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

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#471

Post by neumann » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #449

closeparen wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This is a very nice description of what I've noticed moving to a large organisation. There is also a lot of busy work. As the organisation grows, communicating and negotiating between groups requires extra effort that often ends up being the role of a new management level, and groups have self-preserving incentives to stay relevant leading to lots of entropy (busy work, repeated work, hero projects that are just there for internal branding). As someone who has recently been put in this level of management I spend a lot of time having to negotiate out of new project initiatives invented more to attract exec attention or satisfy a rogue execs dream project. Makes me really look forward to moving back to working in a smaller company.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#472

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

gbronner wrote: post #265

whymauri wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the firings are waves. Is this a logistics thing, or a morale thing somehow? Because it seems like it would negatively impact morale, more than anything. In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.

At Lehman Brothers, the waves came every few weeks. On Tuesdays, HR fired business people, and engineering people cleaned up the mess. On Wednesdays, HR fired engineering people. On Thursdays, HR fired each other. It allows you to ramp down without pandemonium.

Jeez, I hope they remembered to declare their base class destructor virtual.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#473

Post by mbesto » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

dbancajas wrote: post #336

michaelyoshika wrote: post #329

Am I the only one feeling that we should be thankful that these unicorns (whether actually profitable or driven by crazy VC money) have created so many jobs in the past several years?

> middle-management kept asking for more developers, though, so everyone was happy. > reply not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.

> not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.

This trope needs to die. Pension funds are heavily diversified investment vehicles of which VC is one part of the asset allocation. If a pension fund CIO (Chief Investment Officer) weights their asset allocation towards too much of the VC asset allocation then yes this is a problem - but they don't. In fact they have made size-able returns as a result of simply being disciplined about the risks and rewards of VC as an asset class.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#474

Post by GiorgioG » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:15 PM UTC

citizenkeen wrote: post #421

GiorgioG wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And yet it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the story/post.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#475

Post by GiorgioG » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:16 PM UTC

SenorSourdough wrote: post #423

GiorgioG wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Once again, none of this is relevant to the post regarding Uber's layoffs unless they're somehow disproportionately laying off more women than men can it be even considered remotely relevant.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#476

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

staysaasy wrote: post #459

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…

As someone who has hired many engineers and PMs, and runs a hiring budget today, there are some reasons to feel at least fairly secure if you're an engineer at a growing company: - 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…

Quoting for readability:

"""

- 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.

"""

Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#477

Post by pm90 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC

all_usernames wrote: post #429

bradlys wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 funct…

Systemic leadership problems are more common than you think. Most larger corporations have orgs within them with very different cultures. It’s not hard to know why: the effective managers listen to their developers and shield them from the shit that comes from above. A healthy tree is nurtured under the protection offered by these managers; their reports never know what kind of shitstorms they were protected from. But these kinds of managers are rare albeit very effective.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#478

Post by closeparen » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #451

PaulWaldman wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see the ratio of how many micro services an org maintains vs the number of engineers.

I think this could be an interesting metric to apply across the board. 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…

Depends. R > 1 can also mean that projects are getting wrapped up and left alone, and their teams moving onto new stuff. Three people per module-project, three project cycles in, will have R = 1. That is not necessarily a bad thing, although it can be a liability if they all suddenly need attention at once.

R Ideally you want to be spotting the common patterns and replacing e.g. five 10k-line modules with one 10k-line module. But there's also an unfortunate tendency to favor consolidation into one 50k-line module. In that case they were separate for a good reason...

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#479

Post by GiorgioG » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #420

GiorgioG wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet you are treating their comment like a "real problem"... you're the one crusading, they just gently and non-confrontationally made a suggestion. You could have just passed on by if you didn't agree with their suggestion, but you turned it into a crusade against them. To the observer, you are in fact the one acting like a "snowflake" fired up (dare I say "triggered") by their actually quite gentle suggestion, i…

My annoyance is that it has absolutely no relevance and adds nothing to the discussion regarding the story/post. It's just noise, which begets noise (my response) and so on. Let's talk about tech.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#480

Post by wayoutthere » Mon, May 18, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #467

LaGrange wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

We're asking to simply feel included (this includes women as well as trans people; I'm both). When so much of your life is being told you don't belong or that people like you don't / shouldn't exist, it's a big deal. It's 1) more accurate and 2) more reflective of the wide variety of experiences a person can have. I'm not being glib here, but of course the need for gender neutral language seems irrelevant: it is to you because you were already included. It's doubly important in heavily male-dominated industries.

I, too, prefer using "dev" or "employee" in place of "man" in these cases simply because it's more accurate. But it's really not a lot of effort and it actually means something when someone corrects themselves because it's basically "wow I feel seen and like I have a place here". When you've never seen someone like you in a position of success above you because you're one of the first, it really, really matters to feel accepted in any way you can.

Like, you don't have to do it. But these days it really does sound a bit anachronistic to use "man-hours" -- language changes along with the culture and it always has.