Uber engineering layoffs expected tomorrow
theinformation.com
theinformation.com
Edit: actually, the fault here seems to be that the submitter rewrote the title in an editorializing way, which is against the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for plenty of past explanation.
Edit 2: the article isn't buried for that reason but because of the hard paywall. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23214650
I sent an email to The Information asking if they'd unlock this one for HN readers: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... They do that sometimes. If they do, and it isn't too late, we'll unbury the submission.
[0] https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21
Asking employees to take a pay cut is always a bad idea. Having gone through the dotcom bust, I can tell you that paycuts across the board will demotivate employees, even if they keep their jobs. As soon as this pandemic is over, they will flee to another company willing to pay them more.
The best way to handle crises like this, or the dotcom bust, or the next recession, is to cut deeply once. Too many times you get into situations where you want to do the least amount of damage and you don't have the courage to make the cuts you need. And then you end up going through multiple cuts over and over again, which paralyzes the company. Cut deeply, and preserve the cash bonuses and promotion cycles for the ones who remain. Show that you will take care of the employees laid off with generous severance packages, and then you will take care of the employees that stay, and this will cement loyalty.
“Uber by McKinsey” [1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins...
Now is the time to:-
- Get your resume up-to-date
- Keep on top of friends/ex-colleagues who are at other companies still hiring
- Be ready (to move out of state, start your own gig, etc.)
Are any of them any good?
I am sorry but Uber is just a glorified taxi middleman and I have seen a good enough alternatives in some local markets that blew Uber out of the water.
What does Uber bring to the table if they cant even win in some super small countries?
The high salary bonanza may be over, but work still seems plentiful.
This kind of recession plays to our skills.
The .com bust was really the last time there was a huge wave of layoffs in the software industry. I'm glad I was able to go through that early in my career to get perspective. And honestly, at the end of the day I think it was a good thing. It flushed out most the people who didn't give 2 shits about software but saw it as the place to get money. Perhaps another downturn like that is needed.
“I did it for about 10 years, then I took a couple years off to work as a programmer, then got back into selling cars about 2 years ago...”
The industry was snapping up anyone who could spell computer back in the late 90s. It seems less excessive than that in the current/just ended boom.
The number of engineers that know how to write a basic java or ruby/node/go web service, some frontend, and basics of using a RDBMS getting half a mil TC is quite high in the bay. However, they lack the background to really advance a company's technical direction, reduce major inefficiencies, or handle problems of scale in a rigorous manner. It's a trend I see having interacted with engineers of all levels at a large number of silicon valley companies.
With the era of kubernetes and virtually unlimited cloud hardware on-demand, any college grad can stand up dozens of microservices quickly and satisfy almost any consumer or enterprise product's requirements by throwing money at the problem. To some degree, it's worse at FANGs given how the tooling has essentially narrowed most engineer's focuses to just writing application logic and abstracting everything else away. For these companies, it's effectively cheaper to run thousands of extremely inefficient microservices than try to consolidate the architecture into something leaner and more efficient. Sadly, smaller companies try to emulate this pattern and end up burning piles of VC cash to build something that really requires a fraction of the compute or engineering resources.
What this ultimately means is most "engineers" truly are replaceable, lack depth in understanding, and are nothing more than code monkeys. It's about time we see a market correction.
Pretend money met reality.
So not that risky all things considered and they did pay better than FAANG to make up for that.
Do you realise you can sell it to get real money?
If you were doing that every year and treating your RSUs are a normal part of your compensation then you would have been taking home your entire half-million or so pre-tax as an engineer at Uber.
That's not pretend money.
You do realize they’re worthless until you vest right? I’m pretty sure Uber and Lyft are on a one year cliff. That’s one year of risk and what do you know, those RSUs just vaporized..
The only non FAANG RSUs making money now are real tech companies, not these service industries masquerading as tech.
So, what's your point again?
You could have joined FB and probably gotten a 100k signing bonus on top of what you had in RSUs and you’d still have a job.
These companies were masquerading and pretending they can compete with FAANG, they can’t.
Not sure why you consider getting laid off a problem for someone who has Facebook offers in the recent past. It's the people still employed at Lyft that are in a harder position versus having taken a Facebook offer. That's however a quirk of the pandemic, in any other recession your Facebook RSUs would be tanking in value as well.
The stock is down roughly 27% of what my pre-IPO offer was.
TC-wise, I’m sitting at ~390k vs ~440k. Roughly 12% less than what I was expecting. It sucks but it’s not the end of the world.
You just explained it yourself. It's either pay 300-500k or the people you need to hire will go Apple instead. There's no option to pay less if you need highly competent people.
Work tends to always fill the available work capacity. Creating fake work that holds up the whole organization. Wasting time and money. The first one is much more important than the second.
I wrote about Overhiring in a much too long article here https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/overhiring-b966a6ff383d... (free to read medium link, must migrate away from them soon).
> Uber Managers Asked for Pay Cut to Save Jobs. The CEO Said No
In a small startup the "company-wide pay cuts" might fly for a while, if everyone is truly motivated. But in a massive public company, where the majority doesn't feel connected to leadership, this would never work. The star employees would jump ship immediately if there weren't carve-outs for some people to avoid the cuts, which defeats the whole "we are in this together" purpose of the company-wide pay cuts.
I'll say this straight - if I was a non-upper management employee and they asked me to lose 25% of my income, I would leave ASAP.