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Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

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Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#581

Post by josteink »

blihp wrote: post #91
rvz wrote: post #62

I can't imagine how companies like Uber, Lyft and WeWork could be sustainable in the long term with huge costs and a high burn rate, but this action is definitely in addressing the future Q2 results in the summer which is the actual results including the impact on the coronavirus outbreak. Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with hug…

The game plan is pretty simple: use VC cash to quickly provide services everywhere and build market share, drive competitors out of business / acquire them, move to self-driving cars to the extent possible and eventually raise rates when customers have no other options.

> drive competitors out of business / acquire them, move to self-driving cars to the extent possible

The problem is that they have no self-driving cars and thus just represents the most massively over-staffed taxi-hailing mobile app ever.

I’d be surprised if we don’t see much more dramatic job cuts in the future.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#583

Post by Drakar1903 »

seankimdesign wrote: post #370
sandworm101 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-…

That's more of a failure for the ux and product vision than it is a failure of project management. The trick isn't to just roll out new changes slowly, but to involve the users and figure out what needs to change and how.

This is one of those cases where that Ford quote about a faster horse is relevant. Many people will be happy to just have what they have now without thinking how it could be better.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#584

Post by varjag »

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…

It is fair to say that when you have R&D headcount in thousands it better be something really impressive.

Boeing 747 design team was 4500 engineers and they were done in 29 months.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#585

Post by Drakar1903 »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #529
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sde-year, dev-year, engineer-year, resource-year, employee-year, are all variants I've heard before. I can understand not wanting to miss-quote something, but otherwise seems simple enough to use different language.

While those variants solve some complaints, they're a lot more specific and may change the meaning of some statements. For example, many of those terms exclude work that isn't done by "engineers". Using a term like "employee-hours" might make contractors on your team feel less valued.

Call them contributor-hours, this way only the people that slack off can be offended.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#586

Post by achow »

wayoutthere wrote: post #480
serf wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for. statements like this are not useful for building understanding. rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought. Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement. What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for…

> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that? We're asking to simply feel included (this includes women as well as trans people; I'm both). When so much of your life is being told you don't belong or that people like you don't / shouldn't exist, it's a big deal. It's 1) more accurate and 2) more reflective of the wide variety of experiences a person ca…

I'm totally with you on the inclusion part, everyone in a diverse team needs to feel included.

However, on the solution part, if you say dev-hours, I as a designer would have a huge problem :-), or even as a PM I would have same problem. 'Employee' comes close, but then it precludes estimating for consultants, freelancers etc. 'Person Hours' does not seem to have any of above problems, but then as mentioned it is awkward to use.

Well, maybe perfect solution does not exist, or maybe the perfect solution is being more accepting - accepting gender diversity AND also accepting that many times things that we do is out of laziness or choosing easier path or just out of habit - people in professional work environment do not do things with ill intention.

There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#587

Post by lordgrenville »

kaitai wrote: post #524
eadmund wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral. It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable. One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case. I think that language…

Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equ…

But this is something you do constantly as an English speaker. "Drinking" can mean any liquid, or just alcohol. Wood can be a material, or a forest. A bank can be a financial institution or the side of a river. A mouse can be a rodent or a computer peripheral. Does it really take conscious difficulty to figure out the intended meaning?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#588

Post by lordgrenville »

wayoutthere wrote: post #468
eadmund wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral. It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable. One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case. I think that language…

> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country. I don't want to be that person but Zoroastranism is the religion you should be comparing against -- it predates Islam by a good deal and developed alongside Farsi. And Zoroastranism do…

Iran has been Muslim for over 1300 years. Zoroastrians today are a tiny minority. It's a bit disingenuous to refer to the (brief, mainly urban) liberalism of the Pahlavi years in place of everything that came before or after.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#590

Post by anticensor »

IgorPartola wrote: post #565
tanilama wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoff == less spend Their stock price will go up.

By that logic why do companies even bother to have employees or contractors? No payroll == more money?

Worker rights. Employees mean more bonding, less freedom of movement.
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