Uber CTO resigns amidst 5400 employee layoff | Hacker News Reader

Uber CTO resigns amidst 5400 employee layoff

techcrunch.com

176 pointsdzonga52 comments

This article lifts from https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-discusses-plan-..., which is discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011146.

That thread was buried because of the hard paywall (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but The Information sometimes unlocks their articles for HN readers, and they agreed to do so with this one. Thanks!

We'll merge the relevant comments thither. It's a bit tricky, as we don't want the supercapitary carp to end up in the wrong thread.

FWIW, I'm getting the paywall.

EDIT: Ah, if you click from this article, you get the paywall. But if you follow dang's link to the other thread, and click from there, the paywall is removed.

Sorry for the confusion. I'll try to fix this link too.

I have no idea what "supercapitary carp" is, but I just love the sound of it... :D

I couldn't think of an adjective for the carp that is over our heads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014677), so I made one.

> and offering only a carp over their heads

Is this an American term? Or is it a typo for 'tarp'.

I wondered the same thing. Sleeping under a fish just seems kind of odd.

I’m an American and was highly confused by this statement.

Not an American term. Just a typo that, like everything about Uber, is a little too fishy.

You made me click. They fixed it to tarp. And here I was about to go on a wild goose chase to see if there might have been a reasonable explanation for why a carp was used. :)

Maybe related: in Spanish, "carpa" means both "carp" the fish and "tent".

I never thought to ask why they're the same, but Wikipedia says "carpa" as "tent" comes from Quechua and as a fish comes from Latin.

Sounds like they're floundering around looking for the right word.

If this is your sense of humor, can I recommend an inkredible anime called Squid Girl ika?

The carp is an invasive species in the Americas, so I'd say both?

Looks like they fixed it.

Is the resignation actually related to layoffs or the title just clickbait? Because "amidst" means nothing concrete.

It would seem the actual article title is: "Thuan Pham, who fled Vietnam as a child and became Uber’s CTO in 2013, is leaving the company". Maybe it changed after posting, maybe not. But the clickbait we have now is a bit disingenuous. The article TechCrunch cites as its source has far less ambiguous wording:

"Layoffs of that magnitude, which haven’t been finalized but could be announced in stages in the coming weeks, could result in more than 5,400 of Uber’s 27,000 employees losing their jobs. Separately, Uber’s chief technology officer Thuan Pham—who joined Uber in 2013 and is the longest-serving senior executive at the company—has resigned from the company, said a person with knowledge of the situation."

This is a pernicious problem with journalism in general(or really, any writing that wants to convince you of some point of view).

Whenever I see the weasley language of "X happens amidst Y" or "As Y grows, X happens", I just assume that X has nothing to do with Y unless I am given evidence otherwise.

I think I should probably do that, but it feels so unnatural for me to be suspicious or cynical of so much at face value and assume that people are always trying to manipulate my thinking at some level. I may end up being more intelligent by doing this and have better outcomes in everything I do, but I'm not confident that I'd feel happier in the process.

If you were looking to maximize happiness, not reading anything beyond local news once every day or two and national/international news every 5-7 days would probably go a long way.

I think what they mean is that they don't yet have proof it's related, but it's a factor reasonable people could think relevant.

And personally, I'm sure it is. There's no way that that discussions around his resignation didn't involve the pandemic. Even if he had planned 6 months ago to leave now, execs still should have said, "Hey, it looks really bad for you to leave right now, and your people would benefit from stability. Could you stay longer?"

The title says "5400 employee layoff" but the article doesn't seem to mention that. It only mentions that they expect a big layoff. Am I missing some other news or is this title wrong?

> Uber’s 27,000 employees

I am curious why Uber has 27,000 employees and whether tis is reasonable? Does this number include their other app UberEats too? And do they consider their branches for driver registration verification etc in each city to be employees? I feel like a lot of this can be trimmed down.

Offline/online takes a lot of people. Global logistics is nothing to scoff at.

I'm actually more surprised they have 3,800 engineers. Probably one of the biggest cost centers will definitely get trimmed.

Yeah, me too.

It is insane the amount of people developing software those companies have.

If they can keep afloat while having such a big tech body paying high salaries hats off to them! It still amazes me.

That 27,000 number isn't all software developers.

It includes the number working on their Eats, Driver, autonomous driving, internal products, etc. It's the employees of Uber, the company, not Uber the ride share app.

Article states:

> The outlet suggests the discussed cuts could impact upwards of 20 percent of Uber’s 27,000 employees

which checks out -- 20% of 27,000 is 5400.

Ah thank you!

Given Uber's high level of internal competitiveness, their culture issues, and their grow-at-all-costs ethos, I would be totally unsurprised that they have a lot more people than you'd see at a hypothetical saner company delivering the same value.

Even if that's true, it doesn't mean that a large cut like this will help anything. It's totally plausible that this will the make culture worse, get staff into a scarcity mindset, and reduce the levels of collaboration and value focus.

Losing weight can be good, but just cutting off a limb is not the best way to go about it.

A criticism of the "grow at all costs" mindset: they aren't even executing on that efficiently. Per their GitHub account, they have 162 open source libraries. That's 162 open source solutions they could have found elsewhere and moved on to more pressing business needs.

Perhaps the thing didn’t exist and they had to create it? Perhaps the open source thing didn’t fit their needs?

Perhaps not perfect substitutions, but business acumen is seeing a solution that's 90% of what you're looking for is more than adequate. It seems unlikely the organization identified 162 truly novel problems. It appears some needless reinventing of the wheel may have occurred. It's a common problem that certainly isn't exclusive to Uber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

Licensing can also be an issue sometimes.

Tell me about it. Oracle wants a pound of flesh for a few licenses, and Windows, VMware, and others can be onerous (though I'll concede Windows is getting better)

Yeah, I have to wonder how much of that is Promotion-Driven Development. A few contributions to an existing package is way less impressive than writing a whole new thing from scratch. In case others are curious, here's the list:

https://github.com/uber

I'm sure some of those were necessary. But I have a hard time believing all of them were.

I once saw some article about them writing their own rich chat client for their internal tooling because their existing solution wouldn't "uber scale" - whatever that meant.

That reminds me of the delightful "MongoDB is web scale" spoof video from years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Clearly Uber scale is one level up!

How many of those libraries are even used by Uber? While I think open source is intrinsically valuable, it feels like a lot of work out there is innovation theater by those with extra VC cash.

So they shouldn't have open sourced?

I think the point is that they shouldn't have written the code in the first place. Although if it is innovation theater, then yeah, maybe they shouldn't release it, either. A real open-source project is a long-term commitment to a community, not a PR checklist item.

There’s very little downside. Spend some money from wealthy people and institutions, get some engineers paid, get some code written. The only losers are the investors who, per their job description, take the risk. Perhaps simplified but I like companies spending money on this stuff.

Risk is part of investment of course, but isn't the assumption the money will be spent in ways that focuses on return? (I know the answer being a developer, but taking the broader perspective)

They've definitely over-hired at times -- if you raise a lot of cash, you have to spend it somewhere.

This is true. I've seen startups spend huge amounts of money on things like lavish game-rooms, lavish-company-outings, lavish-xyz.... It really is because they have to spend the money. It sounds crazy (and maybe it is), but a company doesn't always raise money because they need it. They often sell stock at price $Y so they can say X shares at $Y price means that we are valued at $Z - wanna buy us out? They have to spend money that they brought in selling pre-ipo stock at price $Y so that they can show (on paper) that they're worth $Z for buyout (or maybe more stock splits). But when they raise the money and they want to raise more (to raise their company value), then they have to demonstrate that they need it; you don't need money if you already have some in the bank. Gotta get rid of that money first, then show why you need it and how much you'll be worth some day. Source: Done-it (to a small degree).

You don’t have to be out of money to raise funds, so I question that you have to spend the money. You can raise with years of runway, provided that you have a compelling story about how you’re going to put the additional funds to use creating value.

I agree that you don't have to be out of money, and some companies do take the approach that you describe. Honestly, I wish that the world worked more like that...I really do. In my experience, though, that's not how the majority of the dot-com startup-world works. Maybe it was just the decade and location in which I had my run at it (this past decade 2010-2020, SoCal) that's left me jaded. That said, I don't think that a compelling story about how you're going to add value is always enough - in a lot of competitive spaces, in order to be compelling you must have either (a) existing Intellectual Property (IP, aka Patents) that will keep competitors out of market or (b) enough "might-makes-right momentum" (aka money) to keep competitors out of the market. But... in scenario (b), you can't really get money unless you ask for it (or earn it the old fashioned way by having a profitable business model), and you can't ask for money unless you can demonstrate a need.... and you don't need it if you already have some money... It easily and quickly becomes a Catch-22 where you are spending money so that you can show that you don't have any; simultaneously, you can base your company value (and how much investors can should give) on how much you've earned (i.e. your stock price).

I'm not refuting your point so much as I'm suggesting that there's a darker underside to how things often work. You're right -- you don't have to be out of money to raise funds; but smoke and mirrors is a lot easier than hard work...and many people/companies choose the latter path.

How do the returns on this kind of spending compare to spending on more traditional capital assets?

Tends to be "high-risk, high-reward".

I don't know the correct answer but is it that surprise?

Uber offers their service in 63 countries. The nature of their business model requires the presence of physical branch office in these 64 countries.

In the Tokyo, even the restaurants run by very old people who don't understand what the Internet is support UberEats. That means somebody physically visit these restaurants, negotiate to support it, hand them the tablet with SIM and patiently teach how to use it. I doubt they could do that tasks with just a bunch of contractors.

That's actually what I was wondering whether they have those presence in the countries and UberEats as employees or contractors/third party. I feel like things like background checks can easily be done via third parties.

The information article says they are going to layoff 800 tech staff from 3,800 in total.

Oh wow, and we just had this story, I'm not sure if it's similar enough to merge:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011146

I think your custom link title gives far more relevant context than the TC title, and in far fewer words.

My last submission got on the front page then they edited the title back to the (IMO opaque) original title, citing the guidelines[1]:

> If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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