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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

#661

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

rgblambda wrote: post #596
pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc. These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing…

>>Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer. Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove. Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the h…

I think there are more than just those two interpetations.

I also think more people than Graeber have been aware of the existence of BS jobs for a long time.

What is nice about the Wikipedia page is that it acknowledges that BS jobs "is a thing".

Perhaps it facilitates more open discussion of the phenomenon.

SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 may be facilitating the discussion even more as it has forced people to consider what jobs are "essential" versus what logically can be referred to as "non-essential".

I have seen one commenter on HN raise the issue of why pay does appear to correlate with whether a job is essential or not. Perhaps this is something more people will start to think about.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#662

Post by alfalfasprout »

senderista wrote: post #463
alfalfasprout wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think so but that's at least not the impression I've gotten. At Google that's certainly going to be the case but at a company like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb the bloat ends up largely arising due to managerial bloat (managers want to grow their org to make themselves seem more important) and low technical standards for higher level ICs (which results in far more resources used to accomplish each project).

Are you saying that technical standards are lowered as one moves up the IC ladder? If so, how and why?

Technical competence isn't as well evaluated at companies like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb at L6+ especially for external hires. So it's not so much that the technical bar is dropped but that it just is less enforced at higher levels. As a result you end up with a lot of ICs that are all talk but little else. This is, of course, a gross generalization. I've worked with and know great engineers of all levels at these companies. But Uber in particular had plenty of really bad apples that got hired into other companies across the bay at L6/L7/L8.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#663

Post by alfalfasprout »

rockostrich wrote: post #635
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…

> 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…

In a bloated org, they can get away with it though... we had to let one high level Uber hire go because they couldn't code to save their lives, had insufficient technical expertise to guide any kind of substantive project, and played a lot of politics to seem important. I've run into at least 4 high level hires from Uber with the same kind of profile.

At the end of the day, it's just a reminder that careful screening is important. Could be a cultural issue that impacts certain unicorns, but it's also on the hiring company to thoroughly fact-check and test a candidate (and no, leetcode and simple arch questions aren't enough).

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#664

Post by badfrog »

Stupulous wrote: post #655
badfrog wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comp…

> If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?

Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#665

Post by wutbrodo »

luckydata wrote: post #487
victords wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Uber specifically? Money, better and cheaper transportation where it sucked, and jobs for much more people than just developers.

had advantages but remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car. I'm still convinced Uber is not a sustainable business at the scale they operate at.

> remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car

I've still yet to see any analysis show this that didn't have serious problems. The most common, and most severe, failing of these studies is the way they assume that time-based depreciation on a car is zero...implying that buying a car and letting it sit idle would maintain 100% of its value. That is to say, these studies define away the possibility that increasing utilization of your car allows you to get more value out of the asset, which IMO is at the core of the value calculation.

I wouldn't be shocked if better analyses found that the net income of being an Uber driver was pretty poor, but the fact that every analysis includes this glaring flaw makes me slightly more suspicious of the claim than I otherwise would be. And I don't think your unqualified statement of this claim as fact is warranted.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#666

Post by BlackJack »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #577
BlackJack wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Props for posting an ordering :O This seems to be ranked on eng availability, but in terms of actual city tiers it's more like T1: SF / NY / LA / Miami / Chicago / Atlanta T2: Seattle / Boston / Austin / SLC / Portland T3: Minneapolis / Ann Arbor

That’s a pretty strange ordering, mixing up a Seattle and Boston metros of 4 and 4.6m with an SLC, Portland, and Austin metros Of 1.2, 2.5, and 2.1m respectively. Why mix up the small and large cities in T2? Then your T3 has Minneapolis, at 3.6m. Why would Minneapolis be ranked lower than tiny SLC given it has 3x the population?

Thanks for the population numbers, I didn't know they were so different. I just ranked them from (my perceived) livability - SLC close to skiing/nature, while Minneapolis/Ann Arbor are not destination cities like the other ones.

I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the T1s.

I see your logic though, and maybe it's better to just have a T1 and T2.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#667

Post by Hallucinaut »

agakshat wrote: post #450
Thrymr wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge might also be thinking about protecting his own job. Being irreplaceable is good job security.

I’ve always wondered, does this actually happen? People not getting fired because they are irreplaceable partly because of their own failure to document stuff?

Very frequently in corporate environments, at least in investment banks I have known and heard of many people earning four figures a day pretty much purely because they've been allowed to carve their own niche that becomes indispensable.

Ironically, the worse they are (think 5000 lines of Perl with two functions) then the less viable it is to replace them.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#668

Post by seanmcdirmid »

BlackJack wrote: post #666
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty strange ordering, mixing up a Seattle and Boston metros of 4 and 4.6m with an SLC, Portland, and Austin metros Of 1.2, 2.5, and 2.1m respectively. Why mix up the small and large cities in T2? Then your T3 has Minneapolis, at 3.6m. Why would Minneapolis be ranked lower than tiny SLC given it has 3x the population?

Thanks for the population numbers, I didn't know they were so different. I just ranked them from (my perceived) livability - SLC close to skiing/nature, while Minneapolis/Ann Arbor are not destination cities like the other ones. I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the…

Minneapolis is the biggest American metro between Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix. It basically anchors a huge amount of the country. SLC in contrast plays second fiddle to nearby (relatively speaking) Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (at least it is bigger than Boise).

Ann Arbor is so small and close to Detroit, it is odd to hear it listed as a significant city in its own right (like Madison WI). Heck, they are about the same close-ish distance away from Toledo, and Toledo is much bigger than Ann Arbor.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#669

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

microtherion wrote: post #126
amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true in more than just in the self-driving car space. Even at companies like AAPL and AMZN where ML focused researchers/engineers work on production related tasks, I've seen their value production is dubious at best.

[Disclaimer: AAPL engineer, technically classified as ML] I would argue that ML researchers/engineers have a clear impact on AAPL products in several areas: * FaceID * Steadily improving speech recognition accuracy in Siri * Considerable improvement in speech synthesis quality * Increasing sophistication in camera image processing

In my experience working on these product teams, most of the real gains are just from solid engineering combined with public advances in ML. The teams filled with ML specific folk aren't able to accomplish much.

Re: Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices

#670

Post by luckydata »

wutbrodo wrote: post #665
luckydata wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had advantages but remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car. I'm still convinced Uber is not a sustainable business at the scale they operate at.

> remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car I've still yet to see any analysis show this that didn't have serious problems. The most common, and most severe, failing of these studies is the way they assume that time-based depreciation on a car is zero...implying that buying a car and letting it sit idle would maintain 100% of its value. That is to say, these studi…

the cost per mile of maintaining a fleet car is one of the subject matters best studied and quantified in the entire universe. My wife is a fleet manager, I'm very damn well sure what I'm talking about (contrary to you).

I'm also a product manager so I did some back of the envelope math because I REALLY wanted to understand to what I was missing that Softbank wasn't. Turns out, absolutely nothing, I'm the sane one.

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