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Comment by factorymoo | Hacker News Reader

Same question for Uber with 36k employees. It's an app that connects taxis to clients. I guess I'm showing a lot of ignorance here - but why does this need 36k people?

I guess this was Elon's thoughts when he laid off most of twitter.

Edit: Found a good answer for Uber on quora: https://qr.ae/py4zBU

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Uber is different because every place it has to operate is different. Maybe something weird happens in XYZ city that requires drivers to route around a certain street so they need a feature that generalizes that. or some such deal. Reddit OTOH... nope.

Uber also has a bunch of regulations to follow that are different everywhere. Each city will need it's own operations teams to deal with drivers, local authorities, etc. Then a country operations that that deal with payroll, taxes, etc.

You then need to have a customer support service. That is probably 5,000 employees right there.

Just because a company has 36,000 employees it doesn't mean they have 30,000 people working on the tech. There are lots of jobs that need to be done just to operate day to day. That most people on here wouldn't even think about, like cleaning staff for example. How many people on here even thought about cleaning staff?

For any company too small to own its own building outright, as well as many that do own their own buildings, cleaning staff work for a contracted janitorial company and not the company itself.

Considering how widespread Uber is, it's probably got a formula for opening up new offices in new locations. I know other companies I worked for had one so I can only assume Uber is the same. This is they know they need 2 x, 3 y, 1 z. Managing a series of contractors at that scale for each location would probably be a job by itself and kind of remove the benefits of outsourcing. Considering Uber literally deals with high turnover of personal by the nature of what they do, they don't seem like they would be likely to be that risk adverse to the paperwork challenges that potentially could come from low level staff like cleaners which is normally why companies prefer to outsource it. Like if your used to hiring office staff where high turnover would be employees leaving after a year vs cleaning staff where staff could change on a monthly basis, the hassle of dealing with paperwork isn't worth it. But if you've already got the person who deals with the paperwork, etc because that's your business it's less of an issue.

I think it's very likely Uber employs cleaners themselves due to costs attached to outsourcing and that they already have the staff to manage that sort of worker.

One crazy story I've heard from one of their competitors is when they were banned in one key city they wanted to get their drivers diplomatic passports from some random country so they could keep driving around as they pleased. Based on the "get shit done" mentality some startup founders have, I wouldn't be surprised if that was true.

> I wouldn't be surprised if that was true

Conversely, I would be more than highly surprised if it was. It has all the trappings of an urban myth.

Uber drivers are allowed to use 3rd party navigation apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, etc. I'm honestly not sure if they require specialists for each major city to handle city-wide traffic events. The 3rd parties that drivers piggyback on do it for them, to some degree of success.

It's not just navigation, there are many local nuances like where in airports or large stadiums they're allowed to operate or not operate out of. Dealing with city and county ordinances at the scale of Uber takes some bit of human power.

That's their backup mode of operation as far as I know. Their primary mode is to disregard all rules. They paid for the drivers' fines for years in my country until they were flat out banned. Only a few places like China were able to really get rid of them. A seriously shady company.

Regardless of past behavior, there are many many locales that do in fact levy their rules on Uber who have made a business decision to comply, leading to localized experiences of the app and service that can change both between different cities and even within different areas of a city.

You're right of course. I think they attack a new market from two directions. First they just enter the market, rules be damned. But from a different angle they have a huge lobbying arm to make themselves legal in the long run and in favorable terms. That's actually not a bad strategy businesswise IF you can pull it off in enough places. Usually the public really likes the service so there is no push back.

> Uber drivers are allowed to use 3rd party navigation apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, etc.

are you saying that the Uber-Driver's-App/Backend will communicate with the driver via these different mapping apps? or that so long as they use the Uber-Driver's-App to stay in contact with Uber, that Uber accommodates them also using other mapping software?

You turn off the voice on Uber and use another phone for the navigation. Or multi task on the same phone.

As a matter of fact, most European Uber drivers do exactly this. I'm from Poland and over last few years I've seen a single(!) Uber driver actually using built in navigation. Also most of them also work for Bolt at the same time and juggle orders from both...

> It's an app that connects taxis to clients.

Uber does a lot more than that! If you want an honest accounting of what Uber's employees are doing you need to start with an honest listing of everything Uber actually does.

When Uber started, they basically reinvented half of Google/Amazon since the cloud was no where near as mature as it was now. They were running their own data centers. It takes a lot of people to rebuild robust NoSql DBs, stream processing, container management, monitoring and the like from scratch.

Could Uber be built with a lot less now days? Absolutely, but it's also an interesting balance of even if they could, if their cloud bill for X service is 10m a year, and they think their own team of 4 could build X internally for less then that...why not do that?

Uber is not really a taxi company. They do a whole lot of general transport infrastructure not for laymen.

But 36k still seems absurd.

I saw a ferry in a YouTube video the other day that had "Uber Boat" plastered on the side.

The public transport boats in London are operated by Uber

They now also sell Eurostar tickets (although I don't see the advantage over Eurostars website)

> The public transport boats in London are operated by Uber

They're sponsored by Uber, that's it - they bought the naming rights. The actual boats are owned and run by the Thames Clipper company.

Thanks for the correction, I assumed Uber ran the ticketing as well for some reason, I haven't taken one since the uber branding

Was amusing getting the notification for "$35" Eurostar tickets on the Uber app, when it should be £35, very on brand.

When I was in Dubai, there were Uber helicopters. I'm still half tempted to take one when I'm back there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375921

I guess I'm showing a lot of ignorance here - but why does this need 36k people?

Their stated goal to supplant as much of the existing TLC infrastructure for the planet as they can get their hands on. You can bet that these organizations (even restricted to those markets they are successful at "disrupting") employ a lot more than 36k people

Maybe you haven’t used in Uber in awhile, but it definitely does more than just connecting taxis to clients in 2023.

Because it's the number to show venture capital the real "growth".

Funny you mention that, I was just listening to the Tropical MBA podcast, and last week they had a guy who works in private equity come on the show. He explained a lot of basics of how PE works, since the podcast is mostly about small-scale bootstrapping and hiding out in cheap locations. It sounds like having a ton of headcount actually does make you look way more valuable to business investors, at least at the low end he was talking about.. I could see how that would scale up

Uber is publicly traded and has been for awhile now. I'm not sure how VC is relevant.

At times working at certain companies I can genuinely say I felt like being like an extra in a movie. I just had to be there, but the work I did wasn't important at all.

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