Well, I'd rather get laid off over zoom than email, also, I was laid off in 3 minutes in-person. Is that better? I would have preferred they just called me that morning so i could have stayed home. Maybe that's just me. It sucks to be laid off any way you look at it.
Presumably there is a lot of management being laid off as well that managed those 3,500 people. There probably isn't enough HR to manage that volume of layoffs 1:1. No point in dragging it out over multiple days, dealing with rumors, etc.
I watched the call in the article. Given the severance they're getting I think they did the most humane thing possible.
> 'They were going based on a lottery, like Russian roulette. The severance package is generous, but they're treating us like they treat the drivers,' she continued, referring to Uber's less than stellar reputation in fairly compensating their independent contractors.
Maybe I am old but it seems to me that woman is super entitled. By her own words the severance package is generous; what else does she want?
To be treated as a human being, and to have the people in management at her company treat their employees as if their jobs at least mattered at some point.
I’m sorry but saying being laid off via an online meeting with a generous severance package is equivalent to not being “treated as a human being” is a bit rich.
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.
What makes it feel inhumane is when you're laid off with 3700 other employees in a three minute meeting. It means you don't get to talk directly with your manager nor are you potentially given a chance to speak with your team.
For-profit corporations without employee ownership and regular employees on the board of directors will inevitably treat employees like disposable cogs or dirt. The mistake many people repeatedly make is the line-up to be abused when they should form their own business ventures with civilized, humane, and Golden Rule treatment of others rather than rent-seeking investors to squeeze blood money out of them and cheat them out of livable wages.
> What makes it feel inhumane is when you're laid off with 3700 other employees in a three minute meeting.
At least they spared them one more long meeting where they yap on about how important people are, how this a hard choice, how the company will emerge stronger (like I care), this doesn't reflect upon you personally, etc. They weren't cowards hiding behind nice words while the "liberated" people from their jobs. That's more humane than most companies.
> It means you don't get to talk directly with your manager nor are you potentially given a chance to speak with your team.
This very often happens during in person layoffs already, "we're sorry to let you go, security has a box with all your crap at the door".
> This very often happens during in person layoffs already, "we're sorry to let you go, security has a box with all your crap at the door".
Yes...and? That's also an inhumane way of laying off employees and frankly, any company that treats their workers like that deserves to be heavily criticized.
Calling this more humane is a bold take, but a wrong one. It's akin to getting laid off in a single mass email across the company. What happens if someone missed the meeting, or if they were otherwise working on stuff with their team? It's flagrant disrespect for their time and the work they've put in for the company. Calling them not cowards when they made the most cowardly way of laying people off isn't right. It's one step away from getting a text from your boss telling you to stop coming in and that they'll mail you your stuff.
You're making some assumptions here and taking third-hand information as gospel. It depends on what "generous" means in fact, how much notice they were given, and their prospects or help to get other jobs in a job climate that is worse than the Great Depression. What if it were you?
I dunno. Seemed like a good way to do the layoff to me. Do the hard thing in one swoop. Should they have separate meetings where people who haven't gotten fired yet hear rumors and have to writhe in uncertainty until they get the call?
Besides, getting fired along with 3499 people has got to feel better than getting fired alone.
You can't treat people in your own office like you treat those people on the street. Office people do not have to bring their own gear to work everyone knows that.
>but they're treating us like they treat the drivers.
So it's fine to treat drivers bad?
Who enabled this treatment of drivers?
I prefer being fired/layed off through a text message, it will save me not having to make weird faces and hide emotions when dealing with the person who laid me off.
It’s not some poor HR person. The HR person loves to fire people, for lots of different reasons. Here are just three reasons.
1. The HR person craves drama. They live for it. It’s the reason they are an HR person. Firing people is drama.
2. Firing people gives the the HR person a sense of power over others and sense of being important. They are really just doing the bidding of someone higher up, but that is why it makes them feel important because they are “in the know” when most others are not.
3. It gives them a feeling of being in control and immune to being fired since they often manipulate and control the outcomes.
If someone wanted to help people then they wouldn’t have chosen HR as a profession. HR isn’t there to help the employees. They are there to help and protect the company.
> prefer being fired/layed off through a text message [...]
where I suggest that a text message could be forged. From that point, either you don't pay attention to that possibility, and take the risk of being fired for real, or you request a confirmation through some other mean of communication, something that can be verified, and thus render the original message moot.
Or did that person imply that somehow message of that sort would be signed off cryptographically? I didn't think about that option, but I wonder how many companies deploy PKIs for emails between employees. Maybe this is more common than I think?
This will come off insensitive and I apologize but: 3500(15/hr40/week*52/weeks) comes to $109,200,000/yr. 100+ million in frontline support payroll? Seems excessive to me. Does anyone know what exactly frontline support is @ Uber?
Is it really that absurd? Uber operates in over 70ish different countries, with frontline support serving as customer service, recruiting and likely driver support.
If you assume at least 50 reps per country, that alone would get you to 3500 employees. That's likely on the smaller side too, considering Uber supports places such as China and the US which would have far higher CS requirements due to a larger population. You also need to consider that this requires around the clock support, meaning you'd have also have employees working graveyard shifts or find a way to offload that to other regions.
I really don’t get this criticism of “laying off over Zoom.” What are they supposed to do, visit them in person at their home and infect them with Covid while laying them off? All meetings are over Zoom now.
A manager 1:1 or immediate-working-team video call would have been more respectful way to end a working relationship, no? Something that includes some amount of personal communication/conversation rather than a mass broadcast anonymous message?
Treating someone as a person, rather than a resource. If it were happening to you, what would you hope for?
I'd be happy with the generous severance package and move on with my life. But do you honestly care about a generic exit interview? Do you think any employer cares that much? Seems like a total waste of time for everyone involved given the circumstances.
Or even better, I'd hope for a written email explaining the detail instead.
I never encountered a layoff. But I encountered several rejections after on-site interviews.
And, every time, the recruiters insisted on talking on the phone. It wasted my time. Scheduling a phone call required scheduling it the next day and finding available time and etc.
Just tell me the outcome. Personal communication is great, but it shouldn't waste people's time.
I think that makes sense if you assume the manager were not let go. But in a layoff case, they usually chop the entire org, which is as huge as 100+ people.
You are making a lot of assumptions, one is that the managers weren't laid off too. In that case, there is nobody to do a 1:1 with.
Do you know the worst thing about a layoff, knowing that people are being laid off and not knowing what's happening to you or the details of the layoff. In your scenario, the first few people who were laid off are very likely going to reach out to their work friends and soon everyone knows there are layoffs, but no one knows who's getting let go. So you do you prolong this suffering, or do you make it quick and provide a way to ask questions afterwards? I think quick is better.
I've been through an in person layoff, and nobody spends time with those who are leaving. We did the visit each person and tell them their fate, and it sucked. But we spent only a few minutes with each person, because we had to make it relatively quick. Everyone had to wait in their offices to find out their fate.
No matter what way you choose, there is always going to be an armchair quarterback saying the way you did it is wrong. Layoffs are hard and there is no way to make everybody really happy about them.
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.
Surely theres a better source for this news than this sort of tabloid trash? Just looking at the article's title - it's so sensationalist and clickbaity.
I feel even more uncomfortable reading this sentence.
Maybe I'm overreacted but feels like many historical political events like "We help them deal with <an ethnic group>. But
we didn't expect they treating us the same way after that."
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadA mass call with thousands of people though? I don't see how that's ever okay.
I watched the call in the article. Given the severance they're getting I think they did the most humane thing possible.
Maybe I am old but it seems to me that woman is super entitled. By her own words the severance package is generous; what else does she want?
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.
What makes it feel inhumane is when you're laid off with 3700 other employees in a three minute meeting. It means you don't get to talk directly with your manager nor are you potentially given a chance to speak with your team.
You don't want this to happen to you? Unionize.
The tech industry might finally get the wakeup call to unionize.
At least they spared them one more long meeting where they yap on about how important people are, how this a hard choice, how the company will emerge stronger (like I care), this doesn't reflect upon you personally, etc. They weren't cowards hiding behind nice words while the "liberated" people from their jobs. That's more humane than most companies.
> It means you don't get to talk directly with your manager nor are you potentially given a chance to speak with your team.
This very often happens during in person layoffs already, "we're sorry to let you go, security has a box with all your crap at the door".
Yes...and? That's also an inhumane way of laying off employees and frankly, any company that treats their workers like that deserves to be heavily criticized.
Calling this more humane is a bold take, but a wrong one. It's akin to getting laid off in a single mass email across the company. What happens if someone missed the meeting, or if they were otherwise working on stuff with their team? It's flagrant disrespect for their time and the work they've put in for the company. Calling them not cowards when they made the most cowardly way of laying people off isn't right. It's one step away from getting a text from your boss telling you to stop coming in and that they'll mail you your stuff.
Besides, getting fired along with 3499 people has got to feel better than getting fired alone.
And "Russian roulette" would imply suicidal gambling of one's own volition so that is an improper metaphor.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
She almost reached the point of enlightenment, but stopped right there.
So it's fine to treat drivers bad?
Who enabled this treatment of drivers?
I prefer being fired/layed off through a text message, it will save me not having to make weird faces and hide emotions when dealing with the person who laid me off.
1. The HR person craves drama. They live for it. It’s the reason they are an HR person. Firing people is drama.
2. Firing people gives the the HR person a sense of power over others and sense of being important. They are really just doing the bidding of someone higher up, but that is why it makes them feel important because they are “in the know” when most others are not.
3. It gives them a feeling of being in control and immune to being fired since they often manipulate and control the outcomes.
If someone wanted to help people then they wouldn’t have chosen HR as a profession. HR isn’t there to help the employees. They are there to help and protect the company.
> prefer being fired/layed off through a text message [...]
where I suggest that a text message could be forged. From that point, either you don't pay attention to that possibility, and take the risk of being fired for real, or you request a confirmation through some other mean of communication, something that can be verified, and thus render the original message moot.
Or did that person imply that somehow message of that sort would be signed off cryptographically? I didn't think about that option, but I wonder how many companies deploy PKIs for emails between employees. Maybe this is more common than I think?
If you assume at least 50 reps per country, that alone would get you to 3500 employees. That's likely on the smaller side too, considering Uber supports places such as China and the US which would have far higher CS requirements due to a larger population. You also need to consider that this requires around the clock support, meaning you'd have also have employees working graveyard shifts or find a way to offload that to other regions.
Treating someone as a person, rather than a resource. If it were happening to you, what would you hope for?
Or even better, I'd hope for a written email explaining the detail instead.
I never encountered a layoff. But I encountered several rejections after on-site interviews.
And, every time, the recruiters insisted on talking on the phone. It wasted my time. Scheduling a phone call required scheduling it the next day and finding available time and etc.
Just tell me the outcome. Personal communication is great, but it shouldn't waste people's time.
Do you know the worst thing about a layoff, knowing that people are being laid off and not knowing what's happening to you or the details of the layoff. In your scenario, the first few people who were laid off are very likely going to reach out to their work friends and soon everyone knows there are layoffs, but no one knows who's getting let go. So you do you prolong this suffering, or do you make it quick and provide a way to ask questions afterwards? I think quick is better.
I've been through an in person layoff, and nobody spends time with those who are leaving. We did the visit each person and tell them their fate, and it sucked. But we spent only a few minutes with each person, because we had to make it relatively quick. Everyone had to wait in their offices to find out their fate.
No matter what way you choose, there is always going to be an armchair quarterback saying the way you did it is wrong. Layoffs are hard and there is no way to make everybody really happy about them.
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.
s/1/10/
How long does Lyft have? When can Uber raise its prices to become EBITDA positive?
Easier to impress when you start from a smaller amount and don't have a bunch of pet projects to shed.
People are obsessed with this rideshare/gig economy winner take all idea almost like they have to believe it... actually that explains a lot.
They could have asked them to fly in and then they'd have to fire 3800. And some would sill complain and also decide to sue Uber for something.
> The employee tells DailyMail.com that more layoffs at Uber are expected.
Leaks at the executive level + lack of trust by employees for the future means those who can leave will. This part is a problem of their own making.
I feel even more uncomfortable reading this sentence.
Maybe I'm overreacted but feels like many historical political events like "We help them deal with <an ethnic group>. But we didn't expect they treating us the same way after that."