Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
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That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
Never worked for a unicorn, but everything from big corp to startup to government. "Urgent" provokes no reaction from me anymore because of this.
On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.
,"Critically Important", etc. is the most recent whatever caught the attention of a typical S/E/VP with the attention span of a ferret long enough for him/her to be able to utter it in the words. If you're able to highly visibly jump and demonstrate activity during exact that moment - a great talent leading to advancements/promotions - there is no point to react as the next new "critical" directive/change of course/etc. is coming very soon. Of course if your manager is one of those aspiring "talented jumpers", he/she will try to make you jump with him/her - it is a real PITA to have such a manager who instead of filtering and protecting the team from would amplify all that stuff flowing down.
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, I make myself scarce for a while until things calm down. If I see that the artificial state of panic is a perpetual feeding machine, I try to dance around it. I've read my share of Dilbert to know to avoid these toxic environments.
Sometimes you need to be a Wally to survive.
Ideally in a company there would be one single order backlog, showing the relative value of each project to everyone. However getting such an ordering would involve huge co-ordination across vastly differing internal companies / cultures and would drag up every buried political hand grenade of the company's lifetime.
So instead you do what someone shouts loudly about. If the shouter is right more than 50/50 they are doing pretty well.
The whole point of "Agile" was supposed to break down these divisions. Management is "generally charged" with getting the greatest productivity they can out of their resources. How that productivity is measured may be by "the priorities as set by Product", but that doesn't take into account ROI, sunk costs, COGS, Cap/Opex etc etc.
1) Are you suggesting that developers should go join a smaller company so they are less expendible?
2) Are you suggesting that developers, now that they are laid off, go work on R&D projects, tooling and open source startups?
I am so confused. What is the take away?
I've always worked in manufacturing so people aren't that easily expendible. Takes a long time to train someone and without them, one of the line shuts down or gets less productive / slow.
Orthogonally, typically large companies have a maslow hierarchy of sorts: for every infrastructural endeavor, there may be a number of others that are more "nice-to-have" niche projects that aren't really critical to anyone else's ability to deliver results.
The most vulnerable employees are those on niche projects, despite these projects being internally focused (as opposed to open sourced). Infra folks whose work may be open source are typically less vulnerable because they do in fact work on critical, well, infrastructure.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
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-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
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.
“On this page, 12% more users clicked save if the save button was green instead of blue”
That really depends on your customers and the product. In this case, control systems, incremental changes are definitely not the way to go. Imagine if your car made an incremental change to the position of the brake pedal every time you turned it on. In such situations you don't babystep. You announce the change ahead of time, provide your customers with transition training, and make the change as scheduled.
In the case of "adaptive" menus in control systems, imagine if the elevator in your building rearranged its floor buttons so that the most requested floors were always at the top. Total chaos. People learn where their button is on day one. After that ANY change is going to go badly no matter what the UI engineers say. That UI should be carved in stone for the life of the building.
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).
Fuck people doing this. Especially extremely radical design changes such as Twitter's and Facebook's "redesigns" that they force down the throats of their users. Or Microsoft.
No, the trick is to iteratively change the UI in a way that's easy for the user to get used to.
Those example pathologies you listed are SOP at all the mature orgs I've worked at.
What do you think differentiates a company that becomes "mature" vs one that flames out?
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 situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
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 selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.
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 utterly failed?"
(Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)
You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...
Ergo, standing in the present, one should do ones best to estimate future costs and decide what percent of perfection seems optimal.
In reality, when asked to self-estimate, too many teams (and especially naive PMs) select perfection as the optimal approach.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.
The decision to agree to a feature request starts to consider Who the feature request came from before any of the practicalities of the feature itself.
They're not idiots, and they are doing what is necessary, but the goals have moved from outward-facing market and customer concerns to inward-facing organisational-political concerns.
Every coder in a large organisation, sooner or later, gets given a task that makes no engineering sense but achieves some internal political goal.
Boeing 747 design team was 4500 engineers and they were done in 29 months.
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, it did have the benefit of over 50 years of aviation and aeronautical science behind it, all figured out.
Whereas software is still somewhat in its infancy right now. And every few decades, it seems to revolutionize itself, as newer and faster hardware become available.
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.
I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much different than working at a startup day-to-day. And as a bonus you get to be a part of the large-scale wins and loses. Much like how it's exciting when the Warriors win, it's exciting when something big comes out of your company. Even if you did nothing but cheer.
Everyone is expendable. Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable. So are people at large companies or small startups. But within your team, you get to do good work, and it doesn't feel that way.
I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
There are programmers and senior programmers, data designers and senior etc. There are also team leads and program managers. There's basically two tracks, you either create stuff or you manage the creation of it.
They have different titles now, and there's a lot of Agile fluff (how is a scrum master not just a secretarial service and the function of a team leader not to keep their meetings focused?)
Software has way gone out of the stage where one person keep the recipe for the secret sauce, and could change the game.
No one is irreplacable.
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.
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.
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).
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. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.
A few heuristics that I find useful: 1. Revenue per employee 2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months 3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.
It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.
This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).
However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.
You're wrong, and not just about the Pareto principle.
You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.
R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.
Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).
If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).
As the userbase scales, infrastructure scales, and what was once a simple "ALTER TABLE" is now a system with a team managing it because a single Postgres instance didn't scale.
As the engineering headcount scales, code changes, builds, even understanding the system become slower. You overcome that with better engineering, but mostly more engineers.
As the product matures, there's still a drive for growth, but the low-hanging product fruit has been picked, so you get lots of product teams trying to either optimize their little part because, at scale, it makes a big difference, or product teams working on new, crazy ideas--the startup within a unicorn-startup--that will most likely fail.
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.
(edited for formatting, thanks @mkl)
"""
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
I work at company with less than 100 people, I know where many of the bodies are buried, etc. But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least.
If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty minimal if your cause of death is meteor strike. It would likely cover a percentage of the income you would have earned for your remaining years of work.
But opening a req seems totally reasonable when you are demonstrably not coming back.
But the point is everyone is expendable. I worked for a company around 2009. They laid a lot of people off that had more seniority than I did. I wondered why they kept me around.
Three months later I found out. The founder had written a bespoke development tool chain in C++ using MVC and assembly. The board push him out and the CTO told me that I was now responsible for maintaining the tool chain because I was the only one who knew C++ and assembly.
In the extremum, everyone is expendable, but not everyone is equally expendable, as your own anecdote bears out.
When you expend enough people, especially increasingly less expendable people who carry your basic institutional knowledge and skills, you do so by inflicting damage on your company or organization.
The economic winds may dictate that, as they did frequently in the 2008 economic crisis, but it's not like there is no institutional cost to expending people. This is the basically why countries like Germany and the UK are paying employers to keep idled people on payroll.
Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers.
The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.
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 revenues or decreasing costs. 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 handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.
I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.
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.
Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.
It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.
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.
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
All said and done, I’m actually impressed they got through this in under a month.
It allows you to ramp down without pandemonium.
It'd be fun to negotiate your own exit package in that situation though :-D
Also as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
Then you get to the critical component where you fire the lead architect/programmer and then it keeps working fine for few weeks, but you find more bugs and you need to upgrade/fix it. Only to find out the documentation if they exist don't help at all and the first 2 tries builds fine so you put it in production only to see everything destroyed. And after 1 year of back and forth you hire 10 other developer to maintain this thing and then 50 others to write a new one.
This is especially bad for software that are written under tight deadline - no matter how much document you write about it. And sadly, there's more software that are written like that than otherwise.
When the newcomer can't get anything out of that doc, if it exist, he/she just need to ask the creator, who will explain very nicely how everything is done, and that newcomer become a code guru in that codebase, and the cycle continues.
Until you layoff 50% of the team and now suddenly nobody knows how 50% of the stuff work.
Ironically, the worse they are (think 5000 lines of Perl with two functions) then the less viable it is to replace them.
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.
The full email:
Team Uber:
These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly that we had to take tough action to resize our company to the new reality of our business, and that I would come back to you this week with the specifics.
Today I have the specifics: we have made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce by around 3,000 people, and to reduce investments in several non-core projects. As a leadership team we had to take the time to make the right decisions, to ensure that we are treating our people well, and to make certain that we could walk you through our decision making in the sort of detailed and transparent manner you deserve.
Where we started and hard choices
We began 2020 on an accelerated path to total company profitability. Then the coronavirus hit us with a once-in-a-generation public health and economic crisis. People are rightfully staying home, and our Rides business, our main profit generator, is down around 80%. We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape.
You’ve heard me say it before: hope is not a strategy. While that’s easy to say, the truth is that this is a decision I struggled with. Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear. Ultimately, I realized that hoping the world would return to normal within any predictable timeframe, so we could pick up where we left off on our path to profitability, was not a viable option.
I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect our stock price, or to please our Board or investors. I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world—our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us—demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.
We have to take these hard actions to stand strong on our own two feet, to secure our future, and to continue on our mission.
I know that none of this will make it any easier for our friends and colleagues affected by the actions we are taking today. To those of you personally impacted, I am truly sorry. I know this will cause pain for you and your families, especially now. Many of you will be affected not because of the quality of your work, but because of strategic decisions we made to discontinue certain areas of activity, or projects that are no longer necessary, or simply because of the stark reality we face. You have been a huge part of this company and every day forward we will build on the foundations that you established, brick by brick.
Our decisions and the road forward
We have decided to re-focus our efforts on our core. If there is one silver lining regarding this crisis, it’s that Eats has become an even more important resource for people at home and for restaurants; and delivery, whether of groceries or other local goods, is not only an increasing part of everyday life, it is here to stay. We no longer need to look far for the next enormous growth opportunity: we are sitting right on top of one. I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses. I have every belief that the moves we are making will get Eats to profitability, just as we did with Rides, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
So we need to fundamentally change the way we operate. We need to make some really hard decisions about what we will and won’t do going forward, based on a few principles:
We are organizing around our core: helping people move, and delivering things.
We are building a cost-efficient structure that avoids layers and duplication and can scale, at speed.
We are being intentional with our location strategy focused on key markets/hubs.
Mac will now lead a unified Mobility team, which will include Rides and, as of today, Transit. Mac will continue to manage our cross-cutting functions like Safety & Insurance, CommOps, U4B, and Business Development, the latter of which will be centralized across Rides, Eats, and Freight under Jen. Pierre will lead what we will call “Delivery” internally, encompassing Eats, Grocery and Direct.
Given the necessary cost cuts and the increased focus on core, we have decided to wind down the Incubator and AI Labs and pursue strategic alternatives for Uber Works. Due to these decisions, Zhenya has decided it makes sense to move on from Uber. Zhenya is customer-centric to her core, and I am deeply grateful for all of her hard work.
We are also looking at our geographic footprint. While it served us well for many years to cast a wide physical net, it’s time to be more intentional about where we have employees on the ground. We are closing or consolidating around 45 office locations globally, including winding down Pier 70 in San Francisco and moving some of those colleagues to our new HQ in SF. And over the next 12 months we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services.
Having learned my own personal lesson about the unpredictability of the world from the punch-in-the-gut called COVID-19, I will not make any claims with absolute certainty regarding our future. I will tell you, however, that we are making really, really hard choices now, so that we can say our goodbyes, have as much clarity as we can, move forward, and start to build again with confidence.
How we are helping departing employees
As we previewed last week, we have taken a lot of feedback and worked to provide strong severance benefits and other support for those leaving Uber, like healthcare coverage and an alumni talent directory. We’re also taking care to support people in special situations a bit differently, like those on US visas or parental leaves. While the details will differ slightly by country, you can see a summary here. Every departing employee will have a 1:1 to receive the details of their individual package.
Given the global nature of these changes, and the local rules and regulations involved, the individual experience today will vary by country:
All other countries (those not listed to the right)
Argentina, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland (COE only), Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan (Karachi only), Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, UK (ULL only)
In these countries, we can communicate about individual impacts today.
Everyone in these countries who is affected has already received an email, and will soon have a calendar invitation to a private meeting with a manager and HR.
If you are in one of these countries and you did not receive a separate email this morning, you are not affected.
In these countries, local laws mean that we cannot be as specific about individual impacts today.
In some countries, we will start a consultation process. In others, there are restrictions on making changes during the COVID lockdown.
If you are in one of these countries, you will get an email from Nikki describing next steps for your location.
If you are one of the many affected Uber teammates, I’ll acknowledge right here that any package we offer, regardless of how thoughtful or generous, will never replace the opportunity to belong, to make a difference, to establish the kinds of bonds you establish with any important company or cause. We wouldn’t be here without you. We will finish what you started, and we will be excited to see the great things that you will build next.
I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because the resilience and grit you’ve shown has made Uber the company it is and will continue to be. I’ve never had a harder day professionally than today, but Uber has consistently surprised me with the challenges it has thrown my way. But it’s the toughest challenges that are worthwhile, and I know even more strongly in my heart than I ever have that Uber is worth it, and more.
Dara
That said, I've seen a number of layoff announcements from CEOs recently where there have been a number of "Wow, really great job announcing those layoffs" comments. And, while I agree with that, part of me thinks that we've become so conditioned to especially shitty layoff announcements and corporate double speak that when someone does something that really shouldn't be that difficult (speak with empathy, genuineness, but clarity on what must be done, and treat employees who are leaving well) that we're all particularly impressed.
I'm in no way saying layoffs are easy, and I know many good CEOs who agonize over those decisions. At the same time, I think we should try to raise our expectations of how employees should be humanely treated.
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that but who knows.
I'm just curious, did you take the time to add the emphasis here, or did the original email have the word "everyone" surrounded by asterisk characters?
Any company that facilitates or provides an in-person service that has seen a sharp decline from Covid-19 is pretty clearly not an essential service in the minds of their customers.
And precisely because public transport IS essential we still had all of it running, just at a reduced capacity to facilitate the essential public demand. So comparing public transport with Uber only highlights even more how Uber is non essential, because we can live pretty much without it, but we evidently can't without public transport (as seen in London).
I would argue some portion of the accommodations industry is essential (avg. occupancy rates of around ~%60 in normal times, so let's say ~%60 of hotels/motels are essential) and yet I know multiple hoteliers who have had to close shop for the next few months due to zero volume. This doesn't mean that day-to-day, hotels aren't an essential service.
This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for their shareholders. Portraying it as something noble is more than a little tone-deaf.
I feel for the people affected and I hope they find new roles soon.
By those measures BTW, antibiotics, modern sewers and (for the most part) vacinations aren't essential.
And indeed they aren't, for the survival of the human race. They are, however, very important for the survival of individual humans.
The World Wide Web was invented only 30 years ago, yet it's arguably the single most essential service during this time. Without it, social distancing while keeping large parts of the economy alive wouldn't have even been an option.
At the rate technology is becoming embedded into our daily lives, I think an arbitrary number of years is definitely not the way to decide whether something is essential. Context matters. What if instead of a pandemic that affects the lungs, the next one affects older people's ability to walk? Not very hard to imagine Uber being considered a 100% essential service at that point.
Useful? No. Effective? No. Meaningful? No. But definitely simple.
Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets.
A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
is uber cheaper than cabs/public transpo w/o the VC subsidy? 15 years ago there was no uber and people were able to get by using public transpo.
uber loses money on every ride because uber loses money overall because it spends a lot of money on other projects, not because the marginal cost/benefit of each ride is negative.
Ridesharing services allow for an unprecedented level of mobility for those who don't already own cars.
I suspect buying a reasonable used compact car is much more financially prudent than using Uber as you means of transportation. Maybe the calculus flips in a dense city like NYC but there's no way people who commute every day with Uber are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.
Believe it or not, there are people out there who don't have $2000 and these people are also the same ones who can't get anyone to lend them money.
How much would it actually cost to commute 20-30 minutes to and from work in an Uber? $40 a day? More? Let's just say its 40 and you strictly commute during the week so that's $200 a week or 800 a month. Even with bad credit or no credit you would be able to save for a car rapidly. The $2000 car would only take 10 weeks to pay for fully in cash and the savings of 800$ per month could easily cover maintenance.
My point is if you can afford to use Uber as your sole means of transportation you can surely afford your own car and the people who can't are using subways or Buses. It's pretty simple, people who are struggling aren't using Uber very often.
But then I'd have to park it, and just that would double the monthly cost. And then I'd probably use it once a month on average.
A taxi service is an essential complement to mass transit, and Uber provides that service in areas with poor taxi service (essentially everywhere).
Yes there is: Public transportation (bus, metro, train). Millions of people get to work using it every day. Just having a car sit on the street would cost me at least 100$ per month in taxes, insurance, parking and other misc costs. I spend much less on public transportation.
Most people live in dense cities so these services exist. I almost only use Uber/taxis when I need to go to places that are hard to reach or at night.
I mean, it's not a luxury good in the sense that you can buy a car, but I suspect many folks have made difficult or expensive to unwind decisions that make car ownership expensive. Classifying transportation where an alternative may well cost more than $1k/mo as a "luxury good" is a real stretch of the word luxury.
I think my point is being missed though and that is that using Uber as your daily commute is certainly not cheaper than owning a car. I think that's perfectly reasonable to say.
Also I don't mean to imply that Uber is a luxury in the same way Lois Vuitton is a luxury.
In my examples in other comments using Uber as a daily commute option almost certainly costs nearly 1000 or more per month.
Transporting large items, or groceries for an entire family are extremely difficult if not impossible over public transportation. Transporting a group of people (3+) can be approximately the same price on public transportation and Uber without potentially sacrificing comfort, safety, time and effort, many of which can be essential depending on your circumstances.
The cost of using Uber and Public transportation also requires a lot less upfront cost which is necessary for people living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to spend around $2k on a car, as well as deal with it's maintenance time and cost.
Most of the time I could take a bus or public transit, but when I couldn’t (like buying groceries) then I’d use an Uber. It was significantly cheaper versus owning a car, and it was absolutely an “essential” service at that point in my life.
It also discounts the horrible stress that adding a known monthly bill can cause, when Uber is more flexible, pay-what-you-need. And I was never as bad as many others, so I can see how the least-prepared and least-financially-secure could see Uber as a viable use, either once-in-a-while (e.g., missed the bus), or for regular use (paying $12 for a two-way, 1 mile trip through a crappy part of town can pay for itself if you avoid an hour of walking and get an hour of working).
Literally folks with cars are telling folks without cars (but who use uber when needed) that uber is not necessary (ie, partial access to a car is not needed) while they have 24/7 access.
Anyone who has NOT owned a car will tell you - uber is essential - full stop.
30% of the population has HOUSEHOLD income from all sources of $30K or less. The cost of parking alone can be a major issue (many cheaper apts do not have dedicated parking).
I don't have a car and hopefully never will. I never used an Uber or any similar service. I used taxi maybe 2 or 3 times in the past few years.
It is extremely easy to live without a car if the city / country accommodates for it.
You think poor people are using Uber to get around?
I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I don't have any of those things. Not even close.
You are completely twisting the label of an essential service in a way that makes it effectively meaningless. For every worker that depends on their salary for their livelihood, their job is essential, but that has nothing to do with an "essential service".
When you are working 10-12 hours a day to make ends meet and shoulder the all costs of the depreciating fix assets there is very little opportunity dig yourself out of that hole.
Uber and similar companies are destroying the very small businesses (or squashing their margins into nothing) which traditionally are the environment that the poor can become entrepreneurs and build their own local business.
Even with the highly publicized Uber failures, no Uber I've ever taken has been worse than many of the cabs I was in prior. Something as simple as knowing the price up front has been key when traveling.
So sure, of course they want to stay an ongoing concern. But, services like Uber and Lyft have become essential to many people.
That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
She doesnt drive following a car wreck. She had walk half a mile to wait out in the bitter rocky mountain cold at a bus stop to go to the Dr. Shes on social security. She told me she didnt have the money to take a cab, that is if she could even get a hold of one.
Then uber came along.
She learn to use uber on her own before even whatsapp.
Yea, I'd call it downright essential.
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
[1] https://www.jornalcruzeiro.com.br/sorocaba/locadoras-de-carr... (pt-br) [2] https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/03/23/coronavirus-s... (pt-br) [3] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/sem-servico-160-mil-mo... (pt-br) [4] https://www.uol.com.br/carros/colunas/autodata/2020/05/15/lo... (pt-br) [5] https://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2020/0... [6] https://www.blogdaslocadoras.com.br/locadoras-de-carros/reco...
Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.
Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.
For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.
Lucky for you that this is an option. For many people less fortunate than yourself it is not an option and they rely on taxis such as Uber.
They can't afford not to!
> I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube.
You're lucky that you have access to walkable pavements, busses, and a tube. That's a lot of privilege! I'd sure they'd be happy to use those as well! But many people don't have access to those things, and if they want to get anywhere they need to pay taxis.
If I want to get somewhere outside my village in less than a couple of hours I'd have to use a taxi or drive.
But if you go to for example some parts of the US, they literally don't even have pavements let alone busses, let alone tubes.
They can't even walk to their local shops in some cases. They're trapped without a car or taxi.
Yes, one of the reasons you mention is why I never accepted a job in the US as I would be stuck!
R = # of micro services / # of engineers
If R >= 1, this is potentially problematic and may indicate engineers being unable to work with the code of their peers. Operating in this regime would be viewed as risky. R can go to infinity very quickly if you go down this path without very deliberate planning, involving the consensus of both the entire management and engineering staffs.
If R < 1, you have more engineers than micro services. People share code bases and are not afraid of each other. This is probably a safe regime to operate in, even if you completely fuck up the intent of micro services.
I think R could also serve as an arbitrary bus impact scalar for the org chart.
R < 1 can mean that either the same functionality is getting reworked over and over, or people are breaking separation of concerns and concatenating unrelated stuff onto existing modules.
Ideally you want to be spotting the common patterns and replacing e.g. five 10k-line modules with one 10k-line module. But there's also an unfortunate tendency to favor consolidation into one 50k-line module. In that case they were separate for a good reason...
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.
That doesn't mean it never provided value, just that there are now better alternatives.
I call this the "You're doing it wrong" Theory of Architectural Deficiency: anything that appears to be a fundamental architectural issue is actually just you being an idiot.
For examples, see every discussion about REST ever.
Uber's github shows lots of work on opentracing, so if that's widely deployed then the remove operation is a straightforward.
Everywhere else though, I take Uber/Lyft.
Money, better and cheaper transportation where it sucked, and jobs for much more people than just developers.
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.
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.
Yeesh calm down, drink a glass of water or something. Do you always fly off the handle when people have a different understanding of a situation than you? I was going off of the popular coverage of studies that I've seen, much of which has been widely discussed here before. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that that's what you were going off of. Good to know that you have more rigor behind your assumption than those sources did, but I'm still left wondering why they have such glaring holes.
> reply
not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.
This trope needs to die. Pension funds are heavily diversified investment vehicles of which VC is one part of the asset allocation. If a pension fund CIO (Chief Investment Officer) weights their asset allocation towards too much of the VC asset allocation then yes this is a problem - but they don't. In fact they have made size-able returns as a result of simply being disciplined about the risks and rewards of VC as an asset class.
They still make a large loss every year. Cash is not as bad, because (a) half the loss is in the form of "stock-based-compensation" and (b) they've been growing, which improves cash flows.
Stock prices are (astonishingly) doing ok. Idk if that means uber can still raise whatever they need, but I suppose it does.
They can't really ride out a dip in stock price though. They almost certainly can't cut enough to be profitable... Even if 2020 revenues weren't lower than last year's.
Uber still operates financially like a startup... they have a certain amount of runway.... It's longer than most startups, but it's still under two years.
Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-lawrence-b77400b8/
Overall though the severence is healthy, so I'll be plenty ok while I find another gig.
Here's us: https://curativeinc.com/ Here's me: maddox@curativeinc.com
We do testing, all aspects. They're oral swabs, which greatly reduces the barrier for many people who could get tested: They don't want a swab so far up their nose it feels like it's scraping their brain.
We build the software for the full-stack of testing from managing drivethrough sites with healthcare workers, full lab operations, results delivery to patients, integrations with cities and state health departments.
We're now handling hundreds of thousands of tests. We'll probably need at least 100x that to re-open the country with confidence.
Hit me up: maddox@curativeinc.com with questions/comments/anything.
Software team all remote, good pay + equity and benefits, satisfying work, and I love the people I work with.
Some recent (public) things:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/14/texas-prisons-corona...
https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2156392/air-...
https://dot.la/coronavirus-rapid-test-curative-los-angeles-2...
Also building out a data science team—idk what the preferred stack is there.
If you can afford it, I’d suggest taking a break.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gm5zwu/what_is_t...?
I'm down to see what you have going on there.
You can debate whether it was successful at GE. The criticism of Jack Welch was that his approach improved short-term financials, but he left a hollowed-out company to his successor that became irrelevant and lost value relative to the S&P.
The way I see this playing out at Uber is rapidly exiting categories like Scooters, Freight, Works, and AV. And doubling down on Ride Share and Eats with acquisitions in geographies where they have a leading position. I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility.
Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.
The reason they're treated like trash, by both the company that put them there and by pedestrians, is because that is what they are.
I think the rental bikes which have a fixed docking station are a better design.
Now Santa Monica does have a great bike share infrastructure that I also used quite a bit, but nothing is more frustrating that getting on a well used bike and having the brakes hardly work or the crank constantly slipping as you push the pedal downward. Don't get me wrong, you can totally get a bad scooter that isn't running well, but I think I ran into more worn down bikes, likely due to the bike program having been around longer.
My 2 cents, the more options the better.
EDIT: Also wanted to note, Santa Monica has a lot of bike lanes, which made riding the scooters around much easier and safer from my perspective.
The helmetless riders are a real issue. And the injuries caused by the morons using them are a business model externality that isn't dealt with.
I think I'm the intended use case because I live about 2 miles (3.2km) from an entertainment district. I can walk it, and I have done so, but it takes quite a while, around 45 minutes. On a scooter it takes like 10.
Because of parking costs, scooter is cheaper than driving. It might even be faster. I own a bike, so I could ride that, but I don't like parking it in a busy downtown area.
There's also a bus I can take, and sometimes I take bus one direction and scooter the other if the bus schedule doesn't work for me.
I admit many people park scooters in a very inconsiderate way, but I always park carefully out of the way, so I don't feel bad about that personally.
I’m 100% for walking places but it’s important to have options once you start getting out that far.
I live in a city that banned the companies but see a few people still commuting on them in the bike lane.
They're mostly focused on the scooters now (or, well, yesterday) but many cities have bikeshare systems backed by Uber.
Basically by only keeping the strongest you should get the highest rate of return until these is a failure. A portfolio play gives you more modest returns but more consistent over time -- you should still trim the losers who do not have potential.
All that compared to making concentrated bets where you can win big, or lose big.
If we use the long-term yardstick that Jack Welch suggested we use, he does not come out looking good. We are now at roughly the two-decade mark and GE is trading at the same price that it did in 1992 and 80% below where it was when he retired.
And it's a well-known issue with executive compensation that CEOs will juice numbers in the short-term to get their payouts which is likely why he proposed this as a measure of his performance.
As a factual matter, the measurement isn't meaningless at all. Give Jack some credit.
It's good to be the king, I guess.
1981 • Jack Welch becomes CEO • $1.29 2001 • Jack Welch retires • $37.20 (down from its peak of near $60.00 in mid 2000) 2020 • Nearly 20 years post Jack Welch • $6.28.
20 years of Jack Welch - +2,800% increase 20 years after Jack Welch - -83% decrease
GE = (1+2800%)*(1-83%) = 4.93 = 393% appreciation since 1981.
S&P = S&P has appreciated 2000% since 1981.
GE << S&P
They just sold Jump, while investing in Lime. I think scooters could still be used as a "last-mile" strategy for Ride Share, and maybe acquire teen mindshare and a sort of platform play. But it's a spinoff with a long leash.
What context does Uber have now, that they did not when the initial layoff wave happened?
the cut deep, cut once method for layoffs is doing business 101, but still there are 2 rounds of layoffs at uber
Better to give people a heads up so they can start getting their resumes in order, hitting up their networks, etc. rather than telling a blatant lie.
- lie, by saying there is no discussion
- omit, by not saying whether or not there is a discussion
- discuss openly
- don't discuss, just make the decision rashly
Decisions like this tend to follow one of the first two options, but clearly none of them are great. They're all damaging in their own way.
> What context does Uber have now
More data that can be feed into their financials models to understand the short-term and long-term impact of this market on their cash flow. Companies don't do layoffs because things are nice and predictable.
You seem to like that word, it being your nick, but that said, it would seem to me that any management that believes it is omnipotent ought to be fired on the spot. That sort of delusion can only end in tears.
My profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmaskasky/
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 who made it through the filter.
I suppose I should get started on making something that I can own.
Level 1: There's a basic web site. Think of it as fizz buzz. I can see you have a basic sense of style -- web site aesthetics, code quality, etc. You don't need a lot, but what's there ought to be sane, sensible, and good.
Level 2: There are a few awesome things on it. Something clever, or something which shows some technical prowess.
It can't really hurt; if it's not fancy, I'll assume you didn't have time. If you have typos, blink/marquee tags, and syntax errors, I'll pass. But the more information you bring to the table, the better.
Right now, what people know about you is you passed a few reasonably rigorous interviews -- Tesla and Uber. Given you passed those, you'd likely pass more technical interview too (which is not the same as getting a job offer). Weaker companies might hire based on that. Stronger wants will want more signal. Anything you can do to generate that signal will help.
As a footnote, you included the line "I developed tooling for real time data through graphql subscriptions and grpc streaming. I built a protobuf to graphql schema generator tool. I have extensive experience with React hooks and making Redux-less applications. I was on the Uber Elevate team and brought several applications from 0-1." Put that in you linkedin.
There's a hierarchy I use when I look at resumes:
1) Weakest: Applicant worked somewhere. ("I was a software engineer for bagels.com")
2) Weak: Applicant worked on / with something. ("I worked on the customer database for bagels.com")
3) Average: Applicant accomplished something ("I increased the performance of the customer database of bagles.com by 25%, saving the company $50k/year in server costs and reducing latency")
4) Strong: Applicant accomplished something which justified their salary ("I rewrote the Fortran applicant database of bagles.com in node.js, moving it from a mainframe to AWS. This resulted in 25% higher customer conversion rates, and saved $500k / year.")
5. Strongest: Applicant accomplished something clever and technically impressive ("I built a pipeline which could render photorealistic bagle sandwiches for bagles.com prior to customer orders. This increased customer conversion rates 5x. I used [insert set of technically impressive techniques].")
The higher up you go that chain, the more likely you are to get the job you want.
He needs to put line items into his LinkedIn, that's for sure. But he was probably dodging recruiterspam.
1) A strong resume / linkedin. Worked on projects which were successful. Worked for companies with rigorous recruiting processes. Didn't job hop randomly.
2) Good references from people I trust. In an ideal case, a personal referal.
3) A nice portfolio. I can see artifacts on github, on their web site, and through publications in academic journals.
4) A strong undergraduate school. Passed undergraduate recruiting.
5) A strong interview
6) A history of interest in what we do.
I don't think I've ever met an ideal candidate, but as an applicant, you want to give as many strong signals on all of those fronts as you can.
If all he had was an on-line portfolio, I probably wouldn't hire either.
Just fill out the LinkedIn profile - bullet points under the Uber section. Link to GitHub if he has it, then post something on LinkedIn.
How many people have personal portfolio sites that are 2-3 years out of date... even 4-5 discussing how to build a product list in Backbone.js.
And to your comment, most portfolio sites are years out-of-date. I don't know anyone particularly cares. Most also aren't called 'portfolio sites' but 'personal web pages.'
If someone wrote a good backbone.js web site a half-decade ago, that gives me a pretty good indication of, well, a lot of things I care in hiring. I'm not making a check-list of technologies people know. Most experienced engineers can pick up new technologies in a month or two. I'm more looking for the sorts of things which are timeless:
* For a UI/UX designer, is there a sense of style? Did they think through what I want from their web site and how I get there? If that's a not the latest styles, that's okay. I respect the people who designed NextSTEP or Amiga too.
* For a front-end engineer, is the HTML correct? Accessible? Semantic? Is it split up properly between JS/CSS/HTML? All of this will be second-nature to someone I'd hire, but I see a lot of people are missing basics somewhere or other.
... and so on.
Basic skills gaps, (1) I haven't seen new hires close (2) are often indicative of deeper problems. That's why those stereotypical algorithmic interviews came around for back-end. People now optimize so much to the metric that it's become a lousy metric (and why I don't trust interviews much anymore), but the basic concept is right. Smart people who understand fundamentals, learning quickly, and execute well / get stuff done, preferably with good soft skills.
I'll also mention: I'm not sure anyone's getting hired overnight right now. We've gone from a seller's market to a buyer's market. A lot of layoffs, and not a lot of hiring going on right now. In previous downturns, which were much milder than this one, I saw very good people on job markets for months, and average people sometimes for years.
Seriously, we're hiring everywhere and we're optionally wfh until October. We remotely interview and onboard.
www.amazon.jobs, or email me at <this HN alias> at <company> dot com. Happy to help direct you.
Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with huge costs, the actual reality is that this is nothing more than the emperor new clothes. Unfortunately there are no sacred cows being saved here, especially engineering being affected in this.
So whether they are funded by VC's or large institutional buyers who are the majority traders on the public market, there is no difference and the companies continue to lost money.
The issue for Uber is that they need to change the narrative. They don't have the story that Amazon did, that they are losing money because they are reinvesting it back into tremendous infrastructure which will give them scale.
Uber is losing money because they grew very quickly so there were a lot of innate inefficiencies because of that. So these firings are a chance to right size the company and see if the new trimmed down Uber will now be profitable when eventually ridership returns to normal.
I feel bad for the people who got fired, but I also believe is was bound to happen, the current situation with Covid-19 just speed up the process.
The problem is that they have no self-driving cars and thus just represents the most massively over-staffed taxi-hailing mobile app ever.
I’d be surprised if we don’t see much more dramatic job cuts in the future.
And to be frank, maybe those cities or municipalities should consider hiring some of the laid off employees, buying the infrastructure during the fire sale (if they don't actually already own it), cutting out the middle man, and doing it themselves.
But if the city wants more bikes or parts, where do they get it?
They're not in the manufacturing business either.
This server could not prove that it is archive.vn; its security certificate is from cloudflare-dns.com.
Are archive.vn working?
What makes you think it's a collapse?
A collapse is dropping by close to 50% or more, like Uber's demand. It's suddenly playing an entirely different game, it becomes a qualitatively different business.
If this isn't a collapse, nothing is.
A "pause" would imply things will return to normal as soon as things are "unpaused". If you cut 3,000 jobs and 45 offices, those are not just magically reappearing when things are "unpaused".
No doubt this is accelerating certain motivators, but I for one am a little sick of the "COVID Excuse" for blaming aspects of these non-business plans that were bad ideas without a global pandemic on which to blame them.
There's not many roles open at the moment, but here's one: https://jobs.ebayclassifiedsgroup.com/job/amsterdam/senior-b...
Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
Your explanation seems as good as any.
Yes.
This is Uber's way of saying to their investors that their costs will decrease due to losing billions during the coronavirus outbreak, thus head count must be decreased. But some who are buying now, may see this as a way of selling at the "bull trap" in Q2.
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Austin / Salt Lake / Los Angeles / Portland / Atlanta
---
Ann Arbor / Chicago / Minneapolis / Miami
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
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.
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.
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
Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that?
Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR
"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/uber-nabs-1-billion-self-dri...
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
(My source is a friend working on self-driving who was laid off today)
Can anyone explain how this works/how this came to be?
Delivery companies are fighting for a piece of that market which isn't full of margin, so they're having to fight for it. Plus they're in a landgrab, so choosing growth over profits.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uber-on-thanks-memories-thuan...
Their stock price will go up.
"Well see, we discovered a hose that money pours out of. It's called 'online advertising'. Now what we do is spend half our effort trying to make the hose pour faster, and the other half trying to find another hose."
Uber figured out the 'Uber for X' pattern. Now they're trying to optimize it, and figure out something else that makes money.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyft-expects-to-be-profitable-a...
International companies generally announce cross-border layoffs on Monday (US-time), because that announcement will be during the work week everywhere they operate.
Another is that if the company doesn't want the media to pick up the "bad news", Friday is the best time to do it because it'll get lost over the weekend when it's reported on.
And finally, there's less worry about retaliation from disgruntled employees if they have the weekend to calm down over being let go.
https://www.kornferry.com/insights/articles/bad-news-deliver...
However a Monday layoff in San Francisco means a Tuesday layoff in Asia which won't be separated by a weekend.
Sociopaths.
Layoffs were on the cards since more than 6 months already, COVID was just an excuse
Assuming anyone laid off had unexercised options, they'll likely have a short window to exercise them before they expire.
The typical "exercising of an option for an illiquid asset which will be taxed as if it's liquid" problems with start-up stock options simply don't exist in this case.
Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.
My use of ethical here is strongly tied to obligation. e.g., it is kind to give money to a person, but not unethical if you chose not to especially if you can't afford to.
The way I understand you is that it's kinder/more sympathetic to provide a greater severance. This part I agree with!
Severance is not free, though. Increasing it will either cost Uber more heads or greater risk (and more heads later). I'm repeating this question: Is this not unethical to the retained employees?
Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.
The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.
We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.