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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

#621

Post by wegs »

armageddon wrote: post #347
wegs wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a suggestion, point people to a personal web page or portfolio. Especially for a front-end engineer, I would never recruit someone based on a LinkedIn profile. That's doubly-true in this market. To make it through the filter, it doesn't need to be fancy or take a lot of time, but it does need to be tasteful. Of course, fancy and playful go a very, very long ways for separating yourself from all the other people wh…

Plenty of other people will recruit him. The guy has worked as a front-end engineer at Uber and Tesla. Just fill out the LinkedIn profile - bullet points under the Uber section. Link to GitHub if he has it, then post something on LinkedIn. How many people have personal portfolio sites that are 2-3 years out of date... even 4-5 discussing how to build a product list in Backbone.js.

Perhaps you're right. But if you prepare well, better organizations will hire you for better jobs.

And to your comment, most portfolio sites are years out-of-date. I don't know anyone particularly cares. Most also aren't called 'portfolio sites' but 'personal web pages.'

If someone wrote a good backbone.js web site a half-decade ago, that gives me a pretty good indication of, well, a lot of things I care in hiring. I'm not making a check-list of technologies people know. Most experienced engineers can pick up new technologies in a month or two. I'm more looking for the sorts of things which are timeless:

* For a UI/UX designer, is there a sense of style? Did they think through what I want from their web site and how I get there? If that's a not the latest styles, that's okay. I respect the people who designed NextSTEP or Amiga too.

* For a front-end engineer, is the HTML correct? Accessible? Semantic? Is it split up properly between JS/CSS/HTML? All of this will be second-nature to someone I'd hire, but I see a lot of people are missing basics somewhere or other.

... and so on.

Basic skills gaps, (1) I haven't seen new hires close (2) are often indicative of deeper problems. That's why those stereotypical algorithmic interviews came around for back-end. People now optimize so much to the metric that it's become a lousy metric (and why I don't trust interviews much anymore), but the basic concept is right. Smart people who understand fundamentals, learning quickly, and execute well / get stuff done, preferably with good soft skills.

I'll also mention: I'm not sure anyone's getting hired overnight right now. We've gone from a seller's market to a buyer's market. A lot of layoffs, and not a lot of hiring going on right now. In previous downturns, which were much milder than this one, I saw very good people on job markets for months, and average people sometimes for years.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#622

Post by kumarharsh »

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]

Can we call it "sweat-year" or "work-year" please?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#623

Post by chalst »

slavik81 wrote: post #611
kaitai wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forgot…

This is a good point, excuse a quibble: 'werman' did not seem to actually see usage in Old English, although 'wepman', meaning male human, did in Middle English.

I'm basing this on a discussion at Wiktionary:

> Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:werman

And 'wepman' is documented on the Middle English Compendium.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti...

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#624

Post by Pxtl »

1propionyl wrote: post #568
Pxtl wrote: post #548

The 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.

At least in my city, it was a locally owned program. The city owned the bikes and the business that handled maintenance and rebalancing was a private not for profit. Uber was basically only involved with the software.

But if the city wants more bikes or parts, where do they get it?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#625

Post by wayoutthere »

achow wrote: post #586
wayoutthere wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 awk…

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

I agree; very few people use male-centered language with ill intentions. But it's still a choice people can make if they choose to, and it means a lot to those of us who often feel marginalized. You're not a jerk if you don't, but it's pretty much all upside if you do.

Anecdotally, I would say I hear gender-neutral language used about 2/3 of the time in the Fortune 500 world. While I don't hide the fact that I'm trans, I'm fortunate to pass for cisgender so most people I work with outside my immediate team don't know -- I'm pretty sure they're not altering their language for me. Maybe it's because I'm a woman, but it was a trend I noticed before I transitioned as well.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#626

Post by slavik81 »

chalst wrote: post #623
slavik81 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forgot…

This is a good point, excuse a quibble: 'werman' did not seem to actually see usage in Old English, although 'wepman', meaning male human, did in Middle English. I'm basing this on a discussion at Wiktionary: > Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:werman And 'wepman' is docu…

Thanks for pointing that out. I think Wiktionary is where I first heard the word, and I hadn't seen it was removed.

So, wer did mean male/husband and man did mean everyone. It's just that they weren't used together. I should probably also have noted that woman was 'wifman' back then. That one has more obvious descendants than the male version.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#627

Post by MandieD »

rauhl wrote: post #437
SenorSourdough wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male. Training yourself to default to non-gendered language like person-kind and to think about whether a term originates from problematic aspects of gender dynamics is a relatively easy first step towards breaking down some of the insidious aspects of sexism that are imbedded in langu…

> Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male. That is not actually true. The Old English word for a male human being is wer, as in werewolf; it is cognate to the Latin vir (also meaning a male human being, and the source of modern English words like virile & virtue). That word is no longer in common use in modern English,…

Modern German "Mann" is an adult, human male. Ehemann (husband), Fachmann (expert), Kaufmann (salesman). The parallel, of course, is Frau (adult, human woman), which also does double-duty on its own as a word for "wife": Ehefrau (wife), Fachfrau (expert), Putzfrau (cleaning lady). That "Putzfrau" is a long-standing word but "Putzmann" doesn't exist, and that "fachmännisch" and not "fachfrauisch" (fachfräulisch?) is a word are examples of the sexism deeply embedded in languages a lot of us are going on about. Thoughtful Germans are finding their way towards more gender-neutral terms, especially in job postings, which used to be horribly gendered - think "Reinigungskraft" (cleaning power) instead of "Putzfrau", or "Entwickler*in" instead of "Entwickler" (developer, grammatically male).

Modern German "man" (single 'n') is an indirect pronoun that is usually best translated as "one" or "someone", but even then, you fall into the sexism of male as default. "Man ist was man isst" (one is what one eats)

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#628

Post by itsamoreh »

N1H1L wrote: post #373
gbronner wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Lehman Brothers, the waves came every few weeks. On Tuesdays, HR fired business people, and engineering people cleaned up the mess. On Wednesdays, HR fired engineering people. On Thursdays, HR fired each other. It allows you to ramp down without pandemonium.

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.

A few years ago I worked at a small-ish company that had to do a mass layoff of about 10% of their employees. The only HR person had to write her own layoff letter. A few days later she had to walk back her own layoff because the company realized they probably shouldn't layoff their only HR person during a mass layoff.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#630

Post by MandieD »

MattGaiser wrote: post #388
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's your Startup Idea!

You jest, but an email to backlog service is something some managers might buy.

Gasping in horror at the prospect of that JIRA plug-in coming into being, especially since even I, a casual admin for our Atlassian products, have a good idea what combination of API calls would make that happen.
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