I don't understand this... Lift and Grab aren't doing so bad. Also, things are opening back up again. Even their quarterly results looked very bad, it was already priced in and so no benefit there. This reduced focus basically just translates to much lower ambition and not a good thing for long term valuation. On the other hand money is super cheap. They could double on debt if they want to. I'm not sure what this layoff buys them anything except injuring their future prospects.
Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
561–570 of 689 posts
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#562Anyone working at Uber, can you share how is morale in Uber at this moment? How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people, but people don't want to go there? Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
Not me personally but a close friend I know that works there says morale is at an all time low understandably. Luckily he wasn't fired but a close coworker of his who was the #25th employee of Uber was removed. 6+ years at Uber and was managing and running a team that wasn't deemed essential to Uber core services apparently. Kind sucks but these people are at a position where it shouldn't be difficult to find another position elsewhere.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#563Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers work…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc.
These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing revenues or decreasing costs. Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#564Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers work…
All the big startups hire all the best people mostly to stop them from getting hired anywhere else until they can't sustain it. Having 1000 extra developers is better than having 200, 5 person engineering teams working against them.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#565Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pro…
Sounds like you have a problem handling the fact that some people are tired of the bellyaching every time someone uses a common term in which it is not meant in a derogatory way.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment. Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude. But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without…
> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?" (2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?" (3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utt…
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies.
You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#568The big worry for many cities is they've eviscerated their docked bike-rental program. Those are municipal infrastructure... If Uber is abandoning this product, there are a lot of cities that are going to have an orphaned bikeshare service with hard infrastructure installed all over town.
The thing is that they never actually were municipal infrastructure. They were an outsourced attraction posing as municipal infrastructure.
And to be frank, maybe those cities or municipalities should consider hiring some of the laid off employees, buying the infrastructure during the fire sale (if they don't actually already own it), cutting out the middle man, and doing it themselves.
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#569Are they going to regret having 4,000 micro services now?
Well I think that's one of the benefits of microservices actually. Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.
Ha ha, please! That has to be a "/s"
Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
#570I was let go today from Uber. If anyone is looking for a Frontend/Fullstack with 7yoe. I'm here :) Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-lawrence-b77400b8/
This might help. I created https://tryjobalerts.com to help find dev jobs, and it is free. Throwaway emails are welcome, use it however you want.