Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 689 posts

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#651

Post by saagarjha »

nostrademons wrote: post #174
economicslol wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason why software companies don't generally hire contract software developers Have you ever been inside a FAANG? Sometimes it feels like red badges outnumber FTE 2:1 so I have no idea what you're talking about.

Worked for Google for 5 years. Red badges were largely confined to QA testers, physical security, and the kitchen, along with a few UI designers or engineers that didn't want to be employees because they liked the freedom that being a contractor allowed (eg. being able to work for someone else on the side). Basically everyone I interacted with on a daily basis was a FTE. Product area could have something to do with i…

I'm not sure about Google, but I know that many companies segregate contractors into other buildings. At one of my previous employers pretty much everyone I interacted with was a full time employee as well, but that was only because contractors largely did not have badge access to the office and worked somewhere else.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#652

Post by saagarjha »

lykr0n wrote: post #507
balls187 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but do you feel the same way about AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, every major auto manufacturer, Tesla, Amazon, and myriad of other companies that behave in unethical ways? I can't think of a single tech company that hasn't engaged in some eye brow raising behavior. There was even some controversy with YCombinator funding a fantasy sports betting company.

Yeah. AirBNB has destroyed the rental markets of 100s of metropolitan areas. If you're working there, then you helped that. Facebook is the sole reason we have AntiVaxxers, Trump, and fake news in general. Working at facebook, you're supporting that. Apple I don't really have a beef with. Amazon has killed people in it's factories, and if you work there you are in some part responsible for those deaths and the destro…

> Apple I don't really have a beef with.

I'm curious if this is because you agree with everything they've done or because you haven't really looked too deeply into it.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#653

Post by staticassertion »

brianwawok wrote: post #547
staticassertion wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or do A/B testing and incremental rollouts?

A/B tested products are terrible. Please don’t do that to an actual product people pay money for. “On this page, 12% more users clicked save if the save button was green instead of blue”

Bad A/B testing is bad. Incremental rollouts are not bad.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#654

Post by datadem »

hintymad wrote: post #323
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…

It's not about in unicorns or not. It's about the scope and impact of your projects, both of which have more to do with the size than the PR status of a company. When the quantity of people in a company exceeds the quantity of work, you'll be much more expendable. Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. J…

Uber actually has some of the best technical writing in [datasci/causal inference](https://eng.uber.com/causal-inference-at-uber/).

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#655

Post by Stupulous »

badfrog wrote: post #470
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…

> It is not painless: it is dissonant The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language? > and takes another syllable. That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.

Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that?

I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be complete conjecture. Language is this ancient thing that evolved in concert with our minds, optimizing for some vast array of factors. Human intervention into that process seems to always go wrong, down to US attempts to fix the spelling.

It bothers me that speaking my dialect with common definitions is not good enough. Can we not just be charitable in our interpretations of others' speech? Why do I have to dedicate cognitive load to verifying that every possible interpretation of every word is acceptable with no expectation of others meeting me in the middle, even just as far as the dictionary definition? If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#656

Post by thejynxed »

pyuser583 wrote: post #531
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…

Even at Google, how many people work in advertising?

Arguably everyone from the CEO to the intern pulling gofer duty seeing as how that is the vast, vast majority of their revenue and profit and everything else is just more advertising for Google itself.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#657

Post by bhupy »

CydeWeys wrote: post #649
bhupy wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think for the vast VAST majority of riders, the "random person with an app" is good enough. In the age of turn-by-turn directions, rides are commoditized. A hundred crimes per year divided by billions of trips per year represents decimal point percentage crime rate — which is a risk not all that different from aircraft crash statistics, or even car crash statistics.

I know I definitely prefer to save tens of dollars per ride vs the services provided by some platonic ideal of a "professional driver".

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#658

Post by jpalomaki »

ethbro wrote: post #556
munificent wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?" (2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?" (3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utt…

The problems caused by "half-assed" solutions are likely somewhere down the line, in distant future and their true costs impossible to estimate.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#659

Post by graham_paul »

travisl12 wrote: post #353
graham_paul wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you end up in the States?

It's a long tail starting back in the days of my great great great great grandfather. Back in the mother country he was tired of the same old same old and decided to travel to the New World to start anew. 300 years later I was born here :)

Ah I thought you were British, I looked at your Linkedin profile and saw a UK uni there

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#660

Post by zaptheimpaler »

Uber needed an excuse to layoff some people for a long time now. They went with a very "parallel" strategy, spinning up new teams for every project and ignoring code/process efficiency by sharing. Basically throw money at it to win quickly. Pretty unsophisticated engineering, enough microservices and huge DBs to ignore coordination problems.

They will transition to a more efficient structure with more co-ordination now that they have many different bets going and 1-2 core businesses that could work. Right in line with wallstreet expectations and Dara's job to make Uber profitable. I called it a year ago :D

Post reply on HN