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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

#611

Post by slavik81 »

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…

As with many things that don't make much sense, it started from something more reasonable. Long, long ago the word 'man' unambiguously referred to all human beings, while 'woman' was used for females and 'werman' was used for males.

The forgotten sexism is that we began using 'men' to refer specifically to males, almost like they were the only people that mattered. It happened so long ago that it's been mostly forgotten that there even was another name.

Though, you still see vestiges of it in the language. That's the same wer- as in werewolf.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#612

Post by caoilte »

varjag wrote: post #602
blackrock wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A taxi company over here had a contractor build them their own hailing app. Cost them less than €600k, it's pretty slick.

fair, but also a lot of Uber's business model is leveraged on top of the basic platform.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#613

Post by casperb »

I wonder if it is harder to let so many engineers go when you have so many microservices as Uber has/had. Seems to me that a monolith is easier to maintain when the amount of people working on it goes down, then with all those small microservices. They maybe/probably will have microservices running that now has no one to maintain them.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#615

Post by simias »

matt_morgan wrote: post #376
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-…

[flagged]

I actually considered that when writing my original comment but "the mythical man-month" is such an obvious reference that it felt weird to change it. I suppose you can also think of it like "horsepower", it's an equivalency but doesn't actually mean that the power literally comes from a horse.

Still, point taken, I'll consider using person-year next time.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#616

Post by apetresc »

caoilte wrote: post #612
varjag wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A taxi company over here had a contractor build them their own hailing app. Cost them less than €600k, it's pretty slick.

fair, but also a lot of Uber's business model is leveraged on top of the basic platform.

What does that mean?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#617

Post by alangibson »

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…

I've noticed that, as projects or entire companies grow, the effort spent on the product decreases relative to the effort spent on things _about_ the product.

Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.

It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#618

Post by alangibson »

Evangelosggg wrote: post #444

I remember being at Droidcon or some Android specific conference years ago.... When Uber was presenting the speaker said "I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to work on an app that hundreds or thousands of devs are all contributing to at once!" and the entire crowd just looked at each other like dogs do when they hear a very high pitched sound.

And the one's that did know looked at each other like dogs that spent the day in a Skinner box.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#619

Post by alangibson »

jakemal wrote: post #483
schnable wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wonder is how often the "remove" operation happens. I'd wager it's more likely there are many services doing variations of the same thing, but existing ones are hard to kill because there is a web of dependencies.

If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.

> If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.

I call this the "You're doing it wrong" Theory of Architectural Deficiency: anything that appears to be a fundamental architectural issue is actually just you being an idiot.

For examples, see every discussion about REST ever.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#620

Post by mathattack »

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…

The risk is the same at non-Unicorns. Look at developers at J Crew, hospitals and governments. All will face a squeeze.
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