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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

I cannot understand why Uber needs 22k employees.

I get it that WhatsApp and StackOverflow and Instagram have/had a lot less legal, financial, and marketing requirements. But Uber has almost 1000 times the amount of employees WhatsApp, Instagram, and StackOverflow had when they reached similar scale.

I get it that there's a lot more analytics and geospatial complexity in Uber. I get it that they have to manage tens (hundreds?) of thousands of drivers.

It just seems like there's a LOT of unnecessary fat that could be cut.

Facebook only had 4k employees when they IPOed. Google had only 1,900!

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Uber has a huge community operations team that's in charge of making sure that its drivers stay productive and at least semi-at-peace with the way the system works (and evolves!) There's a lot more human-to-human work needed in this business than for a social-media site, or an automated online-ad service.

That's where a lot of the 22,000 employees are, and if Uber could thrive without them, it surely would have already done so. Among the tasks I see listed in a current Uber job ad:

--Walk driver-partners through the onboarding process and all of the tools they need to be successful on the Uber platform

-- Help existing driver-partners troubleshoot any issues they experience (i.e. a delayed payment)

-- Help brand the Uber name and get driver-partners excited to be on the road

-- Assist with events and promotions as needed (occasionally off-site, during off-hours or weekends)

>and if Uber could thrive without them, it surely would have already done so.

That's uber's position, that doesn't make it so.

----Help brand the Uber name and get driver-partners excited to be on the road

Why is this essential? It seems like a fluffy marketing position to me.

It is fluffy marketing. But bear in mind that when you're offering a B-minus experience to drivers in terms of pay, hours and quality of life, it takes a lot of fluffy marketing to minimize driver churn or corrosive behavior.

Classic HN lol.

Just get one of the engineers to write code to get driver-partners excited to be on the road. Seems like an easy weekend hack.

Uber has around 25 offices in the UK alone. Most are required for local regulation afaik. If this is scaled across the US and Europe that could easily run into hundreds of offices, inflating their employee count for relatively minor employees.

https://www.uber.com/en-GB/drive/resources/contact-us/

I can definitely understand 22k considering all the drivers to manage. And imagine how many employees you need to manage regulatory compliance in as many cities, counties, provinces, states, countries they have to deal with.

The more interesting figure to me would be how many of those 22k are developers.

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