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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

#631

Post by InvisibleCities »

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.

The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#632

Post by thrav »

munificent wrote: post #449
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…

I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment. Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude. But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without…

Every tech company thinks they’ll just build their own CRM until they try.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#633

Post by varjag »

InvisibleCities wrote: post #631
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.

The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.

I'm talking about R&D specifically, not infra folks.

But let's say designing for scale is 100 times harder than a taxi app for just one national taxi service. Based on my 23 year career in trenches I seriously doubt that's the case, but let's be generous.

That would net us into ballpark of €60M expense. Non-negligible, but it translates into a hundred developers pulling €100k a year for 6 years, still at least an order of magnitude below Uber.

Very obviously it does not scale anywhere near linear. There has to be a severe case of diminishing returns in technical hiring.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#634

Post by rockostrich »

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.

No, the trick is to iteratively change the UI in a way that's easy for the user to get used to.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#635

Post by rockostrich »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #303
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'm at Airbnb (opinions strictly are my own). The number of engineers working on tooling for us is actually not that large. The vast, vast majority are product engineers and with our most recent layoffs the majority of the cuts were for those types of engineers. My own opinion is that we simply had way too many product engineers for the amount of actual output we got from them. Uber is on another different plane alto…

> Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.

This seems so strange to me. As a lead, most of my work is management, organization, and planning. To scratch the development itch I usually have 1 pet project going on that I either use when I'm taking a break from actual work or work on in my spare time. But even that pet project has pretty clear long or short term value and the only reason why it's not being worked on by my team is because it hasn't been prioritized yet. I can't imagine working on a pet project that has no clear value to the company.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#637

Post by rockostrich »

dehrmann wrote: post #533
alfalfasprout wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at Airbnb (opinions strictly are my own). The number of engineers working on tooling for us is actually not that large. The vast, vast majority are product engineers and with our most recent layoffs the majority of the cuts were for those types of engineers. My own opinion is that we simply had way too many product engineers for the amount of actual output we got from them. Uber is on another different plane alto…

> Uber is on another different plane altogether These are complete guesses for the pre-covid era, but it gives an idea of scale difference. The average Airbnb user probably books 2-3 times per year. The average Uber user probably books 2-3 rides per week. At 50x the volume, the infrastructure is different, and probably more complicated to handle the volume.

Eh, they're solving different problems. I don't think you can necessarily call Uber's problem more complicated just because it's an order of magnitude more volume. I worked at a small ad tech start-up with a team of 5 engineers on a real-time bidding platform that was serving 1k requests/second and moved to a travel company that's now 100+ engineers that serves maybe ~250 requests/second at peak traffic, but the travel company's infrastructure is a lot more complicated even though the volume is smaller.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#638

Post by blaser-waffle »

freeone3000 wrote: post #510
greenyoda wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor. On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.

How can a person working on features tell the difference between critical and non-critical features?

Ignore it and see how many calls you get

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#639

Post by ardy42 »

nom wrote: post #249
jacquesm wrote: post #134

Hard to let go of that many people without losing critical knowledge, Uber will come out of this a diminished company in many ways. Best of luck to those laid off.

IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.

> IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.

Critical knowledge is with the developers unless:

1. The system is stable and feature-complete.

2. You've employed about 10 FTEs documenting every aspect of the thing.

If those two criteria aren't met, they system becomes tech debt, a larger risk, and will likely decay until replaced.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#640

Post by jrochkind1 »

GiorgioG wrote: post #566
jrochkind1 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a snowflake problem to me. If left alone, there would have been nothing distracting about that short and explicitly non-accusatory comment, but you were triggered and chose to build a crusade around how you don't want to see certain kinds of comments on HN. You seem to have trouble handling the fact that some people have different opinions than you, about what comments are worth making. Very snowflake pro…

Sounds like you have a problem handling the fact that some people are tired of the bellyaching every time someone uses a common term in which it is not meant in a derogatory way.

I guess we're all equally snowflakes here then.
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