
Uber lays off around 350 more across Eats, self-driving and other departments - coloneltcb
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/14/uber-lays-off-another-350-across-eats-self-driving-and-other-departments/
======
hintymad
This is hardly surprising at all. There used to be lots of complaints, both
internally and publicly, about how bloated and ineffective Uber's engineering
organization was. Many engineers were bitter about many overlapping projects
in Uber. It's also funny that Uber engineers used many bogus reasons to
implement NIH projects. A typical example is that Uber had a team to implement
their own Bazel-like system because "Bazel (or any other tool) does not scale
in Uber-scale". Same went for their own GPU database, their own SQS, their own
key-value store, their own resource scheduler, their own datacenter, and their
own deployment system. The end result was that almost everything sucked.
Engineers suffered productivity loss for years. I kid you not that Uber's
docker system didn't support persistent volume for more than three years, so
anyone who wanted to build a persistent system like Elasticsearch had to jump
hoops and spent weeks even just to get machines. And the sad fact is, Uber did
not have a "Uber scale". The traffic and complexity it had to handle was far
less than other internet companies.

I wish they didn't hire so irresponsibly back in 2015 and 2016.

~~~
mooted1
I worked at Uber from 2014-2018.

Can confirm this. It was a very poorly managed org because it was extremely
grassroots driven—leadership was underempowered to say no to front line teams
or hold groups accountable.

The overlaps and poorly considered projects described above are not an
exaggeration. Many of them were designed for building the lead engineer's open
source brand, not for company needs. Half of the projects described above have
since been canceled.

Google:

\- Hyperbahn

\- Cherami

\- Schemaless

\- Peloton

\- uDeploy

\- m3db

\- piper

\- XYS

Contrary to their glossy open source and tech blog presentations, these
projects were highly contentious internally and widely viewed as inferior to
industry counterparts. Each of these projects had 5-20 engineers working on
them for over a year; many of them are being EOLed or phased out currently.
And this is just the list that I can publicly talk about. This development
came at extraordinary cost for the org and, in the case of the people who were
laid off, cost to people's careers.

~~~
brownbat
Ok, innocent question, having never worked in a giant tech company with a
viable, popular product -- how do they deploy the massive amount of available
engineering hours?

Do teams just work on random projects like the above while other people fix
bugs? Is it like a million mini startups internally all pitching an idea to
the CEO all the time?

Or do you need 90% of people focused on how to develop your product at first,
then suddenly it flips and you need 90% of your engineers to balance enormous
amounts of network traffic and data storage?

~~~
peterwwillis
A guess, from other companies: a manager is given some engineers, they ask
themselves "What should we create?", they come up with an idea, make up a
random business justification, POC it to upper management, get approval and
headcount, and spend a year or two trying to prove it was worthwhile. Best
case it works and gets used by other internal teams for 2-5 years, worst case
the team gets broken apart and the project abandoned. (Mind you, nobody gets
laid off, they just find other reasons to keep paying people who aren't making
anything of value) If you have ever heard about it publicly, it was probably
someone's pet project and they wanted their ego stroked, or to "get a win" and
a promotion.

Many of the projects are just a response to some other internal problem, like
"the teams aren't using a shared platform", so they build a platform for the
platforms. Persistent problems get ignored because nobody wants to rock the
boat. The joys of working in a large corporation...

~~~
tootie
I saw this at a decades-old retail company. New CTO brought a Silicon Valley
perspectives to the company which involved hiring a load specialist engineers
into newly created departments without any explicit business justification.
Literally said that once they were hired they'd come up with useful projects.
He also wanted to start exporting our in-house software as standalone products
even when we were still running transactions through a mainframe. CEO bought
it all hook, line and sinker.

~~~
naravara
> Literally said that once they were hired they'd come up with useful
> projects.

This is a great way to have engineers burn time on projects they think are
interesting rather than projects that will actually have good ROI.

~~~
iamasoftwaredev
How do you balance avoiding this with wanting engineers who have ideas and
agency?

~~~
karthikb
Bring engineers in to solve problems you know need to get solved. As they
learn the system, its debt, the business, etc., listen to their ideas. For
ones that sound good, give them the resources to develop a POC. For the POCs
that work, give them the resources to take it all the way.

Larger companies with substantial profits can hire engineers explicitly to
come up with POCs one after another.

------
burlesona
I wonder at what point this kind of thing is enough to tip the Bay Area tech
labor market into a new equilibrium.

In the recent past there have been a lot (hundreds?) of startups and a few
dozen larger players fighting to hire in an environment with virtually zero
unemployment. There are thousands of empty jobs waiting to be filled. Hence if
you live around here and have tech something on your resume, it's 3-5
recruiter emails a day.

Across three rounds, Uber has let go ~1000 people. I have no idea how many are
in the Bay Area, but to pick a random number and say "half," that's ~500 new
people in the labor market who are probably well qualified for the rest of the
open jobs.

By itself that's pretty healthy, and should actually help a lot of smaller
companies in particular to be able to get "butts in seats."

But with this whole thing of "the window being open," and a lot of recent
IPOs, if we start seeing a lot of the other IPO companies engage in similar
layoffs, it's not hard to imagine we end up with a few thousand qualified
people suddenly looking for jobs.

Is there still so much demand that the market swallows that up without
noticing? Is it just enough that it helps take some of the pressure off
locally, that labor demand dips but remains healthy? Or is it enough that
employers can start being pickier, or stingier with their offers?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how you estimate the impact of something like
that, but it's an interesting question to me. Anyone with a labor economics
background have an idea how many layoffs it would take to get Bay Area
supply/demand in balance?

~~~
throwing838383
In the bay area, Non-engineers, like product managers, MBA types and data
analysts, etc are having a really hard time finding work (sometimes taking 1
to 3 years to find their next job!) based on what I've seen in my circle of
friends. (unless your in a specialization that's in high demand like User
acquisition).

It's the senior engineers (5+ years) which have multiple emails from
recruiters and are in really high demand, not so much junior engineers.

Look at the last StackOverflow dev survey: the number of devs with 0-5 years
of experience is almost double the number of devs with 6-10 years. That means
the number of senior engineers will be increasing very rapidly over the next 5
years. You can bet it's going to be much harder to get a job in about 5 years
or so, layoff or not.

~~~
heavenlyblue
>> Look at the last StackOverflow dev survey

Just looked at it.

In 2018 there were 87,259 responses and 72,688 in 2019.

Developers with less than 5 years experience were 35% in 2018 and 13.4% in
2019.

~~~
throwing838383
For 2019 I see the following:

Less than 5 years 41% 5-10 years 27% 10-15 years 14%

As you can see, there has been a massive supply increase of junior engineers
(probably entering the industry). And this massive increase will in a few
years result in a massive increase in senior engineers. Right now being a
senior engineer is still a huge advantage but that will diminish quickly over
time.

~~~
redisman
Personal anecdote, at 12+ years in the industry I don't really go to
StackOverflow anymore so I wouldn't have even seen the survey. The kind of
questions I Google now are most often answered only in Github Issues.

------
aresant
Re: The target of UBER EATS this especially interesting news given they will
likely be reporting Q3 results soon.

\- Last quarter of UBER's $1.2b operating loss almost 50% of that is from UBER
eats subsidies. They paid $544m more to drivers to deliver food than they took
in. Why? (a) It is their fastest growing (by %) division (2) It's arguably the
most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a "last mile" delivery
network at scale.

\- Their core business - ridesharing - has improved their gross margin and
unit economics quarter-over-quarter to the point that operating and
discounting losses here are almost non-material (less than $22m total
worldwide this quarter, representing less than 1/2 a percent of total ride
sharing revenue).

\- In addition another area of analyst criticism has been losses in their
"other bets" which is almost certainly their freight brokering network at
-$50m, and the losses appear to be diminishing.

Seems to me like these layoffs are analyst signaling that there are still
inefficiencies in those departments, UBER is aware and working on in
preparation for Q3 finances.

(1) [https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-
det...](https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-
details/2019/Uber-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx)

~~~
iamasoftwaredev
> It's arguably the most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a
> "last mile" delivery network at scale.

But it's also hard to get the prices up enough without people just getting off
their lazy asses and buying food.

source: price goes up I get up off my lazy ass.

~~~
raz32dust
I don't think they can increase service fee much more. The endgame will be to
have enough users and drivers that they don't need to increase prices and can
make their share from volume, ads and deals with restaurants. Economy of scale
+ Winner takes all.

------
ejcx
350 people across a 25,000 person company sounds more like performance
management than layoffs, especially since they are still hiring.

I think Uber has way overhired but this doesn't seem to be the signal a lot of
you all are making it to be.

------
throwaway66920
I think food delivery will come to be won by pseudo food trucks. Vehicles with
minimal cooking capabilities, perhaps just warming, that go around delivering
standard uncustomized meals.

The economics of one driver picking up one order and delivering it just don’t
make sense to me.

~~~
CydeWeys
Food delivery in cities doesn't use cars, it use bicycles (increasingly of the
e- variety).

~~~
kickopotomus
Do you happen to have a source for this? Also perhaps the average full trip
distance/time for a runner? I.e. from where they are when they accept the
delivery, how far do they travel to the store and then to their destination?

I suspect that Uber Eats, Door Dash et al. do not want those figures published
because it makes the profitability issues glaringly obvious.

~~~
Kiro
In Europe I only see bicycles delivering Uber Eats and in Sweden it's even
illegal to deliver with car unless you have a special permit which is
expensive.

------
amelius
I don't understand why Uber would need so many engineers, give that their
business is so easily shardable, and scaling is not even a major issue. In
that sense, the Whatsapp team of 50 engineers solved a tougher problem. I
know, it's difficult to compare these companies, but still I'd expect the
labor force to be within a factor of 10 at most.

~~~
sytelus
Uber does almost 1 million rides _per hour_. About 100 million monthly active
users are driven around 26 billion miles each year. Think about all these car
locations, requests, passenger details, messages, prices, tips, customer
support etc landing into their system every second. Think about price
predictions that can be off by just few cents and could make a dent in your
earnings or push customers to the competition. Add onto this reliability in at
least 3 or 4 nines, latencies across the globe, security, fail-over, multi-
platforms, privacy etc issues. Don't forget you need to operate in 700 cities
worldwide with all kind of regulations, customizations and geographic/culture
adaptation. Uber accomplishes 230,000 trips per employee and earns $500,000
per employee - which is on par with other tech companies. I think you will
find that the scaling system without falling on your face every day, every
hour is a pretty significant undertaking at this point.

------
mark_l_watson
“” In total, the layoffs represent about 1% of the company””

That seems like a very small lay-off. From reading the article it sounds like
this is full time employees, not gig workers.

~~~
tyingq
1135 employees total across three waves. They say they have approximately
19,000 actual employees. So about 6% total laid off.

~~~
asah
IIRC it was normal for large companies (Sun, Intel, Oracle, etc) to terminate
the "bottom n%" where n=5+ by some performance metric?

~~~
Judgmentality
Sure, and most (not all) consider that a horrible practice that encourages
backstabbing politics. And it's definitely bad for morale. And the people that
defend the idea say it's nice to cut the flak once a year, but it's obviously
better to just fire people for being bad as needed rather than create this
constant annual layoff. The main reason it's done it's because it's so much
easier than managing companies correctly.

~~~
jandrese
It creates perverse incentives for managers to hire one sacrificial goat per
year so they don't have to cut into their otherwise effective team.

A lot of this is just managers that don't want to be confrontational and
firing the guy who just isn't working out but seems perfectly happy to just
keep sucking at his job. These 10% haircuts give them the excuse they need to
do their job.

------
jerrya
> The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life
> were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the
> Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but
> needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

> So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no
> cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall,
> your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take
> his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job
> for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never
> delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

------
cryptozeus
Strange that they are also ramping up hiring in other cities at the same time.
Could this be because they just want to clean house and lay off high paying
employees and replace them with newly hired low paying ones. Also they can
force to sell the stocks and they dont have to give it to new employees.

~~~
throwing838383
i think it's just standard hire/lay off routine. It's not about the employees
that get laid off.

The purpose of the lay offs is to keep everyone else working even harder.
People will work even harder to keep their jobs.

------
djhaskin987
They lost around 1185 people over the last 3 months. They claim that this is
all that they will lose for a while.

1185 x $150000 average salary per employee (guessing at the numbers) yields
annual savings for the company of $177.75 million. A sizable chunk, I suppose,
but they lost 656 million EBITDA just _last quarter_ , or around three times
that amount.

------
shadowtree
The funniest piece is a16z bragging about how many startups they're now
funding that are run by ex-Ubers.

Yes, let's assume people who did not work in a sane environment, who have
never seen how to make a profit, yes, let's give them funding. Same BS as all
the ex-Googlers who immediately ran most of their start ups into the ground
(after 6-7 awesome funding rounds of course).

Let's be clear, the ex-Uber founders will make mint, given what happens in
those endless funding round pyramids. But for anyone considering joining those
rackets? Goooooood luck.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Can you name a couple ex-Googlers who ran their startups into the ground after
6-7 rounds of funding? Or even 2-3 rounds...

~~~
luckydata
Andy Rubin comes to mind but the list is very large and full of people you
never heard of. Google is not very good at teaching their employees what it
takes to run a successful company, their cash cow is just too successful and
most people don't realize their contribution is close to zero and most of what
they do doesn't make any difference.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Wait, Andy Rubin is your only example? What company has he started and then
“run into the ground”?

I’m going to call bullshit. Have many Googlers started startups that failed?
Yes, but that’s the default state for startups so it hardly seems notable. I
doubt the failure rate for ex-Googler founders is any higher than for regular
founders. In fact, I suspect it’s higher, if only because they’re probably
more likely than the average founder to be able to raise a round, and that
likely increases your success rate vs the average startup. But you’re still
probably going to fail.

What I take exception to is the 6-7 rounds of funding. A tiny, tiny fraction
of companies raise more than 3 rounds, so the idea that there’s a “very large
list” of failed companies started by ex-Googlers who have raised 6-7 rounds is
total hogwash. Your hand-waving “you’ve never heard of them” notwithstanding.

~~~
luckydata
Which company has Rubin started that was not a huge commercial failure?

~~~
malandrew
Android, Inc.

~~~
luckydata
How was Android a commercial success?

~~~
mav3rick
Are you kidding me ? Mobile ad revenue for one ? This comment shows you are
not acting in good faith or just plain anti Google.

~~~
luckydata
This is funny. You're making the point Android is successful as a product
because it provides google with "ad impressions" which is exactly my point,
Google knows only how to make money one way, with ad impressions. Android the
company wasn't successful commercially (no revenue from licensing, not self
sustainable) and was acquired quite early when they realized it wouldn't be.
Android itself is a huge money pit for Google, and it's worth it only because
it creates an avenue to monetize mobile. In commercial terms that's a "loss
leader", not a profitable product.

Stick to engineering, it's better.

~~~
mav3rick
In the same way that BMW builds "only cars" ? The Play Store gets 30% of in
app purchases too. First party phones are sold at profits. The collective
revenue of Google due to Android is a big net positive. Not to mention the
stickiness to Google products that results too. You don't know anything about
business and yet you call out "all the Googlers" who don't succeed at
startups. Stick to trolling on HN and feeling good about yourself. Google and
Googlers will march on.

------
yalogin
How much money does Uber Eats make? For that matter do any of these delivery
companies make money? Its pretty hard to see how. Someone has to take a hit,
enter the restaurant, delivery company or the user. One cannot expect the user
to fork a lot of money, and the delivery company probably wants to make money
at some point, so it will mean the restaurants have to be willing to eat these
costs over the longterm. Is this sustainable? I cannot imagine the
delivery/routing algorithm to find optimum routes every time to merge or make
the delivery efficient.

~~~
jddj
Glovo say they become profitable (in that city) six to nine months after
arriving.

They seem to be run quite differently though to Uber / Deliveroo, probably
because VC money doesn't or didn't flow quite as easily in Barcelona as it
does in California.

They talk about how it's a matter of timing and not entering markets with two
established players, but I think the key for them has been only bothering with
places which have a combination of low salary expectations/requirements and
high densities (southern Europe, Latin America, Africa).

I imagine that it's the driver pay in high-pay societies which blows up the
economics of it.

------
myth_buster
If I'm not mistaken, the lockout period expires Nov 10th.

Also give how aggressively they were hiring in the run up to IPO, a lot of
people are probably nearing the 1yr cliff.

~~~
joeblau

      Nov 4th: Q3 Earnings[1] 
      Nov 6th: Blackout ends 2 days after earnings
      Nov 6th: Lockup expires
    

...not that I'm counting or anything

[1] - [https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-
det...](https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-
details/2019/Uber-Announces-Date-of-Third-Quarter-2019-Results-Conference-
Call/default.aspx)

------
uwuhn
Curious to know how many of those are iOS engineers. It could easily be dozens
or even 100+ given how many Uber has in SF alone.

------
anon1m0us
The ultimate problem here with all these startups like this is the financial
strategy.

That strategy is precisely: Get big fast. That means hire a bunch of
engineers, build out an expensive infrastructure, consume a lot of office
space. Sell.

Nowhere in that strategy is: Earn a lot of money. Do it cheaply.

The VC world doesn't care about earnings. They don't care about profit. The
value of a business to VC only comes when it is sold to someone else. You
don't need something really good to sell it to someone else. You just need
someone to believe it is worth the amount of money you want to sell it for.

The problem with that strategy now is that the public is wising up to them. We
ain't your fool anymore VC. Go home.

------
RoyTyrell
I have never found Uber eats, or Grub Hub for that matter, to be particularly
great services. Only twice have I ever not received my food but my god the
delivery is expensive. I could either order 3 items from Taco Bell or an
entire pizza plus wing and a 2L of Coke for the same amount of money. Also the
local chain pizza delivery is almost always faster.

While I'm not in one of the big cities like NYC/LA/SF or in a big tech area,
my state or metro area isn't tiny either. I've since stopped trying all of the
tech-company food delivery services and likely won't be going back. Also, not
too keen on them skimming tips.

~~~
malandrew
Only Doordash and Instacart skimmed tips. Instacart reversed course on it as
soon as they were called out. Doordash defended the practice for a while
before paid lip service, but last I heard they were still skimming tips.

------
Scuds
Weird. Recruiters were calling me last month for some well paid contract gigs
there.

~~~
majora2007
Even weirder, they are building a new HQ in Dallas and just last week, they
reconfirmed and signed the contracts to build a new skyscrapper.

~~~
saalweachter
Was it Google that was famous in its early days for using the headquarters of
other companies that went bankrupt building them as its own headquarters,
rather than building one itself?

~~~
bojanbabic
Google HQ used to be Silicon Graphics building

------
joezydeco
They just signed a 10-year lease on _half a million sqft_ of office space in
Chicago. How's that going to go?

~~~
tanilama
Gradually move their workforce there to reduce cost is what they will do.

------
Flowsion
UberEATS just shut down their entire operation in South Korea.

------
rainyMammoth
The first wave of many waves for Uber. They are still overvalued by a factor
of 4 or 5 X.

~~~
xbeta
They said this is a "final wave"

~~~
ithinkinstereo
Perhaps. But obviously they'd want to make this appear as the "final" wave to
not overly-agitate existing employees. It'll be interesting to see how this
quarter's earnings go (especially since the lockup expires in Nov). If the
market reacts poorly, expect additional cost cuts.

~~~
brink
No, that would erode trust. Saying "this is the final wave", and following
that up with a fourth wave of layoffs would be even worse for employee
agitation, and have a worse long-term effect. I doubt Uber management is that
dumb.

~~~
rainyMammoth
So you think there will NEVER be another waves of layoffs? This is obviously a
statement they needed to make in order to calm down the current employees.

------
tbrock
Uber EATS was the worst eating experience I’ve ever had in my life. It was
super bowl a couple years back and After 2 hours this guy in a black Honda
Accord rolls up and hands me a sack of wings that were disgusting and smelled
like pine air freshener.

Glad that one is getting axed.

~~~
rolltiide
A) Uber EATS isn't getting axed, their engineering efforts are because it
doesn't need more bloat since it functions efficiently enough.

B) You ordered from a restaurant that had poor service, two years ago. You
should have ordered from a better restuarant, and you still can. Maybe from
one you recognize and have eaten at before. That has very little to do with
Uber EATS.

