Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers working on tooling, R&D projects, and at least partially on open source projects, roles that could presumably go away if a company had to focus strictly on the core product.
I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having a massively more complicated hierarchy of bosses and managers and project leaders and it seems like everybody is chief of something and everybody loses sight of the big picture as they just become focused on a single aspect of a given product. What was once a lean startup with a vision is now struggling to get new products out of the pipeline even though they have ten times (or more) the manpower.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
>suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product
At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.
When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment.
Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude.
But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.
Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
This is a very nice description of what I've noticed moving to a large organisation. There is also a lot of busy work. As the organisation grows, communicating and negotiating between groups requires extra effort that often ends up being the role of a new management level, and groups have self-preserving incentives to stay relevant leading to lots of entropy (busy work, repeated work, hero projects that are just there for internal branding). As someone who has recently been put in this level of management I spend a lot of time having to negotiate out of new project initiatives invented more to attract exec attention or satisfy a rogue execs dream project. Makes me really look forward to moving back to working in a smaller company.
> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
Three questions.
(1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?"
(2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?"
(3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utterly failed?"
(Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies.
You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...
That’s a false dichotomy. It’s likely that that are both not idiots and what they are doing isn’t necessary.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.
As soon as an organisation gets above a size limit, organisational politics becomes the most important factor in any decision.
The decision to agree to a feature request starts to consider Who the feature request came from before any of the practicalities of the feature itself.
They're not idiots, and they are doing what is necessary, but the goals have moved from outward-facing market and customer concerns to inward-facing organisational-political concerns.
Every coder in a large organisation, sooner or later, gets given a task that makes no engineering sense but achieves some internal political goal.
I can't find you a source right now but back in '94 when I was learning IBM mainframe Assembler the history was mentioned and they claimed thousands of engineers, mathematicians and physicist worked for 3.5 years on the first mainframe (or was that the 360?).
The IBM of that era was literally inventing the modern computing systems. The complexity of the tasks at hand were essential, not incidental. I think the general trend of thought here is a critique of the latter day NIH syndrome and the consequent inflation of the technical teams.
It’s a different type of systems engineering, that’s more akin to sorcery, than to actual physics.
The hardware is, of course, limited by physics, like the speed of electrons and heat dissipation. But once you get past that, your computer system is a collection of bytes that you reassemble to form whatever it is your imagination desires.
And while the 747 is a magnificent plane, it did have the benefit of over 50 years of aviation and aeronautical science behind it, all figured out.
Whereas software is still somewhat in its infancy right now. And every few decades, it seems to revolutionize itself, as newer and faster hardware become available.
The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.
I'm talking about R&D specifically, not infra folks.
But let's say designing for scale is 100 times harder than a taxi app for just one national taxi service. Based on my 23 year career in trenches I seriously doubt that's the case, but let's be generous.
That would net us into ballpark of €60M expense. Non-negligible, but it translates into a hundred developers pulling €100k a year for 6 years, still at least an order of magnitude below Uber.
Very obviously it does not scale anywhere near linear. There has to be a severe case of diminishing returns in technical hiring.
So did early Uber. Famously, the contractors were Spanish-speaking, so FTE engineers #1-5 had Spanish-English dictionaries on their desks to understand the code.
It means that the functionality of the app that immediately comes to mind is only one of the many ways in which they lose an extraordinary amount of money.
>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development.
That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Is this sarcasm? Seems like a really user-hostile attitude if not. Admittedly, my personal point-of-view is that the majority of UI updates are make-work for engineers and PMs with at best no value added, and at worst negative value created (as you experienced).
That's more of a failure for the ux and product vision than it is a failure of project management. The trick isn't to just roll out new changes slowly, but to involve the users and figure out what needs to change and how.
That really depends on your customers and the product. In this case, control systems, incremental changes are definitely not the way to go. Imagine if your car made an incremental change to the position of the brake pedal every time you turned it on. In such situations you don't babystep. You announce the change ahead of time, provide your customers with transition training, and make the change as scheduled.
In the case of "adaptive" menus in control systems, imagine if the elevator in your building rearranged its floor buttons so that the most requested floors were always at the top. Total chaos. People learn where their button is on day one. After that ANY change is going to go badly no matter what the UI engineers say. That UI should be carved in stone for the life of the building.
Were there any dedicated UX people involved? To me, a UI engineer is someone who works exclusively on the front end, and would implement the work of the UX designer. They wouldn't actually do the designing and research themselves.
This is one of those cases where that Ford quote about a faster horse is relevant. Many people will be happy to just have what they have now without thinking how it could be better.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Fuck people doing this. Especially extremely radical design changes such as Twitter's and Facebook's "redesigns" that they force down the throats of their users. Or Microsoft.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
No, the trick is to iteratively change the UI in a way that's easy for the user to get used to.
I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It's off-topic and tedious, and leads to nasty flamewars that are also off-topic and tedious. It's also against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), as other users have pointed out.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral.
It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable.
One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case.
I think that language is far less important here than culture. Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equal, haha".
As with many things that don't make much sense, it started from something more reasonable. Long, long ago the word 'man' unambiguously referred to all human beings, while 'woman' was used for females and 'werman' was used for males.
The forgotten sexism is that we began using 'men' to refer specifically to males, almost like they were the only people that mattered. It happened so long ago that it's been mostly forgotten that there even was another name.
Though, you still see vestiges of it in the language. That's the same wer- as in werewolf.
This is a good point, excuse a quibble: 'werman' did not seem to actually see usage in Old English, although 'wepman', meaning male human, did in Middle English.
I'm basing this on a discussion at Wiktionary:
> Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken.
Thanks for pointing that out. I think Wiktionary is where I first heard the word, and I hadn't seen it was removed.
So, wer did mean male/husband and man did mean everyone. It's just that they weren't used together. I should probably also have noted that woman was 'wifman' back then. That one has more obvious descendants than the male version.
But this is something you do constantly as an English speaker. "Drinking" can mean any liquid, or just alcohol. Wood can be a material, or a forest. A bank can be a financial institution or the side of a river. A mouse can be a rodent or a computer peripheral. Does it really take conscious difficulty to figure out the intended meaning?
> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
I don't want to be that person but Zoroastranism is the religion you should be comparing against -- it predates Islam by a good deal and developed alongside Farsi. And Zoroastranism does hold men and women to be equal. [1] Iran was actually a pretty liberal country prior to the Islamic Revolution (which was really more of a rebellion against American control).
Iran has been Muslim for over 1300 years. Zoroastrians today are a tiny minority. It's a bit disingenuous to refer to the (brief, mainly urban) liberalism of the Pahlavi years in place of everything that came before or after.
The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language?
> and takes another syllable.
That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.
Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that?
I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be complete conjecture. Language is this ancient thing that evolved in concert with our minds, optimizing for some vast array of factors. Human intervention into that process seems to always go wrong, down to US attempts to fix the spelling.
It bothers me that speaking my dialect with common definitions is not good enough. Can we not just be charitable in our interpretations of others' speech? Why do I have to dedicate cognitive load to verifying that every possible interpretation of every word is acceptable with no expectation of others meeting me in the middle, even just as far as the dictionary definition? If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?
Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.
This is long, and I apologize for that. I think I've said some important things though, and I'll ask you to do me the kindness of reading it. Thanks.
There's a notion in improv that when you respond only to the last thing that someone said, it's because you are in your own head and you're not listening. Additionally, it feels like you're talking down to me and others in this thread. Are those feelings invalid? It just seems like showing some respect to others should be a precursor to caring about whether a word could be misinterpreted as exclusionary, if the goal really is to make people feel less bad.
I personally devote a huge amount of time and energy to the feelings of others. I need to be doing it less, it degrades me. If I were to start caring about this on top of everything else, I would be completely dysfunctional. You call it a minor inconvenience, but if I were to accept that this is worth doing, I'd implicitly be agreeing to a thousand minor inconveniences, overthinking everything I say even more than I already do (this is a fifth draft, and look how long it has been made so I can feel I'm communicating effectively), and inevitably retreating altogether from social interactions that already give me anxiety.
Back to the subject at hand. What the word 'man' as in 'mankind', 'manpower', or 'man-hours' means to me is a dehumanized, de-individualised, notion of genetic humans working towards some end. This is a _very_ useful construct for me. A person is something else, a human individual. It is impossible for me to consider a single person, let alone thousands. People have 86 billion neurons of uncompressable complexity, and I've only got 86 billion of my own to try and grok that. This is also an incredibly useful construct for me. I can't just swap one for the other, it would be a significant long term effort to rewire all of the associations.
A better solution would be a new word to take the place of 'man' there. 'Man' already does the job, but I'm sure there are other prefixes in english that also mean human. I don't think it's a material issue, so I'm not going to devote energy to solving it. But if someone is going to tell me how to talk, they can afford to make the damn effort to find a suitable alternative instead of forcing me to adapt to the first thing that comes to mind. And when it is pointed out that it doesn't work, and it doesn't sound right, they could maybe try to figure out what is wrong with their solution, rather than assuming I'm a closed-minded closeted sexist. I don't know.
Seriously, the amount of time people who pretend to be hard and rational loose their minds over things like "one syllable."
> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
That's a straw man. Asking for gender-neutral terms when referring to groups of people does not equate to asking for gender-neutral culture. Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.
>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.
statements like this are not useful for building understanding.
rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought.
Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.
What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
For what it's worth, I already use 'dev-hours', but not from any gender/rights perspective, it just sounds better and correlates the specific industry to the metric. It's also about the same amount of verbal effort as 'man-hours', so the change was easy.
> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
We're asking to simply feel included (this includes women as well as trans people; I'm both). When so much of your life is being told you don't belong or that people like you don't / shouldn't exist, it's a big deal. It's 1) more accurate and 2) more reflective of the wide variety of experiences a person can have. I'm not being glib here, but of course the need for gender neutral language seems irrelevant: it is to you because you were already included. It's doubly important in heavily male-dominated industries.
I, too, prefer using "dev" or "employee" in place of "man" in these cases simply because it's more accurate. But it's really not a lot of effort and it actually means something when someone corrects themselves because it's basically "wow I feel seen and like I have a place here". When you've never seen someone like you in a position of success above you because you're one of the first, it really, really matters to feel accepted in any way you can.
Like, you don't have to do it. But these days it really does sound a bit anachronistic to use "man-hours" -- language changes along with the culture and it always has.
I'm totally with you on the inclusion part, everyone in a diverse team needs to feel included.
However, on the solution part, if you say dev-hours, I as a designer would have a huge problem :-), or even as a PM I would have same problem. 'Employee' comes close, but then it precludes estimating for consultants, freelancers etc. 'Person Hours' does not seem to have any of above problems, but then as mentioned it is awkward to use.
Well, maybe perfect solution does not exist, or maybe the perfect solution is being more accepting - accepting gender diversity AND also accepting that many times things that we do is out of laziness or choosing easier path or just out of habit - people in professional work environment do not do things with ill intention.
There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.
> There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.
I agree; very few people use male-centered language with ill intentions. But it's still a choice people can make if they choose to, and it means a lot to those of us who often feel marginalized. You're not a jerk if you don't, but it's pretty much all upside if you do.
Anecdotally, I would say I hear gender-neutral language used about 2/3 of the time in the Fortune 500 world. While I don't hide the fact that I'm trans, I'm fortunate to pass for cisgender so most people I work with outside my immediate team don't know -- I'm pretty sure they're not altering their language for me. Maybe it's because I'm a woman, but it was a trend I noticed before I transitioned as well.
> statements like this are not useful for building understanding.
I don't ask you to "understand," honestly I'm not sure if I even particularly want you to. I want you to _respect_ us, and others. And no, understanding is not a precondition to respect. By insisting on using exclusive language, or even by framing otherwise inclusive language as exclusive, you are showing lack of such respect.
And true understanding is a huge amount of work. If you need understanding for respect, there ain't going to be many people you'll respect.
> Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.
> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
We ask you to say "humankind" and "employee-hours." Among other mostly practical, material things: don't exclude us and don't get in our way.
I do hope you know that it’s never intentional. I’m definitely not excluding any gender when I think of the concept of “man hours”—it’s just an abbreviation for “human” to me. I try to use gender neutral language where ever I can, whenever I think of it... I end my meetings with “thanks everyone” rather than “thanks guys”, even though “guys” just means people to me. But it can be stressful to always have to worry about the different intentions people can put behind words, even if none are meant. Basically I think trying to use more gender neutral language is a great thing, but we also shouldn’t criticize it every time it’s seen. I think it’s fair to assume we all have good intentions and that we’re not secretly sexist.
I don't alter quotes, even for PC reasons. And If I am going to reuse language for effect I am not going to make changes unless they add to the point I am making. The first comment said man-years and I stuck with that as I wasn't trying to correct their gender grammar.
Also, "person-year" is vague as "persons" includes non-humans entities such as corporations and partnerships. "Man-year" refers only to work by biological humans. "People-years" might be better but that is plural. Had I been the first I might have used person-years, but when someone else sets a precedent that avoids confusion I'm happy to stick with it despite potential microaggressions.
While those variants solve some complaints, they're a lot more specific and may change the meaning of some statements. For example, many of those terms exclude work that isn't done by "engineers". Using a term like "employee-hours" might make contractors on your team feel less valued.
I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent either, but it's also painless and traditional just to refrain from unsolicited corrections of people's word choice when there isn't any ill intent to be talked about.
I find it very enlightening when people who find issue with my expression let me know about it in a friendly way. I think the commenter took a lot of care to phrase their concern in a very nice way; when people do this to me I thank them. It’s the only way that I can keep learning how the language changes with time.
If matt_morgan has concern, matt_morgan can personalize his concern, not preach about what's "painless, traditional-grammar-friendly" generally to all. I don't find that friendly, I find it intrusive.
I always find it so interesting that a full-out flamewar is just fun, while a side comment about improving communication is "intrusive". This is the internet, my friend...
The OP's intent was not to single out a gender. He/she was using a very common catchphrase. Your call-out was really passive-aggressive and uncalled for.
Do you get pressed everytime someone talks about history, and suggest they use the word "herstory" or "perstory" instead?
Seems to imply a different amount of time. Work year would be the amount of time worked in a year (usually ~2000 hours give or take). Sort of like how a work-day is 8 hours rather than 24.
Man/woman/person/dev/etc-year seem to imply an amount of work that is equivalent to a year (~8760 hours).
Or at least that's how I would use those terms. It's entirely possible that these definitions are regional in nature.
We were once negotiating an SLA and my colleague happily agreed to a 24 hour turnaround time. I asked him if he thought that was perhaps a bit optimistic and he replied, “24 business hours, that’s a three day turnaround time!”
I actually considered that when writing my original comment but "the mythical man-month" is such an obvious reference that it felt weird to change it. I suppose you can also think of it like "horsepower", it's an equivalency but doesn't actually mean that the power literally comes from a horse.
Still, point taken, I'll consider using person-year next time.
I suspect they got the point, and rather you are missing their point, which is taking the (trivially easy) opportunity to be more gender-neutral with our language..
Well then don't say anything at all. It adds nothing to the conversation. Don't push your ideals on others. Take your SJW crusade elsewhere. That's one positive thing from this pandemic - the shift in focus away from these types of (IMO) non-existent 'problems.'
It is tiresome to see these types irrelevant comments on a story. So yes it does fire me up a bit. These are people out of work, and the parent chose to focus on pushing their gender-neutral grammar preferences. Real problems vs. Snowflake problems.
And yet you are treating their comment like a "real problem"... you're the one crusading, they just gently and non-confrontationally made a suggestion. You could have just passed on by if you didn't agree with their suggestion, but you turned it into a crusade against them. To the observer, you are in fact the one acting like a "snowflake" fired up (dare I say "triggered") by their actually quite gentle suggestion, in which they make it clear that they weren't accusing anyone of ill-intent.
Do you think your annoyance and anger at their suggestion is a "real problem" or a "snowflake problem"? If you don't think it matters that much if someone says "man year" or "person year" (you said it wasn't a "real problem"), why is the suggestion to do either way so triggering to you? Do you think it might be more in line with how worthy of your annoyance it is to see someone suggest "person year" (maybe not worth that much annoyance in the grand scheme of thing when we have 'real problems'?) to reflect on your own about why their suggestion to say "person year" made you so angry and upset, without needing to reply on HN and turn it into a crusade?
My annoyance is that it has absolutely no relevance and adds nothing to the discussion regarding the story/post. It's just noise, which begets noise (my response) and so on. Let's talk about tech.
If left alone, there would have been nothing distracting about that short and explicitly non-accusatory comment, but you were triggered and chose to build a crusade around how you don't want to see certain kinds of comments on HN. You seem to have trouble handling the fact that some people have different opinions than you, about what comments are worth making. Very snowflake problem.
Sounds like you have a problem handling the fact that some people are tired of the bellyaching every time someone uses a common term in which it is not meant in a derogatory way.
What are you worried about. The intellectual left is effectively dead.
Sanders.
Dead.
Warren.
Dead.
Gender police.
Dead.
The democrats are going to fight one another to one-uo republicans on immigration post corona. And pro-US first no further dependence on globalist masks or hand sanitizer.
There may be a few gender cops here and there, but the movement is dead. There is no point in fighting
You understand that there are millions of women who are victims of abuse, sidelined or disregarded by society, and constantly repressed because of sexism, right?
Losing your job is a temporary problem for most people. Sexism, like the kind that is baked right into our language, is an inescapable daily struggle for many women.
We have the capacity to think about both women's rights and the recently unemployed at the same time. It's frankly sad that you can't look deeply enough at this issue to see it as more than a problem of "grammar preferences".
Once again, none of this is relevant to the post regarding Uber's layoffs unless they're somehow disproportionately laying off more women than men can it be even considered remotely relevant.
I disagree with such a compartmentalized way of thinking about these issues, where it's inappropriate to discuss gendered language when it comes up in some other context. That's often the only effective opportunity to address this kind of problem. A comment about the use of gendered language is relevant in response to a comment that uses arguably gendered language.
This is not a common way of speaking anymore, IMO. When I read "all the developers are men", I didn't understand what you meant at all. I thought maybe you were making some kind of ironic joke about sexism. I did get what you meant after re-reading of course, but "All people are men" sounds very archaic to me, like something out of Tolkien.
Usually when we want to talk about humans as a species or whatever, we now use the word "human."
Language is fluid. The thing that was "right" to say 500 years ago wasn't right 100 years ago, and what was "right" 100 years ago wouldn't be right now. There are clear arguments for why encouraging people to think about the gendered language that they use and how it perpetuates gender roles would be beneficial in combating sexism. The arguments for maintaining existing language because it is currently the most popular tend to be pretty thin.
When you move into how people feel are we introducing inequality? People feel at different rates. Some can go into a rage in an instant while others can be a rock. Are we rewarding the primate brain over scientific obvervations when we choose to accept personal feeling as the gold standard? Should we be encouraging one over the other?
Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.
Training yourself to default to non-gendered language like person-kind and to think about whether a term originates from problematic aspects of gender dynamics is a relatively easy first step towards breaking down some of the insidious aspects of sexism that are imbedded in language.
> Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.
That is not actually true. The Old English word for a male human being is wer, as in werewolf; it is cognate to the Latin vir (also meaning a male human being, and the source of modern English words like virile & virtue). That word is no longer in common use in modern English, although I think maybe it survives in some dialects.
The word man(n), OTOH is the gender-neutral Old English word for a human being, as found in such words as woman (from wifman, a wife-man) or leman (a mistress, or love-man), both notably referring to female human beings. It is cognate to modern German mann, again referring to any human being.
The word mankind thus refers to … any kind of man.
Modern German "Mann" is an adult, human male. Ehemann (husband), Fachmann (expert), Kaufmann (salesman). The parallel, of course, is Frau (adult, human woman), which also does double-duty on its own as a word for "wife": Ehefrau (wife), Fachfrau (expert), Putzfrau (cleaning lady). That "Putzfrau" is a long-standing word but "Putzmann" doesn't exist, and that "fachmännisch" and not "fachfrauisch" (fachfräulisch?) is a word are examples of the sexism deeply embedded in languages a lot of us are going on about. Thoughtful Germans are finding their way towards more gender-neutral terms, especially in job postings, which used to be horribly gendered - think "Reinigungskraft" (cleaning power) instead of "Putzfrau", or "Entwickler*in" instead of "Entwickler" (developer, grammatically male).
Modern German "man" (single 'n') is an indirect pronoun that is usually best translated as "one" or "someone", but even then, you fall into the sexism of male as default. "Man ist was man isst" (one is what one eats)
> Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?
I love languages. Each one is beautiful and endearing and ugly and infuriating in its own way. I really love English, because it’s my native tongue and I know the most about it, but I love studying languages in general. One thing I have found is that the more one knows about many languages the less likely one is to go off half-cocked about perceived problems in one’s own.
I did study a little bit formally, but I also love computers and there’re a lot more career opportunities in software development than in philology or etymology, so that’s where I focused.
Can we be species neutral. Person refers to humans and leaves out animals and other substances like carbon which would experience a year in the same manner as a human.
For what it's worth, this isn't unique to unicorns. Almost company successful enough to get to the scale of tens of thousands of employees likely has huge amounts of waste within it. The situation you describe of niche projects being scrapped after several person-years of effort had been invested, incomprehensible management hierarchy, and no coherent strategy perfectly matches my first job out of college, a year at Sprint in 1999. Me and two other new hires spent a year doing next to nothing on a team of 20+ building a complicated Java service with a purpose I never understood, but which had been going on for about a year, with half the team made up of contractors. Pretty sure I never wrote any actual code, though I did have to fill out time sheets every week. I had two managers, neither of whom I ever talked to. After a year, I got a 15% raise and a promotion. Then soon after I found another job and quit, our project got cancelled, but everyone on the team just got moved to other teams doing similar "work".
Do you think the degree to which a company succumbs to one of these "pathologies" matters? Is it a matter of timing (i.e. becoming successful faster than they become moribund)?
What do you think differentiates a company that becomes "mature" vs one that flames out?
Mature companies, notably, make a profit. Not a future profit, not an expected profit, not profit-discounting-advertising, a right-now end-of-year no-accounting-tricks more revenue from sale of goods than expenditures from all sources. I'm going to take a page out of the IRS handbook, and say that they have made a profit for the last three out of five years, in fact. Let's take that a step further and say that they've existed for five years. Their primary method of financing operations is not private equity, but public equity or loans. Once a company looks like this, it's pretty well set.
Oh, you might be surprised how many people are not working on anything of consequence. Some of these companies don't even do much in the way of building stuff outside of the product teams, and even then, they frequently fizzle after some point.
You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.
R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.
Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).
If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).
I see it more as scaling problems that make it look like people aren't actually busy.
As the userbase scales, infrastructure scales, and what was once a simple "ALTER TABLE" is now a system with a team managing it because a single Postgres instance didn't scale.
As the engineering headcount scales, code changes, builds, even understanding the system become slower. You overcome that with better engineering, but mostly more engineers.
As the product matures, there's still a drive for growth, but the low-hanging product fruit has been picked, so you get lots of product teams trying to either optimize their little part because, at scale, it makes a big difference, or product teams working on new, crazy ideas--the startup within a unicorn-startup--that will most likely fail.
I'm at Airbnb (opinions strictly are my own). The number of engineers working on tooling for us is actually not that large. The vast, vast majority are product engineers and with our most recent layoffs the majority of the cuts were for those types of engineers. My own opinion is that we simply had way too many product engineers for the amount of actual output we got from them.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
These are complete guesses for the pre-covid era, but it gives an idea of scale difference. The average Airbnb user probably books 2-3 times per year. The average Uber user probably books 2-3 rides per week. At 50x the volume, the infrastructure is different, and probably more complicated to handle the volume.
Eh, they're solving different problems. I don't think you can necessarily call Uber's problem more complicated just because it's an order of magnitude more volume. I worked at a small ad tech start-up with a team of 5 engineers on a real-time bidding platform that was serving 1k requests/second and moved to a travel company that's now 100+ engineers that serves maybe ~250 requests/second at peak traffic, but the travel company's infrastructure is a lot more complicated even though the volume is smaller.
You'd think so but that's at least not the impression I've gotten. At Google that's certainly going to be the case but at a company like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb the bloat ends up largely arising due to managerial bloat (managers want to grow their org to make themselves seem more important) and low technical standards for higher level ICs (which results in far more resources used to accomplish each project).
Technical competence isn't as well evaluated at companies like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb at L6+ especially for external hires. So it's not so much that the technical bar is dropped but that it just is less enforced at higher levels. As a result you end up with a lot of ICs that are all talk but little else. This is, of course, a gross generalization. I've worked with and know great engineers of all levels at these companies. But Uber in particular had plenty of really bad apples that got hired into other companies across the bay at L6/L7/L8.
The fact that this term exists implies bloat and a focus on process not productivity. You may as well call them "leaf nodes".
There are programmers and senior programmers, data designers and senior etc. There are also team leads and program managers. There's basically two tracks, you either create stuff or you manage the creation of it.
They have different titles now, and there's a lot of Agile fluff (how is a scrum master not just a secretarial service and the function of a team leader not to keep their meetings focused?)
> Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
This seems so strange to me. As a lead, most of my work is management, organization, and planning. To scratch the development itch I usually have 1 pet project going on that I either use when I'm taking a break from actual work or work on in my spare time. But even that pet project has pretty clear long or short term value and the only reason why it's not being worked on by my team is because it hasn't been prioritized yet. I can't imagine working on a pet project that has no clear value to the company.
In a bloated org, they can get away with it though... we had to let one high level Uber hire go because they couldn't code to save their lives, had insufficient technical expertise to guide any kind of substantive project, and played a lot of politics to seem important. I've run into at least 4 high level hires from Uber with the same kind of profile.
At the end of the day, it's just a reminder that careful screening is important. Could be a cultural issue that impacts certain unicorns, but it's also on the hiring company to thoroughly fact-check and test a candidate (and no, leetcode and simple arch questions aren't enough).
Worth pointing out that Uber is no longer a unicorn. It is a large publicly traded corporation with a market cap of $58B. I suppose you're asking your question about large tech companies generally, not so much unicorns? Most unicorns are still quite small (revenue and employee count-wise) relative to large publicly traded corporations like Uber and the FANGs.
Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years.
That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
I call this "artificial panic". That term came to mind when I joined a FMCG around Y2K, and on my first weeks I noticed people were running around stressed, like headless chicken. When I asked "what's on fire" and the answer was "nothing".
The "Minimalists" say on their podcast that "most emergencies, aren't". When I see panic setting camp in a company's mentality, I make myself scarce for a while until things calm down. If I see that the artificial state of panic is a perpetual feeding machine, I try to dance around it. I've read my share of Dilbert to know to avoid these toxic environments.
Ideally in a company there would be one single order backlog, showing the relative value of each project to everyone. However getting such an ordering would involve huge co-ordination across vastly differing internal companies / cultures and would drag up every buried political hand grenade of the company's lifetime.
So instead you do what someone shouts loudly about. If the shouter is right more than 50/50 they are doing pretty well.
Correcting myself (for the record). The Minimalists say that "most CRISES, aren't" (apologies for the caps). I used the word emergencies, which is inaccurate quote.
,"Critically Important", etc. is the most recent whatever caught the attention of a typical S/E/VP with the attention span of a ferret long enough for him/her to be able to utter it in the words. If you're able to highly visibly jump and demonstrate activity during exact that moment - a great talent leading to advancements/promotions - there is no point to react as the next new "critical" directive/change of course/etc. is coming very soon. Of course if your manager is one of those aspiring "talented jumpers", he/she will try to make you jump with him/her - it is a real PITA to have such a manager who instead of filtering and protecting the team from would amplify all that stuff flowing down.
Gasping in horror at the prospect of that JIRA plug-in coming into being, especially since even I, a casual admin for our Atlassian products, have a good idea what combination of API calls would make that happen.
Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor.
On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.
A large company would never manage to switch to a competitor in one quarter. And they try any hard, it most likely means their getting a cashback under the table for the new contract, or other perk of the sort, the feature is just an excuse.
When I was working at Stanford, a new colleague came rushing out of a meeting ready to start a big new initiative because our VP said something should get done. I had to explain that patience was important because no single person at the University could make a project happen, but hundreds of people at all levels of the org chart could stop a major initiative in it’s tracks if they felt threatened.
Hmm, sounds like you've got some dyfunctional managers. I've never personally witnessed management faking urgency on a project just to get productivity on it. Management is generally charged with making sure ICs know what the priorities are as set by Product. It's possible that Product changes its mind often, confusing everyone. But if Product, Management, and ICs are confused about what your "critical business functions" are, I think you've got some systemic leadership problems.
Systemic leadership problems are more common than you think. Most larger corporations have orgs within them with very different cultures. It’s not hard to know why: the effective managers listen to their developers and shield them from the shit that comes from above. A healthy tree is nurtured under the protection offered by these managers; their reports never know what kind of shitstorms they were protected from. But these kinds of managers are rare albeit very effective.
I love how you distinguish between "ICs" "Management" and "Product". When you say "Product" do you mean Marketing? Sales? Production? Manufacturing? Do they have "ICs" as well as their own "Management"?
The whole point of "Agile" was supposed to break down these divisions. Management is "generally charged" with getting the greatest productivity they can out of their resources. How that productivity is measured may be by "the priorities as set by Product", but that doesn't take into account ROI, sunk costs, COGS, Cap/Opex etc etc.
Yeah, I was taking artistic license with the term, but "large tech" is probably a better term, though I'd filter it down to those on the lower profitability side. (even those with large IPOs are often just a startup at scale)
Unicorn never meant lower on the profitability side though. It just means a valuable pre-IPO late stage start-up. Plenty of them were or went on to be insanely profitable.
As someone who has hired many engineers and PMs, and runs a hiring budget today, there are some reasons to feel at least fairly secure if you're an engineer at a growing company:
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
It's not about in unicorns or not. It's about the scope and impact of your projects, both of which have more to do with the size than the PR status of a company. When the quantity of people in a company exceeds the quantity of work, you'll be much more expendable.
Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.
A few heuristics that I find useful:
1. Revenue per employee
2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months
3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.
I agree this is a great way to think about it. At the end of the day “business impact” per employee is the thing that matters most to your individualized risk. If your expertise is essential to the continued improvement of the company’s core business model, you have nothing to fear.
It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.
This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).
However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.
Let's say you like the Warriors. You and a group of friends get together every game to cheer for them. You're the one everyone looks to for bringing the beer, and you enjoy the group you hang out with. And when the Warriors win (or lose), there's a huge energy you get to be a part of.
I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much different than working at a startup day-to-day. And as a bonus you get to be a part of the large-scale wins and loses. Much like how it's exciting when the Warriors win, it's exciting when something big comes out of your company. Even if you did nothing but cheer.
Everyone is expendable. Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable. So are people at large companies or small startups. But within your team, you get to do good work, and it doesn't feel that way.
Much like the Warriors in the last year, it's hard to ignore your team taking losses, especially when success was so easy in the past, and thinking about finding a new team if things don't improve.
> Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable.
I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.
Definitely. The company just felt bloated. Feature teams needed 7 or 8 people working constantly on single screens that would be an afterthought in an MVP, just to keep up with the constant changes in architecture and infrastructure. Lots of over-engineering and NIH from veterans that didn't want work on teams. Lots of rewrites due to performance issues. All that without any noticeable change for the customer (other than the website becoming slower). VCs and middle-management kept asking for more developers, though, so everyone was happy, but the general perception was that we would do just as well (or better) with a half, or a third of the staff.
All developers are expendable. If 5% of all developers at any of FAANGM's got hit by a bus, the company would keep moving.
I work at company with less than 100 people, I know where many of the bodies are buried, etc. But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
> But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least.
If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty minimal if your cause of death is meteor strike. It would likely cover a percentage of the income you would have earned for your remaining years of work.
But opening a req seems totally reasonable when you are demonstrably not coming back.
Group life through most companies are 1x salary. That amount is a pittance to buy on your own.
But the point is everyone is expendable. I worked for a company around 2009. They laid a lot of people off that had more seniority than I did. I wondered why they kept me around.
Three months later I found out. The founder had written a bespoke development tool chain in C++ using MVC and assembly. The board push him out and the CTO told me that I was now responsible for maintaining the tool chain because I was the only one who knew C++ and assembly.
In the extremum, everyone is expendable, but not everyone is equally expendable, as your own anecdote bears out.
When you expend enough people, especially increasingly less expendable people who carry your basic institutional knowledge and skills, you do so by inflicting damage on your company or organization.
The economic winds may dictate that, as they did frequently in the 2008 economic crisis, but it's not like there is no institutional cost to expending people. This is the basically why countries like Germany and the UK are paying employers to keep idled people on payroll.
It's a double edged sword, on the one hand you have the freedom to work on interesting projects, new technologies and get well compensated. On the other hand most engineers working at uber should be able to critically think about their job and say "Is what I'm doing contributing to the noticeably to the core business or am I part of a gamble the company can afford to make right now"
I'm saying that large companies in tech tend to have a large developer headcount, often working on projects outside of the core business. As such, I think those employees are more expendable.
Teams that open source stuff typically have leveraging roles, i.e. they build things that several other teams depend on.
Orthogonally, typically large companies have a maslow hierarchy of sorts: for every infrastructural endeavor, there may be a number of others that are more "nice-to-have" niche projects that aren't really critical to anyone else's ability to deliver results.
The most vulnerable employees are those on niche projects, despite these projects being internally focused (as opposed to open sourced). Infra folks whose work may be open source are typically less vulnerable because they do in fact work on critical, well, infrastructure.
I've always worked in manufacturing so people aren't that easily expendible. Takes a long time to train someone and without them, one of the line shuts down or gets less productive / slow.
Well regardless of economic boom or bust, the chance that a startup runs out of money is probably higher than the chance that a big company chooses to lay you off.
I worked for small and big. Everyone is expendable. Running lean or efficiency is not something those companies optimize for. That's why they have so many employees. They optimize for growth. Until something bad happens.
"Developers at unicorns:" Prato principal crystallized. Look at any big repro or any large company. There is usually about ~5 ish people that know wtf is going on. I think uber could be ran with 10 people.
I've noticed that, as projects or entire companies grow, the effort spent on the product decreases relative to the effort spent on things _about_ the product.
Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.
It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.
I wish we would take a hard look at corporate culture from a systems perspective, as self-professed systems professionals intent on "solving hard problems" and see how we ourselves contribute to the culture of disenfranchisement through our cumulative individual actions which we often attribute to "that's just how it is" rather than taking extreme ownership and fixing things in our own favour
I think for large companies this is true and by design. Companies don’t like single points of failure so by design should be able to afford to loose x% if engineers (or marketing etc).
Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers.
The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.
Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc.
These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing revenues or decreasing costs. Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
>>Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove.
Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.
I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.
I think there are more than just those two interpetations.
I also think more people than Graeber have been aware of the existence of BS jobs for a long time.
What is nice about the Wikipedia page is that it acknowledges that BS jobs "is a thing".
Perhaps it facilitates more open discussion of the phenomenon.
SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 may be facilitating the discussion even more as it has forced people to consider what jobs are "essential" versus what logically can be referred to as "non-essential".
I have seen one commenter on HN raise the issue of why pay does appear to correlate with whether a job is essential or not. Perhaps this is something more people will start to think about.
Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs?
I've never been at a unicorn, but I have been at many startups. The story is the same everywhere. Almost no one is irreplaceable. When times get tight, cutting overhead means letting people go.
All the big startups hire all the best people mostly to stop them from getting hired anywhere else until they can't sustain it. Having 1000 extra developers is better than having 200, 5 person engineering teams working against them.
Arguably everyone from the CEO to the intern pulling gofer duty seeing as how that is the vast, vast majority of their revenue and profit and everything else is just more advertising for Google itself.
Anyone working at Uber, can you share how is morale in Uber at this moment? How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people, but people don't want to go there?
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
Well, everyone knew it was coming. Dara has been pretty transparent about the timelines, plus there were a ton of leaks in the news about details over the course of the last few weeks. It looks like everyone in eng got an email this morning that stated in bold italics whether they are affected or not. Gotta say I appreciated that clarity.
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
I don't understand why the firings are waves. Is this a logistics thing, or a morale thing somehow? Because it seems like it would negatively impact morale, more than anything.
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
The logistics. In the best of times it takes at least a week to let go a few thousand employees. I can think of about ten things to take care of. Now multiply that with number of countries, the local laws to be handled. Add another multiplier or two for being a public company. The PR angle. And finally the unprecedented COVID-19 situation we are in, which compounds by adding a few more variables, the least of which is remote coordination.
All said and done, I’m actually impressed they got through this in under a month.
At Lehman Brothers, the waves came every few weeks.
On Tuesdays, HR fired business people, and engineering people cleaned up the mess.
On Wednesdays, HR fired engineering people.
On Thursdays, HR fired each other.
If you broke labor laws while laying yourself off, would it be grounds to sue the company afterward since the actions were taken by an employee of the company?
It's a funny thought, but I have to think it'd get noticed pretty quickly that you're suing the company for something you actually did, and it'd be dismissed pretty quickly.
It'd be fun to negotiate your own exit package in that situation though :-D
A few years ago I worked at a small-ish company that had to do a mass layoff of about 10% of their employees. The only HR person had to write her own layoff letter. A few days later she had to walk back her own layoff because the company realized they probably shouldn't layoff their only HR person during a mass layoff.
The leadership team has repeatedly said they acknowledge it sucks to leave people hanging for weeks on end since it obviously drags morale through the mud, but that the logistics are complicated, due to the sheer number of people involved, local laws, etc. The leaks have just made it all the more stressful.
Not me personally but a close friend I know that works there says morale is at an all time low understandably. Luckily he wasn't fired but a close coworker of his who was the #25th employee of Uber was removed. 6+ years at Uber and was managing and running a team that wasn't deemed essential to Uber core services apparently. Kind sucks but these people are at a position where it shouldn't be difficult to find another position elsewhere.
It's gauche to say it on the day a bunch of people lost their jobs (and there's no need for the schadenfraude) but I think the underlying point is sane. Uber's business model is replacing FTEs in a a hidebound, regulated industry with gig workers (& good UX!).
If you were forecasting how this company in particular would deal with a downturn, it's a reasonable guess that they'll try to do the same thing to their own workforce, if they can find engineers willing to take on gig work. It's in their DNA.
To be charitable, the grandfather comment is a warning to think about the broader effects of the work we do, driven home by the possibility of a "what goes around comes around" situation.
EDIT: as many have pointed out, taxi drivers don't get benefits either (I originally said one of the margins Uber competes on is not providing benefits).
The reason why software companies don't generally hire contract software developers rather than bringing them on as FTEs is that they're less effective. Software development is a high-communication, high-trust activity; it's very helpful to be able to explicitly direct and manage the activities of your workforce, because otherwise they don't produce anything useful. For specific tasks that don't need to be high-trust and high-communication (eg. writing an iOS app for a non-critical part of the business that uses a public API), companies are already inclined to hire contractors.
The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?" Tech company success tends to be binary: either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
Exactly, Uber's business model only applies to (highly) fungible labour markets. As past experience shows, you (usually) can't swap out 10 devs here with 10 devs there and expect similar results (although who knows in the future)
I don't think this is accurate. I've worked several contracts in my life, often working alongside the company's FTE developers. In every situation, we were fully integrated into the team, with the same level of access, etc. We fully participating in meetings and planning. The contracts were several months. (one as long as 18 months; it only was cut short due to 9/11) I will admit these weren't strictly software companies, and in every one of these roles, I was a w2 employee of a staffing company, not a 1099. However, I was at least as effective as their regular team members; probably more so because I could be released far more easily.
> either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
I think rather than looking at those names we might ask ourselves about the ones that managed to survive: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, as an example
Sure, we might argue that they have not always been the most ethical companies out there, but it doesn't mean they haven't had to reinvent themselves here and there
How come Oracle and IBM got more money from Java than Sun? Windows is now "free" but MS continues to make money.
Those companies that went away seems to be mostly good examples of the Inventor's dilema. Especially SGI.
Worked for Google for 5 years. Red badges were largely confined to QA testers, physical security, and the kitchen, along with a few UI designers or engineers that didn't want to be employees because they liked the freedom that being a contractor allowed (eg. being able to work for someone else on the side). Basically everyone I interacted with on a daily basis was a FTE. Product area could have something to do with it: I was on a core product (Search), it's possible red badges are more common in peripheral products.
Your comment downplays the number of contractors at Google as if they are rare, but in reality, Google employs ~100k FTEs and ~120k contractors. It's definitely more than just QA testers and kitchen staff.
You may really have just been on a team that doesn't interact often with contractors, but the reality for the broader company is that contracting is a way of life for much more than just Uber.
My understanding is that a lot of those are jobs like street view driver, autonomous vehicle tester, search quality rater, contract recruiter, content moderator, con-ops (help forums & customer support), etc. That's a big portion of the company but not a big portion of core engineering teams. I'd acknowledged the existence of them in my original comment, but this article is specifically about layoffs of software engineers within Uber's core products. I maintain that someone in that position is far more likely to come in contact with other FTEs than with contractors.
I'm not sure about Google, but I know that many companies segregate contractors into other buildings. At one of my previous employers pretty much everyone I interacted with was a full time employee as well, but that was only because contractors largely did not have badge access to the office and worked somewhere else.
I think the even bigger risk with getting a job at Uber will be that some of the future employers may not be willing to consider you due to sketchy reputation Uber has as a company.
This is something I see employees worry about all the time, but I have never seen a business owner or person with hiring authority consider it. People who get to that position within a company learn to inhabit shades of grey; unless you personally did something illegal, they're not going to hold the company you worked for against you, except to the extent that they may think that people working at that company are incompetent.
I see ex-Facebook and ex-Uber employees popping up all the time at high positions within hot (and sometimes even ethical) growth companies within the valley.
Not a thing I’ve ever considered on a hiring front unless you’re famous as a sexual harasser or for pulling a Damore. Literally never heard of anyone doing this either.
> The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?"
what's median job duration for a software engineer in startup-land anyway? I'd be surprised if it was much over 2 years...
I'd think that if your famous company goes under, folks won't generally hold that against you. Heck, I'd think people who watched it all fall apart would would have the most interesting stories (and valuable lessons about mistakes to avoid).
You seem to not know how taxi companies work. They are independent contractors except they are even more at a disadvantage. They need to pay money upfront for their shift and spend half their time earning that money back before they even make money. And they have no benefits.
New York is probably one of the most union heavy places in America. Checking where they are unionized more isn't an accurate reflection of the rest of the world.
Great, I think you came up with the simplest solution: Uber should make whatever single digit percentage of total drivers that comprise their Uber Black drivers FTEs.
This might be a good selling point for the higher levels of Uber service: You're getting a full-time, professional driver who's been thoroughly vetted. It's not just some random person with an app.
I think for the vast VAST majority of riders, the "random person with an app" is good enough. In the age of turn-by-turn directions, rides are commoditized. A hundred crimes per year divided by billions of trips per year represents decimal point percentage crime rate — which is a risk not all that different from aircraft crash statistics, or even car crash statistics.
I know I definitely prefer to save tens of dollars per ride vs the services provided by some platonic ideal of a "professional driver".
and they dont' pay % of their revenue to the 'base station entity'.
This Uber trick: taking % of the revenue for the fixed cost service (they provide to the taxis drivers ) is the master trick making uber money.
So far, in Europe, all taxi corporations charge taxi driver FIXED (quite small 100..200 usd/month) amount for operating telco/web/radio and coordinating fleet of taxis.
Uber's ability to push bulshine here is really business milking 101 course: Fixed costs, uncaped incomes.
> and they dont' pay % of their revenue to the 'base station entity'.
Unless they own their own medallion, they pay "medallion rent". They'll also pay dispatch fees. Many taxi drivers switched over to being Uber drivers because they could earn (and keep) more money, not less.
Uber has screwed over a lot of people in the past. I'm not going to cry for people who worked for a bad company getting screwed over by said bad company
Sure, but do you feel the same way about AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, every major auto manufacturer, Tesla, Amazon, and myriad of other companies that behave in unethical ways?
I can't think of a single tech company that hasn't engaged in some eye brow raising behavior.
There was even some controversy with YCombinator funding a fantasy sports betting company.
I'm a little more nuanced in my analysis than the GP, but yes, I do feel that way in some degree about all the companies you mention, and how the employees have some incremental responsibility for the bad those companies do.
Offered rents in Vancouver have dropped 15% since the pandemic took hold and AirBnB became a dead business for a bunch of mini-hoteliers. If you helped build that software, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the crisis in affordable housing we've been struggling with, that AirBnB has contributed to.
If you work at Facebook, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the consequences of the 2016 U.S. election and Donald Trump's presidency.
Your share of the responsibility is likely tiny, and I'm not going act like you're a mass murderer. But at the end of the day you were part of the machine that left a trail of damage in its wake, and I won't ignore that just because you were merely a cog.
I get your point, but any culpability on their part should not cause us to withhold compassion and empathy to a person losing their livelihood.
Being laid off sucks.
I can't imagine what it's like to be laid off during the worst economic period in US history since the great depression, AND to have people bag on you because you were employed by a company they didn't agree with.
Are you sure it's AirBNB, or the general economy dropping? RE values and rents as a knock on result have been dropping everywhere as demand ($$$ to pay for rent) has dropped globally as peoples jobs are lost and people move in with their parents or similar and drop leases fairly suddenly.
When you really research how much AirBNB is part of a housing market, it's minuscule. One or 3 condo buildings can usually cover whatever supply AirBNB put into alternative demand markets. AirBNB is a convenient scapegoat in most markets, because it diverts attention from building more supply and all the NIMBYs blocking it.
AirBNB has destroyed the rental markets of 100s of metropolitan areas. If you're working there, then you helped that.
Facebook is the sole reason we have AntiVaxxers, Trump, and fake news in general. Working at facebook, you're supporting that.
Apple I don't really have a beef with.
Amazon has killed people in it's factories, and if you work there you are in some part responsible for those deaths and the destroyed small businesses.
You can work where ever you want, as is your right. But by you working at a company, does not make you immune from being responsible for the company's actions. You have a choice of where you work, and if you choose to work there knowing the bad things the company does- that's on you.
The cynical part of me is thinking about the people who never had a chance at a decent livelihood. Demi-employment didn't sneak up on us, we just thought we were too classy and sophisticated as workers to have it ever effect us.
This isn't the first time our generations have experienced this. It's practically the third. You should know very well by now that many of these jobs aren't coming back, and those that do are really only going to be open to people who are younger than you.
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)
I'm really worrying that the mindfulness and how to think gender neutral courses will be cancelled which would be a great shame. Furthermore I fear that I can't spend time on a completely new revolutionary javascript framework which makes all the other ones obsolete.
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.
I can't imagine how companies like Uber, Lyft and WeWork could be sustainable in the long term with huge costs and a high burn rate, but this action is definitely in addressing the future Q2 results in the summer which is the actual results including the impact on the coronavirus outbreak.
Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with huge costs, the actual reality is that this is nothing more than the emperor new clothes. Unfortunately there are no sacred cows being saved here, especially engineering being affected in this.
Going public is still a fundraising event that puts cash on the balance sheet of the company.
So whether they are funded by VC's or large institutional buyers who are the majority traders on the public market, there is no difference and the companies continue to lost money.
The issue for Uber is that they need to change the narrative. They don't have the story that Amazon did, that they are losing money because they are reinvesting it back into tremendous infrastructure which will give them scale.
Uber is losing money because they grew very quickly so there were a lot of innate inefficiencies because of that. So these firings are a chance to right size the company and see if the new trimmed down Uber will now be profitable when eventually ridership returns to normal.
The game plan is pretty simple: use VC cash to quickly provide services everywhere and build market share, drive competitors out of business / acquire them, move to self-driving cars to the extent possible and eventually raise rates when customers have no other options.
The big worry for many cities is they've eviscerated their docked bike-rental program. Those are municipal infrastructure... If Uber is abandoning this product, there are a lot of cities that are going to have an orphaned bikeshare service with hard infrastructure installed all over town.
The thing is that they never actually were municipal infrastructure. They were an outsourced attraction posing as municipal infrastructure.
And to be frank, maybe those cities or municipalities should consider hiring some of the laid off employees, buying the infrastructure during the fire sale (if they don't actually already own it), cutting out the middle man, and doing it themselves.
At least in my city, it was a locally owned program. The city owned the bikes and the business that handled maintenance and rebalancing was a private not for profit. Uber was basically only involved with the software.
But if the city wants more bikes or parts, where do they get it?
Makes you wonder how these companies ever planned to last during the "next" economic downturn. I don't think anyone bet on a global pandemic causing this shock but the point still stands: These kind of companies were still burning cash at incredible rates 10+ years in. How were they ever going to survive?
I mean, a downturn is generally considered to be down by 10%, maybe 20%. Quantitatively different, but not qualitatively different. Adjustments, but things still generally continue as planned.
A collapse is dropping by close to 50% or more, like Uber's demand. It's suddenly playing an entirely different game, it becomes a qualitatively different business.
If this isn't a collapse, nothing is.
A "pause" would imply things will return to normal as soon as things are "unpaused". If you cut 3,000 jobs and 45 offices, those are not just magically reappearing when things are "unpaused".
Oh, I re-read the comments and realized I completely confused the two. Never mind me, sorry! Yes, the economy as a whole has not collapsed, it is more of a pause, agreed.
>> attempts to steer the ride-hailing giant through the coronavirus pandemic.
No doubt this is accelerating certain motivators, but I for one am a little sick of the "COVID Excuse" for blaming aspects of these non-business plans that were bad ideas without a global pandemic on which to blame them.
If anyone at Uber reads this, feel free to get in touch (Go, Java, SRE) if you want to effectively stay in the same building working for a multinational.
It's not unusual for stocks to go up on layoffs, but as others have commented there isn't always a simple explanation either. But it wasn't a secret that Uber was going to be getting hit hard by quarantine - it would probably already be priced into the stock by the point. The news today is that Uber's leadership is recognizing that and aggressively taking action to protect the bottom line - sucks in the short-term for employees, especially those directly affected, but that's great news for investors.
There's not always a true, causal explanation of why stocks are reacting as they are. Don't be too quick to trust cable news anchors or other stock market shills that make a living making up and touting stock market narratives. By definition a stock price is a split of the public consensus of what's happening, just as many people are selling as buying at that price.
> Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
Yes.
This is Uber's way of saying to their investors that their costs will decrease due to losing billions during the coronavirus outbreak, thus head count must be decreased. But some who are buying now, may see this as a way of selling at the "bull trap" in Q2.
That’s a pretty strange ordering, mixing up a Seattle and Boston metros of 4 and 4.6m with an SLC, Portland, and Austin metros Of 1.2, 2.5, and 2.1m respectively. Why mix up the small and large cities in T2? Then your T3 has Minneapolis, at 3.6m. Why would Minneapolis be ranked lower than tiny SLC given it has 3x the population?
Thanks for the population numbers, I didn't know they were so different. I just ranked them from (my perceived) livability - SLC close to skiing/nature, while Minneapolis/Ann Arbor are not destination cities like the other ones.
I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the T1s.
I see your logic though, and maybe it's better to just have a T1 and T2.
Minneapolis is the biggest American metro between Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix. It basically anchors a huge amount of the country. SLC in contrast plays second fiddle to nearby (relatively speaking) Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (at least it is bigger than Boise).
Ann Arbor is so small and close to Detroit, it is odd to hear it listed as a significant city in its own right (like Madison WI). Heck, they are about the same close-ish distance away from Toledo, and Toledo is much bigger than Ann Arbor.
Don't really agree with this at all unless you are only talking in the context of the software engineering job market - which I don't think is usually what people refer to by "tier N"
I could argue that Atlanta is tier 3 as well, the distinction between tier 2/3 could just be a simple rule of numbers (over a 1M pop vs. under 1M pop) and not a tech center. Or in my case that when I've interviewed people from the given locations that they didn't meet the bar by a given level. UIUC produces some amazing engineers, but UChicago doesn't...
Ann Arbor is an amazing town, but I'm surprised to see it on the same level as much larger metros. Is tech that much deeper there than when I was in school a handful of years ago? Who are the big players these days?
Uber needed an excuse to layoff some people for a long time now. They went with a very "parallel" strategy, spinning up new teams for every project and ignoring code/process efficiency by sharing. Basically throw money at it to win quickly. Pretty unsophisticated engineering, enough microservices and huge DBs to ignore coordination problems.
They will transition to a more efficient structure with more co-ordination now that they have many different bets going and 1-2 core businesses that could work. Right in line with wallstreet expectations and Dara's job to make Uber profitable. I called it a year ago :D
"AI Labs" tend to publish papers more than they actually work on real projects, so I wouldn't assume shutting down an AI lab implies suspending the self-driving car project.
That's true in more than just in the self-driving car space. Even at companies like AAPL and AMZN where ML focused researchers/engineers work on production related tasks, I've seen their value production is dubious at best.
In my experience working on these product teams, most of the real gains are just from solid engineering combined with public advances in ML. The teams filled with ML specific folk aren't able to accomplish much.
I thought the self-driving unit had been spun off. This article [1] (from April 2019) said:
"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."
Food is a business with skinny skinny margins (source, worked on a startup which provided services to food businesses, family members own food businesses).
Delivery companies are fighting for a piece of that market which isn't full of margin, so they're having to fight for it. Plus they're in a landgrab, so choosing growth over profits.
Uber's chief technology officer and longest-serving executive, Thuan Pham, has resigned effective May 16, the company said Tuesday, as the company reportedly mulls further cost cutting to weather the coronavirus pandemic
I wonder if it is harder to let so many engineers go when you have so many microservices as Uber has/had. Seems to me that a monolith is easier to maintain when the amount of people working on it goes down, then with all those small microservices. They maybe/probably will have microservices running that now has no one to maintain them.
My understanding is: they announced they would do layoffs 1-2 weeks ago, so it's priced in. And usually your stock goes up when you announce and do layoffs because your costs are lower
Whoever is still being recruited by uber or close to an offer better make sure they have a solid severance clause written into their contract! Nothing less than 1 to 2 years of pay.
I don't understand this... Lift and Grab aren't doing so bad. Also, things are opening back up again. Even their quarterly results looked very bad, it was already priced in and so no benefit there. This reduced focus basically just translates to much lower ambition and not a good thing for long term valuation. On the other hand money is super cheap. They could double on debt if they want to. I'm not sure what this layoff buys them anything except injuring their future prospects.
When I was an intern at Google maaaany years ago, a mentor of mine described what it is Google does with all these engineers:
"Well see, we discovered a hose that money pours out of. It's called 'online advertising'. Now what we do is spend half our effort trying to make the hose pour faster, and the other half trying to find another hose."
Uber figured out the 'Uber for X' pattern. Now they're trying to optimize it, and figure out something else that makes money.
Lyft also set such pretentious goals for 2021 last year. Not sure what crystal ball they were basing their forecast on but, such jokes are meant to be reserved for a late night comedy show not in an earnings call. [0]
A lot of the layoffs are international, so if they had announced on Friday the employees would have learned of their terminations over theirs weekends, as Friday in the U.S. is generally at least Saturday in Europe and Asia.
International companies generally announce cross-border layoffs on Monday (US-time), because that announcement will be during the work week everywhere they operate.
The most reasonable explanation is that they were targeting Friday, but were late and so it was Monday. Firing 3,000 employees takes a lot of preparation. If there are a few corner case employee resolutions, that holds up the whole bunch
Not OP, but a lot of American companies do layoffs on a Friday in an attempt to have fewer headlines on a weekend (news outlets aren’t fully staffed then, people are distracted, etc.)
There are several, one is that you can time it with payroll, so your last day is the end of the current payroll period, just makes it neat for accounting purposes.
Another is that if the company doesn't want the media to pick up the "bad news", Friday is the best time to do it because it'll get lost over the weekend when it's reported on.
And finally, there's less worry about retaliation from disgruntled employees if they have the weekend to calm down over being let go.
I think he/she is saying that announcing bad news on a Friday usually helps because it mitigates the amount of negative coverage it would receive from the media. Announcing on a Monday then seems unusual from a PR perspective.
Furthermore, Uber is a public company now, and there is (as far as I know) no outstanding lockout period for employees. IF anyone has outstanding options, that are subject to a (most likely) 90-day exercise window, they can be exercised and immediately sold.
The typical "exercising of an option for an illiquid asset which will be taxed as if it's liquid" problems with start-up stock options simply don't exist in this case.
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb?
Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.
Is shorter or zero severance unethical? We all enter into this employment contract knowing it could end abruptly from either party. If money is tight, they could afford longer severances for all if they cut 4000 instead. Does that not seem unethical toward the extra 1000 cut?
Regardless of legality and what the parties agreed to contractually, the fact remains that abrupt termination with zero severance is harmful for the former employee, especially in this economic climate. If the corporation pays a generous severance, the harm is reduced or eliminated. On a scale of ethicality, the more harmful an action is, the less ethical it is, so yes, paying severance is more ethical than not paying severance.
I find the terms "less and more" applied to ethical confusing. Telling a company to harm people a little instead of a lot is enabling.
My use of ethical here is strongly tied to obligation. e.g., it is kind to give money to a person, but not unethical if you chose not to especially if you can't afford to.
The way I understand you is that it's kinder/more sympathetic to provide a greater severance. This part I agree with!
Severance is not free, though. Increasing it will either cost Uber more heads or greater risk (and more heads later). I'm repeating this question: Is this not unethical to the retained employees?
Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.
The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.
We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.
A lot of companies don't have a public image because nobody knows or cares what they do. So they have nothing to fear from a few bad glassdoor reviews.
Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers working on tooling, R&D projects, and at least partially on open source projects, roles that could presumably go away if a company had to focus strictly on the core product.
I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having a massively more complicated hierarchy of bosses and managers and project leaders and it seems like everybody is chief of something and everybody loses sight of the big picture as they just become focused on a single aspect of a given product. What was once a lean startup with a vision is now struggling to get new products out of the pipeline even though they have ten times (or more) the manpower.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
>suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product
At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.
When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment.
Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude.
But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.
Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
This is a very nice description of what I've noticed moving to a large organisation. There is also a lot of busy work. As the organisation grows, communicating and negotiating between groups requires extra effort that often ends up being the role of a new management level, and groups have self-preserving incentives to stay relevant leading to lots of entropy (busy work, repeated work, hero projects that are just there for internal branding). As someone who has recently been put in this level of management I spend a lot of time having to negotiate out of new project initiatives invented more to attract exec attention or satisfy a rogue execs dream project. Makes me really look forward to moving back to working in a smaller company.
> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
Three questions.
(1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?"
(2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?"
(3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utterly failed?"
(Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies.
You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...
That second paragraph summarized the last 5 years of my professional career.
In my experience, I've always listened to the last UX design E guy. Every time we worked on what he said the users asked for, we did well..
The problems caused by "half-assed" solutions are likely somewhere down the line, in distant future and their true costs impossible to estimate.
Anything less than perfection will incure avoidable future costs, and perfection approaches infinite time to deliver.
Ergo, standing in the present, one should do ones best to estimate future costs and decide what percent of perfection seems optimal.
In reality, when asked to self-estimate, too many teams (and especially naive PMs) select perfection as the optimal approach.
Every tech company thinks they’ll just build their own CRM until they try.
See also: build systems and UI frameworks.
That’s a false dichotomy. It’s likely that that are both not idiots and what they are doing isn’t necessary.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.
As soon as an organisation gets above a size limit, organisational politics becomes the most important factor in any decision.
The decision to agree to a feature request starts to consider Who the feature request came from before any of the practicalities of the feature itself.
They're not idiots, and they are doing what is necessary, but the goals have moved from outward-facing market and customer concerns to inward-facing organisational-political concerns.
Every coder in a large organisation, sooner or later, gets given a task that makes no engineering sense but achieves some internal political goal.
It is fair to say that when you have R&D headcount in thousands it better be something really impressive.
Boeing 747 design team was 4500 engineers and they were done in 29 months.
I can't find you a source right now but back in '94 when I was learning IBM mainframe Assembler the history was mentioned and they claimed thousands of engineers, mathematicians and physicist worked for 3.5 years on the first mainframe (or was that the 360?).
The IBM of that era was literally inventing the modern computing systems. The complexity of the tasks at hand were essential, not incidental. I think the general trend of thought here is a critique of the latter day NIH syndrome and the consequent inflation of the technical teams.
Software is a little strange sometimes.
It’s a different type of systems engineering, that’s more akin to sorcery, than to actual physics.
The hardware is, of course, limited by physics, like the speed of electrons and heat dissipation. But once you get past that, your computer system is a collection of bytes that you reassemble to form whatever it is your imagination desires.
And while the 747 is a magnificent plane, it did have the benefit of over 50 years of aviation and aeronautical science behind it, all figured out.
Whereas software is still somewhat in its infancy right now. And every few decades, it seems to revolutionize itself, as newer and faster hardware become available.
A taxi company over here had a contractor build them their own hailing app. Cost them less than €600k, it's pretty slick.
The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.
I'm talking about R&D specifically, not infra folks.
But let's say designing for scale is 100 times harder than a taxi app for just one national taxi service. Based on my 23 year career in trenches I seriously doubt that's the case, but let's be generous.
That would net us into ballpark of €60M expense. Non-negligible, but it translates into a hundred developers pulling €100k a year for 6 years, still at least an order of magnitude below Uber.
Very obviously it does not scale anywhere near linear. There has to be a severe case of diminishing returns in technical hiring.
So did early Uber. Famously, the contractors were Spanish-speaking, so FTE engineers #1-5 had Spanish-English dictionaries on their desks to understand the code.
fair, but also a lot of Uber's business model is leveraged on top of the basic platform.
What does that mean?
It means that the functionality of the app that immediately comes to mind is only one of the many ways in which they lose an extraordinary amount of money.
>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development.
That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Is this sarcasm? Seems like a really user-hostile attitude if not. Admittedly, my personal point-of-view is that the majority of UI updates are make-work for engineers and PMs with at best no value added, and at worst negative value created (as you experienced).
It's a funny joke because everyone from Microsoft, IBM, and Apple to Canonical and the GNOME Project has been guilty of this in the past.
Oh god you're right
That's more of a failure for the ux and product vision than it is a failure of project management. The trick isn't to just roll out new changes slowly, but to involve the users and figure out what needs to change and how.
>> roll out new changes slowly.
That really depends on your customers and the product. In this case, control systems, incremental changes are definitely not the way to go. Imagine if your car made an incremental change to the position of the brake pedal every time you turned it on. In such situations you don't babystep. You announce the change ahead of time, provide your customers with transition training, and make the change as scheduled.
In the case of "adaptive" menus in control systems, imagine if the elevator in your building rearranged its floor buttons so that the most requested floors were always at the top. Total chaos. People learn where their button is on day one. After that ANY change is going to go badly no matter what the UI engineers say. That UI should be carved in stone for the life of the building.
Were there any dedicated UX people involved? To me, a UI engineer is someone who works exclusively on the front end, and would implement the work of the UX designer. They wouldn't actually do the designing and research themselves.
This is one of those cases where that Ford quote about a faster horse is relevant. Many people will be happy to just have what they have now without thinking how it could be better.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Fuck people doing this. Especially extremely radical design changes such as Twitter's and Facebook's "redesigns" that they force down the throats of their users. Or Microsoft.
Or do A/B testing and incremental rollouts?
A/B tested products are terrible. Please don’t do that to an actual product people pay money for.
“On this page, 12% more users clicked save if the save button was green instead of blue”
Bad A/B testing is bad. Incremental rollouts are not bad.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
No, the trick is to iteratively change the UI in a way that's easy for the user to get used to.
I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It's off-topic and tedious, and leads to nasty flamewars that are also off-topic and tedious. It's also against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), as other users have pointed out.
Internet forum threads can't withstand this sort of provocation, which means your comment had troll effects whether you intended it to or not. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Indeed. That was not a debate worth bringing up.
> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral.
It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable.
One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case.
I think that language is far less important here than culture. Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equal, haha".
Makes me think of Ismo and the word "ass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
As with many things that don't make much sense, it started from something more reasonable. Long, long ago the word 'man' unambiguously referred to all human beings, while 'woman' was used for females and 'werman' was used for males.
The forgotten sexism is that we began using 'men' to refer specifically to males, almost like they were the only people that mattered. It happened so long ago that it's been mostly forgotten that there even was another name.
Though, you still see vestiges of it in the language. That's the same wer- as in werewolf.
This is a good point, excuse a quibble: 'werman' did not seem to actually see usage in Old English, although 'wepman', meaning male human, did in Middle English.
I'm basing this on a discussion at Wiktionary:
> Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:werman
And 'wepman' is documented on the Middle English Compendium.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti...
Thanks for pointing that out. I think Wiktionary is where I first heard the word, and I hadn't seen it was removed.
So, wer did mean male/husband and man did mean everyone. It's just that they weren't used together. I should probably also have noted that woman was 'wifman' back then. That one has more obvious descendants than the male version.
But this is something you do constantly as an English speaker. "Drinking" can mean any liquid, or just alcohol. Wood can be a material, or a forest. A bank can be a financial institution or the side of a river. A mouse can be a rodent or a computer peripheral. Does it really take conscious difficulty to figure out the intended meaning?
> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
I don't want to be that person but Zoroastranism is the religion you should be comparing against -- it predates Islam by a good deal and developed alongside Farsi. And Zoroastranism does hold men and women to be equal. [1] Iran was actually a pretty liberal country prior to the Islamic Revolution (which was really more of a rebellion against American control).
[1] https://www.hinduwebsite.com/zoroastrianism/gender.asp
Iran has been Muslim for over 1300 years. Zoroastrians today are a tiny minority. It's a bit disingenuous to refer to the (brief, mainly urban) liberalism of the Pahlavi years in place of everything that came before or after.
> It is not painless: it is dissonant
The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language?
> and takes another syllable.
That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.
Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that?
I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be complete conjecture. Language is this ancient thing that evolved in concert with our minds, optimizing for some vast array of factors. Human intervention into that process seems to always go wrong, down to US attempts to fix the spelling.
It bothers me that speaking my dialect with common definitions is not good enough. Can we not just be charitable in our interpretations of others' speech? Why do I have to dedicate cognitive load to verifying that every possible interpretation of every word is acceptable with no expectation of others meeting me in the middle, even just as far as the dictionary definition? If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?
> If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?
Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.
This is long, and I apologize for that. I think I've said some important things though, and I'll ask you to do me the kindness of reading it. Thanks.
There's a notion in improv that when you respond only to the last thing that someone said, it's because you are in your own head and you're not listening. Additionally, it feels like you're talking down to me and others in this thread. Are those feelings invalid? It just seems like showing some respect to others should be a precursor to caring about whether a word could be misinterpreted as exclusionary, if the goal really is to make people feel less bad.
I personally devote a huge amount of time and energy to the feelings of others. I need to be doing it less, it degrades me. If I were to start caring about this on top of everything else, I would be completely dysfunctional. You call it a minor inconvenience, but if I were to accept that this is worth doing, I'd implicitly be agreeing to a thousand minor inconveniences, overthinking everything I say even more than I already do (this is a fifth draft, and look how long it has been made so I can feel I'm communicating effectively), and inevitably retreating altogether from social interactions that already give me anxiety.
Back to the subject at hand. What the word 'man' as in 'mankind', 'manpower', or 'man-hours' means to me is a dehumanized, de-individualised, notion of genetic humans working towards some end. This is a _very_ useful construct for me. A person is something else, a human individual. It is impossible for me to consider a single person, let alone thousands. People have 86 billion neurons of uncompressable complexity, and I've only got 86 billion of my own to try and grok that. This is also an incredibly useful construct for me. I can't just swap one for the other, it would be a significant long term effort to rewire all of the associations.
A better solution would be a new word to take the place of 'man' there. 'Man' already does the job, but I'm sure there are other prefixes in english that also mean human. I don't think it's a material issue, so I'm not going to devote energy to solving it. But if someone is going to tell me how to talk, they can afford to make the damn effort to find a suitable alternative instead of forcing me to adapt to the first thing that comes to mind. And when it is pointed out that it doesn't work, and it doesn't sound right, they could maybe try to figure out what is wrong with their solution, rather than assuming I'm a closed-minded closeted sexist. I don't know.
> It is not painless: it is dissonant
You'll get used to it in about 5 minutes.
> and takes another syllable.
Seriously, the amount of time people who pretend to be hard and rational loose their minds over things like "one syllable."
> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
That's a straw man. Asking for gender-neutral terms when referring to groups of people does not equate to asking for gender-neutral culture. Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.
>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.
statements like this are not useful for building understanding.
rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought.
Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.
What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
For what it's worth, I already use 'dev-hours', but not from any gender/rights perspective, it just sounds better and correlates the specific industry to the metric. It's also about the same amount of verbal effort as 'man-hours', so the change was easy.
> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
We're asking to simply feel included (this includes women as well as trans people; I'm both). When so much of your life is being told you don't belong or that people like you don't / shouldn't exist, it's a big deal. It's 1) more accurate and 2) more reflective of the wide variety of experiences a person can have. I'm not being glib here, but of course the need for gender neutral language seems irrelevant: it is to you because you were already included. It's doubly important in heavily male-dominated industries.
I, too, prefer using "dev" or "employee" in place of "man" in these cases simply because it's more accurate. But it's really not a lot of effort and it actually means something when someone corrects themselves because it's basically "wow I feel seen and like I have a place here". When you've never seen someone like you in a position of success above you because you're one of the first, it really, really matters to feel accepted in any way you can.
Like, you don't have to do it. But these days it really does sound a bit anachronistic to use "man-hours" -- language changes along with the culture and it always has.
I'm totally with you on the inclusion part, everyone in a diverse team needs to feel included.
However, on the solution part, if you say dev-hours, I as a designer would have a huge problem :-), or even as a PM I would have same problem. 'Employee' comes close, but then it precludes estimating for consultants, freelancers etc. 'Person Hours' does not seem to have any of above problems, but then as mentioned it is awkward to use.
Well, maybe perfect solution does not exist, or maybe the perfect solution is being more accepting - accepting gender diversity AND also accepting that many times things that we do is out of laziness or choosing easier path or just out of habit - people in professional work environment do not do things with ill intention.
There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.
> There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.
I agree; very few people use male-centered language with ill intentions. But it's still a choice people can make if they choose to, and it means a lot to those of us who often feel marginalized. You're not a jerk if you don't, but it's pretty much all upside if you do.
Anecdotally, I would say I hear gender-neutral language used about 2/3 of the time in the Fortune 500 world. While I don't hide the fact that I'm trans, I'm fortunate to pass for cisgender so most people I work with outside my immediate team don't know -- I'm pretty sure they're not altering their language for me. Maybe it's because I'm a woman, but it was a trend I noticed before I transitioned as well.
> statements like this are not useful for building understanding.
I don't ask you to "understand," honestly I'm not sure if I even particularly want you to. I want you to _respect_ us, and others. And no, understanding is not a precondition to respect. By insisting on using exclusive language, or even by framing otherwise inclusive language as exclusive, you are showing lack of such respect.
And true understanding is a huge amount of work. If you need understanding for respect, there ain't going to be many people you'll respect.
> Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.
> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
We ask you to say "humankind" and "employee-hours." Among other mostly practical, material things: don't exclude us and don't get in our way.
I do hope you know that it’s never intentional. I’m definitely not excluding any gender when I think of the concept of “man hours”—it’s just an abbreviation for “human” to me. I try to use gender neutral language where ever I can, whenever I think of it... I end my meetings with “thanks everyone” rather than “thanks guys”, even though “guys” just means people to me. But it can be stressful to always have to worry about the different intentions people can put behind words, even if none are meant. Basically I think trying to use more gender neutral language is a great thing, but we also shouldn’t criticize it every time it’s seen. I think it’s fair to assume we all have good intentions and that we’re not secretly sexist.
I don't alter quotes, even for PC reasons. And If I am going to reuse language for effect I am not going to make changes unless they add to the point I am making. The first comment said man-years and I stuck with that as I wasn't trying to correct their gender grammar.
Also, "person-year" is vague as "persons" includes non-humans entities such as corporations and partnerships. "Man-year" refers only to work by biological humans. "People-years" might be better but that is plural. Had I been the first I might have used person-years, but when someone else sets a precedent that avoids confusion I'm happy to stick with it despite potential microaggressions.
Since people don't like the man part of human, what if we started saying hu-years? Hu is still only one syllable.
sde-year, dev-year, engineer-year, resource-year, employee-year, are all variants I've heard before.
I can understand not wanting to miss-quote something, but otherwise seems simple enough to use different language.
While those variants solve some complaints, they're a lot more specific and may change the meaning of some statements. For example, many of those terms exclude work that isn't done by "engineers". Using a term like "employee-hours" might make contractors on your team feel less valued.
Call them contributor-hours, this way only the people that slack off can be offended.
I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent either, but it's also painless and traditional just to refrain from unsolicited corrections of people's word choice when there isn't any ill intent to be talked about.
I find it very enlightening when people who find issue with my expression let me know about it in a friendly way. I think the commenter took a lot of care to phrase their concern in a very nice way; when people do this to me I thank them. It’s the only way that I can keep learning how the language changes with time.
If matt_morgan has concern, matt_morgan can personalize his concern, not preach about what's "painless, traditional-grammar-friendly" generally to all. I don't find that friendly, I find it intrusive.
I always find it so interesting that a full-out flamewar is just fun, while a side comment about improving communication is "intrusive". This is the internet, my friend...
> there isn't any ill intent to be talked about
In addition to intent, outcome must also be considered.
The OP's intent was not to single out a gender. He/she was using a very common catchphrase. Your call-out was really passive-aggressive and uncalled for.
Do you get pressed everytime someone talks about history, and suggest they use the word "herstory" or "perstory" instead?
I typically use “resource-year” so as to dehumanize everyone equally.
Why not go with "work-years"? It has the benefit of being gender neutral and even more relevant.
Seems to imply a different amount of time. Work year would be the amount of time worked in a year (usually ~2000 hours give or take). Sort of like how a work-day is 8 hours rather than 24.
Man/woman/person/dev/etc-year seem to imply an amount of work that is equivalent to a year (~8760 hours).
Or at least that's how I would use those terms. It's entirely possible that these definitions are regional in nature.
We were once negotiating an SLA and my colleague happily agreed to a 24 hour turnaround time. I asked him if he thought that was perhaps a bit optimistic and he replied, “24 business hours, that’s a three day turnaround time!”
I always interpret a work year to be the same thing as a person year, which is ~2000 hours.
That is a life-year.
I actually considered that when writing my original comment but "the mythical man-month" is such an obvious reference that it felt weird to change it. I suppose you can also think of it like "horsepower", it's an equivalency but doesn't actually mean that the power literally comes from a horse.
Still, point taken, I'll consider using person-year next time.
Can we call it "sweat-year" or "work-year" please?
you are missing the point, it is still a year of work, regardless of gender.
I suspect they got the point, and rather you are missing their point, which is taking the (trivially easy) opportunity to be more gender-neutral with our language..
That's all!
You need to me more accepting of people words what he said was fine maybe he prefers traditional grammar and you just need to accept people
> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent
Well then don't say anything at all. It adds nothing to the conversation. Don't push your ideals on others. Take your SJW crusade elsewhere. That's one positive thing from this pandemic - the shift in focus away from these types of (IMO) non-existent 'problems.'
You are in fact the one that sounds like you are crusading, not the person you are replying to. You seem really fired up about it.
It is tiresome to see these types irrelevant comments on a story. So yes it does fire me up a bit. These are people out of work, and the parent chose to focus on pushing their gender-neutral grammar preferences. Real problems vs. Snowflake problems.
And yet you are treating their comment like a "real problem"... you're the one crusading, they just gently and non-confrontationally made a suggestion. You could have just passed on by if you didn't agree with their suggestion, but you turned it into a crusade against them. To the observer, you are in fact the one acting like a "snowflake" fired up (dare I say "triggered") by their actually quite gentle suggestion, in which they make it clear that they weren't accusing anyone of ill-intent.
Do you think your annoyance and anger at their suggestion is a "real problem" or a "snowflake problem"? If you don't think it matters that much if someone says "man year" or "person year" (you said it wasn't a "real problem"), why is the suggestion to do either way so triggering to you? Do you think it might be more in line with how worthy of your annoyance it is to see someone suggest "person year" (maybe not worth that much annoyance in the grand scheme of thing when we have 'real problems'?) to reflect on your own about why their suggestion to say "person year" made you so angry and upset, without needing to reply on HN and turn it into a crusade?
My annoyance is that it has absolutely no relevance and adds nothing to the discussion regarding the story/post. It's just noise, which begets noise (my response) and so on. Let's talk about tech.
Sounds like a snowflake problem to me.
If left alone, there would have been nothing distracting about that short and explicitly non-accusatory comment, but you were triggered and chose to build a crusade around how you don't want to see certain kinds of comments on HN. You seem to have trouble handling the fact that some people have different opinions than you, about what comments are worth making. Very snowflake problem.
Sounds like you have a problem handling the fact that some people are tired of the bellyaching every time someone uses a common term in which it is not meant in a derogatory way.
I guess we're all equally snowflakes here then.
And look where we are now. There are 30 comments that have been made on an irelevant topic, that detracted from the issue.
Was it worth it? Did you feel good about yourself, to distract everyone like this?
What are you worried about. The intellectual left is effectively dead.
Sanders. Dead. Warren. Dead. Gender police. Dead.
The democrats are going to fight one another to one-uo republicans on immigration post corona. And pro-US first no further dependence on globalist masks or hand sanitizer.
There may be a few gender cops here and there, but the movement is dead. There is no point in fighting
The fact that you view a history of systemic sexism in tech and in the world as not a real problem is, in fact, part of the problem.
The good news is when people start being more inclusive with their language you'll see fewer people correcting them!
And yet it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the story/post.
You understand that there are millions of women who are victims of abuse, sidelined or disregarded by society, and constantly repressed because of sexism, right?
Losing your job is a temporary problem for most people. Sexism, like the kind that is baked right into our language, is an inescapable daily struggle for many women.
We have the capacity to think about both women's rights and the recently unemployed at the same time. It's frankly sad that you can't look deeply enough at this issue to see it as more than a problem of "grammar preferences".
Once again, none of this is relevant to the post regarding Uber's layoffs unless they're somehow disproportionately laying off more women than men can it be even considered remotely relevant.
I disagree with such a compartmentalized way of thinking about these issues, where it's inappropriate to discuss gendered language when it comes up in some other context. That's often the only effective opportunity to address this kind of problem. A comment about the use of gendered language is relevant in response to a comment that uses arguably gendered language.
I presume all the developers are men? as in members of mankind... All people are men.
This is not a common way of speaking anymore, IMO. When I read "all the developers are men", I didn't understand what you meant at all. I thought maybe you were making some kind of ironic joke about sexism. I did get what you meant after re-reading of course, but "All people are men" sounds very archaic to me, like something out of Tolkien.
Usually when we want to talk about humans as a species or whatever, we now use the word "human."
This is going to sound stupid but at some point, it's less important what's right and more important how something makes people feel.
Language is fluid. The thing that was "right" to say 500 years ago wasn't right 100 years ago, and what was "right" 100 years ago wouldn't be right now. There are clear arguments for why encouraging people to think about the gendered language that they use and how it perpetuates gender roles would be beneficial in combating sexism. The arguments for maintaining existing language because it is currently the most popular tend to be pretty thin.
When you move into how people feel are we introducing inequality? People feel at different rates. Some can go into a rage in an instant while others can be a rock. Are we rewarding the primate brain over scientific obvervations when we choose to accept personal feeling as the gold standard? Should we be encouraging one over the other?
Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.
Training yourself to default to non-gendered language like person-kind and to think about whether a term originates from problematic aspects of gender dynamics is a relatively easy first step towards breaking down some of the insidious aspects of sexism that are imbedded in language.
> Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.
That is not actually true. The Old English word for a male human being is wer, as in werewolf; it is cognate to the Latin vir (also meaning a male human being, and the source of modern English words like virile & virtue). That word is no longer in common use in modern English, although I think maybe it survives in some dialects.
The word man(n), OTOH is the gender-neutral Old English word for a human being, as found in such words as woman (from wifman, a wife-man) or leman (a mistress, or love-man), both notably referring to female human beings. It is cognate to modern German mann, again referring to any human being.
The word mankind thus refers to … any kind of man.
Modern German "Mann" is an adult, human male. Ehemann (husband), Fachmann (expert), Kaufmann (salesman). The parallel, of course, is Frau (adult, human woman), which also does double-duty on its own as a word for "wife": Ehefrau (wife), Fachfrau (expert), Putzfrau (cleaning lady). That "Putzfrau" is a long-standing word but "Putzmann" doesn't exist, and that "fachmännisch" and not "fachfrauisch" (fachfräulisch?) is a word are examples of the sexism deeply embedded in languages a lot of us are going on about. Thoughtful Germans are finding their way towards more gender-neutral terms, especially in job postings, which used to be horribly gendered - think "Reinigungskraft" (cleaning power) instead of "Putzfrau", or "Entwickler*in" instead of "Entwickler" (developer, grammatically male).
Modern German "man" (single 'n') is an indirect pronoun that is usually best translated as "one" or "someone", but even then, you fall into the sexism of male as default. "Man ist was man isst" (one is what one eats)
This is amazing.
This is why I come to read HN =) - interesting content like this, or esoteric/cool facts, or awesomely deep tech discussions.
Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?
(As a side-note, this whole SJW crusade does irk me somewhat, but hey, I guess it resulted in gems like this).
> Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?
I love languages. Each one is beautiful and endearing and ugly and infuriating in its own way. I really love English, because it’s my native tongue and I know the most about it, but I love studying languages in general. One thing I have found is that the more one knows about many languages the less likely one is to go off half-cocked about perceived problems in one’s own.
I did study a little bit formally, but I also love computers and there’re a lot more career opportunities in software development than in philology or etymology, so that’s where I focused.
Can we be species neutral. Person refers to humans and leaves out animals and other substances like carbon which would experience a year in the same manner as a human.
Corporations are people too, my friend.
For what it's worth, this isn't unique to unicorns. Almost company successful enough to get to the scale of tens of thousands of employees likely has huge amounts of waste within it. The situation you describe of niche projects being scrapped after several person-years of effort had been invested, incomprehensible management hierarchy, and no coherent strategy perfectly matches my first job out of college, a year at Sprint in 1999. Me and two other new hires spent a year doing next to nothing on a team of 20+ building a complicated Java service with a purpose I never understood, but which had been going on for about a year, with half the team made up of contractors. Pretty sure I never wrote any actual code, though I did have to fill out time sheets every week. I had two managers, neither of whom I ever talked to. After a year, I got a 15% raise and a promotion. Then soon after I found another job and quit, our project got cancelled, but everyone on the team just got moved to other teams doing similar "work".
"...you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way."
Those example pathologies you listed are SOP at all the mature orgs I've worked at.
Do you think the degree to which a company succumbs to one of these "pathologies" matters? Is it a matter of timing (i.e. becoming successful faster than they become moribund)?
What do you think differentiates a company that becomes "mature" vs one that flames out?
Mature companies, notably, make a profit. Not a future profit, not an expected profit, not profit-discounting-advertising, a right-now end-of-year no-accounting-tricks more revenue from sale of goods than expenditures from all sources. I'm going to take a page out of the IRS handbook, and say that they have made a profit for the last three out of five years, in fact. Let's take that a step further and say that they've existed for five years. Their primary method of financing operations is not private equity, but public equity or loans. Once a company looks like this, it's pretty well set.
Sound like what happened at Intel
Well said. That's exactly what happened to many unicorns, including Uber.
Oh, you might be surprised how many people are not working on anything of consequence. Some of these companies don't even do much in the way of building stuff outside of the product teams, and even then, they frequently fizzle after some point.
You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.
R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.
Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).
If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).
I see it more as scaling problems that make it look like people aren't actually busy.
As the userbase scales, infrastructure scales, and what was once a simple "ALTER TABLE" is now a system with a team managing it because a single Postgres instance didn't scale.
As the engineering headcount scales, code changes, builds, even understanding the system become slower. You overcome that with better engineering, but mostly more engineers.
As the product matures, there's still a drive for growth, but the low-hanging product fruit has been picked, so you get lots of product teams trying to either optimize their little part because, at scale, it makes a big difference, or product teams working on new, crazy ideas--the startup within a unicorn-startup--that will most likely fail.
I'm at Airbnb (opinions strictly are my own). The number of engineers working on tooling for us is actually not that large. The vast, vast majority are product engineers and with our most recent layoffs the majority of the cuts were for those types of engineers. My own opinion is that we simply had way too many product engineers for the amount of actual output we got from them.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
> Uber is on another different plane altogether
These are complete guesses for the pre-covid era, but it gives an idea of scale difference. The average Airbnb user probably books 2-3 times per year. The average Uber user probably books 2-3 rides per week. At 50x the volume, the infrastructure is different, and probably more complicated to handle the volume.
Eh, they're solving different problems. I don't think you can necessarily call Uber's problem more complicated just because it's an order of magnitude more volume. I worked at a small ad tech start-up with a team of 5 engineers on a real-time bidding platform that was serving 1k requests/second and moved to a travel company that's now 100+ engineers that serves maybe ~250 requests/second at peak traffic, but the travel company's infrastructure is a lot more complicated even though the volume is smaller.
right. this recession is actually giving cover to let go of a lot of bloat that has built up over the years.
Well, freeing it up to compete. I expect some of the bloat is just so that someone can't work for a competitor.
You'd think so but that's at least not the impression I've gotten. At Google that's certainly going to be the case but at a company like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb the bloat ends up largely arising due to managerial bloat (managers want to grow their org to make themselves seem more important) and low technical standards for higher level ICs (which results in far more resources used to accomplish each project).
Are you saying that technical standards are lowered as one moves up the IC ladder? If so, how and why?
Technical competence isn't as well evaluated at companies like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb at L6+ especially for external hires. So it's not so much that the technical bar is dropped but that it just is less enforced at higher levels. As a result you end up with a lot of ICs that are all talk but little else. This is, of course, a gross generalization. I've worked with and know great engineers of all levels at these companies. But Uber in particular had plenty of really bad apples that got hired into other companies across the bay at L6/L7/L8.
Where does IC stands for? Probably not intensive care :D
Individual contributor (technical path as opposed to a managerial path)
Individual Contributor. Basically means no direct reports.
The fact that this term exists implies bloat and a focus on process not productivity. You may as well call them "leaf nodes".
There are programmers and senior programmers, data designers and senior etc. There are also team leads and program managers. There's basically two tracks, you either create stuff or you manage the creation of it.
They have different titles now, and there's a lot of Agile fluff (how is a scrum master not just a secretarial service and the function of a team leader not to keep their meetings focused?)
Thank you! That makes sense, I will try to remember it :)
This is just a myth.
Software has way gone out of the stage where one person keep the recipe for the secret sauce, and could change the game.
No one is irreplacable.
> Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
This seems so strange to me. As a lead, most of my work is management, organization, and planning. To scratch the development itch I usually have 1 pet project going on that I either use when I'm taking a break from actual work or work on in my spare time. But even that pet project has pretty clear long or short term value and the only reason why it's not being worked on by my team is because it hasn't been prioritized yet. I can't imagine working on a pet project that has no clear value to the company.
In a bloated org, they can get away with it though... we had to let one high level Uber hire go because they couldn't code to save their lives, had insufficient technical expertise to guide any kind of substantive project, and played a lot of politics to seem important. I've run into at least 4 high level hires from Uber with the same kind of profile.
At the end of the day, it's just a reminder that careful screening is important. Could be a cultural issue that impacts certain unicorns, but it's also on the hiring company to thoroughly fact-check and test a candidate (and no, leetcode and simple arch questions aren't enough).
Worth pointing out that Uber is no longer a unicorn. It is a large publicly traded corporation with a market cap of $58B. I suppose you're asking your question about large tech companies generally, not so much unicorns? Most unicorns are still quite small (revenue and employee count-wise) relative to large publicly traded corporations like Uber and the FANGs.
Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years.
That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
> show urgency
I call this "artificial panic". That term came to mind when I joined a FMCG around Y2K, and on my first weeks I noticed people were running around stressed, like headless chicken. When I asked "what's on fire" and the answer was "nothing".
https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-07-15
The "Minimalists" say on their podcast that "most emergencies, aren't". When I see panic setting camp in a company's mentality, I make myself scarce for a while until things calm down. If I see that the artificial state of panic is a perpetual feeding machine, I try to dance around it. I've read my share of Dilbert to know to avoid these toxic environments.
Sometimes you need to be a Wally to survive.
https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-11-12
Urgency is a matter of prioritisation.
Ideally in a company there would be one single order backlog, showing the relative value of each project to everyone. However getting such an ordering would involve huge co-ordination across vastly differing internal companies / cultures and would drag up every buried political hand grenade of the company's lifetime.
So instead you do what someone shouts loudly about. If the shouter is right more than 50/50 they are doing pretty well.
Correcting myself (for the record). The Minimalists say that "most CRISES, aren't" (apologies for the caps). I used the word emergencies, which is inaccurate quote.
Reminds me of Douglas Adam's "Crisis Inducer" :)
> "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again.
Never worked for a unicorn, but everything from big corp to startup to government. "Urgent" provokes no reaction from me anymore because of this.
>"Urgent"
,"Critically Important", etc. is the most recent whatever caught the attention of a typical S/E/VP with the attention span of a ferret long enough for him/her to be able to utter it in the words. If you're able to highly visibly jump and demonstrate activity during exact that moment - a great talent leading to advancements/promotions - there is no point to react as the next new "critical" directive/change of course/etc. is coming very soon. Of course if your manager is one of those aspiring "talented jumpers", he/she will try to make you jump with him/her - it is a real PITA to have such a manager who instead of filtering and protecting the team from would amplify all that stuff flowing down.
I am shocked at how often I can just ignore an annoying email and have the issue go away...
"Never put of until tomorrow anything you can get out of altogether"
I wonder if there is a way to convert Harvard Business Review articles into top-of-the-backlog items automatically...
There's your Startup Idea!
You jest, but an email to backlog service is something some managers might buy.
Gasping in horror at the prospect of that JIRA plug-in coming into being, especially since even I, a casual admin for our Atlassian products, have a good idea what combination of API calls would make that happen.
The only truly urgent thing I've seen is a product being down / a critical bug in production.
Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor.
On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.
How can a person working on features tell the difference between critical and non-critical features?
Ignore it and see how many calls you get
Go to lunch with the PM?
A large company would never manage to switch to a competitor in one quarter. And they try any hard, it most likely means their getting a cashback under the table for the new contract, or other perk of the sort, the feature is just an excuse.
When I was working at Stanford, a new colleague came rushing out of a meeting ready to start a big new initiative because our VP said something should get done. I had to explain that patience was important because no single person at the University could make a project happen, but hundreds of people at all levels of the org chart could stop a major initiative in it’s tracks if they felt threatened.
Hmm, sounds like you've got some dyfunctional managers. I've never personally witnessed management faking urgency on a project just to get productivity on it. Management is generally charged with making sure ICs know what the priorities are as set by Product. It's possible that Product changes its mind often, confusing everyone. But if Product, Management, and ICs are confused about what your "critical business functions" are, I think you've got some systemic leadership problems.
Systemic leadership problems are more common than you think. Most larger corporations have orgs within them with very different cultures. It’s not hard to know why: the effective managers listen to their developers and shield them from the shit that comes from above. A healthy tree is nurtured under the protection offered by these managers; their reports never know what kind of shitstorms they were protected from. But these kinds of managers are rare albeit very effective.
I love how you distinguish between "ICs" "Management" and "Product". When you say "Product" do you mean Marketing? Sales? Production? Manufacturing? Do they have "ICs" as well as their own "Management"?
The whole point of "Agile" was supposed to break down these divisions. Management is "generally charged" with getting the greatest productivity they can out of their resources. How that productivity is measured may be by "the priorities as set by Product", but that doesn't take into account ROI, sunk costs, COGS, Cap/Opex etc etc.
You are not[1] correct. Product Owner is a well-defined Agile manifesto role.
[1] https://manifesto.co.uk/scrum-roles-product-owner/
Yeah, I was taking artistic license with the term, but "large tech" is probably a better term, though I'd filter it down to those on the lower profitability side. (even those with large IPOs are often just a startup at scale)
Unicorn never meant lower on the profitability side though. It just means a valuable pre-IPO late stage start-up. Plenty of them were or went on to be insanely profitable.
As someone who has hired many engineers and PMs, and runs a hiring budget today, there are some reasons to feel at least fairly secure if you're an engineer at a growing company:
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.
(edited for formatting, thanks @mkl)
Quoting for readability:
"""
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
It's not about in unicorns or not. It's about the scope and impact of your projects, both of which have more to do with the size than the PR status of a company. When the quantity of people in a company exceeds the quantity of work, you'll be much more expendable.
Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.
A few heuristics that I find useful: 1. Revenue per employee 2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months 3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.
I agree this is a great way to think about it. At the end of the day “business impact” per employee is the thing that matters most to your individualized risk. If your expertise is essential to the continued improvement of the company’s core business model, you have nothing to fear.
It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.
This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).
However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.
Uber actually has some of the best technical writing in [datasci/causal inference](https://eng.uber.com/causal-inference-at-uber/).
These heuristics are interesting. Do you have concrete numbers for some of the big techs?
Let's say you like the Warriors. You and a group of friends get together every game to cheer for them. You're the one everyone looks to for bringing the beer, and you enjoy the group you hang out with. And when the Warriors win (or lose), there's a huge energy you get to be a part of.
I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much different than working at a startup day-to-day. And as a bonus you get to be a part of the large-scale wins and loses. Much like how it's exciting when the Warriors win, it's exciting when something big comes out of your company. Even if you did nothing but cheer.
Everyone is expendable. Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable. So are people at large companies or small startups. But within your team, you get to do good work, and it doesn't feel that way.
Much like the Warriors in the last year, it's hard to ignore your team taking losses, especially when success was so easy in the past, and thinking about finding a new team if things don't improve.
> Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable.
I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.
Definitely. The company just felt bloated. Feature teams needed 7 or 8 people working constantly on single screens that would be an afterthought in an MVP, just to keep up with the constant changes in architecture and infrastructure. Lots of over-engineering and NIH from veterans that didn't want work on teams. Lots of rewrites due to performance issues. All that without any noticeable change for the customer (other than the website becoming slower). VCs and middle-management kept asking for more developers, though, so everyone was happy, but the general perception was that we would do just as well (or better) with a half, or a third of the staff.
All developers are expendable. If 5% of all developers at any of FAANGM's got hit by a bus, the company would keep moving.
I work at company with less than 100 people, I know where many of the bodies are buried, etc. But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
> But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least.
If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty minimal if your cause of death is meteor strike. It would likely cover a percentage of the income you would have earned for your remaining years of work.
But opening a req seems totally reasonable when you are demonstrably not coming back.
Group life through most companies are 1x salary. That amount is a pittance to buy on your own.
But the point is everyone is expendable. I worked for a company around 2009. They laid a lot of people off that had more seniority than I did. I wondered why they kept me around.
Three months later I found out. The founder had written a bespoke development tool chain in C++ using MVC and assembly. The board push him out and the CTO told me that I was now responsible for maintaining the tool chain because I was the only one who knew C++ and assembly.
> But the point is everyone is expendable.
In the extremum, everyone is expendable, but not everyone is equally expendable, as your own anecdote bears out.
When you expend enough people, especially increasingly less expendable people who carry your basic institutional knowledge and skills, you do so by inflicting damage on your company or organization.
The economic winds may dictate that, as they did frequently in the 2008 economic crisis, but it's not like there is no institutional cost to expending people. This is the basically why countries like Germany and the UK are paying employers to keep idled people on payroll.
It's a double edged sword, on the one hand you have the freedom to work on interesting projects, new technologies and get well compensated. On the other hand most engineers working at uber should be able to critically think about their job and say "Is what I'm doing contributing to the noticeably to the core business or am I part of a gamble the company can afford to make right now"
I don't understand your point, can you please elaborate more? I read it twice and your comment isn't making any sense to me:
1) Are you suggesting that developers should go join a smaller company so they are less expendible?
2) Are you suggesting that developers, now that they are laid off, go work on R&D projects, tooling and open source startups?
I am so confused. What is the take away?
I'm saying that large companies in tech tend to have a large developer headcount, often working on projects outside of the core business. As such, I think those employees are more expendable.
Teams that open source stuff typically have leveraging roles, i.e. they build things that several other teams depend on.
Orthogonally, typically large companies have a maslow hierarchy of sorts: for every infrastructural endeavor, there may be a number of others that are more "nice-to-have" niche projects that aren't really critical to anyone else's ability to deliver results.
The most vulnerable employees are those on niche projects, despite these projects being internally focused (as opposed to open sourced). Infra folks whose work may be open source are typically less vulnerable because they do in fact work on critical, well, infrastructure.
I do not think he is suggesting any course of action beyond awareness that their position is less stable than it might be in other jobs.
Worth pointing that your position at a unicorn is probably more secure than at a random small startup.
Ohh....I get it now. Jeez, I need more coffee.
I've always worked in manufacturing so people aren't that easily expendible. Takes a long time to train someone and without them, one of the line shuts down or gets less productive / slow.
How long do people usually stay at your company?
Average is probably 8 years.
Well regardless of economic boom or bust, the chance that a startup runs out of money is probably higher than the chance that a big company chooses to lay you off.
I worked for small and big. Everyone is expendable. Running lean or efficiency is not something those companies optimize for. That's why they have so many employees. They optimize for growth. Until something bad happens.
"Developers at unicorns:" Prato principal crystallized. Look at any big repro or any large company. There is usually about ~5 ish people that know wtf is going on. I think uber could be ran with 10 people.
> Prato principal crystallized
You're wrong, and not just about the Pareto principle.
He is probably Portuguese speaking, and his autocorrect changed the spelling.
Can confirm, I was having a hard time parsing how "main course" in Portuguese made sense in the middle of that sentence.
I've noticed that, as projects or entire companies grow, the effort spent on the product decreases relative to the effort spent on things _about_ the product.
Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.
It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.
I wish we would take a hard look at corporate culture from a systems perspective, as self-professed systems professionals intent on "solving hard problems" and see how we ourselves contribute to the culture of disenfranchisement through our cumulative individual actions which we often attribute to "that's just how it is" rather than taking extreme ownership and fixing things in our own favour
I think for large companies this is true and by design. Companies don’t like single points of failure so by design should be able to afford to loose x% if engineers (or marketing etc).
Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers.
The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc.
These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing revenues or decreasing costs. Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
>>Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove.
Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.
I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.
I think there are more than just those two interpetations.
I also think more people than Graeber have been aware of the existence of BS jobs for a long time.
What is nice about the Wikipedia page is that it acknowledges that BS jobs "is a thing".
Perhaps it facilitates more open discussion of the phenomenon.
SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 may be facilitating the discussion even more as it has forced people to consider what jobs are "essential" versus what logically can be referred to as "non-essential".
I have seen one commenter on HN raise the issue of why pay does appear to correlate with whether a job is essential or not. Perhaps this is something more people will start to think about.
Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs?
I've never been at a unicorn, but I have been at many startups. The story is the same everywhere. Almost no one is irreplaceable. When times get tight, cutting overhead means letting people go.
All the big startups hire all the best people mostly to stop them from getting hired anywhere else until they can't sustain it. Having 1000 extra developers is better than having 200, 5 person engineering teams working against them.
Well you don’t get VC money because you want to give people jobs, so yes.
These companies are beyond being unicorns though. I work at a unicorn and our whole R&D team is only like 100-120 people.
The risk is the same at non-Unicorns. Look at developers at J Crew, hospitals and governments. All will face a squeeze.
Even at Google, how many people work in advertising?
Arguably everyone from the CEO to the intern pulling gofer duty seeing as how that is the vast, vast majority of their revenue and profit and everything else is just more advertising for Google itself.
5,000 engineers for Uber. Absurd.
Anyone working at Uber, can you share how is morale in Uber at this moment? How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people, but people don't want to go there?
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
Well, everyone knew it was coming. Dara has been pretty transparent about the timelines, plus there were a ton of leaks in the news about details over the course of the last few weeks. It looks like everyone in eng got an email this morning that stated in bold italics whether they are affected or not. Gotta say I appreciated that clarity.
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
I don't understand why the firings are waves. Is this a logistics thing, or a morale thing somehow? Because it seems like it would negatively impact morale, more than anything.
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
The logistics. In the best of times it takes at least a week to let go a few thousand employees. I can think of about ten things to take care of. Now multiply that with number of countries, the local laws to be handled. Add another multiplier or two for being a public company. The PR angle. And finally the unprecedented COVID-19 situation we are in, which compounds by adding a few more variables, the least of which is remote coordination.
All said and done, I’m actually impressed they got through this in under a month.
At Lehman Brothers, the waves came every few weeks. On Tuesdays, HR fired business people, and engineering people cleaned up the mess. On Wednesdays, HR fired engineering people. On Thursdays, HR fired each other.
It allows you to ramp down without pandemonium.
I don't know whether it's an urban legend or not, some HR people were asked to write their own emails firing themselves at Lehman.
If you broke labor laws while laying yourself off, would it be grounds to sue the company afterward since the actions were taken by an employee of the company?
It's a funny thought, but I have to think it'd get noticed pretty quickly that you're suing the company for something you actually did, and it'd be dismissed pretty quickly.
It'd be fun to negotiate your own exit package in that situation though :-D
A few years ago I worked at a small-ish company that had to do a mass layoff of about 10% of their employees. The only HR person had to write her own layoff letter. A few days later she had to walk back her own layoff because the company realized they probably shouldn't layoff their only HR person during a mass layoff.
I feel like a skilled HR professional probably could have communicated the error of this decision before it was taken.
Jeez, I hope they remembered to declare their base class destructor virtual.
The leadership team has repeatedly said they acknowledge it sucks to leave people hanging for weeks on end since it obviously drags morale through the mud, but that the logistics are complicated, due to the sheer number of people involved, local laws, etc. The leaks have just made it all the more stressful.
For the layoffs last year I'm pretty sure they were trying to stay under the 500-employee threshold of the WARN Act.
Not me personally but a close friend I know that works there says morale is at an all time low understandably. Luckily he wasn't fired but a close coworker of his who was the #25th employee of Uber was removed. 6+ years at Uber and was managing and running a team that wasn't deemed essential to Uber core services apparently. Kind sucks but these people are at a position where it shouldn't be difficult to find another position elsewhere.
I only speak for myself and my own observations - both morale and productivity have been low the past 2 weeks.
It's a lot easier to find such things on Blind, FWIW
> How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people
"Independent contractors" working from home and using their own equipment. "Gig economy". Hope they enjoy it.
Geez, this is incredibly callous. These are real people who are losing their livelihoods.
It's gauche to say it on the day a bunch of people lost their jobs (and there's no need for the schadenfraude) but I think the underlying point is sane. Uber's business model is replacing FTEs in a a hidebound, regulated industry with gig workers (& good UX!).
If you were forecasting how this company in particular would deal with a downturn, it's a reasonable guess that they'll try to do the same thing to their own workforce, if they can find engineers willing to take on gig work. It's in their DNA.
To be charitable, the grandfather comment is a warning to think about the broader effects of the work we do, driven home by the possibility of a "what goes around comes around" situation.
EDIT: as many have pointed out, taxi drivers don't get benefits either (I originally said one of the margins Uber competes on is not providing benefits).
The reason why software companies don't generally hire contract software developers rather than bringing them on as FTEs is that they're less effective. Software development is a high-communication, high-trust activity; it's very helpful to be able to explicitly direct and manage the activities of your workforce, because otherwise they don't produce anything useful. For specific tasks that don't need to be high-trust and high-communication (eg. writing an iOS app for a non-critical part of the business that uses a public API), companies are already inclined to hire contractors.
The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?" Tech company success tends to be binary: either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
Exactly, Uber's business model only applies to (highly) fungible labour markets. As past experience shows, you (usually) can't swap out 10 devs here with 10 devs there and expect similar results (although who knows in the future)
I don't think this is accurate. I've worked several contracts in my life, often working alongside the company's FTE developers. In every situation, we were fully integrated into the team, with the same level of access, etc. We fully participating in meetings and planning. The contracts were several months. (one as long as 18 months; it only was cut short due to 9/11) I will admit these weren't strictly software companies, and in every one of these roles, I was a w2 employee of a staffing company, not a 1099. However, I was at least as effective as their regular team members; probably more so because I could be released far more easily.
> either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
I think rather than looking at those names we might ask ourselves about the ones that managed to survive: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, as an example
Sure, we might argue that they have not always been the most ethical companies out there, but it doesn't mean they haven't had to reinvent themselves here and there
How come Oracle and IBM got more money from Java than Sun? Windows is now "free" but MS continues to make money.
Those companies that went away seems to be mostly good examples of the Inventor's dilema. Especially SGI.
>The reason why software companies don't generally hire contract software developers
Have you ever been inside a FAANG? Sometimes it feels like red badges outnumber FTE 2:1 so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Worked for Google for 5 years. Red badges were largely confined to QA testers, physical security, and the kitchen, along with a few UI designers or engineers that didn't want to be employees because they liked the freedom that being a contractor allowed (eg. being able to work for someone else on the side). Basically everyone I interacted with on a daily basis was a FTE. Product area could have something to do with it: I was on a core product (Search), it's possible red badges are more common in peripheral products.
Your comment downplays the number of contractors at Google as if they are rare, but in reality, Google employs ~100k FTEs and ~120k contractors. It's definitely more than just QA testers and kitchen staff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...
You may really have just been on a team that doesn't interact often with contractors, but the reality for the broader company is that contracting is a way of life for much more than just Uber.
My understanding is that a lot of those are jobs like street view driver, autonomous vehicle tester, search quality rater, contract recruiter, content moderator, con-ops (help forums & customer support), etc. That's a big portion of the company but not a big portion of core engineering teams. I'd acknowledged the existence of them in my original comment, but this article is specifically about layoffs of software engineers within Uber's core products. I maintain that someone in that position is far more likely to come in contact with other FTEs than with contractors.
I'm not sure about Google, but I know that many companies segregate contractors into other buildings. At one of my previous employers pretty much everyone I interacted with was a full time employee as well, but that was only because contractors largely did not have badge access to the office and worked somewhere else.
I think the even bigger risk with getting a job at Uber will be that some of the future employers may not be willing to consider you due to sketchy reputation Uber has as a company.
This is something I see employees worry about all the time, but I have never seen a business owner or person with hiring authority consider it. People who get to that position within a company learn to inhabit shades of grey; unless you personally did something illegal, they're not going to hold the company you worked for against you, except to the extent that they may think that people working at that company are incompetent.
I see ex-Facebook and ex-Uber employees popping up all the time at high positions within hot (and sometimes even ethical) growth companies within the valley.
Not a thing I’ve ever considered on a hiring front unless you’re famous as a sexual harasser or for pulling a Damore. Literally never heard of anyone doing this either.
"You're either a one or a zero. Alive or dead." Gary Winston from AntiTrust
> The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?"
what's median job duration for a software engineer in startup-land anyway? I'd be surprised if it was much over 2 years...
I'd think that if your famous company goes under, folks won't generally hold that against you. Heck, I'd think people who watched it all fall apart would would have the most interesting stories (and valuable lessons about mistakes to avoid).
You seem to not know how taxi companies work. They are independent contractors except they are even more at a disadvantage. They need to pay money upfront for their shift and spend half their time earning that money back before they even make money. And they have no benefits.
> Uber's business model is replacing FTEs
Where are taxi drivers employees with benefits? At least in New York, they're mostly independent contractors. (A minority are sole proprietors.)
Check where they unionized more?
New York is probably one of the most union heavy places in America. Checking where they are unionized more isn't an accurate reflection of the rest of the world.
NL.
Look more at car service companies (Uber's original service), not taxis.
Why? For the vast majority of people, Uber is a taxi service.
The reason is that car service drivers are also being replaced and they are more likely to have been FTEs.
Great, I think you came up with the simplest solution: Uber should make whatever single digit percentage of total drivers that comprise their Uber Black drivers FTEs.
This might be a good selling point for the higher levels of Uber service: You're getting a full-time, professional driver who's been thoroughly vetted. It's not just some random person with an app.
I think for the vast VAST majority of riders, the "random person with an app" is good enough. In the age of turn-by-turn directions, rides are commoditized. A hundred crimes per year divided by billions of trips per year represents decimal point percentage crime rate — which is a risk not all that different from aircraft crash statistics, or even car crash statistics.
I know I definitely prefer to save tens of dollars per ride vs the services provided by some platonic ideal of a "professional driver".
> one of the margins on which they can undercut competition is not paying benefits
You think minicab firms paid benefits before Uber?
A large portion of taxi drivers are independent contractors.
and they dont' pay % of their revenue to the 'base station entity'.
This Uber trick: taking % of the revenue for the fixed cost service (they provide to the taxis drivers ) is the master trick making uber money.
So far, in Europe, all taxi corporations charge taxi driver FIXED (quite small 100..200 usd/month) amount for operating telco/web/radio and coordinating fleet of taxis.
Uber's ability to push bulshine here is really business milking 101 course: Fixed costs, uncaped incomes.
> and they dont' pay % of their revenue to the 'base station entity'.
Unless they own their own medallion, they pay "medallion rent". They'll also pay dispatch fees. Many taxi drivers switched over to being Uber drivers because they could earn (and keep) more money, not less.
So are cab drivers.
Uber has screwed over a lot of people in the past. I'm not going to cry for people who worked for a bad company getting screwed over by said bad company
Sure, but do you feel the same way about AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, every major auto manufacturer, Tesla, Amazon, and myriad of other companies that behave in unethical ways?
I can't think of a single tech company that hasn't engaged in some eye brow raising behavior.
There was even some controversy with YCombinator funding a fantasy sports betting company.
I'm a little more nuanced in my analysis than the GP, but yes, I do feel that way in some degree about all the companies you mention, and how the employees have some incremental responsibility for the bad those companies do.
Offered rents in Vancouver have dropped 15% since the pandemic took hold and AirBnB became a dead business for a bunch of mini-hoteliers. If you helped build that software, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the crisis in affordable housing we've been struggling with, that AirBnB has contributed to.
If you work at Facebook, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the consequences of the 2016 U.S. election and Donald Trump's presidency.
Your share of the responsibility is likely tiny, and I'm not going act like you're a mass murderer. But at the end of the day you were part of the machine that left a trail of damage in its wake, and I won't ignore that just because you were merely a cog.
I get your point, but any culpability on their part should not cause us to withhold compassion and empathy to a person losing their livelihood.
Being laid off sucks.
I can't imagine what it's like to be laid off during the worst economic period in US history since the great depression, AND to have people bag on you because you were employed by a company they didn't agree with.
Are you sure it's AirBNB, or the general economy dropping? RE values and rents as a knock on result have been dropping everywhere as demand ($$$ to pay for rent) has dropped globally as peoples jobs are lost and people move in with their parents or similar and drop leases fairly suddenly.
When you really research how much AirBNB is part of a housing market, it's minuscule. One or 3 condo buildings can usually cover whatever supply AirBNB put into alternative demand markets. AirBNB is a convenient scapegoat in most markets, because it diverts attention from building more supply and all the NIMBYs blocking it.
Yeah.
AirBNB has destroyed the rental markets of 100s of metropolitan areas. If you're working there, then you helped that.
Facebook is the sole reason we have AntiVaxxers, Trump, and fake news in general. Working at facebook, you're supporting that.
Apple I don't really have a beef with.
Amazon has killed people in it's factories, and if you work there you are in some part responsible for those deaths and the destroyed small businesses.
You can work where ever you want, as is your right. But by you working at a company, does not make you immune from being responsible for the company's actions. You have a choice of where you work, and if you choose to work there knowing the bad things the company does- that's on you.
> Apple I don't really have a beef with.
I'm curious if this is because you agree with everything they've done or because you haven't really looked too deeply into it.
Not just people. They are actively screwing over our planet.
The cynical part of me is thinking about the people who never had a chance at a decent livelihood. Demi-employment didn't sneak up on us, we just thought we were too classy and sophisticated as workers to have it ever effect us.
This isn't the first time our generations have experienced this. It's practically the third. You should know very well by now that many of these jobs aren't coming back, and those that do are really only going to be open to people who are younger than you.
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.
And the one's that did know looked at each other like dogs that spent the day in a Skinner box.
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.
And perhaps focus on being a global taxi company instead of things like self-driving cars which is the job of a global taxi manufacturer.
become an AWS competitor?
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.
It could be worse. You could have a large company notorious for rolling out competing external products, like messaging and video chat apps....
IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
That's what business leaders think.
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.
Oracle 12 lists 66 developers https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/REFRN/title.htm
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.
what kind of unique expertise is required to run a taxi app?
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.
Dara
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.
I travel to India, a lot, as I have family there.
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 can relate as someone who was scammed at Heathrow pre-Uber.
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.
Yea, I'd call it downright essential.
> Uber is not an "essential service".
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
[1] https://www.jornalcruzeiro.com.br/sorocaba/locadoras-de-carr... (pt-br) [2] https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/03/23/coronavirus-s... (pt-br) [3] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/sem-servico-160-mil-mo... (pt-br) [4] https://www.uol.com.br/carros/colunas/autodata/2020/05/15/lo... (pt-br) [5] https://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2020/0... [6] https://www.blogdaslocadoras.com.br/locadoras-de-carros/reco...
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.
You can't fault the guy for believing / wanting to believe that what he's doing is useful.
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.
uber helps some drivers, not so much others: Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything: Going Karura http://feeds.prx.org/~r/TOE/~3/EWA9DPM9OaQ/294581
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.
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine without the first sentence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>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 should have specified, my point was that Uber is not the same as public transportation and is essentially a luxury good.
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.
Then car is essentially a luxury good, since it's the same - just someone else is driving it.
Yes. That's my point. Uber is not essential, it is a luxury.
That's not your call to make.
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).
Perhaps you should speak only for yourself and not others?
I don't have a car and hopefully never will. I never used an Uber or any similar service. I used taxi maybe 2 or 3 times in the past few years.
It is extremely easy to live without a car if the city / country accommodates for it.
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 live in Paris, and I could easily afford a new car (or two) with my income as an SRE.
But then I'd have to park it, and just that would double the monthly cost. And then I'd probably use it once a month on average.
So use the taxi for once a month? Uber doesn't have to exist for you to address your problem.
Okay, yes, Uber can be replaced by a taxi service with a good app because Uber's a taxi service with a good app. Gold star.
A taxi service is an essential complement to mass transit, and Uber provides that service in areas with poor taxi service (essentially everywhere).
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 $12 for a two-way, 1 mile trip through a crappy part of town can pay for itself if you avoid an hour of walking and get an hour of working).
So you're saying Uber is a luxury. So it's not essential.
If you can use public transportation, then relying on it with supplementary transportation from Uber is cheaper in most cities.
>A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
You think poor people are using Uber to get around?
No, they are the ones driving it. And now they will be out of their job.
> Ahh - the comment from the person with the multi-car garage, the tesla and the range rover.
I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I don't have any of those things. Not even close.
> ation from the I have a ton of money, can work fr
is uber cheaper than cabs/public transpo w/o the VC subsidy? 15 years ago there was no uber and people were able to get by using public transpo.
the idea that uber loses money on rides because of "VC" needs to die. uber is not VC funded anymore and hasn't been for a long time now.
uber loses money on every ride because uber loses money overall because it spends a lot of money on other projects, not because the marginal cost/benefit of each ride is negative.
If they spin off the ride sharing part of the company how much are they earning? do you know?
The ridesharing line of business has been profitable for at least a year from what I can tell. The plan was for it to cover all the other costs by EoY 2020, incl. HQ expenses and other bets like Eats.
Centuries ago, people got by with horses. Does that mean that cars aren't essential?
Ridesharing services allow for an unprecedented level of mobility for those who don't already own cars.
You could say the same for taxis. If uber cost 100$/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.
This is a terrible measure.
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.
Well, you're right about one thing: that sure is a simple method.
Useful? No. Effective? No. Meaningful? No. But definitely simple.
Why 15 years? Why not 50? Or 150?
By those measures BTW, antibiotics, modern sewers and (for the most part) vacinations aren't essential.
And indeed they aren't, for the survival of the human race. They are, however, very important for the survival of individual humans.
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.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that but who knows.
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.
My educated guess is India. They have a reasonably big development center in Bangalore and Hyderabad, besides operating rides business there.
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.
India is a regulatory nightmare. It's more likely to be Tokyo or Seoul. Maybe Sydney but from a geographic perspective Australia isn't exactly ideal.
This must feel really bad. 200k engineers replaced by 30k indians.
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?
I am replying to a comment that is speculating they are going for India.
The speculation was in response to question about “moving Singapore to APAC”. Sorry if that wasn’t clear from the context.
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?
Anyone know how they are handling folks on TN and H-1B visas?
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?
I copy and pasted it from the CNBC article - not sure if that's their emphasis or not.
I don't consider Uber taxis an essential service, though. More a luxury. Internet is a essential utility service but Uber?
Many, many people live out of the range of public transport. Not everyone can drive, private taxis _are_ an essential service.
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.
> Yes, I can't drive and still only take public transport.
Lucky for you that this is an option. For many people less fortunate than yourself it is not an option and they rely on taxis such as Uber.
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.
Sorry, out of curiosity but where are you from? Where you can't walk or cycle 10-20 minutes to a bus stop?
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).
Are you saying transportation and restaurants are not essential?
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.
How could restaurants be considered essential? People can eat without having food cooked for them.
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.
That makes sense. The earlier employee definitely made off like bandits.
uber is not available in jakarta, only grab & gojek
Are they going to regret having 4,000 micro services now?
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.
If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.
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.
Why reimplement what is already implemented? This is busywork.
Hahahah... ever worked at a big company?
Ha ha, please! That has to be a "/s"
They were already regretting them - they're moving away from them: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1247132806041546754
It would be interesting to see the ratio of how many micro services an org maintains vs the number of engineers.
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...
A couple of years ago it was roughly 3 service per engineer.
It’s another opportunity to rewrite orphaned services
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?
> middle-management kept asking for more developers, though, so everyone was happy.
> reply
not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.
> 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.
what did those jobs produce?
Robust property prices in San Francisco!
For Uber specifically?
Money, better and cheaper transportation where it sucked, and jobs for much more people than just developers.
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.
I always feel thankful that I don't have to deal with taxi drivers when I travel.
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
In the US I’ve never come across a taxi driver that wasn’t an asshole, but Uber drivers are usually chill and fine.
That's how I feel about NYC. When I'm there I couldn't even fathom trying to get an Uber. Why would I? 5 taxis pass me a minute
Everywhere else though, I take Uber/Lyft.
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.
Money?
Given that they've produced jobs for already-affluent programmers by gutting the security and incomes of the working class, not really,
Uber is very vulnerable.
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.
I was let go today from Uber. If anyone is looking for a Frontend/Fullstack with 7yoe. I'm here :)
Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-lawrence-b77400b8/
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https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2156392/air-...
https://dot.la/coronavirus-rapid-test-curative-los-angeles-2...
sounds really good. I am curious, what tech stack do you use?
Typescript/React <-> Flask/Python <-> postgres + redis <-> terraform
Also building out a data science team—idk what the preferred stack is there.
what's the worst way to contact you?
Contact me on Google Wave.
Call from an unfamiliar number, don't leave a message. Keep redialing until they pick up.
When they eventually pick up, play back the sound you hear when you accidentally dial into a fax line.
This is a great question. I'll use this as an icebreaker in the future.
Let's see what Reddit says.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gm5zwu/what_is_t...?
Smoke signals from the house across the street.
at the moment ... in person with a sweaty handshake
Was it all of a sudden or were you guys told this was coming from the higher ups? How did they manage it in terms of benefits, severances etc?
The info about layoffs leaked about 3 weeks ago, which was messed up.
Overall though the severence is healthy, so I'll be plenty ok while I find another gig.
Did you get good severance? Hope you did.
If you can afford it, I’d suggest taking a break.
Yeah severance is pretty good. I'll try to get a gig quick and then push off the start date a bit.
You should add your email address or website to your profile, so people can contact you.
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.
You should also work for a more ethical company next time.
Edit: it's not a snark, just a friendly reminder.
We're hiring at Supergreat (https://supergreat.reviews) :) I'd love to tell you more, email me at alexmic@supergreat.reviews.
What the.. hmm...interesting business for sure.
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.
https://www.collage.com/careers
Hey @travis12 - we're hiring at App Annie for Staff and Senior FE roles - https://boards.greenhouse.io/appannie/jobs/2172372
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)
This might help. I created https://tryjobalerts.com to help find dev jobs, and it is free. Throwaway emails are welcome, use it however you want.
Hi, we're hiring at Poynt (https://poynt.com) – ping me at c@poynt.com
we're hiring at https://atellio.com - do reach out at nick@atellio.com would love to tell you more!
Sorry to hear that. Atlassian is hiring. Pls apply. Thank you.
Find me at http://redundantrobot.com/
I'm down to see what you have going on there.
Good luck, I am super sorry to hear this.
I'll be ok, but your thoughts really are appreciated. Nice words from nice people are always a welcomed thing.
What's the best way to contact you?
www.redundantrobot.com
What's the best way to contact you?
www.redundantrobot.com
Good luck brother. Keep your head up.
Changes in life are an opportunity and that's always something to get excited about. Full steam ahead!
whats the best way to contact you?
www.redundantrobot.com
I'm really worrying that the mindfulness and how to think gender neutral courses will be cancelled which would be a great shame. Furthermore I fear that I can't spend time on a completely new revolutionary javascript framework which makes all the other ones obsolete.
Sad times...
How did you end up in the States?
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 :)
Ah I thought you were British, I looked at your Linkedin profile and saw a UK uni there
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
> 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 think scooters are very area dependent. Both because of weather, and the supporting infrastructure.
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.
Tell that to the homeless guy in SF who made it his life mission to push scooters into the bay. They even had to make a line item just for him.
I'm not really angry. I consider it a public service for the people who come along after me. These things are a hazard for runners.
Where do you live? Maybe I can put them in front of your house.
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.
> you can pretty much walk the same distance
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.
Not only that but 2 miles is a long walk to do often if you’re not very careful about it, especially if you’re carrying much.
I’m 100% for walking places but it’s important to have options once you start getting out that far.
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.
The scooter division was bikes & scooters
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.
The bikeshare system in my city is provided by Uber.
They're mostly focused on the scooters now (or, well, yesterday) but many cities have bikeshare systems backed by Uber.
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.
Scooters are heaven sent.
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.
To read that quote differently:
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
2800% is a much bigger number than 83%. But if you do the math using your numbers, you see that GE substantially underperformed the S&P since 1981:
GE = (1+2800%)*(1-83%) = 4.93 = 393% appreciation since 1981.
S&P = S&P has appreciated 2000% since 1981.
GE << S&P
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.
Maybe that's why Welch said to measure against GE's future leaders if they are destined to forever underperform the S&P. :)
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.
It's good to be the king, I guess.
lol I never praised him for making an audacious claim, I've said it's nonsensical several times.
> Scooters
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.
Sounds more like the playbook of being a real business, meaning to take in more money than they spend....
In other news, GE Appliances just cut my web development contract short by 8 months. Congratulations, India.
I am wondering why there are two separate rounds of layoffs. Isn't it better for morale to just have the band aid ripped quick, once and for all?
What context does Uber have now, that they did not when the initial layoff wave happened?
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.
Management isn't omnipotent.
> What context does Uber have now
More data that can be feed into their financials models to understand the short-term and long-term impact of this market on their cash flow. Companies don't do layoffs because things are nice and predictable.
Isn't the word you're looking for omniscient ?
Haha yes it has become muscle memory.
> omnipotent
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.
uber never seemed like a rational company that thinks of the good of its employees (i know it’s a business, but still).
the cut deep, cut once method for layoffs is doing business 101, but still there are 2 rounds of layoffs at uber
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.
Isn't hinting the worst approach in that case though? I can't imagine that the additional uncertainty helped with staff morale.
Isn't this the ultimate problem of corporate leadership though? You have basically four options when making complicated decisions:
- lie, by saying there is no discussion
- omit, by not saying whether or not there is a discussion
- discuss openly
- don't discuss, just make the decision rashly
Decisions like this tend to follow one of the first two options, but clearly none of them are great. They're all damaging in their own way.
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.
Internally, Dara was very clear that the layoff would happen in 2 stages for the different organizations
I was also let go today, is anyone looking for a frontend engineer with 6 years experience?
My profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmaskasky/
Check this if you've not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042618
Also "Who Wants to Be Hired": https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
Amazon hasn't even slowed down. And if you've seen the front ends we've made, you know there's a lot of need for a good front end developer!
Seriously, we're hiring everywhere and we're optionally wfh until October. We remotely interview and onboard.
www.amazon.jobs, or email me at <this HN alias> at <company> dot com. Happy to help direct you.
Hey, sorry for the bad news. Qualia is hiring. Can you send me your resume at eric.na@qualia.com and miguel@qualia.com?
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.
Yo that's crazy good, put those as line items on LinkedIn you will have to turn off notifications so many people will be bothering you.
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.
Yes, that's true. Avoid an either/or situation. John Cage said that long ago.
Those sites also force some order or format across all projects/profiles so it is easier to dig in and find specific things if needed.
Plenty of other people will recruit him. The guy has worked as a front-end engineer at Uber and Tesla.
Just fill out the LinkedIn profile - bullet points under the Uber section. Link to GitHub if he has it, then post something on LinkedIn.
How many people have personal portfolio sites that are 2-3 years out of date... even 4-5 discussing how to build a product list in Backbone.js.
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.
I can't imagine how companies like Uber, Lyft and WeWork could be sustainable in the long term with huge costs and a high burn rate, but this action is definitely in addressing the future Q2 results in the summer which is the actual results including the impact on the coronavirus outbreak.
Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with huge costs, the actual reality is that this is nothing more than the emperor new clothes. Unfortunately there are no sacred cows being saved here, especially engineering being affected in this.
Q2 is already doomed - plus now they're adding millions of one-time severance costs to the quarter. This is a hail mary for Q3.
Uber and Lyft are public, they haven't relied on VC cash for over a year.
Going public is still a fundraising event that puts cash on the balance sheet of the company.
So whether they are funded by VC's or large institutional buyers who are the majority traders on the public market, there is no difference and the companies continue to lost money.
The issue for Uber is that they need to change the narrative. They don't have the story that Amazon did, that they are losing money because they are reinvesting it back into tremendous infrastructure which will give them scale.
Uber is losing money because they grew very quickly so there were a lot of innate inefficiencies because of that. So these firings are a chance to right size the company and see if the new trimmed down Uber will now be profitable when eventually ridership returns to normal.
The game plan is pretty simple: use VC cash to quickly provide services everywhere and build market share, drive competitors out of business / acquire them, move to self-driving cars to the extent possible and eventually raise rates when customers have no other options.
Well... yes, but the problem with that plan is that Uber would need VC funding for 20 more year while they try to make the self driving cars work.
I feel bad for the people who got fired, but I also believe is was bound to happen, the current situation with Covid-19 just speed up the process.
> drive competitors out of business / acquire them, move to self-driving cars to the extent possible
The problem is that they have no self-driving cars and thus just represents the most massively over-staffed taxi-hailing mobile app ever.
I’d be surprised if we don’t see much more dramatic job cuts in the future.
This is always brought up as the game plan but are there any examples where this worked out?
probably not. but while doing that (takes 10 years), all the execs and VCs get rich while the investing public is left holding the bag.
I believe Amazon was the (modern) prototype of this type of business plan.
The big worry for many cities is they've eviscerated their docked bike-rental program. Those are municipal infrastructure... If Uber is abandoning this product, there are a lot of cities that are going to have an orphaned bikeshare service with hard infrastructure installed all over town.
The thing is that they never actually were municipal infrastructure. They were an outsourced attraction posing as municipal infrastructure.
And to be frank, maybe those cities or municipalities should consider hiring some of the laid off employees, buying the infrastructure during the fire sale (if they don't actually already own it), cutting out the middle man, and doing it themselves.
At least in my city, it was a locally owned program. The city owned the bikes and the business that handled maintenance and rebalancing was a private not for profit. Uber was basically only involved with the software.
But if the city wants more bikes or parts, where do they get it?
Where do companies like Spin get their bicycles and parts from?
They're not in the manufacturing business either.
Atlanta Fed's GDPnow nowcasting estimates that the US Q2 GDP growth was -42.8 percent on May 15 (annual rate of change, not change)
https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
https://archive.vn/vkqbT
Hmm, getting
This server could not prove that it is archive.vn; its security certificate is from cloudflare-dns.com.
Are archive.vn working?
archive.today blocks users of Cloudflare DNS.
Makes you wonder how these companies ever planned to last during the "next" economic downturn. I don't think anyone bet on a global pandemic causing this shock but the point still stands: These kind of companies were still burning cash at incredible rates 10+ years in. How were they ever going to survive?
This is not a downturn though. It is a collapse.
It's more like a pause.
What makes you think it's a collapse?
I mean, a downturn is generally considered to be down by 10%, maybe 20%. Quantitatively different, but not qualitatively different. Adjustments, but things still generally continue as planned.
A collapse is dropping by close to 50% or more, like Uber's demand. It's suddenly playing an entirely different game, it becomes a qualitatively different business.
If this isn't a collapse, nothing is.
A "pause" would imply things will return to normal as soon as things are "unpaused". If you cut 3,000 jobs and 45 offices, those are not just magically reappearing when things are "unpaused".
Oh, did you mean Uber and not the economy as a whole?
Oh, I re-read the comments and realized I completely confused the two. Never mind me, sorry! Yes, the economy as a whole has not collapsed, it is more of a pause, agreed.
infinite growth forever, of course
>> attempts to steer the ride-hailing giant through the coronavirus pandemic.
No doubt this is accelerating certain motivators, but I for one am a little sick of the "COVID Excuse" for blaming aspects of these non-business plans that were bad ideas without a global pandemic on which to blame them.
Does anyone know where one could find a list of the offices they closed?
Can anyone with knowledge share whether the Uber Amsterdam office is impacted?
Yes, but it is not announced due to works council process. It'll take couple of weeks at least.
I'd love to talk to technical product managers. We're hiring at Databricks Amsterdam. Please contact me at bilal dot aslam at databricks dot com
If anyone at Uber reads this, feel free to get in touch (Go, Java, SRE) if you want to effectively stay in the same building working for a multinational.
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Can someone explain why Uber stock is up 7% today then?
Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
It's not unusual for stocks to go up on layoffs, but as others have commented there isn't always a simple explanation either. But it wasn't a secret that Uber was going to be getting hit hard by quarantine - it would probably already be priced into the stock by the point. The news today is that Uber's leadership is recognizing that and aggressively taking action to protect the bottom line - sucks in the short-term for employees, especially those directly affected, but that's great news for investors.
There's not always a true, causal explanation of why stocks are reacting as they are. Don't be too quick to trust cable news anchors or other stock market shills that make a living making up and touting stock market narratives. By definition a stock price is a split of the public consensus of what's happening, just as many people are selling as buying at that price.
Your explanation seems as good as any.
The entire market is up on Powell’s positive remarks on the economy’s recovery.
And the Moderna vaccine progress announcement this morning
> Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
Yes.
This is Uber's way of saying to their investors that their costs will decrease due to losing billions during the coronavirus outbreak, thus head count must be decreased. But some who are buying now, may see this as a way of selling at the "bull trap" in Q2.
Because UBER has tremendous bloat. All COVID did was accelerate the inevitable.
Stocks are always trying to predict the future, having these layoffs makes people think that they're getting leaner and organizing, I guess.
If there's anyone from Vienna, Austria, we're hiring.
45 offices closed. Holy hell.
Vast majority of these offices are small hubs in tier 3 cities occupied by regional tems, or tier 1 cities with multiple offices.
Slightly off topic. What's tier 1/2/3 in the US? I had just heard that kind of system applied in China
San Francisco / Seattle / Boston / New York
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Austin / Salt Lake / Los Angeles / Portland / Atlanta
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Ann Arbor / Chicago / Minneapolis / Miami
Props for posting an ordering :O
This seems to be ranked on eng availability, but in terms of actual city tiers it's more like
T1: SF / NY / LA / Miami / Chicago / Atlanta T2: Seattle / Boston / Austin / SLC / Portland T3: Minneapolis / Ann Arbor
That’s a pretty strange ordering, mixing up a Seattle and Boston metros of 4 and 4.6m with an SLC, Portland, and Austin metros Of 1.2, 2.5, and 2.1m respectively. Why mix up the small and large cities in T2? Then your T3 has Minneapolis, at 3.6m. Why would Minneapolis be ranked lower than tiny SLC given it has 3x the population?
Thanks for the population numbers, I didn't know they were so different. I just ranked them from (my perceived) livability - SLC close to skiing/nature, while Minneapolis/Ann Arbor are not destination cities like the other ones.
I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the T1s.
I see your logic though, and maybe it's better to just have a T1 and T2.
Minneapolis is the biggest American metro between Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix. It basically anchors a huge amount of the country. SLC in contrast plays second fiddle to nearby (relatively speaking) Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (at least it is bigger than Boise).
Ann Arbor is so small and close to Detroit, it is odd to hear it listed as a significant city in its own right (like Madison WI). Heck, they are about the same close-ish distance away from Toledo, and Toledo is much bigger than Ann Arbor.
Don't really agree with this at all unless you are only talking in the context of the software engineering job market - which I don't think is usually what people refer to by "tier N"
Chicago is Tier 3? That doesn't seem right.
I could argue that Atlanta is tier 3 as well, the distinction between tier 2/3 could just be a simple rule of numbers (over a 1M pop vs. under 1M pop) and not a tech center. Or in my case that when I've interviewed people from the given locations that they didn't meet the bar by a given level. UIUC produces some amazing engineers, but UChicago doesn't...
This tiering is surprising to me. Which metric are you using? By population, NY, LA, and Chicago are the top three cities in the country.
Ann Arbor is an amazing town, but I'm surprised to see it on the same level as much larger metros. Is tech that much deeper there than when I was in school a handful of years ago? Who are the big players these days?
Los Angeles, Tier 2 ? I would say it should be Tier 2, considering greater Los Angeles area has 14mn people
Miami tier 3? hawhat?
Uber needed an excuse to layoff some people for a long time now. They went with a very "parallel" strategy, spinning up new teams for every project and ignoring code/process efficiency by sharing. Basically throw money at it to win quickly. Pretty unsophisticated engineering, enough microservices and huge DBs to ignore coordination problems.
They will transition to a more efficient structure with more co-ordination now that they have many different bets going and 1-2 core businesses that could work. Right in line with wallstreet expectations and Dara's job to make Uber profitable. I called it a year ago :D
"Khosrowshahi said the company is winding down its product incubator and artificial-intelligence lab"
Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that?
Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR
"AI Labs" tend to publish papers more than they actually work on real projects, so I wouldn't assume shutting down an AI lab implies suspending the self-driving car project.
I dont know if the whole team was laid off, but I can confirm that a lot of (most?) people working on self-driving were laid off today.
(My source is a friend working on self-driving who was laid off today)
My stomach dropped when I saw the thread and checked in with my pal at ATG. She's safe but half of her department (mapping) is gone.
AI engineers cost an absurd amount of money for dubious ROI in the self-driving car space.
That's true in more than just in the self-driving car space. Even at companies like AAPL and AMZN where ML focused researchers/engineers work on production related tasks, I've seen their value production is dubious at best.
[Disclaimer: AAPL engineer, technically classified as ML]
I would argue that ML researchers/engineers have a clear impact on AAPL products in several areas:
* FaceID
* Steadily improving speech recognition accuracy in Siri
* Considerable improvement in speech synthesis quality
* Increasing sophistication in camera image processing
In my experience working on these product teams, most of the real gains are just from solid engineering combined with public advances in ML. The teams filled with ML specific folk aren't able to accomplish much.
Isn't just a classic risk-vs-reward bet for a company like Uber?
These are different efforts from ATG, the self-driving car division.
I thought the self-driving unit had been spun off. This article [1] (from April 2019) said:
"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/uber-nabs-1-billion-self-dri...
Even in this market whereby consumers must order food via apps, none of the food delivery companies are profitable from my understanding.
Can anyone explain how this works/how this came to be?
Food is a business with skinny skinny margins (source, worked on a startup which provided services to food businesses, family members own food businesses).
Delivery companies are fighting for a piece of that market which isn't full of margin, so they're having to fight for it. Plus they're in a landgrab, so choosing growth over profits.
grubhub was profitable for years
Charging for referrals was profitable; they didn't deliver until 2014.
Delivery at a loss or break-even to drive profitable orders is also a fine strategy, and worked for quite some time
Uber's chief technology officer and longest-serving executive, Thuan Pham, has resigned effective May 16, the company said Tuesday, as the company reportedly mulls further cost cutting to weather the coronavirus pandemic
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uber-on-thanks-memories-thuan...
I wonder if it is harder to let so many engineers go when you have so many microservices as Uber has/had. Seems to me that a monolith is easier to maintain when the amount of people working on it goes down, then with all those small microservices. They maybe/probably will have microservices running that now has no one to maintain them.
How exactly is their stock price not reflecting this at all? Is the market really that irrational right now?
I think lately we've seen stock prices increase after layoffs. Not saying they're causal
My understanding is: they announced they would do layoffs 1-2 weeks ago, so it's priced in. And usually your stock goes up when you announce and do layoffs because your costs are lower
Layoff == less spend
Their stock price will go up.
By that logic why do companies even bother to have employees or contractors? No payroll == more money?
Worker rights. Employees mean more bonding, less freedom of movement.
https://archive.md/5OSus
They’re an app. Do they need 45 offices?
When you're a company like uber you probably need legal and marketing in every market you're in.
Is there a list of offices closing?
Which offices are they closing?
I’m sure Travis Kalanick is so happy he dumped his shares before all this.
He dumped shares at more than 10% below today's closing price, and almost 20% below today's intraday high. Why would he be happy?
The sheer volume of shares he offloaded everyday contributed significantly to the drop in price while he was selling.
Who cares about today? There are a lot of other days in the future.
Whoever is still being recruited by uber or close to an offer better make sure they have a solid severance clause written into their contract! Nothing less than 1 to 2 years of pay.
Surely no offers can be made during this period redundancies and consultation.
I don't understand this... Lift and Grab aren't doing so bad. Also, things are opening back up again. Even their quarterly results looked very bad, it was already priced in and so no benefit there. This reduced focus basically just translates to much lower ambition and not a good thing for long term valuation. On the other hand money is super cheap. They could double on debt if they want to. I'm not sure what this layoff buys them anything except injuring their future prospects.
Who are getting laid off? Software engineers or management and customer team?
Yes
What about Elevate? Seems non-core but couldn't have been cheap.
Is AI Labs the whole AI unit at Uber that is now being shut down?
What in the world did Uber ever need that many people for?
When I was an intern at Google maaaany years ago, a mentor of mine described what it is Google does with all these engineers:
"Well see, we discovered a hose that money pours out of. It's called 'online advertising'. Now what we do is spend half our effort trying to make the hose pour faster, and the other half trying to find another hose."
Uber figured out the 'Uber for X' pattern. Now they're trying to optimize it, and figure out something else that makes money.
Yeah, Google invests in everything and then fails fast. They're worried about missing the Next Big Thing™ after seeing Microsoft miss the early web.
Ahhhhh darn. The job market is gonna be flooded now.
45 offices... why do they need more than one?
they hire many employees in different countries
Is this the last round of layoffs for Uber?
Why in gods name do they have that many people? They are a cab company that doesn't employ drivers. Talk about a dumpster fire of VC money
Remember when Dara predicted "profitability" by 2021? LOL, just another Softbank/VC funded money pit.
Lyft also set such pretentious goals for 2021 last year. Not sure what crystal ball they were basing their forecast on but, such jokes are meant to be reserved for a late night comedy show not in an earnings call. [0]
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyft-expects-to-be-profitable-a...
Hmm wonder why they announced it on a Monday instead of a Friday?
A lot of the layoffs are international, so if they had announced on Friday the employees would have learned of their terminations over theirs weekends, as Friday in the U.S. is generally at least Saturday in Europe and Asia.
International companies generally announce cross-border layoffs on Monday (US-time), because that announcement will be during the work week everywhere they operate.
The most reasonable explanation is that they were targeting Friday, but were late and so it was Monday. Firing 3,000 employees takes a lot of preparation. If there are a few corner case employee resolutions, that holds up the whole bunch
And there are legal steps they will have to go through making redundant that many in the US
Friday in San Francisco is Saturday in Asia which means there's probably a layoff on Monday in Asia.
However a Monday layoff in San Francisco means a Tuesday layoff in Asia which won't be separated by a weekend.
What is the line of reasoning that favors a Friday for layoffs?
Not OP, but a lot of American companies do layoffs on a Friday in an attempt to have fewer headlines on a weekend (news outlets aren’t fully staffed then, people are distracted, etc.)
https://www.kornferry.com/insights/articles/bad-news-deliver...
There are several, one is that you can time it with payroll, so your last day is the end of the current payroll period, just makes it neat for accounting purposes.
Another is that if the company doesn't want the media to pick up the "bad news", Friday is the best time to do it because it'll get lost over the weekend when it's reported on.
And finally, there's less worry about retaliation from disgruntled employees if they have the weekend to calm down over being let go.
I think he/she is saying that announcing bad news on a Friday usually helps because it mitigates the amount of negative coverage it would receive from the media. Announcing on a Monday then seems unusual from a PR perspective.
A version of the article without the paywall: http://archive.is/OOuRC
I need to subscribe to read the full story and I don't want that.
Is Uber dead without a vaccine?
So they've now fired 6700 employees WHILE investing $170M into scooters AND offering to buy Grubhub at ~$6B.
Sociopaths.
Grubhub deal is all stock.
Layoffs were on the cards since more than 6 months already, COVID was just an excuse
Anyone know from the inside how this affects stock vesting and pre-IPO stock options?
Usually late stage startups switch from options to double-trigger RSUs years before they go public. I doubt anyone at Uber has unvested stock options.
Assuming anyone laid off had unexercised options, they'll likely have a short window to exercise them before they expire.
Furthermore, Uber is a public company now, and there is (as far as I know) no outstanding lockout period for employees. IF anyone has outstanding options, that are subject to a (most likely) 90-day exercise window, they can be exercised and immediately sold.
The typical "exercising of an option for an illiquid asset which will be taxed as if it's liquid" problems with start-up stock options simply don't exist in this case.
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb?
Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with equating ethical with generous. Basically it turns ethics into money, with the idea you can buy ethicalness.
If you’re cutting off someone’s source of income, giving them extra money gives them extra time to land on their feet. I’d say that’s pretty ethical.
Is shorter or zero severance unethical? We all enter into this employment contract knowing it could end abruptly from either party. If money is tight, they could afford longer severances for all if they cut 4000 instead. Does that not seem unethical toward the extra 1000 cut?
Regardless of legality and what the parties agreed to contractually, the fact remains that abrupt termination with zero severance is harmful for the former employee, especially in this economic climate. If the corporation pays a generous severance, the harm is reduced or eliminated. On a scale of ethicality, the more harmful an action is, the less ethical it is, so yes, paying severance is more ethical than not paying severance.
I find the terms "less and more" applied to ethical confusing. Telling a company to harm people a little instead of a lot is enabling.
My use of ethical here is strongly tied to obligation. e.g., it is kind to give money to a person, but not unethical if you chose not to especially if you can't afford to.
The way I understand you is that it's kinder/more sympathetic to provide a greater severance. This part I agree with!
Severance is not free, though. Increasing it will either cost Uber more heads or greater risk (and more heads later). I'm repeating this question: Is this not unethical to the retained employees?
Yeah, not sure why you would equate those two.
Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.
The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.
We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.
A lot of companies don't have a public image because nobody knows or cares what they do. So they have nothing to fear from a few bad glassdoor reviews.