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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

#461

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]

Why not go with "work-years"? It has the benefit of being gender neutral and even more relevant.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#462

Even in this market whereby consumers must order food via apps, none of the food delivery companies are profitable from my understanding. Can anyone explain how this works/how this came to be?

grubhub was profitable for years

Charging for referrals was profitable; they didn't deliver until 2014.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, freeing it up to compete. I expect some of the bloat is just so that someone can't work for a competitor.

You'd think so but that's at least not the impression I've gotten. At Google that's certainly going to be the case but at a company like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb the bloat ends up largely arising due to managerial bloat (managers want to grow their org to make themselves seem more important) and low technical standards for higher level ICs (which results in far more resources used to accomplish each project).

Are you saying that technical standards are lowered as one moves up the IC ladder? If so, how and why?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent either, but it's also painless and traditional just to refrain from unsolicited corrections of people's word choice when there isn't any ill intent to be talked about.

> there isn't any ill intent to be talked about

In addition to intent, outcome must also be considered.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#465
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

He is probably Portuguese speaking, and his autocorrect changed the spelling.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent either, but it's also painless and traditional just to refrain from unsolicited corrections of people's word choice when there isn't any ill intent to be talked about.

I find it very enlightening when people who find issue with my expression let me know about it in a friendly way. I think the commenter took a lot of care to phrase their concern in a very nice way; when people do this to me I thank them. It’s the only way that I can keep learning how the language changes with time.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It is not painless: it is dissonant 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…

>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.

statements like this are not useful for building understanding.

rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought.

Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.

What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?

For what it's worth, I already use 'dev-hours', but not from any gender/rights perspective, it just sounds better and correlates the specific industry to the metric. It's also about the same amount of verbal effort as 'man-hours', so the change was easy.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

> 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.

I don't want to be that person but Zoroastranism is the religion you should be comparing against -- it predates Islam by a good deal and developed alongside Farsi. And Zoroastranism does hold men and women to be equal. [1] Iran was actually a pretty liberal country prior to the Islamic Revolution (which was really more of a rebellion against American control).

[1] https://www.hinduwebsite.com/zoroastrianism/gender.asp

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

> It is not painless: it is dissonant

The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language?

> and takes another syllable.

That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.

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