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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#501

Post by Ultimatt »

earthboundkid wrote: post #436
dcolkitt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') I totally agree with everything you're saying. But I'm going to quibble with your phrasing. Apple's cash reserves belong to the shareholders just as much as Uber's funding rounds. Too many CEOs operate under the mistaken belief that retained earnings is "play money" in the way that paid-in-capital is not. For investors, retained earnings are su…

I get that this is the normal ideological description of firms post-70s neoliberal whatever, but if that’s true, like why not just say firms suck, we need communism? Like your description makes Pikkety look like an optimist. “The purpose of a firm is to help rich people get money faster than other rich people” logically implies that eventually a small group of rich people will have all the wealth. That’s feudalism. I…

share holders longer term don't have to be rich

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#502

Post by amerine »

dx034 wrote: post #496
raz32dust wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company relies on Mattermost, I would assume they'd need at least one maintainer per ~100 users, just to make sure that the SMTP keeps working reliably, there are backups etc. One person to maintain Mattermost would cost a company at least 150000 USD in the bay area. That's $100+ per month per user. Slack is way cheaper than that.

Really, 50 maintainers for a 5000 user system? I'd think it scales much better, probably 2-3 people for the whole company. And in that case, it can quickly be cheaper than slack

Exactly. No way does it take 50 people to scales mattermost to 5k because of smtp. This op made that all up.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#503

Post by asveikau »

bitL wrote: post #277
asveikau wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Out for good" is weird here. I interviewed with them more than a decade ago. They'd still consider that "signal"?

They might bring you in to get additional datapoint regardless.

They might, except that I have turned down their recruiters in the last 8 years or so.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#506

Post by bobsil1 »

tbyehl wrote: post #390
tolmasky wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, this is the story of how Slack got built. Slack was built as an internal tool while building Glitch, an online game. From Wikipedia: > Slack began as an internal tool for Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck during the development of Glitch, a defunct online game.[13][14] "Slack" is an acronym for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.

Some day, Stewart Butterfield will launch a gaming company that is successful in the gaming space instead of becoming the inspiration for an entirely unrelated startup.

Butterfield needs to fail at an enterprise app so his side game blows up.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#507

Post by foldr »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #254
foldr wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of the US, probably. It's not so clear cut in London. The tube is usually faster and more pleasant. (London's air quality is pretty bad, and many Uber drivers have an annoying habit of driving through heavy traffic with the windows open.)

Sure, but London has always had taxis, too, because sometimes they're the better tool. It's not like some people are taxi-takers and others are subway-takers. You use whatever's best at the time. When I lived in Boston I took the T every day -- but on some occasions, a taxi was the better choice.

I was responding to the claim that mass transit was "far worse" than Uber.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#508

Post by alexis_fr »

derefr wrote: post #350
uber_throwawa12 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack was evaluated a few times. The reason it was initially rejected when we first considered it is because it wasn't able to handle our scale at the time and the team over at Slack was not interested in prioritizing scaling for us over other things on their product roadmap.

Interesting. IBM adopted Slack just fine, back in 2016. I believe they've got at least 100k employees in their Slack workspace. Not sure if it's Slack or IBM doing the hosting/scaling for it, though.

There is a cultural difference between Uber and IBM which would explain why Slack didn’t shown its limits at IBM: Slack people belong to a startup which typically wouldn’t mind get everything done in a chat; whereas IBM is a 100+ years old company where everyone has to fill a paper form and managers type with two fingers (Source of this specific example: I’ve worked with IBM consultants with one of their products). Chat apps do not play the same role in each.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#509

Post by [deleted] »

simonrobb wrote: post #122
keehun wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the next question is, what do 4000 engineers do? Not aimed as a troll-y question: an informed idea of what the breakdown of that many engineers do would be enlightening. For example, there were about 200 iOS engineers the last I heard. Assuming similar levels for Android, that leaves 3,500-3,600 engineers.

+1 Appreciate you avoiding the usual "it's just a little smartphone app" I'm not going to try and give an exhaustive list, but as a rough explanation: things get really, really hard when you're operating at Uber scale (hundreds of thousands of riders on trip at any one time, each demanding low latency and reliability): - Product: native clients for each side of the marketplace in each vertical (rides, eats, freight,…

[deleted]

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#510

Post by piyushpr134 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #285
fpoijasw wrote: post #278

Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team ha…

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…

It cannot be shittier than slack. My slack desktop app consumes like 20% of my macbook's ram and phone app misses important notifications
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