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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#561

Post by fastball »

jtolmar wrote: post #493
earthboundkid wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put it this way, if the standard theory of why capitalism beat Soviet communism is that competition created better products etc. none of that requires that the goal of firms is to create better than market average returns to shareholders rather than the goal of firms being a) earn sufficient profit to continue to exist b) benefit consumers c) benefit employees d) benefit shareholders. Yes shareholder would prefer to…

If the only defense of capitalism is competition, why not market socialism? As in, markets, competition, and entrepreneurship still exist, but all firms must be worker-owned.

Because then you would be forcing everyone to be an equity partner, even if they would rather take a higher salary than share in the risk. Doesn't sound like freedom to me.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#562

Post by coldtea »

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…

>Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner.

I assume you're not on the side that got laid off. I wonder what their opinion is...

>I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress.

Because those are trivial matters, and they should just suffer through them?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#563

Post by mirkules »

Ntrails wrote: post #555
jholloway7 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The funny thing about your comment is that Slack was born out of a MMO game.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#564

Post by jannes »

greentrust wrote: post #478
buildzr wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but like, run Mattermost or Lync or an XMPP server with apps pre-built for it... don't build your own system. Just a waste of effort.

Ex-uber engineer here. Uber's chat app is based on Mattermost, not built from scratch.

Does the fork stay current with upstream?

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#565

Post by Slartie »

raz32dust wrote: post #490
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.

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.

We are a company with around 100-150 employees, using Mattermost in a real Enterprise setting for years now (with SSO, CI and mail integration and whatnot) and that server is being maintained by our admin team basically "on the side" - nobody was hired specifically for this job, as it does take less than 20% of one person's time according to what the team says.

These Bay Area tech people must be either incredibly inefficient (especially when comparing to what they get paid), or your estimate must be waaaaay off.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#566

Post by 22c »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #513
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.

> 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. This is valid not just for Mattermost but many other apps that support sending e-mails. And that's why it's important that instead of giving up and outsourcing it, we all try to set it up and have first-hand experienc…

What's interesting is setting up a handler for DMARC aggregated feedback reports. I determined that it's not worth doing yourself, even Microsoft do not handle their own DMARC reports.

I ended up outsourcing DMARC report processing, if I wanted to do it in-house I'd have to setup and maintain an Elastic stack[1] which seems like huge overkill.

[1] https://domainaware.github.io/parsedmarc/

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#567

Post by Traubenfuchs »

tln wrote: post #265
rainyMammoth wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also been impressed by everything they are producing and I'm actually really wondering why do they need all of those new OSS projects. They need to scale but to an order of magnitude lower than most other webscales. None of their application is data heavy I have said this before but they seem to have a strong "must be built here" culture. You typically see this in highly political environments where engineers…

> None of their application is data heavy Really?? They have O(thousands) of drivers in O(hundreds) of cities with the app open, sending and receiving data approximately all day. What companies in your mind are data heavy?

83 countries, 858 cities, 75 million riders, 3 million drivers.

5 billion rides in 2017. That's 14 million a day on average. I would guesstimate peak days have at least double the average.

That is data heavy to me. (-;

https://muchneeded.com/uber-statistics/

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#568

Post by 22c »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #513
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.

> 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. This is valid not just for Mattermost but many other apps that support sending e-mails. And that's why it's important that instead of giving up and outsourcing it, we all try to set it up and have first-hand experienc…

> of course you will be able to, but your e-mails won't reach most customers

Unfortunately, I found this to already be somewhat of a reality. Even with all the best practices I went to, many MTAs simply don't trust my IP address. Most "sane" MTAs seem to greylist me rather than blacklist outright, so it just adds a bit of delay to users receiving their emails. Thankfully it seems to be gradually getting better, but gone are the days of simply pointing your apps at sendmail letting them go.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#569

Post by sciurus »

raz32dust wrote: post #519
dx034 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you are really underestimating the bureaucratic overheads in a large company. It is not the same as a 3-person startup serving 5000 customers. Of course I pulled that number out of the air, but the point is that it can make sense. I think I am right around the ballpark of needing a 5 people team to serve 500 users - you'd need a minimum of 3 people just to make sure there is enough redundancy if one person is…

Or you have your existing corporate IT team manage it the same way they're managing other internal apps.

There's no way it suddenly needs a new team of dedicated full time resources.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#570

Post by bravura »

a_t48 wrote: post #550
mucholove wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at this from Spain, you did do this over the weekend. I also work 6 days a week—but my hope is that this didn’t take the place of building a family, having a relationship, finding a relationship going for a hike in the mountains, citizen science, or making art. Your weekend is valuable!

You're totally right that the weekend is valuable, but some people enjoy doing this sort of thing with their free time. It's not anyone's place to decide what anyone else does for entertainment or self improvement. That is to say - what is not valuable to you might be valuable to someone else.

Actually if your leisure activities and your work activities are similar, and you don’t have many interests outside engineering (or finance or law or whatever), then it is the prerogative of others to criticize your lack of well roundedness and insularity.
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