Am I the only one feeling that we should be thankful that these unicorns (whether actually profitable or driven by crazy VC money) have created so many jobs in the past several years?
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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.
Everywhere else though, I take Uber/Lyft.
Money, better and cheaper transportation where it sucked, and jobs for much more people than just developers.
I've still yet to see any analysis show this that didn't have serious problems. The most common, and most severe, failing of these studies is the way they assume that time-based depreciation on a car is zero...implying that buying a car and letting it sit idle would maintain 100% of its value. That is to say, these studies define away the possibility that increasing utilization of your car allows you to get more value out of the asset, which IMO is at the core of the value calculation.
I wouldn't be shocked if better analyses found that the net income of being an Uber driver was pretty poor, but the fact that every analysis includes this glaring flaw makes me slightly more suspicious of the claim than I otherwise would be. And I don't think your unqualified statement of this claim as fact is warranted.
I'm also a product manager so I did some back of the envelope math because I REALLY wanted to understand to what I was missing that Softbank wasn't. Turns out, absolutely nothing, I'm the sane one.
Yeesh calm down, drink a glass of water or something. Do you always fly off the handle when people have a different understanding of a situation than you? I was going off of the popular coverage of studies that I've seen, much of which has been widely discussed here before. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that that's what you were going off of. Good to know that you have more rigor behind your assumption than those sources did, but I'm still left wondering why they have such glaring holes.