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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

#441

Post by himinlomax »

dbancajas wrote: post #402
himinlomax wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Paris, and I could easily afford a new car (or two) with my income as an SRE. But then I'd have to park it, and just that would double the monthly cost. And then I'd probably use it once a month on average.

So use the taxi for once a month? Uber doesn't have to exist for you to address your problem.

I use my bicycle every day, but some people don't have that option. Also I normally use Uber more than once a month. The thing is, a car is way too much of hassle to use most of the time in the city. You need to park it, there's traffic, and then you can't drive drunk or so I've been told.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#442

Post by wegs »

dmaskasky wrote: post #292
wegs wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a great suggestion. Unfortunately, my portfolio is entirely comprised of Uber contributions that I cannot share publicly. I believe many folks are like me, eyes-forward and focused on the company mission. I was going through the process of open sourcing a library, but that's no longer going to happen. I suppose I should get started on making something that I can own.

You're unemployed now. It's not a bad use of your time. There are two levels here:

Level 1: There's a basic web site. Think of it as fizz buzz. I can see you have a basic sense of style -- web site aesthetics, code quality, etc. You don't need a lot, but what's there ought to be sane, sensible, and good.

Level 2: There are a few awesome things on it. Something clever, or something which shows some technical prowess.

It can't really hurt; if it's not fancy, I'll assume you didn't have time. If you have typos, blink/marquee tags, and syntax errors, I'll pass. But the more information you bring to the table, the better.

Right now, what people know about you is you passed a few reasonably rigorous interviews -- Tesla and Uber. Given you passed those, you'd likely pass more technical interview too (which is not the same as getting a job offer). Weaker companies might hire based on that. Stronger wants will want more signal. Anything you can do to generate that signal will help.

As a footnote, you included the line "I developed tooling for real time data through graphql subscriptions and grpc streaming. I built a protobuf to graphql schema generator tool. I have extensive experience with React hooks and making Redux-less applications. I was on the Uber Elevate team and brought several applications from 0-1." Put that in you linkedin.

There's a hierarchy I use when I look at resumes:

1) Weakest: Applicant worked somewhere. ("I was a software engineer for bagels.com")

2) Weak: Applicant worked on / with something. ("I worked on the customer database for bagels.com")

3) Average: Applicant accomplished something ("I increased the performance of the customer database of bagles.com by 25%, saving the company $50k/year in server costs and reducing latency")

4) Strong: Applicant accomplished something which justified their salary ("I rewrote the Fortran applicant database of bagles.com in node.js, moving it from a mainframe to AWS. This resulted in 25% higher customer conversion rates, and saved $500k / year.")

5. Strongest: Applicant accomplished something clever and technically impressive ("I built a pipeline which could render photorealistic bagle sandwiches for bagles.com prior to customer orders. This increased customer conversion rates 5x. I used [insert set of technically impressive techniques].")

The higher up you go that chain, the more likely you are to get the job you want.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#443

Post by bibinou »

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…

> Scooters

They just sold Jump, while investing in Lime. I think scooters could still be used as a "last-mile" strategy for Ride Share, and maybe acquire teen mindshare and a sort of platform play. But it's a spinoff with a long leash.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#444

Post by Evangelosggg »

I remember being at Droidcon or some Android specific conference years ago.... When Uber was presenting the speaker said "I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to work on an app that hundreds or thousands of devs are all contributing to at once!" and the entire crowd just looked at each other like dogs do when they hear a very high pitched sound.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#445

Post by sneak »

gkoberger wrote: post #278
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…

Let's say you like the Warriors. You and a group of friends get together every game to cheer for them. You're the one everyone looks to for bringing the beer, and you enjoy the group you hang out with. And when the Warriors win (or lose), there's a huge energy you get to be a part of. I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much differe…

> Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable.

I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#446

Post by eadmund »

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]

> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral.

It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable.

One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case.

I think that language is far less important here than culture. Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#447

Post by hyunwoona »

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/

Hey, sorry for the bad news. Qualia is hiring. Can you send me your resume at eric.na@qualia.com and miguel@qualia.com?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#448

Post by wdb »

chrisseaton wrote: post #439
wdb wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky for them they can afford these taxis to get everywhere. I can't and I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube. But I prefer the bus as I can take multiple buses within a hour for the same fee :)

> Lucky for them they can afford these taxis to get everywhere. They can't afford not to! > I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube. You're lucky that you have access to walkable pavements, busses, and a tube. That's a lot of privilege! I'd sure they'd be happy to use those as well! But many people don't have access to those things, and if they want to get anywhere they need…

Sorry, out of curiosity but where are you from? Where you can't walk or cycle 10-20 minutes to a bus stop?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#449

Post by munificent »

closeparen wrote: post #424
simias wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 situation…

I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment.

Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude.

But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.

Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#450

Post by agakshat »

Thrymr wrote: post #405
stevenwliao wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge isn't doing their job and management needs to get ahead of this. What if this "key person" decides to find another job?

An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge might also be thinking about protecting his own job. Being irreplaceable is good job security.

I’ve always wondered, does this actually happen? People not getting fired because they are irreplaceable partly because of their own failure to document stuff?
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