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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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems to imply a different amount of time. Work year would be the amount of time worked in a year (usually ~2000 hours give or take). Sort of like how a work-day is 8 hours rather than 24. Man/woman/person/dev/etc-year seem to imply an amount of work that is equivalent to a year (~8760 hours). Or at least that's how I would use those terms. It's entirely possible that these definitions are regional in nature.

I always interpret a work year to be the same thing as a person year, which is ~2000 hours.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#493

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…

There is also a technical reason for microservices -- scaling and releasing independently. The company I work for is a B2B company. We use our APIs for our own (relatively low volume) website. But we also use it for batch jobs and we sell direct access to our APIs to our clients and they use our APIs for their own websites and applications. One large client gets signed, the usage of one API can spike by 30%

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#494
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where does IC stands for? Probably not intensive care :D

Individual Contributor. Basically means no direct reports.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#495

Hard to let go of that many people without losing critical knowledge, Uber will come out of this a diminished company in many ways. Best of luck to those laid off.

Not so sure about that. The company was notorious for having teams constantly rollout competing internal libraries/tools and rewrite them over and over, obviously not having enough bottom-line work to keep everyone busy. A smaller workforce may be able to focus on the work that matters, it doesn't have to imply a lower productivity.

It could be worse. You could have a large company notorious for rolling out competing external products, like messaging and video chat apps....

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#496
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where does IC stands for? Probably not intensive care :D

Individual contributor (technical path as opposed to a managerial path)

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#497
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, a downturn is generally considered to be down by 10%, maybe 20%. Quantitatively different, but not qualitatively different. Adjustments, but things still generally continue as planned. A collapse is dropping by close to 50% or more, like Uber's demand. It's suddenly playing an entirely different game, it becomes a qualitatively different business. If this isn't a collapse, nothing is. A "pause" would imply th…

Oh, did you mean Uber and not the economy as a whole?

Oh, I re-read the comments and realized I completely confused the two. Never mind me, sorry! Yes, the economy as a whole has not collapsed, it is more of a pause, agreed.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#498
post #467

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…

> statements like this are not useful for building understanding.

I don't ask you to "understand," honestly I'm not sure if I even particularly want you to. I want you to _respect_ us, and others. And no, understanding is not a precondition to respect. By insisting on using exclusive language, or even by framing otherwise inclusive language as exclusive, you are showing lack of such respect.

And true understanding is a huge amount of work. If you need understanding for respect, there ain't going to be many people you'll respect.

> 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?

We ask you to say "humankind" and "employee-hours." Among other mostly practical, material things: don't exclude us and don't get in our way.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#500
post #465
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prato principal crystallized You're wrong, and not just about the Pareto principle.

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

Can confirm, I was having a hard time parsing how "main course" in Portuguese made sense in the middle of that sentence.
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