colinmorelli

A lot of companies won't last a year when their business operations are effectively ceased overnight - whether they were sustainable beforehand or not.

Uber certainly had cash flow problems before this started, but even companies with healthy cash flow that operate in heavily hit industries are going to feel this. For example, Expedia recently laid off 3,000 if I remember correctly.

Yeah I was torn about responding to this comment. By the employee's own admission, the severance was generous. There is no other option but to use online meetings for this now. So maybe a 1:1 could have been done, but a) that would have taken significantly longer to complete and b) would have resulted in people spreading rumors and employees who were not impacted would have feared for their jobs thus impacting productivity and morale.

We can talk for hours about all the things Uber could certainly could have done differently throughout their history that - maybe, possibly, in a parallel universe - could have prevented this from happening. But they are where they are now, and there's no "good way" to lay off 3,500 people in a situation like this.

Also, to the sibling here - there's simply not enough information to suggest that these employees could not ask questions at all. At least by my read, that's not stated anywhere, and unless explicitly stated otherwise my assumption is that they were provided with the contact information for someone if they had questions - as this is typically how most companies would handle this, particularly at Uber's size.

Shopify seems to be working towards exactly this, and recently announced their new Shop app: https://www.shopify.com/shop

It only includes Shopify sellers, and of those only the ones that choose to be listed on Shop, but with the Shop app and their new fulfillment network, I think Shopify is currently best positioned to become a real threat to Amazon.

This, but also - these arguments tend to be very one-sided. The implication is that engineers would always do the right thing if pesky management just got out of the way. Is that true sometimes? Of course, there are plenty of shit management teams in the world. There are also plenty of engineers that, left undirected, would add unnecessary scope, introduce unnecessary technology, and create different types of problems.

If there really was one answer, and the answer was just as simple as "get rid of the whole management team, and you'll have a much better product at the end" then I have to imagine companies would have started doing this already. My experience being on both sides of this coin in my career is that: it's just not that easy.

Uber operates in: ride sharing, food delivery, bike messenger, corporate travel, freight, helicopter, and gig economy jobs, and more - and these are just the publicly launched products. Each of those lines has its own external _and_ internal products, with their own features, and their own regulatory burden. They each have their own cost structure and incentive models. They're live in over 900 cities across 85 countries, many of which have their own local regulatory burden such as NYC.

Then, on top of that, you've got 91 million monthly active users. Assume each one takes only one ride per month, and only 1% of them have some kind of issue that requires them to reach out to support - that's still 30,000 new issues per day many of which will require coordinating between both parties involved in the transaction.

Do they have more employees than they need? Define need. It's easy to hire above what's necessary to sustain operations when the cost of capital is cheap. More people can develop new products and grow margins for the business overall. But Uber is seriously far from "an app together with some driver administration" any more than Amazon is "a website with some seller administration."

Apologies for my misunderstanding (hah, very topical for the post). The way it concluded made me interpret it as if you were trying to suggest that the person's actions were the same, and thus the scenarios were the same.

This thought experiment is flawed. It assumes the only variable worth considering are the actions of the individual. The reality is that we apologize all the time for doing something that, done one day previously or to a different person, would not have been a problem at all.

We're typically not apologizing for the act itself, we're apologizing for the effect it had. We don't mean "sorry for writing code with bugs in it", for example. We mean "sorry the bugs in the code caused you problems."

This. It's also worth remembering that the cost to bring products to market - particularly in the software/technology industry, continues to rise. As larger players continue to expand their portfolio of offerings with years of engineering effort behind them, it's significantly more difficult for a small startup to produce something compelling enough for customers to use it over the other options on the market.

In other words, the bar for quality and capability in all products we use on a daily basis continues to rise. That has the direct effect of raising the expectations that consumers and businesses have for new products they want to purchase, and thus the cost to build them. That translates to more time needed to deliver something meaningful to market, which is also likely correlated with higher amounts of VC funding concentrated in a smaller number of companies (pre-COVID)

What you guys are doing is awesome. Best of luck going forward.