Uber is laying off 10% of staff | Hacker News Reader

Uber is laying off 10% of staff

uber.com

130 pointsDeepLogin82 comments

> We are also asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office, and going forward, only ~1% of employees will be remote.

If you believe in return-to-office as a soft layoff, even more than 10% will be leaving.

“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.”

100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model.

I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.

When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure.

But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience.

Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.

Different person. In short:

I get distracted at home, and home is no longer home - it's the office.

I work best when talking through my mental blocks with people. As a consultant I've never gotten over trying to poke my head in via Slack/Teams/etc. In-person huddles and brainstorming get more done in 30 minutes than phone back-and-forth usually does over days.

Being in the office allows some level of personal understanding occur between teams and people.

I like the idea of being able to live where I want, but I haven't moved since going WFH, and I find talking to people in person when I visit gets planning and training done a lot more efficiently. Learning from others and collaborating on problems is something mid-high level IT does a lot more than solo coding for hours at a time.

I love how most any RTO-proponent always presents RTO as "well I'm glad you're back in the office with me because that's better for me". Ask most any WFH-proponent about going to the office and the answer will read like "do whatever works best for yourself, I prefer WFH myself, you can go to the office if you want". It's a very selfish mindset, really. If RTO-proponents cared about not imposing their will on others, they'd also advocate for WFH for anyone that prefers it, but they don't.

Well what do you expect? Holing yourself up in your home is something you can do unilaterally. In-person team collaboration requires... well, collaboration. It's not a unilateral action so there isn't unilateral advice.

in-person collaboration requiring in-person more than collaboration, as collaboration is quite possible remotely, and even asynchronously.

“holing yourself up…”

but it wasn’t about conversation, it was about opinion.

100%. The Linux kernel would have never grown and become so successful if it weren’t for everybody in the office all those years just collaborate-maxxxing … /s

Except most of us don't do team collaboration in the office anyway.

With very few exceptions, all my projects involve distributed teams in a mix of nearshore and offshoring, across multiple locations.

> In-person team collaboration requires... well, collaboration.

You're confusing things. Collaboration doesn't require you to be continuously in the same room with people 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and your personal needs to be in a room with someone else does not justify forcing everyone under payroll to commute to the office.

You already need to schedule meetings to be in the same room with someone, don't you? Why would anyone have to waste their time commuting to the office if you didn't booked a meeting?

You're misunderstanding my use of the term collaboration. I'm not using it as corporate speak for "teamwork". I'm saying that in order for me to go into the office with everyone, everyone needs to go into the office. That's an axiomatic self-proving statement.

As opposed to WFH where one can simply do that without other people also doing it.

> I'm saying that in order for me to go into the office with everyone, everyone needs to go into the office.

No. You feel you need everyone around you at the office, but that is you and you speak for yourself. Others have a say on that, don't they?

For you to be around people in a way you don't get in the way of everyone else around you, you need to coordinate. This means you need to plan ahead and schedule meetings with a specific agenda to discuss with the people whose time you want to waste. That doesn't require everyone else to drive all the way to the office 5 days a week,and then send there 8 or 9 hours a day. In some cases a simple message does the work. In some cases a call will do. For the rare occasions where you need to be at arm's reach of someone, you guys can plan ahead.

So why do you believe it's reasonable ti demand everyone around you to bend backwards to accommodate your peculiar requirements of proximity?

Nah. 99% of meetings are fluff. Something that could have been just an short email. Meetings are for people who do not get anything done. for people who like to waste other peoples time. The actual good meetings are the ones that have a VERY clear context, and goes down to details that EVERYONE in the meetings know by heart. These are rare, maybe one a year.

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me.

If you feel you work better at the office, more power to you.

That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same, particularly if the best argument you can piece together is that forcing others to do something against their will makes you feel better.

> That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same

Literally that's why I wrote: "I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us."

RTO steals one work day from me per week, at a minimum. When i work from home i can start 6am (or whenever i want to), and if im in a flow state, i can push to 5pm easily. I get SOOOO much done. Other days i can lax, have a few teams meetings and chill on the couch and quit work early.

When i go to the office it takes 2 hours from each day only for commute, add meetings, lunch breaks, and the office bullshit chitchat and non-stop blabber that distracts you. People on the phone, or just "hanging" out next to you.

Bottom line is when i have to work from the office i get 5% done of what i do from home. I get angry, and unmotivated. I usually also leave early.

That's a nice idea but how many of those people will wind up at a job that doesn't require RTO? I was applying quite a bit back in April and many places that previously had decently-hard stances on allowing WFH now stated RTO as a requirement.

Depends on the person and their lifestyle and savings. I'm sure some well off single/DINK households can simply weather the recession while making a few concessions, waiting until the market shifts to an employee's market again.

But in the normal case, you are right. Google had extra rounds of layoffs because RTO didn't self-cull enough people. People know this isn't the market to make a stand in without significant leverage.

Sadly, and we all know that butt on chair while doing Teams calls with the offshoring and nearshore teams, is a large improvement in productivity. /s

> Sadly, and we all know that butt on chair while doing Teams calls with the offshoring and nearshore teams, is a large improvement in productivity. /s

I personally liked how they claimed employees complained that they spend too much time aligning with other teams, and somehow their response to they complain was... Firing the people responsible for facilitating that alignment?

And then there's the comical justification that they will increase development speed with larger teams managed by managers with far more responsibilities and far less time to deal with issues.

Uber's announcement wouldn't sound so silly if they just stuck with the financial angle. They are firing people because they aren't growing, they have no answer for stalling, but they still need to present nice numbers to investors who want to get paid. That would be a more respectable answer.

Look at the bright side: any employees compelled to commute now will be much more likely to summon Uber rides every day!

"In Pulse surveys and conversations with many of you, we’ve heard that too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear. I’m sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time “aligning” rather than building, shipping, or serving customers. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the coordination roles that remain. "

Well, in theory this sounds reasonable. But who knows what will be the real consequences.

I don't get it. Too much time is spent coordinating, so fire those who are responsible for coordination? Am I reading this wrong?

People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible.

So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C.

In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.

> In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.

So you get rid of the coordinator. What then? Does this magically unblock people?

Let me frame this differently: if coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?

> Does this magically unblock people?

Yes? Removing and/or minimizing detractors/hangers-ons/randoms from a project is an important part of running a project. Especially in corporate scenarios where telling people to go pound sand is, unfortunately, not an option, more elaborate strategies must be employed.

> If coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?

Are you thinking that humans can predict behavior and evolution of social systems, and especially how they would behave after some change is forced upon them?

In my opinion, that cannot be further from the truth. Any sufficiently complex social system, which Uber with 30k+ employees definitely is, exists and evolves more or less independently from how any one individual part of this system might wish. Even if it's a CEO.

Uber leadership thought cross-team coordination would help them, so they hired a bunch of people to do it. That might have been a correct idea at a time, or at least on paper, it looked like a correct move. But in the end, it did not pan out. So they probably shot themselves in the foot back then. Did they shoot themselves in the foot now? Who knows? (Spoiler: no one) We'll see once enough time has passed.

There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.

That's how I read it, too.

They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination).

Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?

The thinking in these types of reorgs is typically to push it so far down the chart that it comes out the other side

The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.

So TPMs are getting the axe? Product managers too?

I've heard this at other companies and it's almost always an issue of upper management holding too much control over decision making, or poorly communicating actual business objects, but it's project managers and middle management that will bear the brunt of the layoffs.

Leadership Team holding TOO much control over decision making AND poorly communicating actual business objective.s

"Complain about coordination, get laid off" is what this reads like

It's logical if you view them as unsuccessful.

But if "decision-making rights are unclear" is listed, it seems unlikely those people were the problem.

I think the idea is that if you go from 10 decision makers to 5 decision makers, coordidination and securing a decision will become easier

"Over the last 5+ years, Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling"

Orders of magnitude.

He didn't say "Uber has grown by orders of magnitude" == "top line nearly tripling"

They are two separate statements. Maybe some portions of Uber did grow exponentially. Riders, revenue, miles travelled, etc...

He also wants you to know that as part of that exponential growth, top line nearly tripled.

You can't give a concrete and nonsensical way Uber has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders") while revenue tripled.

Cannot be miles. Can't be riders. Can't be drivers. Revenue is top line, by definition.

This statement is as bad as the original. There is no need for hyperbolic statements that one doesn't even understand. "Uber has grown significantly" works. Why the need to sound so sophisticated and use terms like "orders of magnitude" ? It erodes trust by signaling "we are full of sh*t".

He’s basically saying Uber is much bigger than it was 5+ years ago. Revenue almost tripled, and the company added a lot more products, people, and complexity. “Orders of magnitude” here just means “a lot,” not literally 10x or 100x.

Then he could just say uber has grown a lot?

He could have said a myriad of things, but he chose to say that, and what he chose to say isn’t incorrect.

yes, it is. It's incorrect, misleading and douchey.

If they didn't say "revenue tripled" and you asked people to speculate how much Uber had grown in 5 years given the statement, you'd get a lot of guesses around 100x.

skill issue

They are simply measuring in base 1.7 :^)

Uber has grown 2 orders of magnitude!

touche.

Or base 2. 2^1.5 (2.83) is the low bound on two orders of magnitude base 2. So tripled fits.

All this concern, when he merely assumed everyone would realize he meant oom base 2. :P

> has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders")

Two orders of magnitude is 31.6 to 316 (10^1.5 to 10^2.5), so 32x would be sufficient.

Most Uber 5-year growth numbers seem less than 3x. Steelmanning, some programs seem new in 2021 (Uber One, autonomous driving), and thus might have grown more dramatically as they spun up.

But yes, eep. Maybe misuse will, by getting more exposure for the term, eventually get us more people who know and use it properly? Maybe?

I have noticed that "orders of magnitude" is getting the same colloquial treatment that has long-since happened to "decimated". That is, a departure in common parlance from the technical meaning of the word to one used to communicate a general description of largeness.

Sure, but the use of "decimated" is used approximately correctly in most cases, even if not precisely right. And it is a cool sounding word, and it's one word.

"Orders of magnitude" is three words when one would do, it's used to sound sophisticated, and it's use is off by... an order of magnitude or so... in many cases

For a long time I thought it meant to reduce to 1/10th not by 1/10th.

Yes. As a kid, hearing it used in like GI Joe or something, it always felt equivalent to “massacred”.

Hmm... Sometimes decimated is used in ways that are colloquially understandable but actually make no sense at all. For example, "Sadly, my team got decimated in the playoffs". That doesn't even make sense. 1/10th of the team lost the game? What?

Think it's more like the worst thing that can happen to a Roman army unit happened to us.

That and when people use "exponential" to mean big.

Revenue is up massively, so we'll be getting rid of the people that helped that happen. Genius move.

This is a common strategy nowadays. Not sure of the rationale

I thought it was common knowledge that

1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring

2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...

The least cynical take I've heard about RTO is that most managers are deeply under-trained to the point of being mostly incompetent. So forcing people into the office lets them do performative performance monitoring and project management. This makes their job "easier" in that they didn't know how to do it correctly in the first place.

Most managers aren't trained at all, and there's a massive shortage of good ones.

I would contend most corporations have a lot more managers than is necessary.

It appears that the Uber executive team agrees with you!

Then the best people quit on a random Tuesday and we have all hands on why managers cannot retain top talent.

Nobody believes a single promise of a company anymore. That promo promise after a hard assignment? Yeah fuck that.

Khosrowshahi is full of shit 99.9% of the time but this is one of the few, maybe only, layoff letters that actually makes sense and names specific things that seem reasonable (other than forcing RTO), and it doesn't mention AI at all, which is refreshing. Still, sorry for anyone who was laid off.

I really wonder if they still have an office in Aarhus Denmark. It was weird to me that they did because no one drives uber there at all.

If they're hiring I'd work in Aarhus!

A software office, or a driver support center? Aarhus is a pretty respected technical university, so a software office would make sense.

AI is behind this layoff, but the AI is in Waymo's cars.

Jack Welch's legacy

Meanwhile https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

They addressed that in this press release, though.

Yes, they're rather in-your-face about it, aren't they.

Laying off people is uberhaupt nicht nice!

Another

      R
      T
   LAYOFF

If we could jump into this depression faster that would be great. I really want this shit over with.

Uber has employees ? I thought they are all contractors. /s

Interesting -- it doesn't cite AI (smart comms move, and a change from recent practice) but the buried lede is that this frees up resources etc etc.

I think we might be in a new phase: AI layoffs are now being disguised as regular layoffs (rather than the other way around) because of the backlash.

Layoff note mentions AI => it's not AI

Layoff note omits AI => it's AI

I am onboard with the idea that corporate messaging is typically anything but forthright but I don't see the logic here.

Because AI is now a monstrous political issue, and the valence has flipped -- literally the irony I was pointing to :)

Whoosh

Uber was one of the first to admit that AI isn't all it's hyped up to be.

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