of the core business. As such, I think those employees are more expendable.

Teams that open source stuff typically have leveraging roles, i.e. they build things that several other teams depend on.

Orthogonally, typically large companies have a maslow hierarchy of sorts: for every infrastructural endeavor, there may be a number of others that are more "nice-to-have" niche projects that aren't really critical to anyone else's ability to deliver results.

The most vulnerable employees are those on niche projects, despite these projects being internally focused (as opposed to open sourced). Infra folks whose work may be open source are typically less vulnerable because they do in fact work on critical, well, infrastructure.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#319

Post by javajosh »

ping_pong wrote: post #300
javajosh wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting comment because it's a good example of what you see more and more of from people with a positive emotional disposition toward someone who won't let them fail or look bad even if its quite obvious that they failed, and it looks bad (and even if they themselves would admit it). As a factual matter, the measurement isn't meaningless at all. Give Jack some credit.

So are you saying that the new successors to GE have no agency at all, and they are just following a script? That's ridiculous. The CEOs of GE have not been great or successful but that's on them, not Welch.

Presumably Welch believed in the hiring system he put in place. It was also an audacious claim, which comes with its own rewards. But folks like you let Welch have his cake and eat it too: he gets the praise for making an audacious claim, and then when it turns out false, folks like you make excuses for him.

It's good to be the king, I guess.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#320

Post by ojilles »

shuckles wrote: post #34

Can anyone with knowledge share whether the Uber Amsterdam office is impacted?

If anyone at Uber reads this, feel free to get in touch (Go, Java, SRE) if you want to effectively stay in the same building working for a multinational.

There's not many roles open at the moment, but here's one: https://jobs.ebayclassifiedsgroup.com/job/amsterdam/senior-b...

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