Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
wsj.com
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Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.
When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude.
But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.
Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.
Boeing 747 design team was 4500 engineers and they were done in 29 months.
That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Is this sarcasm? Seems like a really user-hostile attitude if not. Admittedly, my personal point-of-view is that the majority of UI updates are make-work for engineers and PMs with at best no value added, and at worst negative value created (as you experienced).
Fuck people doing this. Especially extremely radical design changes such as Twitter's and Facebook's "redesigns" that they force down the throats of their users. Or Microsoft.
No, the trick is to iteratively change the UI in a way that's easy for the user to get used to.
Those example pathologies you listed are SOP at all the mature orgs I've worked at.
What do you think differentiates a company that becomes "mature" vs one that flames out?
You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.
R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.
Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).
If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).
As the userbase scales, infrastructure scales, and what was once a simple "ALTER TABLE" is now a system with a team managing it because a single Postgres instance didn't scale.
As the engineering headcount scales, code changes, builds, even understanding the system become slower. You overcome that with better engineering, but mostly more engineers.
As the product matures, there's still a drive for growth, but the low-hanging product fruit has been picked, so you get lots of product teams trying to either optimize their little part because, at scale, it makes a big difference, or product teams working on new, crazy ideas--the startup within a unicorn-startup--that will most likely fail.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
These are complete guesses for the pre-covid era, but it gives an idea of scale difference. The average Airbnb user probably books 2-3 times per year. The average Uber user probably books 2-3 rides per week. At 50x the volume, the infrastructure is different, and probably more complicated to handle the volume.
This seems so strange to me. As a lead, most of my work is management, organization, and planning. To scratch the development itch I usually have 1 pet project going on that I either use when I'm taking a break from actual work or work on in my spare time. But even that pet project has pretty clear long or short term value and the only reason why it's not being worked on by my team is because it hasn't been prioritized yet. I can't imagine working on a pet project that has no clear value to the company.
At the end of the day, it's just a reminder that careful screening is important. Could be a cultural issue that impacts certain unicorns, but it's also on the hiring company to thoroughly fact-check and test a candidate (and no, leetcode and simple arch questions aren't enough).
That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
I call this "artificial panic". That term came to mind when I joined a FMCG around Y2K, and on my first weeks I noticed people were running around stressed, like headless chicken. When I asked "what's on fire" and the answer was "nothing".
https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-07-15
The "Minimalists" say on their podcast that "most emergencies, aren't". When I see panic setting camp in a company's mentality, I make myself scarce for a while until things calm down. If I see that the artificial state of panic is a perpetual feeding machine, I try to dance around it. I've read my share of Dilbert to know to avoid these toxic environments.
Sometimes you need to be a Wally to survive.
Never worked for a unicorn, but everything from big corp to startup to government. "Urgent" provokes no reaction from me anymore because of this.
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.
(edited for formatting, thanks @mkl)
"""
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.
A few heuristics that I find useful: 1. Revenue per employee 2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months 3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.
It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.
This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).
However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.
I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much different than working at a startup day-to-day. And as a bonus you get to be a part of the large-scale wins and loses. Much like how it's exciting when the Warriors win, it's exciting when something big comes out of your company. Even if you did nothing but cheer.
Everyone is expendable. Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable. So are people at large companies or small startups. But within your team, you get to do good work, and it doesn't feel that way.
I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.
I work at company with less than 100 people, I know where many of the bodies are buried, etc. But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least.
If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty minimal if your cause of death is meteor strike. It would likely cover a percentage of the income you would have earned for your remaining years of work.
But opening a req seems totally reasonable when you are demonstrably not coming back.
But the point is everyone is expendable. I worked for a company around 2009. They laid a lot of people off that had more seniority than I did. I wondered why they kept me around.
Three months later I found out. The founder had written a bespoke development tool chain in C++ using MVC and assembly. The board push him out and the CTO told me that I was now responsible for maintaining the tool chain because I was the only one who knew C++ and assembly.
1) Are you suggesting that developers should go join a smaller company so they are less expendible?
2) Are you suggesting that developers, now that they are laid off, go work on R&D projects, tooling and open source startups?
I am so confused. What is the take away?
Orthogonally, typically large companies have a maslow hierarchy of sorts: for every infrastructural endeavor, there may be a number of others that are more "nice-to-have" niche projects that aren't really critical to anyone else's ability to deliver results.
The most vulnerable employees are those on niche projects, despite these projects being internally focused (as opposed to open sourced). Infra folks whose work may be open source are typically less vulnerable because they do in fact work on critical, well, infrastructure.
I've always worked in manufacturing so people aren't that easily expendible. Takes a long time to train someone and without them, one of the line shuts down or gets less productive / slow.
You're wrong, and not just about the Pareto principle.
Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.
It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.
Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers.
The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.
Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc.
These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing revenues or decreasing costs. Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove.
Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.
I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.
I also think more people than Graeber have been aware of the existence of BS jobs for a long time.
What is nice about the Wikipedia page is that it acknowledges that BS jobs "is a thing".
Perhaps it facilitates more open discussion of the phenomenon.
SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 may be facilitating the discussion even more as it has forced people to consider what jobs are "essential" versus what logically can be referred to as "non-essential".
I have seen one commenter on HN raise the issue of why pay does appear to correlate with whether a job is essential or not. Perhaps this is something more people will start to think about.
I've never been at a unicorn, but I have been at many startups. The story is the same everywhere. Almost no one is irreplaceable. When times get tight, cutting overhead means letting people go.
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
All said and done, I’m actually impressed they got through this in under a month.
It allows you to ramp down without pandemonium.
Also as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
The full email:
Team Uber:
These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly that we had to take tough action to resize our company to the new reality of our business, and that I would come back to you this week with the specifics.
Today I have the specifics: we have made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce by around 3,000 people, and to reduce investments in several non-core projects. As a leadership team we had to take the time to make the right decisions, to ensure that we are treating our people well, and to make certain that we could walk you through our decision making in the sort of detailed and transparent manner you deserve.
Where we started and hard choices
We began 2020 on an accelerated path to total company profitability. Then the coronavirus hit us with a once-in-a-generation public health and economic crisis. People are rightfully staying home, and our Rides business, our main profit generator, is down around 80%. We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape.
You’ve heard me say it before: hope is not a strategy. While that’s easy to say, the truth is that this is a decision I struggled with. Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear. Ultimately, I realized that hoping the world would return to normal within any predictable timeframe, so we could pick up where we left off on our path to profitability, was not a viable option.
I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect our stock price, or to please our Board or investors. I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world—our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us—demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.
We have to take these hard actions to stand strong on our own two feet, to secure our future, and to continue on our mission.
I know that none of this will make it any easier for our friends and colleagues affected by the actions we are taking today. To those of you personally impacted, I am truly sorry. I know this will cause pain for you and your families, especially now. Many of you will be affected not because of the quality of your work, but because of strategic decisions we made to discontinue certain areas of activity, or projects that are no longer necessary, or simply because of the stark reality we face. You have been a huge part of this company and every day forward we will build on the foundations that you established, brick by brick.
Our decisions and the road forward
We have decided to re-focus our efforts on our core. If there is one silver lining regarding this crisis, it’s that Eats has become an even more important resource for people at home and for restaurants; and delivery, whether of groceries or other local goods, is not only an increasing part of everyday life, it is here to stay. We no longer need to look far for the next enormous growth opportunity: we are sitting right on top of one. I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses. I have every belief that the moves we are making will get Eats to profitability, just as we did with Rides, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
So we need to fundamentally change the way we operate. We need to make some really hard decisions about what we will and won’t do going forward, based on a few principles:
We are organizing around our core: helping people move, and delivering things.
We are building a cost-efficient structure that avoids layers and duplication and can scale, at speed.
We are being intentional with our location strategy focused on key markets/hubs.
Mac will now lead a unified Mobility team, which will include Rides and, as of today, Transit. Mac will continue to manage our cross-cutting functions like Safety & Insurance, CommOps, U4B, and Business Development, the latter of which will be centralized across Rides, Eats, and Freight under Jen. Pierre will lead what we will call “Delivery” internally, encompassing Eats, Grocery and Direct.
Given the necessary cost cuts and the increased focus on core, we have decided to wind down the Incubator and AI Labs and pursue strategic alternatives for Uber Works. Due to these decisions, Zhenya has decided it makes sense to move on from Uber. Zhenya is customer-centric to her core, and I am deeply grateful for all of her hard work.
We are also looking at our geographic footprint. While it served us well for many years to cast a wide physical net, it’s time to be more intentional about where we have employees on the ground. We are closing or consolidating around 45 office locations globally, including winding down Pier 70 in San Francisco and moving some of those colleagues to our new HQ in SF. And over the next 12 months we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services.
Having learned my own personal lesson about the unpredictability of the world from the punch-in-the-gut called COVID-19, I will not make any claims with absolute certainty regarding our future. I will tell you, however, that we are making really, really hard choices now, so that we can say our goodbyes, have as much clarity as we can, move forward, and start to build again with confidence.
How we are helping departing employees
As we previewed last week, we have taken a lot of feedback and worked to provide strong severance benefits and other support for those leaving Uber, like healthcare coverage and an alumni talent directory. We’re also taking care to support people in special situations a bit differently, like those on US visas or parental leaves. While the details will differ slightly by country, you can see a summary here. Every departing employee will have a 1:1 to receive the details of their individual package.
Given the global nature of these changes, and the local rules and regulations involved, the individual experience today will vary by country:
All other countries (those not listed to the right)
Argentina, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland (COE only), Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan (Karachi only), Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, UK (ULL only)
In these countries, we can communicate about individual impacts today.
Everyone in these countries who is affected has already received an email, and will soon have a calendar invitation to a private meeting with a manager and HR.
If you are in one of these countries and you did not receive a separate email this morning, you are not affected.
In these countries, local laws mean that we cannot be as specific about individual impacts today.
In some countries, we will start a consultation process. In others, there are restrictions on making changes during the COVID lockdown.
If you are in one of these countries, you will get an email from Nikki describing next steps for your location.
If you are one of the many affected Uber teammates, I’ll acknowledge right here that any package we offer, regardless of how thoughtful or generous, will never replace the opportunity to belong, to make a difference, to establish the kinds of bonds you establish with any important company or cause. We wouldn’t be here without you. We will finish what you started, and we will be excited to see the great things that you will build next.
I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because the resilience and grit you’ve shown has made Uber the company it is and will continue to be. I’ve never had a harder day professionally than today, but Uber has consistently surprised me with the challenges it has thrown my way. But it’s the toughest challenges that are worthwhile, and I know even more strongly in my heart than I ever have that Uber is worth it, and more.
Dara
That said, I've seen a number of layoff announcements from CEOs recently where there have been a number of "Wow, really great job announcing those layoffs" comments. And, while I agree with that, part of me thinks that we've become so conditioned to especially shitty layoff announcements and corporate double speak that when someone does something that really shouldn't be that difficult (speak with empathy, genuineness, but clarity on what must be done, and treat employees who are leaving well) that we're all particularly impressed.
I'm in no way saying layoffs are easy, and I know many good CEOs who agonize over those decisions. At the same time, I think we should try to raise our expectations of how employees should be humanely treated.
This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for their shareholders. Portraying it as something noble is more than a little tone-deaf.
I feel for the people affected and I hope they find new roles soon.
Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.
Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.
For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.
Even with the highly publicized Uber failures, no Uber I've ever taken has been worse than many of the cabs I was in prior. Something as simple as knowing the price up front has been key when traveling.
So sure, of course they want to stay an ongoing concern. But, services like Uber and Lyft have become essential to many people.
She doesnt drive following a car wreck. She had walk half a mile to wait out in the bitter rocky mountain cold at a bus stop to go to the Dr. Shes on social security. She told me she didnt have the money to take a cab, that is if she could even get a hold of one.
Then uber came along.
She learn to use uber on her own before even whatsapp.
Yea, I'd call it downright essential.
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
[1] https://www.jornalcruzeiro.com.br/sorocaba/locadoras-de-carr... (pt-br) [2] https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/03/23/coronavirus-s... (pt-br) [3] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/sem-servico-160-mil-mo... (pt-br) [4] https://www.uol.com.br/carros/colunas/autodata/2020/05/15/lo... (pt-br) [5] https://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2020/0... [6] https://www.blogdaslocadoras.com.br/locadoras-de-carros/reco...
That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
You are completely twisting the label of an essential service in a way that makes it effectively meaningless. For every worker that depends on their salary for their livelihood, their job is essential, but that has nothing to do with an "essential service".
When you are working 10-12 hours a day to make ends meet and shoulder the all costs of the depreciating fix assets there is very little opportunity dig yourself out of that hole.
Uber and similar companies are destroying the very small businesses (or squashing their margins into nothing) which traditionally are the environment that the poor can become entrepreneurs and build their own local business.
Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets.
A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
I suspect buying a reasonable used compact car is much more financially prudent than using Uber as you means of transportation. Maybe the calculus flips in a dense city like NYC but there's no way people who commute every day with Uber are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.
You think poor people are using Uber to get around?
I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I don't have any of those things. Not even close.
is uber cheaper than cabs/public transpo w/o the VC subsidy? 15 years ago there was no uber and people were able to get by using public transpo.
The World Wide Web was invented only 30 years ago, yet it's arguably the single most essential service during this time. Without it, social distancing while keeping large parts of the economy alive wouldn't have even been an option.
At the rate technology is becoming embedded into our daily lives, I think an arbitrary number of years is definitely not the way to decide whether something is essential. Context matters. What if instead of a pandemic that affects the lungs, the next one affects older people's ability to walk? Not very hard to imagine Uber being considered a 100% essential service at that point.
Useful? No. Effective? No. Meaningful? No. But definitely simple.
By those measures BTW, antibiotics, modern sewers and (for the most part) vacinations aren't essential.
And indeed they aren't, for the survival of the human race. They are, however, very important for the survival of individual humans.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that but who knows.
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
I'm just curious, did you take the time to add the emphasis here, or did the original email have the word "everyone" surrounded by asterisk characters?
Any company that facilitates or provides an in-person service that has seen a sharp decline from Covid-19 is pretty clearly not an essential service in the minds of their customers.
And precisely because public transport IS essential we still had all of it running, just at a reduced capacity to facilitate the essential public demand. So comparing public transport with Uber only highlights even more how Uber is non essential, because we can live pretty much without it, but we evidently can't without public transport (as seen in London).
I would argue some portion of the accommodations industry is essential (avg. occupancy rates of around ~%60 in normal times, so let's say ~%60 of hotels/motels are essential) and yet I know multiple hoteliers who have had to close shop for the next few months due to zero volume. This doesn't mean that day-to-day, hotels aren't an essential service.
Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.
> reply
not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.
This trope needs to die. Pension funds are heavily diversified investment vehicles of which VC is one part of the asset allocation. If a pension fund CIO (Chief Investment Officer) weights their asset allocation towards too much of the VC asset allocation then yes this is a problem - but they don't. In fact they have made size-able returns as a result of simply being disciplined about the risks and rewards of VC as an asset class.
Money, better and cheaper transportation where it sucked, and jobs for much more people than just developers.
They still make a large loss every year. Cash is not as bad, because (a) half the loss is in the form of "stock-based-compensation" and (b) they've been growing, which improves cash flows.
Stock prices are (astonishingly) doing ok. Idk if that means uber can still raise whatever they need, but I suppose it does.
They can't really ride out a dip in stock price though. They almost certainly can't cut enough to be profitable... Even if 2020 revenues weren't lower than last year's.
Uber still operates financially like a startup... they have a certain amount of runway.... It's longer than most startups, but it's still under two years.
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Some recent (public) things:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/14/texas-prisons-corona...
https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2156392/air-...
https://dot.la/coronavirus-rapid-test-curative-los-angeles-2...
If you can afford it, I’d suggest taking a break.
You can debate whether it was successful at GE. The criticism of Jack Welch was that his approach improved short-term financials, but he left a hollowed-out company to his successor that became irrelevant and lost value relative to the S&P.
The way I see this playing out at Uber is rapidly exiting categories like Scooters, Freight, Works, and AV. And doubling down on Ride Share and Eats with acquisitions in geographies where they have a leading position. I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility.
Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.
Basically by only keeping the strongest you should get the highest rate of return until these is a failure. A portfolio play gives you more modest returns but more consistent over time -- you should still trim the losers who do not have potential.
They just sold Jump, while investing in Lime. I think scooters could still be used as a "last-mile" strategy for Ride Share, and maybe acquire teen mindshare and a sort of platform play. But it's a spinoff with a long leash.
What context does Uber have now, that they did not when the initial layoff wave happened?
> What context does Uber have now
More data that can be feed into their financials models to understand the short-term and long-term impact of this market on their cash flow. Companies don't do layoffs because things are nice and predictable.
the cut deep, cut once method for layoffs is doing business 101, but still there are 2 rounds of layoffs at uber
My profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmaskasky/
Seriously, we're hiring everywhere and we're optionally wfh until October. We remotely interview and onboard.
www.amazon.jobs, or email me at <this HN alias> at <company> dot com. Happy to help direct you.
To make it through the filter, it doesn't need to be fancy or take a lot of time, but it does need to be tasteful. Of course, fancy and playful go a very, very long ways for separating yourself from all the other people who made it through the filter.
Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with huge costs, the actual reality is that this is nothing more than the emperor new clothes. Unfortunately there are no sacred cows being saved here, especially engineering being affected in this.
And to be frank, maybe those cities or municipalities should consider hiring some of the laid off employees, buying the infrastructure during the fire sale (if they don't actually already own it), cutting out the middle man, and doing it themselves.
This server could not prove that it is archive.vn; its security certificate is from cloudflare-dns.com.
Are archive.vn working?
No doubt this is accelerating certain motivators, but I for one am a little sick of the "COVID Excuse" for blaming aspects of these non-business plans that were bad ideas without a global pandemic on which to blame them.
There's not many roles open at the moment, but here's one: https://jobs.ebayclassifiedsgroup.com/job/amsterdam/senior-b...
Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
Your explanation seems as good as any.
Yes.
This is Uber's way of saying to their investors that their costs will decrease due to losing billions during the coronavirus outbreak, thus head count must be decreased. But some who are buying now, may see this as a way of selling at the "bull trap" in Q2.
They will transition to a more efficient structure with more co-ordination now that they have many different bets going and 1-2 core businesses that could work. Right in line with wallstreet expectations and Dara's job to make Uber profitable. I called it a year ago :D
Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that?
Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR
(My source is a friend working on self-driving who was laid off today)
Can anyone explain how this works/how this came to be?
Delivery companies are fighting for a piece of that market which isn't full of margin, so they're having to fight for it. Plus they're in a landgrab, so choosing growth over profits.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uber-on-thanks-memories-thuan...
Their stock price will go up.
"Well see, we discovered a hose that money pours out of. It's called 'online advertising'. Now what we do is spend half our effort trying to make the hose pour faster, and the other half trying to find another hose."
Uber figured out the 'Uber for X' pattern. Now they're trying to optimize it, and figure out something else that makes money.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyft-expects-to-be-profitable-a...
International companies generally announce cross-border layoffs on Monday (US-time), because that announcement will be during the work week everywhere they operate.
However a Monday layoff in San Francisco means a Tuesday layoff in Asia which won't be separated by a weekend.
Sociopaths.
Layoffs were on the cards since more than 6 months already, COVID was just an excuse
Assuming anyone laid off had unexercised options, they'll likely have a short window to exercise them before they expire.
Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.