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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#551

Post by mnky9800n »

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…

You aren't wrong, but if someone paid me to write a chat application I probably wouldn't fight it. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#552

Post by manmal »

aryamaan wrote: post #540
arbol wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

> Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app. Uber's internal chat tool is built on top of Mattermost.

That's unfortunate - they could have made Mattermost on par with Slack instead.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#553

Post by hef19898 »

fergie wrote: post #521
spookthesunset wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees. Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), i…

That's assuming that, with 27,000 employees (why does Uber have so many?), monthly licensing fees are not negotiable. Which I would doubt.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#554

Post by _pmf_ »

segmondy wrote: post #351
spookthesunset wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uChat is actually built by a pretty large team Which is even more scary. Why isn't uber laying all these people off and paying cash money for a real chat application? What competitive advantage does uber have maintaining a chat application?

They might have to pivot into a chat company

I might actually hire an Uber for the express purpose of having someone to talk to. In Germany, taxi drivers were often former "German studies" or Philosophy students who did not find a job, so it was kind of guaranteed that you'd have a competent, honest communication partner (albeit left leaning).

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#555

Post by Ntrails »

jholloway7 wrote: post #515
22c wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I setup an enterprise-grade Mattermost server in a weekend. The hardest part wasn't even Mattermost itself, but getting SMTP working reliably in the age of DKIM/SPF/DMARC policies. This could be sidestepped by using any of the well-established email providers. No reason to use Slack when such options exist, but also no reason to write your own chat app, either.

Let's not pretend that hosting an OSS chat server is a walk in the park for every enterprise just because you personally got one up and running in a weekend.

When large MMO guilds have had a mostly trouble free chat client that supports a few thousand concurrent users on the free time and good will of admins I'm loathe to believe that this shit is impossible

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#556

Post by C1sc0cat »

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…

Back in 1994 I worked at British telecom on one of the first high profile web projects for our intranet.

Apparently there was a serious suggestion that this new www was shoddy and we needed to write our own version of http - this got stamped on by some senior people at Martlesham (UK version of bell labs)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#557

Post by 2rsf »

arbol wrote: post #536
Piskvorrr wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't require building from scratch.

Funnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

> mattermost seems to list Uber as their client

Not directly related to mattermost and Uber, but companies tend to list clients even if the product is not widely used or was even dumped.

You are a small team in a big company, you evaluate a product and find that it satisfies some of your basic needs but want to work with it for a while, so you purchase a couple of licenses for you team but stop using it after a year or two.

voilà ! you are a client listed on their web site

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#558

Post by C1sc0cat »

spookthesunset wrote: post #347
mv4 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft is no better, spending $8M per month on AWS to process 1M transactions per day.

AWS is the opposite of homebrew. Lyft has no business maintaining its own data centers and operational overhead. There is a huge opportunity cost involved with running your own infrastructure. AWS and the like free your own teams from worrying about how to provision new systems, upgrading DB server versions, etc. Running your own data center is hard. Running your own DC is the same as building your own chat app. It i…

But past a certain point AWS is very expensive compared to renting a rack in a couple of DC's

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#559

Post by chosenbreed37 »

_pmf_ wrote: post #554
segmondy wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have to pivot into a chat company

I might actually hire an Uber for the express purpose of having someone to talk to. In Germany, taxi drivers were often former "German studies" or Philosophy students who did not find a job, so it was kind of guaranteed that you'd have a competent, honest communication partner (albeit left leaning).

I think that's brilliant. I'm curious as to why it is not regarded as proper job. I don't think it's unique to Germany though. I think it is as honorable an occupation as any. And for the philosophical types it might actually be quite a good occupation as it may not be as taxing on the mind (apart from the time they spent thinking on their favorite subjects). That frees them up to study, research and write in their spare time. Secondly I'm curious as to why they tend to be left leaning...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#560

Post by ac2u »

fergie wrote: post #521
spookthesunset wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees. Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), i…

As other replies have said, with a high user count, they've likely negotiated that per head figure WAY down.

But even if they didn't, it's not as simple either as "can those engineers clone this software for less than X", it's whether they can afford to take the opportunity cost of not having engineers work on something core to Uber's business.

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