Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#421

Post by citizenkeen » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #400

jrochkind1 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that you view a history of systemic sexism in tech and in the world as not a real problem is, in fact, part of the problem.

The good news is when people start being more inclusive with their language you'll see fewer people correcting them!

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#422

Post by pishpash » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

outlace wrote: post #361

I’m sure Travis Kalanick is so happy he dumped his shares before all this.

He dumped shares at more than 10% below today's closing price, and almost 20% below today's intraday high. Why would he be happy?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#423

Post by SenorSourdough » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #400

jrochkind1 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You understand that there are millions of women who are victims of abuse, sidelined or disregarded by society, and constantly repressed because of sexism, right?

Losing your job is a temporary problem for most people. Sexism, like the kind that is baked right into our language, is an inescapable daily struggle for many women.

We have the capacity to think about both women's rights and the recently unemployed at the same time. It's frankly sad that you can't look deeply enough at this issue to see it as more than a problem of "grammar preferences".

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#424

Post by closeparen » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #267

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…

I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having…

>suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product

At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.

When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)

It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#425

Post by wolco » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

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]

Can we be species neutral. Person refers to humans and leaves out animals and other substances like carbon which would experience a year in the same manner as a human.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#426

Post by SenorSourdough » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:16 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #406

irthomasthomas wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume all the developers are men? as in members of mankind... All people are men.

This is going to sound stupid but at some point, it's less important what's right and more important how something makes people feel.

Language is fluid. The thing that was "right" to say 500 years ago wasn't right 100 years ago, and what was "right" 100 years ago wouldn't be right now. There are clear arguments for why encouraging people to think about the gendered language that they use and how it perpetuates gender roles would be beneficial in combating sexism. The arguments for maintaining existing language because it is currently the most popular tend to be pretty thin.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#427

Post by IG_Semmelweiss » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:16 PM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #400

jrochkind1 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you worried about. The intellectual left is effectively dead.

Sanders. Dead. Warren. Dead. Gender police. Dead.

The democrats are going to fight one another to one-uo republicans on immigration post corona. And pro-US first no further dependence on globalist masks or hand sanitizer.

There may be a few gender cops here and there, but the movement is dead. There is no point in fighting

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#428

Post by yazaddaruvala » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #409

matt_morgan wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't alter quotes, even for PC reasons. And If I am going to reuse language for effect I am not going to make changes unless they add to the point I am making. The first comment said man-years and I stuck with that as I wasn't trying to correct their gender grammar. Also, "person-year" is vague as "persons" includes non-humans entities such as corporations and partnerships. "Man-year" refers only to work by biolog…

sde-year, dev-year, engineer-year, resource-year, employee-year, are all variants I've heard before.

I can understand not wanting to miss-quote something, but otherwise seems simple enough to use different language.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#429

Post by all_usernames » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

bradlys wrote: post #241

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.

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 -…

Hmm, sounds like you've got some dyfunctional managers. I've never personally witnessed management faking urgency on a project just to get productivity on it. Management is generally charged with making sure ICs know what the priorities are as set by Product. It's possible that Product changes its mind often, confusing everyone. But if Product, Management, and ICs are confused about what your "critical business functions" are, I think you've got some systemic leadership problems.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#430

Post by MisterPea » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

schnable wrote: post #393

Are they going to regret having 4,000 micro services now?

Well I think that's one of the benefits of microservices actually.

Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.