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Uber lays off 435 people

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Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#591

Post by earthboundkid »

Ultimatt wrote: post #501
earthboundkid wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that this is the normal ideological description of firms post-70s neoliberal whatever, but if that’s true, like why not just say firms suck, we need communism? Like your description makes Pikkety look like an optimist. “The purpose of a firm is to help rich people get money faster than other rich people” logically implies that eventually a small group of rich people will have all the wealth. That’s feudalism. I…

share holders longer term don't have to be rich

I agree, but the theory "firms exist to maximize shareholder value" ensures that they will be.

Put it this way: gravity turns space dust into supernovas. Dust is just ever so slightly attracted to other dust, so it accumulates and accumulates, and eventually it becomes so massive that it forms a star.

The theory that firms should beat the market makes money gravitational. A shareholder who beats the market will get more money than other shareholders. Now they have more money that they can use to invest in other market beating schemes, etc. If whether a firm beats the market is random, then some investors will win and some will lose but it all balances out. But if beating the market is not random (and how could it be totally random?) then those with the most money can invest in the best firms faster and more easily than smaller investors and crowd them out. Remember that companies only have a finite number of shares, so not everyone can invest in a winner. If there's even a slight bias towards having more money making it easier to beat the market, then eventually you will get a supernova.

We all understand this on some level. Why is insider trading illegal? Because it makes it trivial to beat the market!

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#592

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

muzz wrote: post #152
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that would make sense for a business with low margins. i'm surprised more companies aren't doing it.

They have been expanding in Palo Alto

PA would be the absolute worst place in the world for a low margin business to expand into. I really have no clue how they arrived at such a conclusion. I can only imagine, it had something to do with investors.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#593

Post by kevstev »

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…

>Uber definitely over hired in 2016

That's interesting, I interviewed with Uber for an engineering management role in 2016, and was blown away when my potential boss said he had a "hiring target" for next year of close to 100 people. This was a relatively small product offshoot of Uber that is now closed. I thought that was absolutely nuts, not just the magnitude of the number but that getting bodies in seats was a metric that he/I would be measured against, but thought maybe that I just didn't understand how hypergrowth startups work and it would be a good way to gain a new perspective!

Full Disclosure: I did not get an offer, even though I walked out of that interview feeling I had never nailed an interview as much as I had that day.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#594

Post by a_t48 »

bravura wrote: post #570
a_t48 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that pretty much falls under "None of your business".

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#595

Post by otterley »

adventured wrote: post #474
otterley wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The first AWS service was launched over 15 years after Amazon.com started selling books on the Internet. It wasn’t even a separate brand until after Amazon S3, SQS and EC2 were launched.

> The first AWS service was launched over 15 years after Amazon.com started selling books on the Internet. Close. It was roughly 11 years. I've been using Amazon AWS since early 2007; I believe it launched to the public in the form we know today in early 2006. They started selling books online to the public in mid 1995. If you go back to the very first AWS services - 2002 - it's closer to being only seven years.

Sorry, typo on my end :-)

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#596

Post by mynegation »

braythwayt wrote: post #399
mynegation wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _Why haven't you already done that?_ With layoffs you want to apply “cut once” approach or at least as rarely as possible, in batches. Constant trickle of layoffs is very bad for morale, no matter who is laid off. It is also bad for an external image of management.

Well, the colloquial understanding of a “layoff” is that it is not based on underperformers, but based on changing business conditions. For example, closing a plant, or getting out of a line of business. If Uber decides not to have anything more to do with self-driving vehicles, they might lay off everyone in its division. That would have nothing to do with poor performance on the part of individuals. On the other ha…

Hello Reginald, I am a fan and a fellow Torontonian!

I agree with your points, but optics might depend on a company. In a startup or smaller company being aware that underperforming employees are let go might actually improve morale. For bigger companies it is a typical situation that you notice or get to know that people from other teams are gone, but you may not be aware of their performance.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#597

Post by theincredulousk »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #567
tln wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

In the grand scheme of things it just isn't. 14 million rides a day, giving them a generous 1MB of data per ride, is "only" 14TB, 420TB/month. The data relevant to a ride for the clients like GPS location and ETA can fit into a few bytes...

A single video doorbell can use 200GB / month. With only 10,000 users that is 2 Petabytes of data traffic per month. Not to mention recordings that have to be stored and hosted for streaming later on.

Everything is relative (-;

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#598

Post by braythwayt »

mynegation wrote: post #596
braythwayt wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the colloquial understanding of a “layoff” is that it is not based on underperformers, but based on changing business conditions. For example, closing a plant, or getting out of a line of business. If Uber decides not to have anything more to do with self-driving vehicles, they might lay off everyone in its division. That would have nothing to do with poor performance on the part of individuals. On the other ha…

Hello Reginald, I am a fan and a fellow Torontonian! I agree with your points, but optics might depend on a company. In a startup or smaller company being aware that underperforming employees are let go might actually improve morale. For bigger companies it is a typical situation that you notice or get to know that people from other teams are gone, but you may not be aware of their performance.

True, but then again you probably don't notice so much. Every month there is a new face here and a new face there, and one old face has... Quit? Retired? Been fired? Who knows...

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#599

Post by foldr »

the_watcher wrote: post #230
landryraccoon wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that taxi cabs existed for decades and were profitable means that this price point exists. That was the whole reason lyft and uber entered the market in the first place.

Taxis are an extremely bad example as they did not operate in an open market, essentially behaving as a government-sanctioned cartel.

Uber is distorting the market on a scale far beyond any traditional taxi company.

Re: Uber lays off 435 people

#600

Post by csb6 »

goatinaboat wrote: post #525
mustacheemperor wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately many people lose close family members, even parents, in tragic, horrible, unfair circumstances that never see justice all the time. Most of them - I would wager almost absolutely all of them - do not commit mass murder afterwards. I vehemently disagree with your opinion about what I would have done in his place and register my unease with how you raise it as an obvious general norm.

Vader moved fast and broke things sure, but he succeeded in disrupting the Old Republic. That’s why he’s the real hero of Star Wars, and a role model for the tech community in general.

Not sure if you’re joking, but I think “moving fast and breaking things” is a bit of an understatement. I mean Vader enabled a heartless dictator to take over the galaxy and personally saw to it that a whole planet of billions of people blew up. Doubtless in the years after Order 66 Vader was responsible for millions of other deaths. I mean he personally strangled Captain Antilles for god’s sake.

The Old Republic was flawed, but disruption in this manner was clearly a step towards a new, shittier status quo. Disrupting something and making it worse doesn’t make him a hero.

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