Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

R = # of micro services / # of engineers

If R >= 1, this is potentially problematic and may indicate engineers being unable to work with the code of their peers. Operating in this regime would be viewed as risky. R can go to infinity very quickly if you go down this path without very deliberate planning, involving the consensus of both the entire management and engineering staffs.

If R I think R could also serve as an arbitrary bus impact scalar for the org chart.

If I want to get somewhere outside my village in less than a couple of hours I'd have to use a taxi or drive.

But if you go to for example some parts of the US, they literally don't even have pavements let alone busses, let alone tubes.

They can't even walk to their local shops in some cases. They're trapped without a car or taxi.

You'll get used to it in about 5 minutes.

> and takes another syllable.

Seriously, the amount of time people who pretend to be hard and rational loose their minds over things like "one syllable."

> 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.

That's a straw man. Asking for gender-neutral terms when referring to groups of people does not equate to asking for gender-neutral culture. Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.

- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.

- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.

- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.

- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.

This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.

(edited for formatting, thanks @mkl)