
Ask HN: Future of Uber - xxxtentacion
For the past couple of weeks, it seems like Uber has drawn a lot of negative press. Do you guys think this will actually affect them in the long run? Amazon gets a lot of negative press and it seems like it doesn&#x27;t affect them at all.
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fstuff
I think it absolutely will fail. I'm in the know about much but I was a
contractor there at 685. Even from my perspective everything I'm reading
sounds 100% true.

One thing no one talks about is the company absolutely does not scale. People
talk about drivers being contractors but no one ever talks Ubers actual
contactors base. Operationally the company is run by contactors. I've seen
people say the have 11,000 employees but really closer 14k thats compared a
40k+ contract base. God if that held it might be closer to 50k by now. Yea you
read that right. No joke I'm told they were growing by 1k contractors per week
and I believe that.

Not one single operational process is defined or automated. For a company that
pretends to be bleading edge the sure get a lot of crap manually. I once heard
a group of data scientist sitting out on one of there many couch lounges
talking about automation and new customer service call center opening in South
America one said out "oh well fuck it we can always leverage more human
capital till we figure it out.

Think about it. Their rapid growth was only fueled by a army of contractors.
Every time they expand they need 1000s of cars, driverops people, new driver
onboarding, insurance claims.

They don't care about these people, most perms treat contractors like theyre
disposal. And to the company they are they want to automate it all but seems
like there's no single vision to do that and no plan to get there. And they
way everything changes or gets thrown out for something else on a whim I don't
think they'll ever get there.

Also I want to throw out that harassment happens a lot to contracts and if you
see anyone complane watch how fast their contract gets pulled and new meat for
harassment is swapped in.

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fstuff
I also meant 1000s of csrs, customer service representative, replying on my
phone. Every support or billing issue submitted through the app is answered by
someone. More often than not they're trying to use low cost call centers in
Asia and Latin America.

