Uber imposes engineer hiring freeze as losses mount | Hacker News Reader

Uber imposes engineer hiring freeze as losses mount

finance.yahoo.com

59 pointsdionmanu18 comments

The clock is ticking and they seem to have no plan at all. So weird to see such a massive company go public with no ideas or serious attempts at becoming profitable, ever.

Congrats to all the investors and employees who were able to cash out before whenever. Everyone else is about to get very, very angry.

I guess if they don't find out how to turn a profit in time, this will probably end in tears for the investors.

In alight with the disappointing Q2 even after Q1 due to their IPO cost, soon the most hyped IPO of the year is now turning into a nightmare for everyone else.

It sounds like the IPO party was over before it had even started.

All the investors are already counting their winnings. They've been out for months, years. Seems like they are now just burning through a billion a month in stock option compensation before it all comes crashing down.

It's bizarre to see such a blatant scam being run out in the open. People used to have shame.

Maybe because it’s not a scam and just not a profitable business venture?

Perhaps. But I think there's a genuine question about whether it was ever reasonable to believe that Uber was going to become a profitable company. Most of the claims I read/heard that there was a legitimate path to profitability amounted to "something something on a long enough timeline something something." We may well never find out if those claims are true. After Uber is dead I'm sure there will be many wishful retrospectives full of counterfactual arguments about "if only Uber had done such and such instead," but we'll never know if those are true, either.

I'm not sure why Uber wouldn't be successful. After all, taxis were a profitable enterprise for millennia.

Uber faces lower costs, and they have scale which allows them to have better targeted offers, surges, and advertising.

I noticed that they spent $3B in R&D last quarter. Presumably a lot of that is going into driverless vehicles. Exclude half of that cost, and exclude their one time IPO related costs, and they're profitable.

As someone who was doing projects for several companies when the dot-com bubble burst, companies like Uber and Wework seem like whatever we had then but at a far bigger scale. The fundamentals do not work so how does anyone think this will end well?

It won’t, it’s going to be another nuclear winter in Silicon Valley.

Uber's lockup period is 6 months or 180 trading days.

https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/uber-technologie...

1 year by contract for most employees.

I think they've gotten "engineering" confused with "engineer"—plenty of people are in the engineering org that aren't engineers.

Really like who? There are only engineers in “engineering” at the company that I work at. Pretty sure it’s always the case unless you’re discounting EMs, which I don’t think you should.

Lots of negative responses thus far. Happy to accommodate any insider views as to why this is not what it seems to be...

I work there (and conduct engineering interviews)

If that's really happening, nobody told me. I had two interviews this week and another one scheduled two weeks from now. And last I heard, my team got approval to increase headcount by 2.

And Glassdoor is covered in Uber positions in my area.

That's VERY interesting given the headline.

this seems reactionary. I mean if they didn't need to hire those engineers in the first place, why hire them?

So another company wouldn't. Spite hiring.

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