Uber cuts 23% of people division as new president takes over
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Do we not need HR and managers, or are those just more popular roles to cut and the impact takes longer to show up?
Of course, the truth is you can have too many middle managers or too few (it really was bad that in 2017, the biggest achievement was "growing headcount"). But fads have a tendency to overcorrect.
They could sack all of those people and give me a payrise and be hundreds of thousands better off.
I wish I could say it’s just this project, but it’s a real theme at this point. There are so many layers of fake jobs in every organisation.
The thought that AI doesn't mean mass layoffs is basically unimaginable.
I feel this is direction much tech companies will take.
This is expected. Expect more layoffs
If most of us are honestly with ourselves, we'd realize the marginal return on difficult hiring decisions is extremely small.
As for the CYA aspect of HR, an AI can definitely do that cheaper and more callously.
HR is rarely involved in hiring decisions, that’s the responsibility of the hiring manager which is typically the new hire’s manager. At a very big company you might have HR screening applicants but that’s to save time for hiring managers.
[1] just as engineering ends up doing a bunch of nonsense when the money is flowing.
"A lot of things."
You still gave zero concrete information about why HR is necessary. Which is exactly the problem here.
If you don’t know, perhaps it’s best to approach with curiosity, and not smarmy, teenage condescension.
Expanding on just a snarky comment, Uber stated to have north of 7M monthly drivers ([1], OP mentions 10M, but with no qualification), so 32k/7M = 4.5 employees for every thousand drivers. Even with the cuts. That's a scrum team per 2000 drivers. Idk what this says but thought it to be interesting
But I quite vividly remember any mention of that here on HN back then was responded to with "I'm paid great and can easily change jobs why would I want a union?" (with many engineers only thinking of factory worker unions as a model and forgetting that very highly paid and in demand actors also belong to a union).
You negotiate when you're in a position of strength, not while your value is rapidly falling through your fingers.
With AI and a growing population of ex-corporate workers desperate for work breaking up attempts to unionize would be easier than ever.
I'm not buying it.
Similar are situations where employees of a labor union are themselves unionized - under a different union - because they feel ill-paid and ill-treated by the union which employs them.
Either you lose job or you make a union.
[1]