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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

#641

Post by eternalban »

chx wrote: post #609
varjag wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't find you a source right now but back in '94 when I was learning IBM mainframe Assembler the history was mentioned and they claimed thousands of engineers, mathematicians and physicist worked for 3.5 years on the first mainframe (or was that the 360?).

The IBM of that era was literally inventing the modern computing systems. The complexity of the tasks at hand were essential, not incidental. I think the general trend of thought here is a critique of the latter day NIH syndrome and the consequent inflation of the technical teams.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#642

Post by jungturk »

schnable wrote: post #440
MisterPea wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think that's one of the benefits of microservices actually. Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.

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 doing microservices well then these services are probably instrumented in a way that makes it trivial to observe and understand the callers' expectations.

Uber's github shows lots of work on opentracing, so if that's widely deployed then the remove operation is a straightforward.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#643

Post by djcapelis »

apetresc wrote: post #616
caoilte wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does that mean?

It means that the functionality of the app that immediately comes to mind is only one of the many ways in which they lose an extraordinary amount of money.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#644

Post by mountainboot »

wegs wrote: post #282
dmaskasky wrote: post #242

I was also let go today, is anyone looking for a frontend engineer with 6 years experience? My profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmaskasky/

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…

Meh idk, seems like a waste of time. I have worked as a front end engineer at large companies my whole career and have never once been asked for a portfolio.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#645

Post by fatnoah »

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…

Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs?

I've never been at a unicorn, but I have been at many startups. The story is the same everywhere. Almost no one is irreplaceable. When times get tight, cutting overhead means letting people go.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#646

Post by HenryBemis »

HenryBemis wrote: post #287
bradlys wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years. That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics -…

> show urgency I call this "artificial panic". That term came to mind when I joined a FMCG around Y2K, and on my first weeks I noticed people were running around stressed, like headless chicken. When I asked "what's on fire" and the answer was "nothing". https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-07-15 The "Minimalists" say on their podcast that "most emergencies, aren't". When I see panic setting camp in a company's mentality,…

Correcting myself (for the record). The Minimalists say that "most CRISES, aren't" (apologies for the caps). I used the word emergencies, which is inaccurate quote.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#647

Post by bhupy »

CydeWeys wrote: post #387
bhupy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? For the vast majority of people, Uber is a taxi service.

The reason is that car service drivers are also being replaced and they are more likely to have been FTEs.

Great, I think you came up with the simplest solution: Uber should make whatever single digit percentage of total drivers that comprise their Uber Black drivers FTEs.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#648

Post by user5994461 »

greenyoda wrote: post #394
Fauntleroy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only truly urgent thing I've seen is a product being down / a critical bug in production.

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.

A large company would never manage to switch to a competitor in one quarter. And they try any hard, it most likely means their getting a cashback under the table for the new contract, or other perk of the sort, the feature is just an excuse.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#649

Post by CydeWeys »

bhupy wrote: post #647
CydeWeys wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that car service drivers are also being replaced and they are more likely to have been FTEs.

Great, I think you came up with the simplest solution: Uber should make whatever single digit percentage of total drivers that comprise their Uber Black drivers FTEs.

This might be a good selling point for the higher levels of Uber service: You're getting a full-time, professional driver who's been thoroughly vetted. It's not just some random person with an app.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#650

Post by thejynxed »

bashinator wrote: post #390
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-…

> 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. Is this sarcasm? Seems like a really user-hostile attitude if not. Admittedly, my personal point-of-view is that the majority of UI updates are make-work for engineers and PMs with at best no value added, and at worst negative value created (as you experienced).

It's a funny joke because everyone from Microsoft, IBM, and Apple to Canonical and the GNOME Project has been guilty of this in the past.
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