Am I the only one feeling that we should be thankful that these unicorns (whether actually profitable or driven by crazy VC money) have created so many jobs in the past several years?
what did those jobs produce?
Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
331–340 of 689 posts
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#332Earlier 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,…
Urgency is a matter of prioritisation.
Ideally in a company there would be one single order backlog, showing the relative value of each project to everyone. However getting such an ordering would involve huge co-ordination across vastly differing internal companies / cultures and would drag up every buried political hand grenade of the company's lifetime.
So instead you do what someone shouts loudly about. If the shouter is right more than 50/50 they are doing pretty well.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worked for Google for 5 years. Red badges were largely confined to QA testers, physical security, and the kitchen, along with a few UI designers or engineers that didn't want to be employees because they liked the freedom that being a contractor allowed (eg. being able to work for someone else on the side). Basically everyone I interacted with on a daily basis was a FTE. Product area could have something to do with i…
Your comment downplays the number of contractors at Google as if they are rare, but in reality, Google employs ~100k FTEs and ~120k contractors. It's definitely more than just QA testers and kitchen staff. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo... You may really have just been on a team that doesn't interact often with contractors, but the reality for the broader company is that contracting is a…
My understanding is that a lot of those are jobs like street view driver, autonomous vehicle tester, search quality rater, contract recruiter, content moderator, con-ops (help forums & customer support), etc. That's a big portion of the company but not a big portion of core engineering teams. I'd acknowledged the existence of them in my original comment, but this article is specifically about layoffs of software engineers within Uber's core products. I maintain that someone in that position is far more likely to come in contact with other FTEs than with contractors.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#334Earlier 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 wonder if there is a way to convert Harvard Business Review articles into top-of-the-backlog items automatically...
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#335Hard 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.
IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
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Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#336Am I the only one feeling that we should be thankful that these unicorns (whether actually profitable or driven by crazy VC money) have created so many jobs in the past several years?
> middle-management kept asking for more developers, though, so everyone was happy.
> reply
not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 alto…
right. this recession is actually giving cover to let go of a lot of bloat that has built up over the years.
Well, freeing it up to compete. I expect some of the bloat is just so that someone can't work for a competitor.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#338Developers 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…
"Developers at unicorns:" Prato principal crystallized. Look at any big repro or any large company. There is usually about ~5 ish people that know wtf is going on. I think uber could be ran with 10 people.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#339Developers 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…
"Developers at unicorns:" Prato principal crystallized. Look at any big repro or any large company. There is usually about ~5 ish people that know wtf is going on. I think uber could be ran with 10 people.
> Prato principal crystallized
You're wrong, and not just about the Pareto principle.