
Uber lays off 435 people - coloneltcb
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/10/uber-lays-off-435-people-across-engineering-and-product-teams/
======
fpoijasw
Hello Uber Engineer here!

Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the
layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general
understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in
2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to
political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every
single team had mobile/web, severe shortage on infra teams since head count
was already taken by main Uber teams. We even started building and maintaining
our own chat app. I disagree that all the cool eng project that we put out and
share here is a waste of time or resources. Those project was initiated by
real needs on Uber and only the best make it out into the rest of the world.
Engineers that shipped those projects are still here and we would've done it
regardless of whether the 435 people that were hired in the first spot. I
fully realize that it's an insensitive thing to say but I think it's important
that it's expressed somewhere.

I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives
that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current
engineer's burnout and stress. Learn to plan better and to prioritize
aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done.

~~~
spookthesunset
> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app

God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey,
slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble
mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application....
how hard can it be?"

Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that
is maintained by nobody because the original author left for greener pastures.
Nobody dares replace it though because that would be sacrilege. That chat app
is part of the company, after all!

Arg.... I hate, hate, hate when engineers with a bad understanding of business
and too much time on their hands lock their organisations into homebrew crap
that has nothing to do with the value delivered by the business.

/rant

~~~
fergie
"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an
recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000
employees.

Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an
Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in
place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million
(cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), it could actually be a pretty sensible
decision- especially when you take into account the tax and stock-price
benefits of capital expenditure.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Unless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run
whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't
require building from scratch.

~~~
arbol
Funnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home
page. [https://mattermost.com](https://mattermost.com)

Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.

~~~
aryamaan
> _Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app._

Uber's internal chat tool is built on top of Mattermost.

~~~
manmal
That's unfortunate - they could have made Mattermost on par with Slack
instead.

------
theincredulousk
Probably some reality shaking out. Uber's engineering team puts out some
impressive stuff, often as OSS. Their engineering blogs are regularly on HN.
I've been genuinely surprised that they churn out some of these things and
release them for free given their relatively extreme financial situation.

In contrast to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc. that have
mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') on research and
OSS side-projects, it always seemed to me that Uber was trying to play the
same game, but far too early. Paying lavish SF engineer salaries to generate
cool, but not revenue generating, software is probably excellent for morale,
culture and recruiting, but a dubious use of resources when you are losing
money seemingly faster than it would be logistically possible to literally
burn it.

Saying they're ~ "culling the low performers" can be entirely true, but it is
also a Silicon Valley, meritocracy-culture-friendly way of saying "we're
losing far too much money to pay bloated growth-stage poaching-game salaries
to engineers, so if you're not working on something that generates revenue,
glhf"

~~~
dcolkitt
> that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors')

I totally agree with everything you're saying. But I'm going to quibble with
your phrasing. Apple's cash reserves belong to the shareholders just as much
as Uber's funding rounds.

Too many CEOs operate under the mistaken belief that retained earnings is
"play money" in the way that paid-in-capital is not. For investors, retained
earnings are subject to the same opportunity cost of capital as funds raised
by equity or debt.

Its management's responsibility to deliver returns exceeding the firm's
weighted-average cost of capital. If they can't do that, then they should
return capital to the shareholders, who can then use it an alternative higher-
returning venture.

~~~
earthboundkid
I get that this is the normal ideological description of firms post-70s
neoliberal whatever, but if that’s true, like why not just say firms suck, we
need communism? Like your description makes Pikkety look like an optimist.
“The purpose of a firm is to help rich people get money faster than other rich
people” logically implies that eventually a small group of rich people will
have all the wealth. That’s feudalism. If that’s the goal, let’s start a
revolution instead.

~~~
Ultimatt
share holders longer term don't have to be rich

~~~
earthboundkid
I agree, but the theory "firms exist to maximize shareholder value" ensures
that they will be.

Put it this way: gravity turns space dust into supernovas. Dust is just ever
so slightly attracted to other dust, so it accumulates and accumulates, and
eventually it becomes so massive that it forms a star.

The theory that firms should beat the market makes money gravitational. A
shareholder who beats the market will get more money than other shareholders.
Now they have more money that they can use to invest in other market beating
schemes, etc. If whether a firm beats the market is random, then some
investors will win and some will lose but it all balances out. But if beating
the market is not random (and how could it be totally random?) then those with
the most money can invest in the best firms faster and more easily than
smaller investors and crowd them out. Remember that companies only have a
finite number of shares, so not everyone can invest in a winner. If there's
even a slight bias towards having more money making it easier to beat the
market, then eventually you will get a supernova.

We all understand this on some level. Why is insider trading illegal? Because
it makes it trivial to beat the market!

------
mlvulfs
Scaling back on the engineering and product teams was a smart move to cut
costs. The promotions in engineering have been based on rollout of new
features. No one was willing to be a grown up and require the engineering team
to fix actual problems with the core product, the app. That is on the VPs.
Sure, fixing bugs is not as much fun as building new features but Uber needs
to make its core product better. Uber also had the opportunity to use a
mapping system like google maps or Tom Tom the way that Lyft has. Instead,
they built their own proprietary system at huge expense, refused to scrap it
after it became clear it would be advantageous to do so, and have yet to work
out the bugs with turn by turn navigation. There are some brilliant people at
Uber doing amazing things, there are also a lot of ridiculous side projects
with engineering teams devoted to them like the flying car team. It’s
unfortunate that Uber laid off so many people. Maybe if upper management had
made smarter choices about how they measure and reward success internally
prior to this they would not be in the situation they are in.

------
ssully
Related, but Uber is said to be hiring 2,00 for it's new Chicago office next
year [1]. A mix of engineering and operations. My understanding this would be
under their freight team, which according to this Techcrunch article, was
unaffected by this layoff.

[1]: [https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-
hiring-o...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-hiring-old-
post-office-20190909-va4mtjmgkfh7bnlrub736fbw5q-story.html)

~~~
txcwpalpha
They also recently announced plans to hire 3,000+ in Dallas [1] at a brand new
massive office. I'm sure the hiring and layoffs are from different business
units, but it does seem strange that there's been multiple several-hundred-
people-layoff stories form Uber recently at the same time they're announcing
otherwise massive hiring expansion. I would at least figure that they would
prefer to transfer engineers between units rather than to layoff and hire
anew.

1: [https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Dallas-Leaders-Approve-
Abo...](https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Dallas-Leaders-Approve-
About-93-Million-in-Incentives-for-Potential-Uber-Expansion-542866411.html)

~~~
epistasis
Does Uber have different pay scales depending on location?

~~~
lucasmullens
I can't possibly imagine they're paying 3000 Dallas employees a bay area
salary.

------
habosa
I don't know the details of this situation and Uber is far from a healthy
company, but I don't like that layoffs are always a sign of a company in peril
in Silicon Valley.

1) This is a public company with shareholders. If they think they can cut
costs without hurting their revenue outlook that's not a bad idea!

2) We all know that interviews for engineers in SV suck ... So why can't you
fire someone if you make a mistake?

3) I work at a company (Google) where the prevailing assumption is that if a
team is not getting enough done it should ask for more engineers. That almost
never helps. It adds communication overhead and doesn't address the problem of
why the team wasn't getting to where it thought it would. Just smothers the
issues. The most effective teams I've ever worked with were 3-10 people who
were motivated and working in their area of expertise.

4) We all know that one bad teammate can undo the work of two good ones.

I could go on. Yes I truly have sympathy for anyone who loses their job
suddenly. It sucks for them and those who depend on them. It's probably good
for Uber though.

~~~
steelframe
> I work at a company (Google) where the prevailing assumption is that if a
> team is not getting enough done it should ask for more engineers.

What I'm finding at Google is that whenever a team takes longer than 2
quarters to do pretty much anything, that's considered some kind of "problem"
that needs to be "fixed." Sometimes the problem is that the technical
challenge really needs more than 2 quarters to be adequately addressed. And
yes, the first instinct is to ask for more headcount. But often times the
problem is also with the headcount you have, not the headcount you don't have.

What is usually needed is to get rid of the TLM who got into a management
position through the IC track because of the collective delusion that someone
who has worked their way up to Senior or Staff SWE by writing dank design docs
and uber code (often in vast quantities) has also acquired senior engineering
management competency.

Once you've hired somebody who has significant education and/or experience
with engineering management is managing the team, the next thing for that
person to do is figure out how to increase the health and effectiveness of the
team they have. You might even need to reorg to get the team size down to
7-10. In the process you need to give the team a couple more quarters to cut
their MVP down to the bone and deliver on it.

Then, and only then, should you think about throwing more headcount in the
team's general direction. And it needs to be done with the goal of adding a
layer of management hierarchy, making sure than no more than 7-10 people are
in the daily standups.

------
dvt
Uber was actively poaching from our team when I was at Edmunds.com a few years
ago; hope my ex-teammates that jumped ship are doing alright.

Uber is in a precarious position and I can't help but wonder what would be
different if Travis Kalanick were still in charge. I know it might be an
unpopular opinion, but I think his leadership and vision were really
instrumental to Uber's early success.

~~~
AgloeDreams
I mean resistance to his ideals and methods are based on his relative
carelessness towards anything but his and the company's goals.

Incredible leader, amazing CEO with the raw ability to move mountains for the
company's growth.

Remarkably bad at human and helping humankind.

If burning the Amazon rainforest helped Uber's goals he would have it torched
in the most efficient and rapid method possible by morning light. Perfect CEO
for the shareholders and maybe for keeping the lights on, not so much for the
rest of us.

~~~
repomies691
> Remarkably bad at human and helping humankind.

I would say that the way how Uber aggressively expanded throughout the world
has massively helped humankind. Because of Uber, many countries have changed
their taxi laws, and many local competitors have sprouted up. More efficient
taxi and ride-sharing services help save the environment and make cities
nicer. Of course this is quite theoretical but I believe Uber was the needed
company to push the mass transit development forward.

~~~
AgloeDreams
Was making more taxis on the road with more downtime and increasing congestion
really an improvement in cities? A Recent study found that 50% of all cars in
lower manhattan were rideshares. Is that really a better world? Ridesharing in
cities has been absolutely proven to increase pollution rather than reduce
while carpooling in rural areas helps reduce pollution. The problem with
rideshares is that they are jobs based on time rather than efficiency. You
drop someone off and then you are available to pick someone up, so you drive
to them, drive them where they need to go and drive to the next person, the
points between passengers are reductions in efficiency vs single cars and add
to congestion in high congestion areas. In any case mass transit is much
better in cities.

~~~
SamReidHughes
There is surplus value to the customer that you aren't accounting for. Mass
transit is a far worse experience than Uber.

~~~
foldr
In most of the US, probably. It's not so clear cut in London. The tube is
usually faster and more pleasant. (London's air quality is pretty bad, and
many Uber drivers have an annoying habit of driving through heavy traffic with
the windows open.)

~~~
SamReidHughes
Sure, but London has always had taxis, too, because sometimes they're the
better tool. It's not like some people are taxi-takers and others are subway-
takers. You use whatever's best at the time. When I lived in Boston I took the
T every day -- but on some occasions, a taxi was the better choice.

~~~
foldr
I was responding to the claim that mass transit was "far worse" than Uber.

------
Zenst
I wonder about Uber, they have spent lots of money branding and getting
everything in place, that they overshot the whole making money aspect and now
playing catchup. Problem is, will they reach that balance before they bleed
beyond the point that they become vulture targets for another large company to
step in, cherry pick what they want and discard the rest.

With all that said, I wonder if maybe Amazon or some self driving car startup
steps in and buys them up for a lot less than it would to build that
penetration. Can imagine your Amazon owned Uber driver bus picking you up,
with half a dozen stops on the way, some people, some packages, doing the
rounds. Things change, how will Uber adapt and more so, all those drivers on
zero hour contracts, are just as easily laid off and much cheaper as well.
Self driving cars are a case of when, not if as so much being done in the
field, progress has become a hot competition and slowly getting there.

~~~
jdsully
Uber was very profitable when they just had Uber Black. The problem is they
were disrupted themselves by Lyft and had to launch UberX (give Travis credit
for launching this _before_ Lyft even though it was their idea).

~~~
Petrova
Are you sure? In the recent book about Uber written by Mike Isaac,the author
stated that Lyft was the first to launch a low cost ride service with non
professional drivers and Uber rushed to copy them.

~~~
jdsully
I read the book last weekend and am going with my memory (I’ve since lent it
out). In the book Travis found out about Lyft’s planned rideshare service and
raced to launch UberX first.

Alas google has become useless for finding useful information so I hope
somebody who still has the book can confirm.

~~~
sparuchuri
That was referring to Pool / Lyft Line.

As others said, Sidecar was technically the first to the "ridesharing" model

~~~
jdsully
Thanks for the correction!

------
txsoftwaredev
Uber is also planning to open an office for 3k employees in Dallas.

"...create 3,000 full-time jobs and pay employees an average salary of at
least $100,000..."

Considering the lower cost to operate in TX it would make sense to move IT
roles to that area.

[https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2019/08/09/ub...](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2019/08/09/uber-
s-dallas-office-could-bring-3000-jobs-downtown-be-company-s-biggest-hub-
outside-san-francisco/)

~~~
dmode
The Dallas office is an administrative office and will not have eng roles.
Also, these are all "promises", we really have to see how it plays out.
Promises are cheap. Remember how Foxcon was going to hire 10k people in
Wisconsin

~~~
txcwpalpha
That isn't what the article in the parent comment says:

>The office would include engineers, finance executives, salespeople and other
roles across Uber's business.

~~~
dmode
Here [https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-new-offices-chicago-
dal...](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-new-offices-chicago-dallas-will-
dwarf-san-francisco-hq-2019-8)

This directly quoted an Uber exec saying that it will be focused on HR, sales,
and ops

------
Yhippa
This is a bold move for sure. It sounds like they might have hired the wrong
people so instead of "redeploying" them they just cut pretty deeply.
Definitely unfortunate for the employees but also impressive that Uber had the
guts to do this. I've seen companies let dead weight hang on for too long. The
fact that they are still hiring makes me think that this was not a panic move
to address Wall Street.

------
rubicon33
There's definitely a tightening of capital happening right now. Investors are
pulling back as fear of recession grows.

EDIT: Did I say I believe there's a recession coming? No. I said (accurately)
that there are growing FEARS of one. There's definitely tightening of
investments and capital happening.

~~~
moate
I mean there's also the fact that California has pending legislation that
seems ready to pass that will kick Uber (and others in the gig economy space)
right in the wallet. Next 2 years should be interesting as we see what effect
that has on things.

~~~
flukus
What's funny is that if they were employees then uber would be a lot harder to
compete with. As it is now uber drivers will use several apps and often
recommend competitors to customers, which they're entitled to do as private
contractors.

~~~
moate
If they were employees, Uber(and the others) would just be another taxi
company and wouldn't have the same market share/investment levels they do.

------
Elof
Kinda interesting that they chose to do the layoffs during the Apple event. I
wish companies would just own what's going on instead of trying to bury it.

~~~
favorited
Some tech company always tries to bury their garbage during Apple keynotes,
unfortunately... Glad this made it to the top here anyway.

------
mytailorisrich
Uber's core business is a taxi app and I get that there are some clever
algorithms involved, but I still don't really understand how they justify the
size of their engineering team.

I read that they had 2,000 engineers out of 6,000 employees in 2016, though I
don't know the numbers now. That seems gigantic.

~~~
kamyarg
There is Uber Eats, Freight, and JUMP bikes in addition to their ride-hailing
product. I believe they share some technical similarities but still each of
the four(I know of) are startups ideas imho.(See Lime, Lyft, Sennder, Delivery
Hero, Takeaway.com, door dash etc.)

------
choppaface
Google is pretty well-known for maintaining a very deep bench-- if an engineer
isn't effective in some role, they'll just move them to some other team. Heck,
a lot of hires (especially 3rd/last attempt) go directly to the bench. This
strategy pays off well when a new competitor (like Facebook or Uber) comes
along and snatches up people in the lead roles, or if the company feels the
need to pivot to something really fast (e.g. Google+, which drew from many
teams across the entire company).

Moreover, hiring a long-term employee today versus tomorrow might save money
for a place like Google, assuming we expect competition and wages to continue
to increase.

It strikes me that if Uber is laying off software engineers, their company
outlook must be very, very dire. A layoff is perhaps better strategy than
firing the bottom 5%, which would likely preclude the departed from re-joining
at a better time. But probably the wrong message to send to a cohort like
software engineers-- a layoff is a legal confirmation that the company made a
big mistake.

~~~
hendzen
This strategy works very well if you have a gigantic money printing machine,
which Google does. Uber has a gigantic money _incinerating_ machine. They
don't have the ability to just have engineers spinning their wheels on non-
business critical projects like Google does.

~~~
trenning
Or in the case of Amazon you have both, printing money with an awful culture
of churning through employees. They even structured their stock vesting around
it.

~~~
meddlepal
What is Amazon's vesting structure?

~~~
kamyarg
Seems it vests over 4 years with 5%, 15%, 40% and 40%

~~~
meddlepal
That's pretty awful.

------
mrich
They are in a race: Be the first with self-driving taxis and go for the
monopoly, or run out of cash. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but my bet is
on the latter. It's just such a hard problem, especially in cities.

I just hope there won't be a kind of AI winter when some of these startups run
out of money.

~~~
paulcole
> Be the first with self-driving taxis

This is thrown out all the time. How exactly does this save them?

Are they going to spend billions to purchase and maintain a fleet of their own
taxis? Are they going to be paying people to "borrow" their self-driving cabs?
Something else?

I just don't see how this suddenly changes the equation in a meaningful way.
People aren't going to spend more for a self-driving ride and the costs can
only go down so much.

~~~
bigzyg33k
Because self driving cars, while expensive, are still significantly cheaper
that employing drivers. Furthermore, it could be argued that you need less
self driving cars than cars with drivers, as they never need to take breaks,
and can work all hours of the day. It would also drastically decrease ubers
cost of entering new cities - previously they relied on driver incentives,
this flattens the variation in cost greatly.

~~~
cookie_monsta
> Because self driving cars, while expensive, are still significantly cheaper
> that employing drivers.

Are they? How much does a self driving car go for in today's market? And does
your calculation include the fact that a driver comes with free car,
maintenance, fuel, etc.

Even if the numbers do add up, SDVs aren't about to roll out next week.
Remember how close we were to VR for about 30 years?

------
djsumdog
How does this work with layoffs + hiring? Can you layoff and then hire in the
same department? I assume companies agree to pay at least unemployment and
possible severance too in the case of layoffs. Can a company say "These 80
employees are under preforming" and justify a reduction in force that way? (I
guess in at-will employment you don't need to justify it at all, so long as
you meet legal unemployment requirements?)

Are they getting rid of under performers and getting new blood or are they
cutting people from certain departments (in which case, they could apply to be
rehired in another division?)

~~~
tempsy
Like another poster mentioned, up until 2 years ago (?) Uber was handing out
very fat compensation packages even to entry level engineers. It's possible
these are employees who've been at Uber for 2+ years and are frankly overpaid
even if there were no serious performance issues.

------
SilasX
Is this the same as the 400 from a month ago, or a new batch?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20558490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20558490)

Edit: Guess not, that initial group was just marketing. From the article:

>These layoffs come shortly after Uber laid off 400 people from its marketing
team.

------
notTyler
I've always wondered if uber were to abandon their ongoing development efforts
and focus on support and maintenance, would they would actually be profitable?
It seems to me they would need a fraction of the tech workers they currently
support.

~~~
TylerE
No. Their quarterly losses are more than double their entire R&D spend.

~~~
simonrobb
Fact check: R&D spend for three months ending June 2019 was $3.06B. Reported
loss for three months ending June 2019 was $5.24B. So, already false.

Now take away the one-time IPO expense of $3.9B, and we're not even close to
being true. Further take away the $300M "IPO driver appreciation award" and
you end up with a $1B loss for three months ending June 2019. In other words,
the quarterly R&D spend is over three times the size of the quarterly loss.

[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)

~~~
jcdavis
But that IPO stock-comp expense is largely attributable to R&D, so if you want
to subtract that from the losses to look at a more cash-focused analysis you
have to substract that cost from the R&D side as well.

Of the $3.95B total stock expense, $2.56B was from R&D, which suggests cash
cost that quarter was more like $910m (still a lot!)

~~~
simonrobb
To my mind this quarter shouldn't be used at all in this kind of discussion
since its so messy. e.g.: I take your point, but that $2.56B is the
culmination of over ten years of R&D compensation. It's not at all
representative of the company's broader financials.

OP's inference that Uber's quarterly loss is more than double Uber's quarterly
R&D costs _in general_ shouldn't be propped up by a moment in time
observation.

------
Railsify
I suspect when the economy takes a downturn luxury purchases like this will be
the first to go. If I think I might be laid off do I spend 10 dollars to Uber
home or walk the 5 blocks and have one less drink? I would personally have one
less drink and walk, or take the train/bus... Those 7 dollars Starbucks venti
iced white chocolate mochas with 5 shots will slow also.

~~~
rubiquity
One drink determines whether you can walk 5 blocks or not?

~~~
smileysteve
It was difficult to follow, but I think the point was to exchange the cost of
the uber for a drink (same cost) but walk home.

------
cwperkins
Is it any coincidence this happens the week that CA is debating a bill that
can drastically change how they compensate drivers? It appears like they are
trying to gain leverage from an outsider’s perspective.

~~~
tanilama
Uber is at a worrying place with or without bill.

------
abalone
Any idea roughly how many SF engineers just got laid off? Trying to get a
sense of how this will hit the local labor market in the next few weeks.

Articles says 265 engineers.. 85% in the U.S. So up to ~200 will be looking
for SF jobs? How many are remote or in other US offices?

------
aj7
This is an unsustainable business model. If you draw a Gaussian surface around
it, the end result is that Uber/Lyft will destroy the taxi industry (which was
execrable, but put a fair amount of kids through college) and replace it with
pauperized “contractors” too naive to calculate depreciation. And at the same
ultimate fares, but with less share for the drivers.

Enjoy it while you can, I guess.

------
streetcat1
My uber alg:

1) open the Uber app.

2) X - price of ride with uber.

3) open the Lyft app.

4) Y = price of Lyft.

IF Y < X -> Choose Lyft. Else : Choose Uber.

Currently, Uber is around 20% more expensive. Not good.

The rest is irrelevant to 99% of the customers.

------
tschwimmer
Anyone know what divisions the layoffs were in?

------
Areibman
"Of those laid off, more than 85% are based in the U.S., 10% in the Asia-
Pacific and 5% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to the
source."

Interesting. This hit seems to be mostly localized to the US. During their
last mass layoff in July, employees from all over the world were affected.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/cwutan/oc_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/cwutan/oc_locations_of_the_400_uber_employees_laid_off/)

------
robotburrito
Dang, I wonder if this makes my job search here in SF much harder now :).

~~~
rolltiide
More startups than people here with multiple black holes sucking up talent
dont worry from this news

Recruiters salivating though

------
yalogin
I predict this situation to get worse over the next couple of years and will
culminate in Uber shutting down the self driving project and partnering with
Waymo.

------
dubliner2077
"exceptionally high-performing teams"

12h sort of performance.

------
happppy
Maybe Uber should focus on fixing their main app first. Driver can't get rides
even after being online for hours sometimes. Card payments are being delayed
and now I know why they are decreasing bonuses day by day, due to over hiring,
because they have to pay over hired engineers a shit amount of money thus
decreasing drivers bonuses!

------
bitL
...and the internal demoralization just started. Once this Pandora box is
opened, it cannot be closed.

------
vkaku
I think the logic is simple:

while(true) { getHired(); work(); quitOrGetFired(); }

There's no logical explanation for any of these steps. Every company that is
being funded is not funded for being responsible, but for showcasing a hockey
stick growth and making investors go $$$$$$$. If you're lucky, there's a
chance your company will be an unicorn, and if you are luckier, your stock
will mean something, and if you are one of the luckiest, you can actually sell
it and do something else with your life than work. Anecdotal evidence shows
that you need to be really lucky than be meritorious to make money. It also
shows that even with low luck, periods of employment basically give you that
money stream.

Leave the analysis for someone else and get going! I've already done the good
deed of referring the Uber engineers in my network.

IMO, about the open source thing - Now that you've left Uber, you still have
the neat tools you need to build something better, faster, bigger and someone
else already paid for the caveman to science work.

------
sparkling
Serious question: what does Uber need 27k employees for?

1k people to run the show in the main headquarters + some small-ish ~50-100
people regional offices should be enough to keep the company running.

~~~
fardin1368
Uber is in 85 countries and each one needs ops, legal, marketing, driver
interaction teams and etc. There are only 4000 engineers.

~~~
keehun
Perhaps the next question is, what do 4000 engineers do? Not aimed as a
troll-y question: an informed idea of what the breakdown of that many
engineers do would be enlightening. For example, there were about 200 iOS
engineers the last I heard. Assuming similar levels for Android, that leaves
3,500-3,600 engineers.

~~~
simonrobb
+1 Appreciate you avoiding the usual "it's just a little smartphone app"

I'm not going to try and give an exhaustive list, but as a rough explanation:
things get really, really hard when you're operating at Uber scale (hundreds
of thousands of riders on trip at any one time, each demanding low latency and
reliability):

\- Product: native clients for each side of the marketplace in each vertical
(rides, eats, freight, atg, et al), maps, localization for every country with
a presence (not just language, but tax, legal, hundreds of region-specific
modes e.g.: tuk tuks)

\- Infrastructure: hardware teams to build on-prem DCs (cloud can get very
expensive at scale), software networking to deal with said low-latency
traffic, storage to optimize for reliability/latency/cost, observability
(metrics, logging, alerting, tracing), security, et al

\- Data: insights, operational support, routing, et al

\- ATG

Hope that gives a better idea.

~~~
dubliner2077
Datacenters are not cheap either, at escale go for the Cloud as it makes some
operations more efficient which is what they want.

VMware for example, assuming they don't use ProxMox lol, is super expensive,
hardware maintenance, network, power, building, etc.

------
CobrastanJorji
This is probably good news for "City Storage Solutions," Kalanick's new
startup, given the volume of recruiting emails I've seen going around from
them.

------
yowlingcat
Sounds like an awesome opportunity for hiring managers. At my last company,
I'd be all over this, and indeed may be all over this when I start my new
position.

------
uwuhn
Curious to know how many of the engineers who were laid-off were specifically
iOS. Relevant to me since I'm pigeon-holed and in the Bay Area :)

------
xenospn
Hi newly ex-Uber engineers! If you’re an iOS developer And live in Southern
California please reach out.

------
_pmf_
Maybe they can be independent contractors, what with the gig economy being no
big problem and such.

~~~
sempak123
Oh yeah

------
jeff_friesen
Does anyone know yet how this will affect their open source work, such as
react-vis and deck.gl?

~~~
null_vector
If they heavily rely on their own tools, odds are good maintenance will
continue.

------
0d0d0fsd0
This is positive, they need to adapt to the expectations of the public
markets.

------
lziest
My question is, do they forfeit the RSUs given to the laid-off workers?

------
efficax
Hey! Maybe there should be unions in tech! Just a thought!

------
xvector
This news comes hours after a massive Uber outage. Huh.

------
nikolay
I can't belive that such simple and hugely profitable idea needs such huge
staff, which can only screw things up. No wonder these idiots are losing big
money!

------
frostyj
well hope their balance sheet looks better now

------
brukaaguka
Dropbox is next.

------
omerekmekci
Ohh we want come back. Uber xl. To Turkey again

------
NoblePublius
I believe the actual term is “deactivated”.

------
renatoautore
This is just unaccetable

------
romeo12
Great news

~~~
happppy
great? how?

------
lukelandlord
I think like @fpoijasw

------
lucie2813
I wonder how long a nonprofitable company can sustain...

~~~
zelly
As long as the Fed keeps lowering interest rates

------
OrgNet
435 of their real employees or fake employees?

------
newnewpdro
Given what we know of Travis Kalanick and Saudi Arabia, burn baby burn!

Good riddance.

------
dominotw
> we have over 27,000 full-time employees in cities around the world

Wow

------
halis
It all comes down to management. ASSHOLE IN === ASSHOLE OUT

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
netfl0
I’d like the see HN consider layoffs in other verticals as well. Particularly
manufacturing.

~~~
arthurcolle
Why?

~~~
netfl0
It seems like technology plays a role in these paradigm shifts, perhaps
awareness might inspire folks to leverage the workforce in new ways, maybe
with technology.

