Not saying they don't need them, it's just that there are a lot of "Wait that needs X people?" situations and I wish I knew what they did for a given use case.
Accounting?
Does uber need a lot of local reps for regulatory requirements?
I think a lot of "omg what do they do?" is actually curiosity.
I work on a SaaS product, we have a really small team. Accordingly we can't afford a lot of NIH when it can be avoided.
I talked to a semi-competitor and they noted they built a thing, we have that thing too ... 24 different devs on that project and they do have some extra features ... but it took them 9 months of 24 devs (not all full time granted) and my boss and I hammered it out in a week.
Our customers are using it, meanwhile they haven't sold it to anyone.
Now I'm sure there are advantages to their work but as far as what it does ... pretty much the same thing as far as core functionality goes :O
The amount of cycles NIH can scoop up is astounding.
This looks to be just for service workers and contractors (like recruiters)
Uber was already a long-term market capture play. They were losing money but grabbing the market with the hope that they'd be able to get automated cars on the road in time. That was kind of sustainable (for a while, anyway), but now they're getting even less cash and will likely have to cut back to the must-haves.
Layoffs have got to be terrible for morale. I'd expect you'd want to minimize the anxiety by getting all the uncertainty out of the way.
My suspicion is that the lay off got leaked and it forced the company’s hand. They are probably scrambling to get everything finalized ASAP.
And eng lay-off requires more planning than customer support lay-off