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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

#591

Post by johnwangdoe »

jeffbee wrote: post #107
treis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a lot of cuts that needed to happen even without Covid. Common refrain for these companies is why does Company X need Y thousands of employees for a single app/website. For Uber I guess we are going to find out how much they were really needed.

Yes, pandemic is going to force companies to take action that was necessary anyway. Uber's businesses, all of them, everywhere, are garbage. There is no sense, no matter how narrow or convoluted, in which Uber has been profitable. Spare me the discussion of how their empanada delivery business in Jakarta is very healthy. Just spare me. When I was a professional investor, whenever management told me that they had a re…

That makes sense. The earlier employee definitely made off like bandits.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#592

Post by mschuster91 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #343
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…

>> 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-…

> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.

Fuck people doing this. Especially extremely radical design changes such as Twitter's and Facebook's "redesigns" that they force down the throats of their users. Or Microsoft.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#593

Post by flak48 »

pishpash wrote: post #422
outlace wrote: post #361

I’m sure Travis Kalanick is so happy he dumped his shares before all this.

He dumped shares at more than 10% below today's closing price, and almost 20% below today's intraday high. Why would he be happy?

The sheer volume of shares he offloaded everyday contributed significantly to the drop in price while he was selling.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#594

Post by marcus_holmes »

kortilla wrote: post #534
closeparen wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

That’s a false dichotomy. It’s likely that that are both not idiots and what they are doing isn’t necessary. When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool…

As soon as an organisation gets above a size limit, organisational politics becomes the most important factor in any decision.

The decision to agree to a feature request starts to consider Who the feature request came from before any of the practicalities of the feature itself.

They're not idiots, and they are doing what is necessary, but the goals have moved from outward-facing market and customer concerns to inward-facing organisational-political concerns.

Every coder in a large organisation, sooner or later, gets given a task that makes no engineering sense but achieves some internal political goal.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#595

Post by smcl »

wlesieutre wrote: post #456
N1H1L wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether it's an urban legend or not, some HR people were asked to write their own emails firing themselves at Lehman.

If you broke labor laws while laying yourself off, would it be grounds to sue the company afterward since the actions were taken by an employee of the company?

It's a funny thought, but I have to think it'd get noticed pretty quickly that you're suing the company for something you actually did, and it'd be dismissed pretty quickly.

It'd be fun to negotiate your own exit package in that situation though :-D

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#596

Post by rgblambda »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #563
bdcravens wrote: post #205

Developers 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…

>>Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.

Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove.

Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.

I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#598

Post by blackrock »

varjag wrote: post #584
closeparen wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Software is a little strange sometimes.

It’s a different type of systems engineering, that’s more akin to sorcery, than to actual physics.

The hardware is, of course, limited by physics, like the speed of electrons and heat dissipation. But once you get past that, your computer system is a collection of bytes that you reassemble to form whatever it is your imagination desires.

And while the 747 is a magnificent plane, it did have the benefit of over 50 years of aviation and aeronautical science behind it, all figured out.

Whereas software is still somewhat in its infancy right now. And every few decades, it seems to revolutionize itself, as newer and faster hardware become available.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#599

Post by PunchTornado »

californical wrote: post #575
PunchTornado wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always feel thankful that I don't have to deal with taxi drivers when I travel.

It's interesting that you say that, since it was one of my favorite parts about Europe being able to just walk up to any main street corner and have a ride somewhere. No need to have an app or anything, always works, no privacy/data issues. And it was never a big deal to walk a couple blocks to the main roads

When I went to Paris I was cheated so much and almost beaten, had a physical altercation with a taxi driver at destination. Never again would I use taxi if I have another option.
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