Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 689 posts

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#501

Post by belorn »

vkou wrote: post #491
ByteJockey wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is a life-year.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#502

Post by bpicolo »

koblas wrote: post #148
Havoc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic. What's tier 1/2/3 in the US? I had just heard that kind of system applied in China

San Francisco / Seattle / Boston / New York --- Austin / Salt Lake / Los Angeles / Portland / Atlanta --- Ann Arbor / Chicago / Minneapolis / Miami

Ann Arbor is an amazing town, but I'm surprised to see it on the same level as much larger metros. Is tech that much deeper there than when I was in school a handful of years ago? Who are the big players these days?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#503

Post by jrochkind1 »

GiorgioG wrote: post #479
jrochkind1 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a snowflake problem to me.

If left alone, there would have been nothing distracting about that short and explicitly non-accusatory comment, but you were triggered and chose to build a crusade around how you don't want to see certain kinds of comments on HN. You seem to have trouble handling the fact that some people have different opinions than you, about what comments are worth making. Very snowflake problem.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#504

Post by [deleted] »

closeparen wrote: post #424
simias wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having…

>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…

[deleted]

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#505

Post by kikokikokiko »

phatfish wrote: post #433
kikokikokiko wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that "Uber is not an essential service" to the millions of otherwise unemployable people that were able to feed their families using it. In countries like Brazil, where I'm from, the fall of Uber will have a gigantic impact. Gig economy apps BECAME ESSENTIAL parts of our lives, there's no denying it. But it was never sustainable. When everybody benefits from a product/service, other than the company that offers…

All the gig economy apps do is ensure the poor stay poor. When you are working 10-12 hours a day to make ends meet and shoulder the all costs of the depreciating fix assets there is very little opportunity dig yourself out of that hole. Uber and similar companies are destroying the very small businesses (or squashing their margins into nothing) which traditionally are the environment that the poor can become entrepre…

You have no idea what you're talking about. I presume you live in the US. You definitely have no sense at how much an average brazilian/argentinian/russian/indian guy can improve their financial life by driving for a ride sharing app. I know of engineers and lawyers down here that are making 2, 3 times more money than they used to make working a 9to5 job. I'm tired of seeing privileged people talking about how the poor, or how the uneducated people are SOOOO sumb that they can't see that "after all the expenses and depreciation" they are literally paying to work for Uber etc. Please, be a little bit more humble and stop trying to prohibit the people that NEED, or even the people that would RATHER work as an Uber driver than to slave on a regular job. It's their needs, it's their CHOICE, not yours.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#506

Post by SenorSourdough »

GiorgioG wrote: post #475
SenorSourdough wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree with such a compartmentalized way of thinking about these issues, where it's inappropriate to discuss gendered language when it comes up in some other context. That's often the only effective opportunity to address this kind of problem. A comment about the use of gendered language is relevant in response to a comment that uses arguably gendered language.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#507

Post by lykr0n »

balls187 wrote: post #169
lykr0n wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber has screwed over a lot of people in the past. I'm not going to cry for people who worked for a bad company getting screwed over by said bad company

Sure, but do you feel the same way about AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, every major auto manufacturer, Tesla, Amazon, and myriad of other companies that behave in unethical ways? I can't think of a single tech company that hasn't engaged in some eye brow raising behavior. There was even some controversy with YCombinator funding a fantasy sports betting company.

Yeah.

AirBNB has destroyed the rental markets of 100s of metropolitan areas. If you're working there, then you helped that.

Facebook is the sole reason we have AntiVaxxers, Trump, and fake news in general. Working at facebook, you're supporting that.

Apple I don't really have a beef with.

Amazon has killed people in it's factories, and if you work there you are in some part responsible for those deaths and the destroyed small businesses.

You can work where ever you want, as is your right. But by you working at a company, does not make you immune from being responsible for the company's actions. You have a choice of where you work, and if you choose to work there knowing the bad things the company does- that's on you.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#508

Post by freeone3000 »

wrkronmiller wrote: post #379
specialist wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way." Those example pathologies you listed are SOP at all the mature orgs I've worked at.

Do you think the degree to which a company succumbs to one of these "pathologies" matters? Is it a matter of timing (i.e. becoming successful faster than they become moribund)? What do you think differentiates a company that becomes "mature" vs one that flames out?

Mature companies, notably, make a profit. Not a future profit, not an expected profit, not profit-discounting-advertising, a right-now end-of-year no-accounting-tricks more revenue from sale of goods than expenditures from all sources. I'm going to take a page out of the IRS handbook, and say that they have made a profit for the last three out of five years, in fact. Let's take that a step further and say that they've existed for five years. Their primary method of financing operations is not private equity, but public equity or loans. Once a company looks like this, it's pretty well set.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#509

Post by tinyhouse »

1024core wrote: post #397
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it." This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for th…

I travel to India, a lot, as I have family there. Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you…

I can relate as someone who was scammed at Heathrow pre-Uber.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#510

Post by freeone3000 »

greenyoda wrote: post #394
Fauntleroy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only truly urgent thing I've seen is a product being down / a critical bug in production.

Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor. On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.

How can a person working on features tell the difference between critical and non-critical features?
Post reply on HN