I remember being at Droidcon or some Android specific conference years ago.... When Uber was presenting the speaker said "I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to work on an app that hundreds or thousands of devs are all contributing to at once!" and the entire crowd just looked at each other like dogs do when they hear a very high pitched sound.
Seems reasonable when your core business has been massively impacted. Being a public company can't make it easier.
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 honestly wonder what the strategy is. Obviously they are heavily impacted in the short term, but also this is a company that has been losing money from the get go. If the intent is to build and build and build and search for profit eventually, then I'd think they'd weather this storm more than they are. They invested heavily in building up a world-class engineering team and just cut a huge chunk loose. It makes me think they aren't just cutting costs, they are refocussing the business and probably won't reenter some markets.
Hard to let go of that many people without losing critical knowledge, Uber will come out of this a diminished company in many ways. Best of luck to those laid off.
Not so sure about that. The company was notorious for having teams constantly rollout competing internal libraries/tools and rewrite them over and over, obviously not having enough bottom-line work to keep everyone busy. A smaller workforce may be able to focus on the work that matters, it doesn't have to imply a lower productivity.
I have never witnessed a company at least the size of Uber where this wasn't the case. This isn't exclusively a culture thing, it's a bandwidth thing. There is limited human IO available to coordinate, and available bandwidth diminishes in proportion to org size. The org can either choose to slow down to match available IO, or run at closer to natural pace and accept duplicate work. I guess the latter must be the obvious choice, or the automatic tendency
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
Even if a tool should not have been written, the ability to troubleshoot it is still critical to its consumers. And making hundreds of dependent teams spend a month migrating is easily more expensive than 3 headcount to maintain it.
IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
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.
I bet the number of developers that are working on the business critical stuff is very low. Years ago I talked a lot to people at Oracle and Apple and it was always amazing how small the core development teams for the big products were.
An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge isn't doing their job and management needs to get ahead of this. What if this "key person" decides to find another job?
Of course there's documentation, and also knowledge sharing, doesn't help he/she and 50% of his/her teammates are let go and without a solid way of knowledge transfer or the desire to do so under this context.
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.
An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge might also be thinking about protecting his own job. Being irreplaceable is good job security.
I’ve always wondered, does this actually happen? People not getting fired because they are irreplaceable partly because of their own failure to document stuff?
Nobody except newcomers to the codebase look at documents on code structure, and of course no one is fired for not producing it/producing a crappy version of it.
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.
Very frequently in corporate environments, at least in investment banks I have known and heard of many people earning four figures a day pretty much purely because they've been allowed to carve their own niche that becomes indispensable.
Ironically, the worse they are (think 5000 lines of Perl with two functions) then the less viable it is to replace them.
> IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
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.
I've seen engineering orgs cut in half and become a lot stronger as a result. Fat is trimmed across the stack. Processes are automated. Runbooks and documentation is written. Applications are 'operationalized' to be easily maintained. You'd be surprised how constraining resources makes it really clear what is important and what is not.
Dara's email was really well written, and felt as compassionate as one can for a letter from a CEO announcing job cuts.
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.
Yep, I agree - it sounds genuine and from the heart. 80% reduction in business is no small thing and especially due to something out of the CEO's control. We can't blame companies from laying off people - it sucks for all of us.
I totally agree with this. I've seen Dara speak before and I've always found him extremely genuine, intelligent, and insightful.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
I moved to LA in the pre-Uber days. Trips from LAX back home were miserable. When my ex-wife had the car and I needed to go somewhere - forget about it. Taxis were impossible to find, even in the middle of West Hollywood. I really don't like Uber, but they did change many peoples' lives.
I dunno. I find services like Uber and Lyft pretty essential. In my smallish city, getting a cab pre-Uber was near impossible. My friends and I had the personal number of 2 cab drivers, and if neither of them picked up, good luck.
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.
You are thinking of only US and similar countries where everyone already owns cars. In country like India, there were not much taxis before Uber came. An alternative was autorickshaw which took twice as long to go the same distance, had much worse safety features, exposed one to all the pollution all the time, not to mention the cheating of fares.
I know of a very senior family friend living in one of the flyover states.
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.
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.
Uber all but destroyed the existing taxi infrastructure in several major cities. So yeah, in many places they're now pretty essential.
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.
The barrier for entry is dealing with municipal taxi commissions so you can actually operate the app. That alone probably require connections that a standard startup won’t be able to overcome.
Tell that "Uber is not an essential service" to the millions of otherwise unemployable people that were able to feed their families using it. In countries like Brazil, where I'm from, the fall of Uber will have a gigantic impact. Gig economy apps BECAME ESSENTIAL parts of our lives, there's no denying it. But it was never sustainable. When everybody benefits from a product/service, other than the company that offers it, something is wrong. Uber only exists still, because of the FED's massive amount of money being printed and injected in the markets since 2008. Boomer's 401ks subsidized my Uber rides. The american taxpayers money created an amazing amount of wealth all over the world, lifted a lot of people from poverty. But now the party is over. Every unsustainable business eventually will die, just like the Dodos. I needed to write this, sorry. This ideia of Uber not being essential is such a miopic stance, it can only come from a person that can't see the impact, for the good, that gig economy apps had for the poor of the world.
The classification as an "essential service" has only to do with the service being essential to the _users_ of the service, and nothing to do with the workers.
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".
All the gig economy apps do is ensure the poor stay poor.
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about. I presume you live in the US. You definitely have no sense at how much an average brazilian/argentinian/russian/indian guy can improve their financial life by driving for a ride sharing app. I know of engineers and lawyers down here that are making 2, 3 times more money than they used to make working a 9to5 job. I'm tired of seeing privileged people talking about how the poor, or how the uneducated people are SOOOO sumb that they can't see that "after all the expenses and depreciation" they are literally paying to work for Uber etc. Please, be a little bit more humble and stop trying to prohibit the people that NEED, or even the people that would RATHER work as an Uber driver than to slave on a regular job. It's their needs, it's their CHOICE, not yours.
Ahh - the comment from the person with the multi-car garage, the tesla and the range rover.
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.
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.
When I lived in SF parking was $400 per month, plus as a young male my insurance was $200+ per month.
Most of the time I could take a bus or public transit, but when I couldn’t (like buying groceries) then I’d use an Uber. It was significantly cheaper versus owning a car, and it was absolutely an “essential” service at that point in my life.
> there's no way people who commute every day are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.
Yes there is: Public transportation (bus, metro, train). Millions of people get to work using it every day.
Just having a car sit on the street would cost me at least 100$ 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 bet Uber/Lyft enable single car ownership for lots of couples, and is nothing like a luxury good. Things like people who carpool, but need a backup when that falls through. Or the ability to get to a doctor (or any location) poorly served by public transit.
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.
So a luxury that you can normally get by without? You seem to be strengthening my argument that it's not essential.
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.
Using Uber alone for all transportation may be a luxury, but if you're in a situation where you rely heavily public transportation, Uber is a nearly essential addition to it.
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.
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 $30K or less. The cost of parking alone can be a major issue (many cheaper apts do not have dedicated parking).
Buying a reasonable used compact car probably costs around 2000$ minimum. And a 2000$ car, no matter how nice, has the potential to require much more $$$ in maintenance when things start breaking.
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.
I use my bicycle every day, but some people don't have that option. Also I normally use Uber more than once a month. The thing is, a car is way too much of hassle to use most of the time in the city. You need to park it, there's traffic, and then you can't drive drunk or so I've been told.
This is not some let them eat cake thing, frankly I think people with your pov are actually the ones saying that.
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.
Why are you so focused on the "sole means of transportation"? Before COVID I've used Uber and the likes around twice a month - when using public transportation was unfeasible, like going to the airport with heavy luggage. Using public transportation and supplementing it with Uber was definitely most reasonable solution.
Because the Grandfather comment was about classifying Uber as an essential service when it's clearly not as demonstrated by yours and other comments. Using Uber a few times a month for extenuating circumstances is really not Essential.
The "essentialness" of an service it a pretty bad concept. Uber is definitely non essential as sole means, but it starts to be pretty essential when you feel sick and want to go to hospital (not on ambulance level tho).
This discounts the difficulties in buying a car when credit is bad or nonexistent. I was in this situation, the only people who will give you a vehicle are loan sharks and scammers. Partially this was my own ignorance (see: awful credit). Partially it was my own bad credit itself.
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 $12 for a two-way, 1 mile trip through a crappy part of town can pay for itself if you avoid an hour of walking and get an hour of working).
the idea that uber loses money on rides because of "VC" needs to die. uber is not VC funded anymore and hasn't been for a long time now.
uber loses money on every ride because uber loses money overall because it spends a lot of money on other projects, not because the marginal cost/benefit of each ride is negative.
The ridesharing line of business has been profitable for at least a year from what I can tell. The plan was for it to cover all the other costs by EoY 2020, incl. HQ expenses and other bets like Eats.
You could say the same for taxis. If uber cost 100$/ride you wouldn't be claiming it is unprecedented. It will die because no one wants to pay for it with the real cost: livable wage + proper car insurance.
There is a very simple way to determine if a service is essential or not. If it existed 15 years ago it might be essential, but if it did not, then it is definitely not essential. Human civilization arose and thrived for thousands of years without ride-share. We'll be fine (better off actually) without it.
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.
I wonder how Dara’s approach will pan out if things get much worse (most economists predict that there will be a greater recession than 08 unless urgent fiscal and monetary actions are taken immediately). Friends in the oil industry have described the environment as cutthroat and unpredictable, swaying wildly from euphoric good times to brutal cost cutting when oil prices fall... I was shocked at how they were treated but in a cyclical market that’s the only kind of company that will survive the lows.
Really well written email... This seems like a smart thing to do: `We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.`
I expect this to get downvoted, but: I would say that was a smart thing to say when laying off thousands of employees. That's not necessarily what the top executives believe, or want, as it is much much harder.
> 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.
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.
The Information had a good article on the engineering layoffs (at least the previous round). The CEO decided to cut people to shift development to lower cost countries even when some managers were willing to cut their own salaries to save some jobs.
Where did you get those numbers? And how did you conclude engineers worldwide are being "replaced by" Indians from a statement which says they're moving APAC hub from Singapore?
Thanks for posting this. It's been interesting to see Uber's engagement with its other businesses (like freight): they've been running trucks at a loss for several years now, it seems, and folks have wondered how long this can continue. That's a funny thing about Uber and more generally VC cash -- it can really cause 'artificial distortions' in industries. Will these layoffs reduce some of these distortions and return some of these industries to for-profit vs for-profit, instead of loss-leader vs normal business?
Personally, I would prefer "Sorry, we're letting you go, reasons are obvious - it's covid19 not you. Thanks for everything, your last month salary will be paid on X and we're giving you Y months of cash to help you transition."... Why make a movie out of it?
> I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because
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?
Yes, I can't drive and still only take public transport. It's more convenient than getting a Uber in London. Even taking a black cab can actually be cheaper. So yeah, I fully aware that transportation is important. I wish that would be better covered.
Lucky for them they can afford these taxis to get everywhere. I can't and I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube. But I prefer the bus as I can take multiple buses within a hour for the same fee :)
> Lucky for them they can afford these taxis to get everywhere.
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.
I live in semi-rural Cheshire - we do have pavements and busses (but the busses take hours to get anywhere). We don't have anything as amazing as the tube!
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, I also living in rural Holland where the bus only ran once a hour. Took hours to get to the closest train station to take the train so I understand the pain :)
Yes, one of the reasons you mention is why I never accepted a job in the US as I would be stuck!
> I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world
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.
As a counterpoint, buses/railways are imo 100% an essential service for cities and yet they were running empty during the COVID-19 lockdown where I live. I would hate to see them recategorized as non-essential because of a situation that is clearly completely abnormal.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint. I agree that public transport is essential, but the level at which it was running previously was 100% non essential, because the majority of the workforce in places like London (where we have excellent public transport) can & should work from home. There's no need for accountants to sit in an open plan office all clustered on the same spot in the City of London and therefore putting a huge strain on public transport which forces London to run a train every 60 seconds.
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).
Judging from my experience - restaurants are not. We have started cooking more since the beginning of the lockdown being able to cook during the time that would have otherwise been spent on commute. And we have saved a surprisingly large amount of money in the process.
Well... transportation hasn't disappeared. People still drive, cycle and take busses and trains, so clearly these means of transport are essential. However, it is true that air travel has collapsed and restaurants as well, both which seem to be non essential. People don't have to fly to other places (for the most part at least, air freight is still happening plentyfull) and people can cook at home or get delivery, so it seems that not all transportation is essential and that restaurants aren't either.
The numbers are skewed because of the nature of this pandemic. People are scared of being in close proximity with each other.
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.
Seems like a lot of cuts that needed to happen even without Covid. Common refrain for these companies is why does Company X need Y thousands of employees for a single app/website. For Uber I guess we are going to find out how much they were really needed.
Yes, pandemic is going to force companies to take action that was necessary anyway. Uber's businesses, all of them, everywhere, are garbage. There is no sense, no matter how narrow or convoluted, in which Uber has been profitable. Spare me the discussion of how their empanada delivery business in Jakarta is very healthy. Just spare me. When I was a professional investor, whenever management told me that they had a really profitable business in Uruguay or Crete or wherever I would run, RUN back to my desk and short their stock. "Big in Japan" is not. Anyway the point is Uber is the most-fucked company that ever was. They will never expand into their new Mission Bay HQ. At best, they will retreat into it, abandoning their other real estate in a continuation of the process that began when they bailed out of Oakland. This has been a long time coming for Uber and Covid-19 merely gives them the cover to do what's needed.
Well I think that's one of the benefits of microservices actually.
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.
What I wonder is how often the "remove" operation happens. I'd wager it's more likely there are many services doing variations of the same thing, but existing ones are hard to kill because there is a web of dependencies.
Ah, the no true microservices idea of webservice architecture. If the idea is that you code to a webservice interface and then providers implement that interface, well, you're going to end up with the same problem, but with different interfaces. If the client specifies the interface using GraphQL or the like, that moves the problem from the incompatible interface to incompatible data naming. And so on. You need global coordination to untangle a mess of interrelated services, or you need continual migration work to adapt from one team's implementation to another.
No matter what you call it, if something can trivially be killed off, was it providing any real value in the first place? Dependencies aren't just things satisfied by linkers.
The cloud and open source world, especially in the infrastructure space has moved incredibly fast in the past five years. It's certainly possible that an in house microservice can now be replaced with one of the latest AWS services or even some of the latest apache OSS + a few lines of yaml/config.
That doesn't mean it never provided value, just that there are now better alternatives.
> If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.
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.
I think that’s kind of the rub with microservices, it is actually a successful architecture when the vast majority of teams are unable to do it correctly?
If they're doing microservices well then these services are probably instrumented in a way that makes it trivial to observe and understand the callers' expectations.
Uber's github shows lots of work on opentracing, so if that's widely deployed then the remove operation is a straightforward.
I think this could be an interesting metric to apply across the board.
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.
There is also a technical reason for microservices -- scaling and releasing independently. The company I work for is a B2B company. We use our APIs for our own (relatively low volume) website. But we also use it for batch jobs and we sell direct access to our APIs to our clients and they use our APIs for their own websites and applications. One large client gets signed, the usage of one API can spike by 30%
Depends. R > 1 can also mean that projects are getting wrapped up and left alone, and their teams moving onto new stuff. Three people per module-project, three project cycles in, will have R = 1. That is not necessarily a bad thing, although it can be a liability if they all suddenly need attention at once.
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...
Am I the only one feeling that we should be thankful that these unicorns (whether actually profitable or driven by crazy VC money) have created so many jobs in the past several years?
> 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.
had advantages but remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car. I'm still convinced Uber is not a sustainable business at the scale they operate at.
> remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car
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.
the cost per mile of maintaining a fleet car is one of the subject matters best studied and quantified in the entire universe. My wife is a fleet manager, I'm very damn well sure what I'm talking about (contrary to you).
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.
> My wife is a fleet manager, I'm very damn well sure what I'm talking about (contrary to you).
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.
It's interesting that you say that, since it was one of my favorite parts about Europe being able to just walk up to any main street corner and have a ride somewhere. No need to have an app or anything, always works, no privacy/data issues. And it was never a big deal to walk a couple blocks to the main roads
When I went to Paris I was cheated so much and almost beaten, had a physical altercation with a taxi driver at destination. Never again would I use taxi if I have another option.
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.
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.
Honestly don’t understand why people don’t have their email address public. Spam filtering is so good these days that this is all upside and no downside.
Sorry you were let go - especially in the current situation. Feel free to look through our listings and, if anything is interesting to you, shoot us a message.
Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation and a lover of App Annie's product. Are you hiring only in Vancouver or is the role open to remote? (US, Pacific Timezone)
It's a long tail starting back in the days of my great great great great grandfather. Back in the mother country he was tired of the same old same old and decided to travel to the New World to start anew. 300 years later I was born here :)
It looks like Dara is executing the Jack Welch & General Electric playbook [1]. Essentially, it comes down to "Be the #1 or #2 company in the market or exit"
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.
> 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.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Electric scooters are fun and useful, especially for commuting in the morning from a drop off location like a train station. The real question is whether or not it can be profitable, which I highly doubt. I would rather just get my own if I needed it.
I live in downtown Orlando. Lime, Lynx, and Bird have littered downtown with scooters. I run almost every day and they are often left directly in the middle of the sidewalk, either upright or fallen over. A couple months ago I began relocating any rental equipment I find in my way on the sidewalk. I am not at all gentle about this and I'm sure I have damaged some of the equipment. I like the idea that people might use these more than cars, but investors need to figure out a better way to store them than in the sidewalk.
I get the anger about sidewalks getting littered with scooters, but damaging or destroying them is just creating more hazardous e-waste to be disposed of.
There needs to be a more sustainable model for scooter rentals than "when the scooter breaks, we just throw it out and replace it with another $20 white label scooter from China"
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.
True, but that still makes them a market fad. Even if you got cities on board, the costs are fairly fixed, so while the scooters are fun, it was never a feasible business at scale.
The problem with electric scooters is even though they're nice in urban areas, they're a best-effort service. You can't rely on them to be somewhere by a specific time as they could either be unavailable around you, too far or the one you end up walking to could happen to be broken.
I think the rental bikes which have a fixed docking station are a better design.
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 would argue this isn't true. I lived in Santa Monica when the scooters came about and once they removed the helmet law I loved the utility they provided. I lived about 2 miles away from downtown Santa Monica, which is totally walkable and I love walking, but sometimes I wanted to meet up with someone in a more reasonable amount of time. Instead of having to order an Uber for such a short trip, I would check Bird or the Lyft scooters to find one close to me, jump on it, and be downtown in roughly 10 minutes. And they're fun to ride!
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.
Not wearing a helmet on a device whose front wheel is a fulcrum of a lever that can smash your head on the pavement at a moment's notice is monumentally reckless.
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 use scooters to commute daily, Revel is more dangerous IMO, i have seen a few of them totaled since they came to Miami. Scooters are the least hassle for me.
I always wondered how the scooter fad was going to work out once people realized they could just buy them for a few hundred bucks. Bicycles are hard to store for apartment dwellers, and more at risk of being stolen when locked up.
I live in a city that banned the companies but see a few people still commuting on them in the bike lane.
Scooters seem very viable in parts of Los Angeles. Before covid people were using them a lot. It is true that mopeds/ bikes are more functional. But there is something about a scooter where you just stand on it and it is very pleasant, vs something you sit on and feel like maybe you should have a helmet. Anecdotally, I saw scooters used a lot more than bikes in Century City, when both were available.
This strategy is the opposite of a portfolio play. It is great if your winners stay winners. I think if you are aligned well with the overall market direction that is great.
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.
I had never thought of it in those terms before, but this is similar to portfolio diversification in investing. There's the quip that when you're properly diversified there's always something to hate in your portfolio. Of course the flipside is that there's always something to love too.
All that compared to making concentrated bets where you can win big, or lose big.
"Short-term"? He was CEO for 20 years, and made it one of the most successful companies during that time. One would be very hardpressed to call GE of 2001 a hollowed-out company.
Jack Welch retired in 2001 after twenty years as CEO. "Upon his retirement from GE, Welch had stated that his effectiveness as its CEO for two decades would be measured by the company's performance for a comparable period under his successors"
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.
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
To be fair, most companies underperform s&p 500. S&p is driven by giant winners, and every generation has different winners. In the 90s GE was the winner and other companies in s&p trailed them. This is what makes survivors like Microsoft so amazing, they managed to remain on top by reinventing themselves many times under different leaderships.
Meh, that's a completely arbitrary measure and flippant at best. He has no control over what his successors do, or their strategy. I, and many many others, prefer to judge him by how he handled the company when he actually had control over it.
When you read his book he portrays himself as a teacher and mentor to the next generation of managers. GE was supposed to crank out high quality managers. He maybe did a good job himself (or was lucky with this timing) but he totally failed at preparing the company for a time after him.
I didn't come up with it. It is the yardstick that he suggested we use to measure his performance :)
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.
Yes, I know. But it's a nonsensical way to measure it. Is sounds like something he said flippantly without thinking about what that meant, because it's meaningless.
An interesting comment because it's a good example of what you see more and more of from people with a positive emotional disposition toward someone who won't let them fail or look bad even if its quite obvious that they failed, and it looks bad (and even if they themselves would admit it).
As a factual matter, the measurement isn't meaningless at all. Give Jack some credit.
So are you saying that the new successors to GE have no agency at all, and they are just following a script? That's ridiculous. The CEOs of GE have not been great or successful but that's on them, not Welch.
Presumably Welch believed in the hiring system he put in place. It was also an audacious claim, which comes with its own rewards. But folks like you let Welch have his cake and eat it too: he gets the praise for making an audacious claim, and then when it turns out false, folks like you make excuses for him.
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.
As I understand it, the first was for comms, operations, and support roles. This layoff was more product-related (so engineering, design, and product roles) and required more thought around how they were going to position themselves strategically going forward.
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.
The delusion is the opposite, in that everyone else thinks management should magically have all the right and best answers at the drop of a dime. In reality, management is people too with varied levels of experience and competence. And like all people, they make mistakes so we shouldn't be surprised they don't get it right all the time.
Dara hinted in his first email that there were more layoffs on the way. I consider them to be a single layoff, one portion of which took more time to execute.
Is it? You already laid off a large percentage of staff. Your product teams will have seen the data showing cratering revenue. Your top engineers are almost certainly already looking for new jobs anyways. You know you are going to have to make this move no matter what. Anyone with a brain knows that the status quo is unsustainable whether you say the quiet part out loud or not.
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.
As a suggestion, point people to a personal web page or portfolio. Especially for a front-end engineer, I would never recruit someone based on a LinkedIn profile. That's doubly-true in this market.
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.
That's a great suggestion. Unfortunately, my portfolio is entirely comprised of Uber contributions that I cannot share publicly. I believe many folks are like me, eyes-forward and focused on the company mission. I was going through the process of open sourcing a library, but that's no longer going to happen.
I suppose I should get started on making something that I can own.
Are you allowed to talk around what you did there? Or even write "Top secret, I can't talk about it". I think you need some line items of some sort, because those are three great companies. You'll probably be out of work for 17 minutes.
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.
You're unemployed now. It's not a bad use of your time. There are two levels here:
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.
I'd much rather have a LinkedIn or a GitHub, I can't stand personal portfolio sites with a lot of frippery and it's unclear what they actually have accomplished.
He needs to put line items into his LinkedIn, that's for sure. But he was probably dodging recruiterspam.
It's not an either-or. Hiring, you want as many independent data points as you can. An ideal candidate would have:
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.
Perhaps you're right. But if you prepare well, better organizations will hire you for better jobs.
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.
If you've worked at big companies on products with millions of users (like OP with Uber, Intuit, and Tesla), can't you just detail the specific team and components you developed?
Meh idk, seems like a waste of time. I have worked as a front end engineer at large companies my whole career and have never once been asked for a portfolio.
