Incoming layoffs... between wework and uber the market will be "flooded" with talent.
I wonder if having wework on your resume is a good or bad thing.
I wonder if having wework on your resume is a good or bad thing.
Uber is another story. They've got a sizeable engineering force.
IDK if making their own was the right solution, but it was driven by necessity and not boredom I assure you.
Anyway, HipChat was bought and killed by Slack. They avoided a dying product by accident.
At any rate HipChat was already dead prior to the sale. Atlassian made a new program from scratch called Stride which was its own little awful can of worms.
Build it, and they will come ... and do something you hadn't planned for.
> It was like 25k people in a single room iirc.
This never happened. I literally could not have happened. Uber ditched Hipchat when it was around 10k employees. The largest rooms I ever saw were outages or eng rooms with a few thousand, most with the room muted unless they needed something.
Seeing this behavior was as easy as doing a join in mysql for user ids and rooms. I mean it's likely you wouldn't have seen it, or the room, or had knowledge of it unless you weren't directly involved with whatever it was?
Most open-source and commercial software advertise that they can scale, but throw the first 500 or 5000 users and it's breaking apart.
Why not slack TL;DR - Uber, surprisingly, is cheap about off-the-shelf solutions. Cheaper than they are about balloons anyway.
Slack was trialed twice. Once in late 2015, and there were some bumps. Rather than stick with it, Uber ditched it citing it "couldn't handle their scale". Maybe that was true at the time, but I had a distinct impression that that's what the group in tech services at the time _wanted_ as well. Their lead on it was very much the type of person that would argue that there's no difference between hipchat and slack. If you asked the right person, you'd get the real answer: slack costs more than hipchat. Besides, the only person they had to convince was directors that didn't use chat anyway. All the executive leadership used Hangouts too. So they just needed to show the price graph comparison to justify, but as far as I know no qualitative productivity cost/savings/improvements measurement was made or factored into this.
Fast forward to the second try, late 2017. Supposedly when Dara came in he asked the same "why not Slack?" question. The UChat team was pretty intent on doubling down justifying their product, but a Slack pilot was done anyway. The pilot was a massive success by all accounts and basically everyone that made the switch was quite happy with it. Then tech services ended the pilot, sent out a survey, and were never heard from again. Would frequently give spiky answers when people asked for the results of the survey as well. Again - ask privately, and the answer you'll get is that Slack was just deemed as too expensive.
In both cases - tech services claimed that Slack was too expensive because of a price that was linearly extrapolated from their website. A lot of people didn't buy this, because that's just not really how enterprise contracts work. But tech services isn't accountable to UChat users, just the eng leadership they report up to.
In any case - everyone* else is still paying the productivity cost of using UChat/mattermost. It's more reliable than hipchat, sure. But is's miles away from being as useful as Slack. Especially the mobile apps - mattermost is a low quality, utilitarian react native app.
*Except ATG. ATG uses Slack because they actually don't fall under the CTO's jurisdiction. And executive leadership all still presumably use hangouts, because the UChat mobile apps are too crap.
I left Uber before the late 2017 Slack test, so I know nothing about it, but I think "It costs too much" is a very fair objection to using a chat app, especially for an unprofitable company that would have to pay for >30k seats.
At this point, I'm sure that Slack has resolved these performance issues for the sake of onboarding all companies that are Uber-sized or larger.
If that's the definition of a tech company, then Citibank, United Airlines and Fedex are also tech companies.
I don't think that's exclusive of the other types of company you can be.
To play devil's advocate a bit, isn't this how science works? If you're not checking the obvious, you won't discover that people actually drink more coffee on the afternoon, or what have you.
I guess I kind of wait until I feel particularly down and tired, but otherwise well hydrated, and that's when I want coffee, but not always at the same time of day.
(psst, train your own, damnit)
Actually, we just need this in general...
Now, Uber has it own share of quite extensive R&D on self driving tech. How can it be a $50 Bn market cap company today? With all the markets it is present in? For me, it looks like an opposite case of that of WeWork. Conspiracy against the company right in public market. It began with Travis getting all the heat for pretty trivial things, all the way till the IPO and now.
I honestly don't understand how a company which practically revolutionized public transport all over the world and created a business model which gave a bazillion uber-for-X companies be valued so less.
This makes their business vulnerable to price competition and raises doubts about their ability to make large profits over any long period of time. At the moment, they are losing money, but their (still high, imo) valuation is based on the fact that they are the biggest player and this means they have 'mind share' / brand awareness. If they try to start making a profit e.g. by pricing above their costs and not giving so many subsidies / bonuses, then they are vulnerable to any of their numerous competitors stealing market share by undercutting / offering their own bonuses or subsidies. They are already in fierce competition in many markets so it doesn't seem that their brand is necessarily enough to give them a huge and defensible advantage.
By contrast, all reports I have read (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/7c8e1d02-2ff2-11e9-8744-e7016697f... ) indicate that Waymo's self-driving tech is the best in the market by some margin, with Cruise a distant second (and everyone else, including Uber, way behind that). And Waymo's technology is fundamentally more complicated and difficult to copy than a taxi hailing app. You couldn't have multiple local competitors to Waymo popping up in each city around the world, in the same way you have with Uber. So their competitive advantage seems a lot more defensible, meaning that their potential to earn defensible profits from their technology seem stronger in the long run. Continuing on this idea of defensibility: whereas people are happy to try any new cab-hailing app that launches with a promotion, the decision on which self-driving tech to use is going to be a lot more strict, in that unless it really works, it's not viable. So having the best tech makes a BIG difference, unlike for ride sharing.
The car industry is worth $1tn+ per year. The market for ride sharing is probably one or two orders of magnitude smaller than that ($12bn by 2025 according to this: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ride-sharing-market... , although Uber's revenues are already $11bn so I question the accuracy of this). Uber is a loss-making and non-unique ride sharing company with so-far unfilled aspirations to develop market-ready self-driving tech. Waymo is a self-driving tech company with apparently real potential to disrupt the trillion-dollar car industry with their unique technology.
Finally, Waymo's valuation is only on paper, whereas Uber's is in a public market. As WeWork (and Uber) have recently demonstrated, private valuations may not hold in private markets. However, given the reasons above, I actually think that the Waymo valuation might be more reasonable than the Uber one.