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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

#391

Post by andyjohnson0 »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #156
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Ahh - the comment from the person with the multi-car garage, the tesla and the range rover. Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets. A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.

> Ahh - the comment from the person with the multi-car garage, the tesla and the range rover.

I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I don't have any of those things. Not even close.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#392

Post by sandworm101 »

seankimdesign wrote: post #370
sandworm101 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-…

That's more of a failure for the ux and product vision than it is a failure of project management. The trick isn't to just roll out new changes slowly, but to involve the users and figure out what needs to change and how.

>> roll out new changes slowly.

That really depends on your customers and the product. In this case, control systems, incremental changes are definitely not the way to go. Imagine if your car made an incremental change to the position of the brake pedal every time you turned it on. In such situations you don't babystep. You announce the change ahead of time, provide your customers with transition training, and make the change as scheduled.

In the case of "adaptive" menus in control systems, imagine if the elevator in your building rearranged its floor buttons so that the most requested floors were always at the top. Total chaos. People learn where their button is on day one. After that ANY change is going to go badly no matter what the UI engineers say. That UI should be carved in stone for the life of the building.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#394

Post by greenyoda »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #286
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.

The only truly urgent thing I've seen is a product being down / a critical bug in production.

Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor.

On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#395

Post by CydeWeys »

bdcravens wrote: post #283
CydeWeys wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I was taking artistic license with the term, but "large tech" is probably a better term, though I'd filter it down to those on the lower profitability side. (even those with large IPOs are often just a startup at scale)

Unicorn never meant lower on the profitability side though. It just means a valuable pre-IPO late stage start-up. Plenty of them were or went on to be insanely profitable.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#396

Post by jrochkind1 »

GiorgioG wrote: post #389
matt_morgan wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent Well then don't say anything at all. It adds nothing to the conversation. Don't push your ideals on others. Take your SJW crusade elsewhere. That's one positive thing from this pandemic - the shift in focus away from these types of (IMO) non-existent 'problems.'

You are in fact the one that sounds like you are crusading, not the person you are replying to. You seem really fired up about it.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#397

Post by 1024core »

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…

I travel to India, a lot, as I have family there.

Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.

Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.

For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#398

Post by brianobush »

matt_morgan wrote: post #376
sandworm101 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-…

[flagged]

you are missing the point, it is still a year of work, regardless of gender.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#399

Post by rachelbythebay »

bdcravens wrote: post #205

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…

Oh, you might be surprised how many people are not working on anything of consequence. Some of these companies don't even do much in the way of building stuff outside of the product teams, and even then, they frequently fizzle after some point.

You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.

R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.

Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).

If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#400

Post by GiorgioG »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #396
GiorgioG wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent Well then don't say anything at all. It adds nothing to the conversation. Don't push your ideals on others. Take your SJW crusade elsewhere. That's one positive thing from this pandemic - the shift in focus away from these types of (IMO) non-existent 'problems.'

You are in fact the one that sounds like you are crusading, not the person you are replying to. You seem really fired up about it.

It is tiresome to see these types irrelevant comments on a story. So yes it does fire me up a bit. These are people out of work, and the parent chose to focus on pushing their gender-neutral grammar preferences. Real problems vs. Snowflake problems.
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