Seems reasonable when your core business has been massively impacted. Being a public company can't make it easier.
Also as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
I honestly wonder what the strategy is. Obviously they are heavily impacted in the short term, but also this is a company that has been losing money from the get go. If the intent is to build and build and build and search for profit eventually, then I'd think they'd weather this storm more than they are. They invested heavily in building up a world-class engineering team and just cut a huge chunk loose. It makes me think they aren't just cutting costs, they are refocussing the business and probably won't reenter some markets.
"AI Labs" tend to publish papers more than they actually work on real projects, so I wouldn't assume shutting down an AI lab implies suspending the self-driving car project.
I thought the self-driving unit had been spun off. This article [1] (from April 2019) said:
"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."
That's true in more than just in the self-driving car space. Even at companies like AAPL and AMZN where ML focused researchers/engineers work on production related tasks, I've seen their value production is dubious at best.
In my experience working on these product teams, most of the real gains are just from solid engineering combined with public advances in ML. The teams filled with ML specific folk aren't able to accomplish much.
Anyone working at Uber, can you share how is morale in Uber at this moment? How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people, but people don't want to go there?
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
It's gauche to say it on the day a bunch of people lost their jobs (and there's no need for the schadenfraude) but I think the underlying point is sane. Uber's business model is replacing FTEs in a a hidebound, regulated industry with gig workers (& good UX!).
If you were forecasting how this company in particular would deal with a downturn, it's a reasonable guess that they'll try to do the same thing to their own workforce, if they can find engineers willing to take on gig work. It's in their DNA.
To be charitable, the grandfather comment is a warning to think about the broader effects of the work we do, driven home by the possibility of a "what goes around comes around" situation.
EDIT: as many have pointed out, taxi drivers don't get benefits either (I originally said one of the margins Uber competes on is not providing benefits).
and they dont' pay % of their revenue to the 'base station entity'.
This Uber trick: taking % of the revenue for the fixed cost service (they provide to the taxis drivers ) is the master trick making uber money.
So far, in Europe, all taxi corporations charge taxi driver FIXED (quite small 100..200 usd/month) amount for operating telco/web/radio and coordinating fleet of taxis.
Uber's ability to push bulshine here is really business milking 101 course: Fixed costs, uncaped incomes.
> and they dont' pay % of their revenue to the 'base station entity'.
Unless they own their own medallion, they pay "medallion rent". They'll also pay dispatch fees. Many taxi drivers switched over to being Uber drivers because they could earn (and keep) more money, not less.
The reason why software companies don't generally hire contract software developers rather than bringing them on as FTEs is that they're less effective. Software development is a high-communication, high-trust activity; it's very helpful to be able to explicitly direct and manage the activities of your workforce, because otherwise they don't produce anything useful. For specific tasks that don't need to be high-trust and high-communication (eg. writing an iOS app for a non-critical part of the business that uses a public API), companies are already inclined to hire contractors.
The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?" Tech company success tends to be binary: either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
Exactly, Uber's business model only applies to (highly) fungible labour markets. As past experience shows, you (usually) can't swap out 10 devs here with 10 devs there and expect similar results (although who knows in the future)
I think the even bigger risk with getting a job at Uber will be that some of the future employers may not be willing to consider you due to sketchy reputation Uber has as a company.
This is something I see employees worry about all the time, but I have never seen a business owner or person with hiring authority consider it. People who get to that position within a company learn to inhabit shades of grey; unless you personally did something illegal, they're not going to hold the company you worked for against you, except to the extent that they may think that people working at that company are incompetent.
I see ex-Facebook and ex-Uber employees popping up all the time at high positions within hot (and sometimes even ethical) growth companies within the valley.
Not a thing I’ve ever considered on a hiring front unless you’re famous as a sexual harasser or for pulling a Damore. Literally never heard of anyone doing this either.
Worked for Google for 5 years. Red badges were largely confined to QA testers, physical security, and the kitchen, along with a few UI designers or engineers that didn't want to be employees because they liked the freedom that being a contractor allowed (eg. being able to work for someone else on the side). Basically everyone I interacted with on a daily basis was a FTE. Product area could have something to do with it: I was on a core product (Search), it's possible red badges are more common in peripheral products.
Your comment downplays the number of contractors at Google as if they are rare, but in reality, Google employs ~100k FTEs and ~120k contractors. It's definitely more than just QA testers and kitchen staff.
You may really have just been on a team that doesn't interact often with contractors, but the reality for the broader company is that contracting is a way of life for much more than just Uber.
My understanding is that a lot of those are jobs like street view driver, autonomous vehicle tester, search quality rater, contract recruiter, content moderator, con-ops (help forums & customer support), etc. That's a big portion of the company but not a big portion of core engineering teams. I'd acknowledged the existence of them in my original comment, but this article is specifically about layoffs of software engineers within Uber's core products. I maintain that someone in that position is far more likely to come in contact with other FTEs than with contractors.
I'm not sure about Google, but I know that many companies segregate contractors into other buildings. At one of my previous employers pretty much everyone I interacted with was a full time employee as well, but that was only because contractors largely did not have badge access to the office and worked somewhere else.
> either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
I think rather than looking at those names we might ask ourselves about the ones that managed to survive: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, as an example
Sure, we might argue that they have not always been the most ethical companies out there, but it doesn't mean they haven't had to reinvent themselves here and there
How come Oracle and IBM got more money from Java than Sun? Windows is now "free" but MS continues to make money.
Those companies that went away seems to be mostly good examples of the Inventor's dilema. Especially SGI.
> The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?"
what's median job duration for a software engineer in startup-land anyway? I'd be surprised if it was much over 2 years...
I'd think that if your famous company goes under, folks won't generally hold that against you. Heck, I'd think people who watched it all fall apart would would have the most interesting stories (and valuable lessons about mistakes to avoid).
I don't think this is accurate. I've worked several contracts in my life, often working alongside the company's FTE developers. In every situation, we were fully integrated into the team, with the same level of access, etc. We fully participating in meetings and planning. The contracts were several months. (one as long as 18 months; it only was cut short due to 9/11) I will admit these weren't strictly software companies, and in every one of these roles, I was a w2 employee of a staffing company, not a 1099. However, I was at least as effective as their regular team members; probably more so because I could be released far more easily.
Great, I think you came up with the simplest solution: Uber should make whatever single digit percentage of total drivers that comprise their Uber Black drivers FTEs.
This might be a good selling point for the higher levels of Uber service: You're getting a full-time, professional driver who's been thoroughly vetted. It's not just some random person with an app.
I think for the vast VAST majority of riders, the "random person with an app" is good enough. In the age of turn-by-turn directions, rides are commoditized. A hundred crimes per year divided by billions of trips per year represents decimal point percentage crime rate — which is a risk not all that different from aircraft crash statistics, or even car crash statistics.
I know I definitely prefer to save tens of dollars per ride vs the services provided by some platonic ideal of a "professional driver".
New York is probably one of the most union heavy places in America. Checking where they are unionized more isn't an accurate reflection of the rest of the world.
You seem to not know how taxi companies work. They are independent contractors except they are even more at a disadvantage. They need to pay money upfront for their shift and spend half their time earning that money back before they even make money. And they have no benefits.
Uber has screwed over a lot of people in the past. I'm not going to cry for people who worked for a bad company getting screwed over by said bad company
Sure, but do you feel the same way about AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, every major auto manufacturer, Tesla, Amazon, and myriad of other companies that behave in unethical ways?
I can't think of a single tech company that hasn't engaged in some eye brow raising behavior.
There was even some controversy with YCombinator funding a fantasy sports betting company.
I'm a little more nuanced in my analysis than the GP, but yes, I do feel that way in some degree about all the companies you mention, and how the employees have some incremental responsibility for the bad those companies do.
Offered rents in Vancouver have dropped 15% since the pandemic took hold and AirBnB became a dead business for a bunch of mini-hoteliers. If you helped build that software, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the crisis in affordable housing we've been struggling with, that AirBnB has contributed to.
If you work at Facebook, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the consequences of the 2016 U.S. election and Donald Trump's presidency.
Your share of the responsibility is likely tiny, and I'm not going act like you're a mass murderer. But at the end of the day you were part of the machine that left a trail of damage in its wake, and I won't ignore that just because you were merely a cog.
Are you sure it's AirBNB, or the general economy dropping? RE values and rents as a knock on result have been dropping everywhere as demand ($$$ to pay for rent) has dropped globally as peoples jobs are lost and people move in with their parents or similar and drop leases fairly suddenly.
When you really research how much AirBNB is part of a housing market, it's minuscule. One or 3 condo buildings can usually cover whatever supply AirBNB put into alternative demand markets. AirBNB is a convenient scapegoat in most markets, because it diverts attention from building more supply and all the NIMBYs blocking it.
I get your point, but any culpability on their part should not cause us to withhold compassion and empathy to a person losing their livelihood.
Being laid off sucks.
I can't imagine what it's like to be laid off during the worst economic period in US history since the great depression, AND to have people bag on you because you were employed by a company they didn't agree with.
AirBNB has destroyed the rental markets of 100s of metropolitan areas. If you're working there, then you helped that.
Facebook is the sole reason we have AntiVaxxers, Trump, and fake news in general. Working at facebook, you're supporting that.
Apple I don't really have a beef with.
Amazon has killed people in it's factories, and if you work there you are in some part responsible for those deaths and the destroyed small businesses.
You can work where ever you want, as is your right. But by you working at a company, does not make you immune from being responsible for the company's actions. You have a choice of where you work, and if you choose to work there knowing the bad things the company does- that's on you.
The cynical part of me is thinking about the people who never had a chance at a decent livelihood. Demi-employment didn't sneak up on us, we just thought we were too classy and sophisticated as workers to have it ever effect us.
This isn't the first time our generations have experienced this. It's practically the third. You should know very well by now that many of these jobs aren't coming back, and those that do are really only going to be open to people who are younger than you.
Well, everyone knew it was coming. Dara has been pretty transparent about the timelines, plus there were a ton of leaks in the news about details over the course of the last few weeks. It looks like everyone in eng got an email this morning that stated in bold italics whether they are affected or not. Gotta say I appreciated that clarity.
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
I don't understand why the firings are waves. Is this a logistics thing, or a morale thing somehow? Because it seems like it would negatively impact morale, more than anything.
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
The leadership team has repeatedly said they acknowledge it sucks to leave people hanging for weeks on end since it obviously drags morale through the mud, but that the logistics are complicated, due to the sheer number of people involved, local laws, etc. The leaks have just made it all the more stressful.
The logistics. In the best of times it takes at least a week to let go a few thousand employees. I can think of about ten things to take care of. Now multiply that with number of countries, the local laws to be handled. Add another multiplier or two for being a public company. The PR angle. And finally the unprecedented COVID-19 situation we are in, which compounds by adding a few more variables, the least of which is remote coordination.
All said and done, I’m actually impressed they got through this in under a month.
At Lehman Brothers, the waves came every few weeks.
On Tuesdays, HR fired business people, and engineering people cleaned up the mess.
On Wednesdays, HR fired engineering people.
On Thursdays, HR fired each other.
If you broke labor laws while laying yourself off, would it be grounds to sue the company afterward since the actions were taken by an employee of the company?
It's a funny thought, but I have to think it'd get noticed pretty quickly that you're suing the company for something you actually did, and it'd be dismissed pretty quickly.
It'd be fun to negotiate your own exit package in that situation though :-D
A few years ago I worked at a small-ish company that had to do a mass layoff of about 10% of their employees. The only HR person had to write her own layoff letter. A few days later she had to walk back her own layoff because the company realized they probably shouldn't layoff their only HR person during a mass layoff.
Not me personally but a close friend I know that works there says morale is at an all time low understandably. Luckily he wasn't fired but a close coworker of his who was the #25th employee of Uber was removed. 6+ years at Uber and was managing and running a team that wasn't deemed essential to Uber core services apparently. Kind sucks but these people are at a position where it shouldn't be difficult to find another position elsewhere.
Furthermore, Uber is a public company now, and there is (as far as I know) no outstanding lockout period for employees. IF anyone has outstanding options, that are subject to a (most likely) 90-day exercise window, they can be exercised and immediately sold.
The typical "exercising of an option for an illiquid asset which will be taxed as if it's liquid" problems with start-up stock options simply don't exist in this case.
Dara's email was really well written, and felt as compassionate as one can for a letter from a CEO announcing job cuts.
The full email:
Team Uber:
These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly that we had to take tough action to resize our company to the new reality of our business, and that I would come back to you this week with the specifics.
Today I have the specifics: we have made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce by around 3,000 people, and to reduce investments in several non-core projects. As a leadership team we had to take the time to make the right decisions, to ensure that we are treating our people well, and to make certain that we could walk you through our decision making in the sort of detailed and transparent manner you deserve.
Where we started and hard choices
We began 2020 on an accelerated path to total company profitability. Then the coronavirus hit us with a once-in-a-generation public health and economic crisis. People are rightfully staying home, and our Rides business, our main profit generator, is down around 80%. We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape.
You’ve heard me say it before: hope is not a strategy. While that’s easy to say, the truth is that this is a decision I struggled with. Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear. Ultimately, I realized that hoping the world would return to normal within any predictable timeframe, so we could pick up where we left off on our path to profitability, was not a viable option.
I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect our stock price, or to please our Board or investors. I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world—our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us—demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.
We have to take these hard actions to stand strong on our own two feet, to secure our future, and to continue on our mission.
I know that none of this will make it any easier for our friends and colleagues affected by the actions we are taking today. To those of you personally impacted, I am truly sorry. I know this will cause pain for you and your families, especially now. Many of you will be affected not because of the quality of your work, but because of strategic decisions we made to discontinue certain areas of activity, or projects that are no longer necessary, or simply because of the stark reality we face. You have been a huge part of this company and every day forward we will build on the foundations that you established, brick by brick.
Our decisions and the road forward
We have decided to re-focus our efforts on our core. If there is one silver lining regarding this crisis, it’s that Eats has become an even more important resource for people at home and for restaurants; and delivery, whether of groceries or other local goods, is not only an increasing part of everyday life, it is here to stay. We no longer need to look far for the next enormous growth opportunity: we are sitting right on top of one. I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses. I have every belief that the moves we are making will get Eats to profitability, just as we did with Rides, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Yep, I agree - it sounds genuine and from the heart. 80% reduction in business is no small thing and especially due to something out of the CEO's control. We can't blame companies from laying off people - it sucks for all of us.
I totally agree with this. I've seen Dara speak before and I've always found him extremely genuine, intelligent, and insightful.
That said, I've seen a number of layoff announcements from CEOs recently where there have been a number of "Wow, really great job announcing those layoffs" comments. And, while I agree with that, part of me thinks that we've become so conditioned to especially shitty layoff announcements and corporate double speak that when someone does something that really shouldn't be that difficult (speak with empathy, genuineness, but clarity on what must be done, and treat employees who are leaving well) that we're all particularly impressed.
I'm in no way saying layoffs are easy, and I know many good CEOs who agonize over those decisions. At the same time, I think we should try to raise our expectations of how employees should be humanely treated.
Personally, I would prefer "Sorry, we're letting you go, reasons are obvious - it's covid19 not you. Thanks for everything, your last month salary will be paid on X and we're giving you Y months of cash to help you transition."... Why make a movie out of it?
> And over the next 12 months we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services.
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
The Information had a good article on the engineering layoffs (at least the previous round). The CEO decided to cut people to shift development to lower cost countries even when some managers were willing to cut their own salaries to save some jobs.
Where did you get those numbers? And how did you conclude engineers worldwide are being "replaced by" Indians from a statement which says they're moving APAC hub from Singapore?
I wonder how Dara’s approach will pan out if things get much worse (most economists predict that there will be a greater recession than 08 unless urgent fiscal and monetary actions are taken immediately). Friends in the oil industry have described the environment as cutthroat and unpredictable, swaying wildly from euphoric good times to brutal cost cutting when oil prices fall... I was shocked at how they were treated but in a cyclical market that’s the only kind of company that will survive the lows.
Seems like a lot of cuts that needed to happen even without Covid. Common refrain for these companies is why does Company X need Y thousands of employees for a single app/website. For Uber I guess we are going to find out how much they were really needed.
Yes, pandemic is going to force companies to take action that was necessary anyway. Uber's businesses, all of them, everywhere, are garbage. There is no sense, no matter how narrow or convoluted, in which Uber has been profitable. Spare me the discussion of how their empanada delivery business in Jakarta is very healthy. Just spare me. When I was a professional investor, whenever management told me that they had a really profitable business in Uruguay or Crete or wherever I would run, RUN back to my desk and short their stock. "Big in Japan" is not. Anyway the point is Uber is the most-fucked company that ever was. They will never expand into their new Mission Bay HQ. At best, they will retreat into it, abandoning their other real estate in a continuation of the process that began when they bailed out of Oakland. This has been a long time coming for Uber and Covid-19 merely gives them the cover to do what's needed.
> I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because
I'm just curious, did you take the time to add the emphasis here, or did the original email have the word "everyone" surrounded by asterisk characters?
> I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world
Any company that facilitates or provides an in-person service that has seen a sharp decline from Covid-19 is pretty clearly not an essential service in the minds of their customers.
As a counterpoint, buses/railways are imo 100% an essential service for cities and yet they were running empty during the COVID-19 lockdown where I live. I would hate to see them recategorized as non-essential because of a situation that is clearly completely abnormal.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint. I agree that public transport is essential, but the level at which it was running previously was 100% non essential, because the majority of the workforce in places like London (where we have excellent public transport) can & should work from home. There's no need for accountants to sit in an open plan office all clustered on the same spot in the City of London and therefore putting a huge strain on public transport which forces London to run a train every 60 seconds.
And precisely because public transport IS essential we still had all of it running, just at a reduced capacity to facilitate the essential public demand. So comparing public transport with Uber only highlights even more how Uber is non essential, because we can live pretty much without it, but we evidently can't without public transport (as seen in London).
Well... transportation hasn't disappeared. People still drive, cycle and take busses and trains, so clearly these means of transport are essential. However, it is true that air travel has collapsed and restaurants as well, both which seem to be non essential. People don't have to fly to other places (for the most part at least, air freight is still happening plentyfull) and people can cook at home or get delivery, so it seems that not all transportation is essential and that restaurants aren't either.
Judging from my experience - restaurants are not. We have started cooking more since the beginning of the lockdown being able to cook during the time that would have otherwise been spent on commute. And we have saved a surprisingly large amount of money in the process.
The numbers are skewed because of the nature of this pandemic. People are scared of being in close proximity with each other.
I would argue some portion of the accommodations industry is essential (avg. occupancy rates of around ~%60 in normal times, so let's say ~%60 of hotels/motels are essential) and yet I know multiple hoteliers who have had to close shop for the next few months due to zero volume. This doesn't mean that day-to-day, hotels aren't an essential service.
"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it."
This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for their shareholders. Portraying it as something noble is more than a little tone-deaf.
I feel for the people affected and I hope they find new roles soon.
There is a very simple way to determine if a service is essential or not. If it existed 15 years ago it might be essential, but if it did not, then it is definitely not essential. Human civilization arose and thrived for thousands of years without ride-share. We'll be fine (better off actually) without it.
The World Wide Web was invented only 30 years ago, yet it's arguably the single most essential service during this time. Without it, social distancing while keeping large parts of the economy alive wouldn't have even been an option.
At the rate technology is becoming embedded into our daily lives, I think an arbitrary number of years is definitely not the way to decide whether something is essential. Context matters. What if instead of a pandemic that affects the lungs, the next one affects older people's ability to walk? Not very hard to imagine Uber being considered a 100% essential service at that point.
Ahh - the comment from the person with the multi-car garage, the tesla and the range rover.
Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets.
A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
the idea that uber loses money on rides because of "VC" needs to die. uber is not VC funded anymore and hasn't been for a long time now.
uber loses money on every ride because uber loses money overall because it spends a lot of money on other projects, not because the marginal cost/benefit of each ride is negative.
The ridesharing line of business has been profitable for at least a year from what I can tell. The plan was for it to cover all the other costs by EoY 2020, incl. HQ expenses and other bets like Eats.
You could say the same for taxis. If uber cost 100$/ride you wouldn't be claiming it is unprecedented. It will die because no one wants to pay for it with the real cost: livable wage + proper car insurance.
I suspect buying a reasonable used compact car is much more financially prudent than using Uber as you means of transportation. Maybe the calculus flips in a dense city like NYC but there's no way people who commute every day with Uber are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.
Buying a reasonable used compact car probably costs around 2000$ minimum. And a 2000$ car, no matter how nice, has the potential to require much more $$$ in maintenance when things start breaking.
Believe it or not, there are people out there who don't have $2000 and these people are also the same ones who can't get anyone to lend them money.
This is not some let them eat cake thing, frankly I think people with your pov are actually the ones saying that.
How much would it actually cost to commute 20-30 minutes to and from work in an Uber? $40 a day? More? Let's just say its 40 and you strictly commute during the week so that's $200 a week or 800 a month. Even with bad credit or no credit you would be able to save for a car rapidly. The $2000 car would only take 10 weeks to pay for fully in cash and the savings of 800$ per month could easily cover maintenance.
My point is if you can afford to use Uber as your sole means of transportation you can surely afford your own car and the people who can't are using subways or Buses. It's pretty simple, people who are struggling aren't using Uber very often.
Why are you so focused on the "sole means of transportation"? Before COVID I've used Uber and the likes around twice a month - when using public transportation was unfeasible, like going to the airport with heavy luggage. Using public transportation and supplementing it with Uber was definitely most reasonable solution.
Because the Grandfather comment was about classifying Uber as an essential service when it's clearly not as demonstrated by yours and other comments. Using Uber a few times a month for extenuating circumstances is really not Essential.
The "essentialness" of an service it a pretty bad concept. Uber is definitely non essential as sole means, but it starts to be pretty essential when you feel sick and want to go to hospital (not on ambulance level tho).
I use my bicycle every day, but some people don't have that option. Also I normally use Uber more than once a month. The thing is, a car is way too much of hassle to use most of the time in the city. You need to park it, there's traffic, and then you can't drive drunk or so I've been told.
> there's no way people who commute every day are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.
Yes there is: Public transportation (bus, metro, train). Millions of people get to work using it every day.
Just having a car sit on the street would cost me at least 100$ per month in taxes, insurance, parking and other misc costs. I spend much less on public transportation.
Most people live in dense cities so these services exist. I almost only use Uber/taxis when I need to go to places that are hard to reach or at night.
I bet Uber/Lyft enable single car ownership for lots of couples, and is nothing like a luxury good. Things like people who carpool, but need a backup when that falls through. Or the ability to get to a doctor (or any location) poorly served by public transit.
I mean, it's not a luxury good in the sense that you can buy a car, but I suspect many folks have made difficult or expensive to unwind decisions that make car ownership expensive. Classifying transportation where an alternative may well cost more than $1k/mo as a "luxury good" is a real stretch of the word luxury.
So a luxury that you can normally get by without? You seem to be strengthening my argument that it's not essential.
I think my point is being missed though and that is that using Uber as your daily commute is certainly not cheaper than owning a car. I think that's perfectly reasonable to say.
Also I don't mean to imply that Uber is a luxury in the same way Lois Vuitton is a luxury.
In my examples in other comments using Uber as a daily commute option almost certainly costs nearly 1000 or more per month.
Using Uber alone for all transportation may be a luxury, but if you're in a situation where you rely heavily public transportation, Uber is a nearly essential addition to it.
Transporting large items, or groceries for an entire family are extremely difficult if not impossible over public transportation. Transporting a group of people (3+) can be approximately the same price on public transportation and Uber without potentially sacrificing comfort, safety, time and effort, many of which can be essential depending on your circumstances.
The cost of using Uber and Public transportation also requires a lot less upfront cost which is necessary for people living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to spend around $2k on a car, as well as deal with it's maintenance time and cost.
When I lived in SF parking was $400 per month, plus as a young male my insurance was $200+ per month.
Most of the time I could take a bus or public transit, but when I couldn’t (like buying groceries) then I’d use an Uber. It was significantly cheaper versus owning a car, and it was absolutely an “essential” service at that point in my life.
This discounts the difficulties in buying a car when credit is bad or nonexistent. I was in this situation, the only people who will give you a vehicle are loan sharks and scammers. Partially this was my own ignorance (see: awful credit). Partially it was my own bad credit itself.
It also discounts the horrible stress that adding a known monthly bill can cause, when Uber is more flexible, pay-what-you-need. And I was never as bad as many others, so I can see how the least-prepared and least-financially-secure could see Uber as a viable use, either once-in-a-while (e.g., missed the bus), or for regular use (paying $12 for a two-way, 1 mile trip through a crappy part of town can pay for itself if you avoid an hour of walking and get an hour of working).
Literally folks with cars are telling folks without cars (but who use uber when needed) that uber is not necessary (ie, partial access to a car is not needed) while they have 24/7 access.
Anyone who has NOT owned a car will tell you - uber is essential - full stop.
30% of the population has HOUSEHOLD income from all sources of $30K or less. The cost of parking alone can be a major issue (many cheaper apts do not have dedicated parking).
Tell that "Uber is not an essential service" to the millions of otherwise unemployable people that were able to feed their families using it. In countries like Brazil, where I'm from, the fall of Uber will have a gigantic impact. Gig economy apps BECAME ESSENTIAL parts of our lives, there's no denying it. But it was never sustainable. When everybody benefits from a product/service, other than the company that offers it, something is wrong. Uber only exists still, because of the FED's massive amount of money being printed and injected in the markets since 2008. Boomer's 401ks subsidized my Uber rides. The american taxpayers money created an amazing amount of wealth all over the world, lifted a lot of people from poverty. But now the party is over. Every unsustainable business eventually will die, just like the Dodos. I needed to write this, sorry. This ideia of Uber not being essential is such a miopic stance, it can only come from a person that can't see the impact, for the good, that gig economy apps had for the poor of the world.
The classification as an "essential service" has only to do with the service being essential to the _users_ of the service, and nothing to do with the workers.
You are completely twisting the label of an essential service in a way that makes it effectively meaningless. For every worker that depends on their salary for their livelihood, their job is essential, but that has nothing to do with an "essential service".
All the gig economy apps do is ensure the poor stay poor.
When you are working 10-12 hours a day to make ends meet and shoulder the all costs of the depreciating fix assets there is very little opportunity dig yourself out of that hole.
Uber and similar companies are destroying the very small businesses (or squashing their margins into nothing) which traditionally are the environment that the poor can become entrepreneurs and build their own local business.
You have no idea what you're talking about. I presume you live in the US. You definitely have no sense at how much an average brazilian/argentinian/russian/indian guy can improve their financial life by driving for a ride sharing app. I know of engineers and lawyers down here that are making 2, 3 times more money than they used to make working a 9to5 job. I'm tired of seeing privileged people talking about how the poor, or how the uneducated people are SOOOO sumb that they can't see that "after all the expenses and depreciation" they are literally paying to work for Uber etc. Please, be a little bit more humble and stop trying to prohibit the people that NEED, or even the people that would RATHER work as an Uber driver than to slave on a regular job. It's their needs, it's their CHOICE, not yours.
I dunno. I find services like Uber and Lyft pretty essential. In my smallish city, getting a cab pre-Uber was near impossible. My friends and I had the personal number of 2 cab drivers, and if neither of them picked up, good luck.
Even with the highly publicized Uber failures, no Uber I've ever taken has been worse than many of the cabs I was in prior. Something as simple as knowing the price up front has been key when traveling.
So sure, of course they want to stay an ongoing concern. But, services like Uber and Lyft have become essential to many people.
Uber all but destroyed the existing taxi infrastructure in several major cities. So yeah, in many places they're now pretty essential.
That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
The barrier for entry is dealing with municipal taxi commissions so you can actually operate the app. That alone probably require connections that a standard startup won’t be able to overcome.
You are thinking of only US and similar countries where everyone already owns cars. In country like India, there were not much taxis before Uber came. An alternative was autorickshaw which took twice as long to go the same distance, had much worse safety features, exposed one to all the pollution all the time, not to mention the cheating of fares.
I know of a very senior family friend living in one of the flyover states.
She doesnt drive following a car wreck. She had walk half a mile to wait out in the bitter rocky mountain cold at a bus stop to go to the Dr. Shes on social security. She told me she didnt have the money to take a cab, that is if she could even get a hold of one.
Then uber came along.
She learn to use uber on her own before even whatsapp.
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.
Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.
For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.
I moved to LA in the pre-Uber days. Trips from LAX back home were miserable. When my ex-wife had the car and I needed to go somewhere - forget about it. Taxis were impossible to find, even in the middle of West Hollywood. I really don't like Uber, but they did change many peoples' lives.
Yes, I can't drive and still only take public transport. It's more convenient than getting a Uber in London. Even taking a black cab can actually be cheaper. So yeah, I fully aware that transportation is important. I wish that would be better covered.
Lucky for them they can afford these taxis to get everywhere. I can't and I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube. But I prefer the bus as I can take multiple buses within a hour for the same fee :)
> Lucky for them they can afford these taxis to get everywhere.
They can't afford not to!
> I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube.
You're lucky that you have access to walkable pavements, busses, and a tube. That's a lot of privilege! I'd sure they'd be happy to use those as well! But many people don't have access to those things, and if they want to get anywhere they need to pay taxis.
I live in semi-rural Cheshire - we do have pavements and busses (but the busses take hours to get anywhere). We don't have anything as amazing as the tube!
If I want to get somewhere outside my village in less than a couple of hours I'd have to use a taxi or drive.
But if you go to for example some parts of the US, they literally don't even have pavements let alone busses, let alone tubes.
They can't even walk to their local shops in some cases. They're trapped without a car or taxi.
Yes, I also living in rural Holland where the bus only ran once a hour. Took hours to get to the closest train station to take the train so I understand the pain :)
Yes, one of the reasons you mention is why I never accepted a job in the US as I would be stuck!
Really well written email... This seems like a smart thing to do: `We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.`
I expect this to get downvoted, but: I would say that was a smart thing to say when laying off thousands of employees. That's not necessarily what the top executives believe, or want, as it is much much harder.
Thanks for posting this. It's been interesting to see Uber's engagement with its other businesses (like freight): they've been running trucks at a loss for several years now, it seems, and folks have wondered how long this can continue. That's a funny thing about Uber and more generally VC cash -- it can really cause 'artificial distortions' in industries. Will these layoffs reduce some of these distortions and return some of these industries to for-profit vs for-profit, instead of loss-leader vs normal business?
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb?
Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.
Is shorter or zero severance unethical? We all enter into this employment contract knowing it could end abruptly from either party. If money is tight, they could afford longer severances for all if they cut 4000 instead. Does that not seem unethical toward the extra 1000 cut?
Regardless of legality and what the parties agreed to contractually, the fact remains that abrupt termination with zero severance is harmful for the former employee, especially in this economic climate. If the corporation pays a generous severance, the harm is reduced or eliminated. On a scale of ethicality, the more harmful an action is, the less ethical it is, so yes, paying severance is more ethical than not paying severance.
I find the terms "less and more" applied to ethical confusing. Telling a company to harm people a little instead of a lot is enabling.
My use of ethical here is strongly tied to obligation. e.g., it is kind to give money to a person, but not unethical if you chose not to especially if you can't afford to.
The way I understand you is that it's kinder/more sympathetic to provide a greater severance. This part I agree with!
Severance is not free, though. Increasing it will either cost Uber more heads or greater risk (and more heads later). I'm repeating this question: Is this not unethical to the retained employees?
Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.
The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.
We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.
A lot of companies don't have a public image because nobody knows or cares what they do. So they have nothing to fear from a few bad glassdoor reviews.
The most reasonable explanation is that they were targeting Friday, but were late and so it was Monday. Firing 3,000 employees takes a lot of preparation. If there are a few corner case employee resolutions, that holds up the whole bunch
A lot of the layoffs are international, so if they had announced on Friday the employees would have learned of their terminations over theirs weekends, as Friday in the U.S. is generally at least Saturday in Europe and Asia.
International companies generally announce cross-border layoffs on Monday (US-time), because that announcement will be during the work week everywhere they operate.
There are several, one is that you can time it with payroll, so your last day is the end of the current payroll period, just makes it neat for accounting purposes.
Another is that if the company doesn't want the media to pick up the "bad news", Friday is the best time to do it because it'll get lost over the weekend when it's reported on.
And finally, there's less worry about retaliation from disgruntled employees if they have the weekend to calm down over being let go.
I think he/she is saying that announcing bad news on a Friday usually helps because it mitigates the amount of negative coverage it would receive from the media. Announcing on a Monday then seems unusual from a PR perspective.
Not OP, but a lot of American companies do layoffs on a Friday in an attempt to have fewer headlines on a weekend (news outlets aren’t fully staffed then, people are distracted, etc.)
There's not always a true, causal explanation of why stocks are reacting as they are. Don't be too quick to trust cable news anchors or other stock market shills that make a living making up and touting stock market narratives. By definition a stock price is a split of the public consensus of what's happening, just as many people are selling as buying at that price.
It's not unusual for stocks to go up on layoffs, but as others have commented there isn't always a simple explanation either. But it wasn't a secret that Uber was going to be getting hit hard by quarantine - it would probably already be priced into the stock by the point. The news today is that Uber's leadership is recognizing that and aggressively taking action to protect the bottom line - sucks in the short-term for employees, especially those directly affected, but that's great news for investors.
> Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
Yes.
This is Uber's way of saying to their investors that their costs will decrease due to losing billions during the coronavirus outbreak, thus head count must be decreased. But some who are buying now, may see this as a way of selling at the "bull trap" in Q2.
If anyone at Uber reads this, feel free to get in touch (Go, Java, SRE) if you want to effectively stay in the same building working for a multinational.
Dara hinted in his first email that there were more layoffs on the way. I consider them to be a single layoff, one portion of which took more time to execute.
Is it? You already laid off a large percentage of staff. Your product teams will have seen the data showing cratering revenue. Your top engineers are almost certainly already looking for new jobs anyways. You know you are going to have to make this move no matter what. Anyone with a brain knows that the status quo is unsustainable whether you say the quiet part out loud or not.
Better to give people a heads up so they can start getting their resumes in order, hitting up their networks, etc. rather than telling a blatant lie.
As I understand it, the first was for comms, operations, and support roles. This layoff was more product-related (so engineering, design, and product roles) and required more thought around how they were going to position themselves strategically going forward.
More data that can be feed into their financials models to understand the short-term and long-term impact of this market on their cash flow. Companies don't do layoffs because things are nice and predictable.
You seem to like that word, it being your nick, but that said, it would seem to me that any management that believes it is omnipotent ought to be fired on the spot. That sort of delusion can only end in tears.
The delusion is the opposite, in that everyone else thinks management should magically have all the right and best answers at the drop of a dime. In reality, management is people too with varied levels of experience and competence. And like all people, they make mistakes so we shouldn't be surprised they don't get it right all the time.
Honestly don’t understand why people don’t have their email address public. Spam filtering is so good these days that this is all upside and no downside.
We do testing, all aspects. They're oral swabs, which greatly reduces the barrier for many people who could get tested: They don't want a swab so far up their nose it feels like it's scraping their brain.
We build the software for the full-stack of testing from managing drivethrough sites with healthcare workers, full lab operations, results delivery to patients, integrations with cities and state health departments.
We're now handling hundreds of thousands of tests. We'll probably need at least 100x that to re-open the country with confidence.
Hit me up: maddox@curativeinc.com with questions/comments/anything.
Software team all remote, good pay + equity and benefits, satisfying work, and I love the people I work with.
Sorry you were let go - especially in the current situation. Feel free to look through our listings and, if anything is interesting to you, shoot us a message.
Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation and a lover of App Annie's product. Are you hiring only in Vancouver or is the role open to remote? (US, Pacific Timezone)
It's a long tail starting back in the days of my great great great great grandfather. Back in the mother country he was tired of the same old same old and decided to travel to the New World to start anew. 300 years later I was born here :)
I'm really worrying that the mindfulness and how to think gender neutral courses will be cancelled which would be a great shame. Furthermore I fear that I can't spend time on a completely new revolutionary javascript framework which makes all the other ones obsolete.
I can't imagine how companies like Uber, Lyft and WeWork could be sustainable in the long term with huge costs and a high burn rate, but this action is definitely in addressing the future Q2 results in the summer which is the actual results including the impact on the coronavirus outbreak.
Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with huge costs, the actual reality is that this is nothing more than the emperor new clothes. Unfortunately there are no sacred cows being saved here, especially engineering being affected in this.
Going public is still a fundraising event that puts cash on the balance sheet of the company.
So whether they are funded by VC's or large institutional buyers who are the majority traders on the public market, there is no difference and the companies continue to lost money.
The issue for Uber is that they need to change the narrative. They don't have the story that Amazon did, that they are losing money because they are reinvesting it back into tremendous infrastructure which will give them scale.
Uber is losing money because they grew very quickly so there were a lot of innate inefficiencies because of that. So these firings are a chance to right size the company and see if the new trimmed down Uber will now be profitable when eventually ridership returns to normal.
The game plan is pretty simple: use VC cash to quickly provide services everywhere and build market share, drive competitors out of business / acquire them, move to self-driving cars to the extent possible and eventually raise rates when customers have no other options.
I could argue that Atlanta is tier 3 as well, the distinction between tier 2/3 could just be a simple rule of numbers (over a 1M pop vs. under 1M pop) and not a tech center. Or in my case that when I've interviewed people from the given locations that they didn't meet the bar by a given level. UIUC produces some amazing engineers, but UChicago doesn't...
That’s a pretty strange ordering, mixing up a Seattle and Boston metros of 4 and 4.6m with an SLC, Portland, and Austin metros Of 1.2, 2.5, and 2.1m respectively. Why mix up the small and large cities in T2? Then your T3 has Minneapolis, at 3.6m. Why would Minneapolis be ranked lower than tiny SLC given it has 3x the population?
Thanks for the population numbers, I didn't know they were so different. I just ranked them from (my perceived) livability - SLC close to skiing/nature, while Minneapolis/Ann Arbor are not destination cities like the other ones.
I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the T1s.
I see your logic though, and maybe it's better to just have a T1 and T2.
Minneapolis is the biggest American metro between Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix. It basically anchors a huge amount of the country. SLC in contrast plays second fiddle to nearby (relatively speaking) Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (at least it is bigger than Boise).
Ann Arbor is so small and close to Detroit, it is odd to hear it listed as a significant city in its own right (like Madison WI). Heck, they are about the same close-ish distance away from Toledo, and Toledo is much bigger than Ann Arbor.
Don't really agree with this at all unless you are only talking in the context of the software engineering job market - which I don't think is usually what people refer to by "tier N"
Ann Arbor is an amazing town, but I'm surprised to see it on the same level as much larger metros. Is tech that much deeper there than when I was in school a handful of years ago? Who are the big players these days?
Hard to let go of that many people without losing critical knowledge, Uber will come out of this a diminished company in many ways. Best of luck to those laid off.
Not so sure about that. The company was notorious for having teams constantly rollout competing internal libraries/tools and rewrite them over and over, obviously not having enough bottom-line work to keep everyone busy. A smaller workforce may be able to focus on the work that matters, it doesn't have to imply a lower productivity.
Even if a tool should not have been written, the ability to troubleshoot it is still critical to its consumers. And making hundreds of dependent teams spend a month migrating is easily more expensive than 3 headcount to maintain it.
I have never witnessed a company at least the size of Uber where this wasn't the case. This isn't exclusively a culture thing, it's a bandwidth thing. There is limited human IO available to coordinate, and available bandwidth diminishes in proportion to org size. The org can either choose to slow down to match available IO, or run at closer to natural pace and accept duplicate work. I guess the latter must be the obvious choice, or the automatic tendency
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
Then you get to the critical component where you fire the lead architect/programmer and then it keeps working fine for few weeks, but you find more bugs and you need to upgrade/fix it. Only to find out the documentation if they exist don't help at all and the first 2 tries builds fine so you put it in production only to see everything destroyed. And after 1 year of back and forth you hire 10 other developer to maintain this thing and then 50 others to write a new one.
An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge isn't doing their job and management needs to get ahead of this. What if this "key person" decides to find another job?
Of course there's documentation, and also knowledge sharing, doesn't help he/she and 50% of his/her teammates are let go and without a solid way of knowledge transfer or the desire to do so under this context.
This is especially bad for software that are written under tight deadline - no matter how much document you write about it. And sadly, there's more software that are written like that than otherwise.
An architect that doesn't leave documentation and share knowledge might also be thinking about protecting his own job. Being irreplaceable is good job security.
I’ve always wondered, does this actually happen? People not getting fired because they are irreplaceable partly because of their own failure to document stuff?
Nobody except newcomers to the codebase look at documents on code structure, and of course no one is fired for not producing it/producing a crappy version of it.
When the newcomer can't get anything out of that doc, if it exist, he/she just need to ask the creator, who will explain very nicely how everything is done, and that newcomer become a code guru in that codebase, and the cycle continues.
Until you layoff 50% of the team and now suddenly nobody knows how 50% of the stuff work.
Very frequently in corporate environments, at least in investment banks I have known and heard of many people earning four figures a day pretty much purely because they've been allowed to carve their own niche that becomes indispensable.
Ironically, the worse they are (think 5000 lines of Perl with two functions) then the less viable it is to replace them.
I bet the number of developers that are working on the business critical stuff is very low. Years ago I talked a lot to people at Oracle and Apple and it was always amazing how small the core development teams for the big products were.
> IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
Critical knowledge is with the developers unless:
1. The system is stable and feature-complete.
2. You've employed about 10 FTEs documenting every aspect of the thing.
If those two criteria aren't met, they system becomes tech debt, a larger risk, and will likely decay until replaced.
I've seen engineering orgs cut in half and become a lot stronger as a result. Fat is trimmed across the stack. Processes are automated. Runbooks and documentation is written. Applications are 'operationalized' to be easily maintained. You'd be surprised how constraining resources makes it really clear what is important and what is not.
It looks like Dara is executing the Jack Welch & General Electric playbook [1]. Essentially, it comes down to "Be the #1 or #2 company in the market or exit"
You can debate whether it was successful at GE. The criticism of Jack Welch was that his approach improved short-term financials, but he left a hollowed-out company to his successor that became irrelevant and lost value relative to the S&P.
The way I see this playing out at Uber is rapidly exiting categories like Scooters, Freight, Works, and AV. And doubling down on Ride Share and Eats with acquisitions in geographies where they have a leading position. I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility.
> I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility
Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Electric scooters are fun and useful, especially for commuting in the morning from a drop off location like a train station. The real question is whether or not it can be profitable, which I highly doubt. I would rather just get my own if I needed it.
I live in downtown Orlando. Lime, Lynx, and Bird have littered downtown with scooters. I run almost every day and they are often left directly in the middle of the sidewalk, either upright or fallen over. A couple months ago I began relocating any rental equipment I find in my way on the sidewalk. I am not at all gentle about this and I'm sure I have damaged some of the equipment. I like the idea that people might use these more than cars, but investors need to figure out a better way to store them than in the sidewalk.
I get the anger about sidewalks getting littered with scooters, but damaging or destroying them is just creating more hazardous e-waste to be disposed of.
There needs to be a more sustainable model for scooter rentals than "when the scooter breaks, we just throw it out and replace it with another $20 white label scooter from China"
The reason they're treated like trash, by both the company that put them there and by pedestrians, is because that is what they are.
True, but that still makes them a market fad. Even if you got cities on board, the costs are fairly fixed, so while the scooters are fun, it was never a feasible business at scale.
The problem with electric scooters is even though they're nice in urban areas, they're a best-effort service. You can't rely on them to be somewhere by a specific time as they could either be unavailable around you, too far or the one you end up walking to could happen to be broken.
I think the rental bikes which have a fixed docking station are a better design.
I use scooters to commute daily, Revel is more dangerous IMO, i have seen a few of them totaled since they came to Miami. Scooters are the least hassle for me.
Scooters seem very viable in parts of Los Angeles. Before covid people were using them a lot. It is true that mopeds/ bikes are more functional. But there is something about a scooter where you just stand on it and it is very pleasant, vs something you sit on and feel like maybe you should have a helmet. Anecdotally, I saw scooters used a lot more than bikes in Century City, when both were available.
I would argue this isn't true. I lived in Santa Monica when the scooters came about and once they removed the helmet law I loved the utility they provided. I lived about 2 miles away from downtown Santa Monica, which is totally walkable and I love walking, but sometimes I wanted to meet up with someone in a more reasonable amount of time. Instead of having to order an Uber for such a short trip, I would check Bird or the Lyft scooters to find one close to me, jump on it, and be downtown in roughly 10 minutes. And they're fun to ride!
Now Santa Monica does have a great bike share infrastructure that I also used quite a bit, but nothing is more frustrating that getting on a well used bike and having the brakes hardly work or the crank constantly slipping as you push the pedal downward. Don't get me wrong, you can totally get a bad scooter that isn't running well, but I think I ran into more worn down bikes, likely due to the bike program having been around longer.
My 2 cents, the more options the better.
EDIT: Also wanted to note, Santa Monica has a lot of bike lanes, which made riding the scooters around much easier and safer from my perspective.
Not wearing a helmet on a device whose front wheel is a fulcrum of a lever that can smash your head on the pavement at a moment's notice is monumentally reckless.
The helmetless riders are a real issue. And the injuries caused by the morons using them are a business model externality that isn't dealt with.
I think I'm the intended use case because I live about 2 miles (3.2km) from an entertainment district. I can walk it, and I have done so, but it takes quite a while, around 45 minutes. On a scooter it takes like 10.
Because of parking costs, scooter is cheaper than driving. It might even be faster. I own a bike, so I could ride that, but I don't like parking it in a busy downtown area.
There's also a bus I can take, and sometimes I take bus one direction and scooter the other if the bus schedule doesn't work for me.
I admit many people park scooters in a very inconsiderate way, but I always park carefully out of the way, so I don't feel bad about that personally.
I always wondered how the scooter fad was going to work out once people realized they could just buy them for a few hundred bucks. Bicycles are hard to store for apartment dwellers, and more at risk of being stolen when locked up.
I live in a city that banned the companies but see a few people still commuting on them in the bike lane.
This strategy is the opposite of a portfolio play. It is great if your winners stay winners. I think if you are aligned well with the overall market direction that is great.
Basically by only keeping the strongest you should get the highest rate of return until these is a failure. A portfolio play gives you more modest returns but more consistent over time -- you should still trim the losers who do not have potential.
I had never thought of it in those terms before, but this is similar to portfolio diversification in investing. There's the quip that when you're properly diversified there's always something to hate in your portfolio. Of course the flipside is that there's always something to love too.
All that compared to making concentrated bets where you can win big, or lose big.
"Short-term"? He was CEO for 20 years, and made it one of the most successful companies during that time. One would be very hardpressed to call GE of 2001 a hollowed-out company.
Jack Welch retired in 2001 after twenty years as CEO. "Upon his retirement from GE, Welch had stated that his effectiveness as its CEO for two decades would be measured by the company's performance for a comparable period under his successors"
If we use the long-term yardstick that Jack Welch suggested we use, he does not come out looking good. We are now at roughly the two-decade mark and GE is trading at the same price that it did in 1992 and 80% below where it was when he retired.
Meh, that's a completely arbitrary measure and flippant at best. He has no control over what his successors do, or their strategy. I, and many many others, prefer to judge him by how he handled the company when he actually had control over it.
I didn't come up with it. It is the yardstick that he suggested we use to measure his performance :)
And it's a well-known issue with executive compensation that CEOs will juice numbers in the short-term to get their payouts which is likely why he proposed this as a measure of his performance.
Yes, I know. But it's a nonsensical way to measure it. Is sounds like something he said flippantly without thinking about what that meant, because it's meaningless.
An interesting comment because it's a good example of what you see more and more of from people with a positive emotional disposition toward someone who won't let them fail or look bad even if its quite obvious that they failed, and it looks bad (and even if they themselves would admit it).
As a factual matter, the measurement isn't meaningless at all. Give Jack some credit.
So are you saying that the new successors to GE have no agency at all, and they are just following a script? That's ridiculous. The CEOs of GE have not been great or successful but that's on them, not Welch.
Presumably Welch believed in the hiring system he put in place. It was also an audacious claim, which comes with its own rewards. But folks like you let Welch have his cake and eat it too: he gets the praise for making an audacious claim, and then when it turns out false, folks like you make excuses for him.
When you read his book he portrays himself as a teacher and mentor to the next generation of managers. GE was supposed to crank out high quality managers. He maybe did a good job himself (or was lucky with this timing) but he totally failed at preparing the company for a time after him.
1981 • Jack Welch becomes CEO • $1.29
2001 • Jack Welch retires • $37.20 (down from its peak of near $60.00 in mid 2000)
2020 • Nearly 20 years post Jack Welch • $6.28.
20 years of Jack Welch - +2,800% increase
20 years after Jack Welch - -83% decrease
To be fair, most companies underperform s&p 500. S&p is driven by giant winners, and every generation has different winners. In the 90s GE was the winner and other companies in s&p trailed them. This is what makes survivors like Microsoft so amazing, they managed to remain on top by reinventing themselves many times under different leaderships.
They just sold Jump, while investing in Lime.
I think scooters could still be used as a "last-mile" strategy for Ride Share, and maybe acquire teen mindshare and a sort of platform play.
But it's a spinoff with a long leash.
Lyft also set such pretentious goals for 2021 last year. Not sure what crystal ball they were basing their forecast on but, such jokes are meant to be reserved for a late night comedy show not in an earnings call. [0]
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadAlso as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that?
Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR
"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/uber-nabs-1-billion-self-dri...
I would argue that ML researchers/engineers have a clear impact on AAPL products in several areas:
* FaceID
* Steadily improving speech recognition accuracy in Siri
* Considerable improvement in speech synthesis quality
* Increasing sophistication in camera image processing
(My source is a friend working on self-driving who was laid off today)
This server could not prove that it is archive.vn; its security certificate is from cloudflare-dns.com.
Are archive.vn working?
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
"Independent contractors" working from home and using their own equipment. "Gig economy". Hope they enjoy it.
If you were forecasting how this company in particular would deal with a downturn, it's a reasonable guess that they'll try to do the same thing to their own workforce, if they can find engineers willing to take on gig work. It's in their DNA.
To be charitable, the grandfather comment is a warning to think about the broader effects of the work we do, driven home by the possibility of a "what goes around comes around" situation.
EDIT: as many have pointed out, taxi drivers don't get benefits either (I originally said one of the margins Uber competes on is not providing benefits).
This Uber trick: taking % of the revenue for the fixed cost service (they provide to the taxis drivers ) is the master trick making uber money.
So far, in Europe, all taxi corporations charge taxi driver FIXED (quite small 100..200 usd/month) amount for operating telco/web/radio and coordinating fleet of taxis.
Uber's ability to push bulshine here is really business milking 101 course: Fixed costs, uncaped incomes.
Unless they own their own medallion, they pay "medallion rent". They'll also pay dispatch fees. Many taxi drivers switched over to being Uber drivers because they could earn (and keep) more money, not less.
The bigger risk with getting a job at Uber is "will they be in business in 2 years?" Tech company success tends to be binary: either you're growing and on top of the world, or you'll be out of business in a couple years. Just ask DEC, Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, etc.
I see ex-Facebook and ex-Uber employees popping up all the time at high positions within hot (and sometimes even ethical) growth companies within the valley.
Have you ever been inside a FAANG? Sometimes it feels like red badges outnumber FTE 2:1 so I have no idea what you're talking about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...
You may really have just been on a team that doesn't interact often with contractors, but the reality for the broader company is that contracting is a way of life for much more than just Uber.
I think rather than looking at those names we might ask ourselves about the ones that managed to survive: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, as an example
Sure, we might argue that they have not always been the most ethical companies out there, but it doesn't mean they haven't had to reinvent themselves here and there
How come Oracle and IBM got more money from Java than Sun? Windows is now "free" but MS continues to make money.
Those companies that went away seems to be mostly good examples of the Inventor's dilema. Especially SGI.
what's median job duration for a software engineer in startup-land anyway? I'd be surprised if it was much over 2 years...
I'd think that if your famous company goes under, folks won't generally hold that against you. Heck, I'd think people who watched it all fall apart would would have the most interesting stories (and valuable lessons about mistakes to avoid).
Where are taxi drivers employees with benefits? At least in New York, they're mostly independent contractors. (A minority are sole proprietors.)
I know I definitely prefer to save tens of dollars per ride vs the services provided by some platonic ideal of a "professional driver".
You think minicab firms paid benefits before Uber?
I can't think of a single tech company that hasn't engaged in some eye brow raising behavior.
There was even some controversy with YCombinator funding a fantasy sports betting company.
Offered rents in Vancouver have dropped 15% since the pandemic took hold and AirBnB became a dead business for a bunch of mini-hoteliers. If you helped build that software, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the crisis in affordable housing we've been struggling with, that AirBnB has contributed to.
If you work at Facebook, then I hold you a little bit responsible for the consequences of the 2016 U.S. election and Donald Trump's presidency.
Your share of the responsibility is likely tiny, and I'm not going act like you're a mass murderer. But at the end of the day you were part of the machine that left a trail of damage in its wake, and I won't ignore that just because you were merely a cog.
When you really research how much AirBNB is part of a housing market, it's minuscule. One or 3 condo buildings can usually cover whatever supply AirBNB put into alternative demand markets. AirBNB is a convenient scapegoat in most markets, because it diverts attention from building more supply and all the NIMBYs blocking it.
Being laid off sucks.
I can't imagine what it's like to be laid off during the worst economic period in US history since the great depression, AND to have people bag on you because you were employed by a company they didn't agree with.
AirBNB has destroyed the rental markets of 100s of metropolitan areas. If you're working there, then you helped that.
Facebook is the sole reason we have AntiVaxxers, Trump, and fake news in general. Working at facebook, you're supporting that.
Apple I don't really have a beef with.
Amazon has killed people in it's factories, and if you work there you are in some part responsible for those deaths and the destroyed small businesses.
You can work where ever you want, as is your right. But by you working at a company, does not make you immune from being responsible for the company's actions. You have a choice of where you work, and if you choose to work there knowing the bad things the company does- that's on you.
I'm curious if this is because you agree with everything they've done or because you haven't really looked too deeply into it.
This isn't the first time our generations have experienced this. It's practically the third. You should know very well by now that many of these jobs aren't coming back, and those that do are really only going to be open to people who are younger than you.
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
All said and done, I’m actually impressed they got through this in under a month.
It allows you to ramp down without pandemonium.
It'd be fun to negotiate your own exit package in that situation though :-D
Assuming anyone laid off had unexercised options, they'll likely have a short window to exercise them before they expire.
The typical "exercising of an option for an illiquid asset which will be taxed as if it's liquid" problems with start-up stock options simply don't exist in this case.
The full email:
Team Uber:
These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly that we had to take tough action to resize our company to the new reality of our business, and that I would come back to you this week with the specifics.
Today I have the specifics: we have made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce by around 3,000 people, and to reduce investments in several non-core projects. As a leadership team we had to take the time to make the right decisions, to ensure that we are treating our people well, and to make certain that we could walk you through our decision making in the sort of detailed and transparent manner you deserve.
Where we started and hard choices
We began 2020 on an accelerated path to total company profitability. Then the coronavirus hit us with a once-in-a-generation public health and economic crisis. People are rightfully staying home, and our Rides business, our main profit generator, is down around 80%. We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape.
You’ve heard me say it before: hope is not a strategy. While that’s easy to say, the truth is that this is a decision I struggled with. Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear. Ultimately, I realized that hoping the world would return to normal within any predictable timeframe, so we could pick up where we left off on our path to profitability, was not a viable option.
I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect our stock price, or to please our Board or investors. I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world—our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us—demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.
We have to take these hard actions to stand strong on our own two feet, to secure our future, and to continue on our mission.
I know that none of this will make it any easier for our friends and colleagues affected by the actions we are taking today. To those of you personally impacted, I am truly sorry. I know this will cause pain for you and your families, especially now. Many of you will be affected not because of the quality of your work, but because of strategic decisions we made to discontinue certain areas of activity, or projects that are no longer necessary, or simply because of the stark reality we face. You have been a huge part of this company and every day forward we will build on the foundations that you established, brick by brick.
Our decisions and the road forward
We have decided to re-focus our efforts on our core. If there is one silver lining regarding this crisis, it’s that Eats has become an even more important resource for people at home and for restaurants; and delivery, whether of groceries or other local goods, is not only an increasing part of everyday life, it is here to stay. We no longer need to look far for the next enormous growth opportunity: we are sitting right on top of one. I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses. I have every belief that the moves we are making will get Eats to profitability, just as we did with Rides, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
So we nee...
That said, I've seen a number of layoff announcements from CEOs recently where there have been a number of "Wow, really great job announcing those layoffs" comments. And, while I agree with that, part of me thinks that we've become so conditioned to especially shitty layoff announcements and corporate double speak that when someone does something that really shouldn't be that difficult (speak with empathy, genuineness, but clarity on what must be done, and treat employees who are leaving well) that we're all particularly impressed.
I'm in no way saying layoffs are easy, and I know many good CEOs who agonize over those decisions. At the same time, I think we should try to raise our expectations of how employees should be humanely treated.
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that but who knows.
I'm just curious, did you take the time to add the emphasis here, or did the original email have the word "everyone" surrounded by asterisk characters?
Any company that facilitates or provides an in-person service that has seen a sharp decline from Covid-19 is pretty clearly not an essential service in the minds of their customers.
And precisely because public transport IS essential we still had all of it running, just at a reduced capacity to facilitate the essential public demand. So comparing public transport with Uber only highlights even more how Uber is non essential, because we can live pretty much without it, but we evidently can't without public transport (as seen in London).
I would argue some portion of the accommodations industry is essential (avg. occupancy rates of around ~%60 in normal times, so let's say ~%60 of hotels/motels are essential) and yet I know multiple hoteliers who have had to close shop for the next few months due to zero volume. This doesn't mean that day-to-day, hotels aren't an essential service.
This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for their shareholders. Portraying it as something noble is more than a little tone-deaf.
I feel for the people affected and I hope they find new roles soon.
By those measures BTW, antibiotics, modern sewers and (for the most part) vacinations aren't essential.
And indeed they aren't, for the survival of the human race. They are, however, very important for the survival of individual humans.
The World Wide Web was invented only 30 years ago, yet it's arguably the single most essential service during this time. Without it, social distancing while keeping large parts of the economy alive wouldn't have even been an option.
At the rate technology is becoming embedded into our daily lives, I think an arbitrary number of years is definitely not the way to decide whether something is essential. Context matters. What if instead of a pandemic that affects the lungs, the next one affects older people's ability to walk? Not very hard to imagine Uber being considered a 100% essential service at that point.
Useful? No. Effective? No. Meaningful? No. But definitely simple.
Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets.
A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
is uber cheaper than cabs/public transpo w/o the VC subsidy? 15 years ago there was no uber and people were able to get by using public transpo.
uber loses money on every ride because uber loses money overall because it spends a lot of money on other projects, not because the marginal cost/benefit of each ride is negative.
Ridesharing services allow for an unprecedented level of mobility for those who don't already own cars.
I suspect buying a reasonable used compact car is much more financially prudent than using Uber as you means of transportation. Maybe the calculus flips in a dense city like NYC but there's no way people who commute every day with Uber are doing so for cheaper than actually owning a car.
Believe it or not, there are people out there who don't have $2000 and these people are also the same ones who can't get anyone to lend them money.
How much would it actually cost to commute 20-30 minutes to and from work in an Uber? $40 a day? More? Let's just say its 40 and you strictly commute during the week so that's $200 a week or 800 a month. Even with bad credit or no credit you would be able to save for a car rapidly. The $2000 car would only take 10 weeks to pay for fully in cash and the savings of 800$ per month could easily cover maintenance.
My point is if you can afford to use Uber as your sole means of transportation you can surely afford your own car and the people who can't are using subways or Buses. It's pretty simple, people who are struggling aren't using Uber very often.
But then I'd have to park it, and just that would double the monthly cost. And then I'd probably use it once a month on average.
A taxi service is an essential complement to mass transit, and Uber provides that service in areas with poor taxi service (essentially everywhere).
Yes there is: Public transportation (bus, metro, train). Millions of people get to work using it every day. Just having a car sit on the street would cost me at least 100$ per month in taxes, insurance, parking and other misc costs. I spend much less on public transportation.
Most people live in dense cities so these services exist. I almost only use Uber/taxis when I need to go to places that are hard to reach or at night.
I mean, it's not a luxury good in the sense that you can buy a car, but I suspect many folks have made difficult or expensive to unwind decisions that make car ownership expensive. Classifying transportation where an alternative may well cost more than $1k/mo as a "luxury good" is a real stretch of the word luxury.
I think my point is being missed though and that is that using Uber as your daily commute is certainly not cheaper than owning a car. I think that's perfectly reasonable to say.
Also I don't mean to imply that Uber is a luxury in the same way Lois Vuitton is a luxury.
In my examples in other comments using Uber as a daily commute option almost certainly costs nearly 1000 or more per month.
Transporting large items, or groceries for an entire family are extremely difficult if not impossible over public transportation. Transporting a group of people (3+) can be approximately the same price on public transportation and Uber without potentially sacrificing comfort, safety, time and effort, many of which can be essential depending on your circumstances.
The cost of using Uber and Public transportation also requires a lot less upfront cost which is necessary for people living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to spend around $2k on a car, as well as deal with it's maintenance time and cost.
Most of the time I could take a bus or public transit, but when I couldn’t (like buying groceries) then I’d use an Uber. It was significantly cheaper versus owning a car, and it was absolutely an “essential” service at that point in my life.
It also discounts the horrible stress that adding a known monthly bill can cause, when Uber is more flexible, pay-what-you-need. And I was never as bad as many others, so I can see how the least-prepared and least-financially-secure could see Uber as a viable use, either once-in-a-while (e.g., missed the bus), or for regular use (paying $12 for a two-way, 1 mile trip through a crappy part of town can pay for itself if you avoid an hour of walking and get an hour of working).
Literally folks with cars are telling folks without cars (but who use uber when needed) that uber is not necessary (ie, partial access to a car is not needed) while they have 24/7 access.
Anyone who has NOT owned a car will tell you - uber is essential - full stop.
30% of the population has HOUSEHOLD income from all sources of $30K or less. The cost of parking alone can be a major issue (many cheaper apts do not have dedicated parking).
I don't have a car and hopefully never will. I never used an Uber or any similar service. I used taxi maybe 2 or 3 times in the past few years.
It is extremely easy to live without a car if the city / country accommodates for it.
You think poor people are using Uber to get around?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I don't have any of those things. Not even close.
You are completely twisting the label of an essential service in a way that makes it effectively meaningless. For every worker that depends on their salary for their livelihood, their job is essential, but that has nothing to do with an "essential service".
When you are working 10-12 hours a day to make ends meet and shoulder the all costs of the depreciating fix assets there is very little opportunity dig yourself out of that hole.
Uber and similar companies are destroying the very small businesses (or squashing their margins into nothing) which traditionally are the environment that the poor can become entrepreneurs and build their own local business.
Even with the highly publicized Uber failures, no Uber I've ever taken has been worse than many of the cabs I was in prior. Something as simple as knowing the price up front has been key when traveling.
So sure, of course they want to stay an ongoing concern. But, services like Uber and Lyft have become essential to many people.
That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
She doesnt drive following a car wreck. She had walk half a mile to wait out in the bitter rocky mountain cold at a bus stop to go to the Dr. Shes on social security. She told me she didnt have the money to take a cab, that is if she could even get a hold of one.
Then uber came along.
She learn to use uber on her own before even whatsapp.
Yea, I'd call it downright essential.
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
[1] https://www.jornalcruzeiro.com.br/sorocaba/locadoras-de-carr... (pt-br) [2] https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/03/23/coronavirus-s... (pt-br) [3] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/sem-servico-160-mil-mo... (pt-br) [4] https://www.uol.com.br/carros/colunas/autodata/2020/05/15/lo... (pt-br) [5] https://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2020/0... [6] https://www.blogdaslocadoras.com.br/locadoras-de-carros/reco...
Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.
Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.
For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.
Lucky for you that this is an option. For many people less fortunate than yourself it is not an option and they rely on taxis such as Uber.
They can't afford not to!
> I am happy to walk a while to get to the closest bus stop so I can get to the tube.
You're lucky that you have access to walkable pavements, busses, and a tube. That's a lot of privilege! I'd sure they'd be happy to use those as well! But many people don't have access to those things, and if they want to get anywhere they need to pay taxis.
If I want to get somewhere outside my village in less than a couple of hours I'd have to use a taxi or drive.
But if you go to for example some parts of the US, they literally don't even have pavements let alone busses, let alone tubes.
They can't even walk to their local shops in some cases. They're trapped without a car or taxi.
Yes, one of the reasons you mention is why I never accepted a job in the US as I would be stuck!
Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.
My use of ethical here is strongly tied to obligation. e.g., it is kind to give money to a person, but not unethical if you chose not to especially if you can't afford to.
The way I understand you is that it's kinder/more sympathetic to provide a greater severance. This part I agree with!
Severance is not free, though. Increasing it will either cost Uber more heads or greater risk (and more heads later). I'm repeating this question: Is this not unethical to the retained employees?
Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.
The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.
We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.
International companies generally announce cross-border layoffs on Monday (US-time), because that announcement will be during the work week everywhere they operate.
Another is that if the company doesn't want the media to pick up the "bad news", Friday is the best time to do it because it'll get lost over the weekend when it's reported on.
And finally, there's less worry about retaliation from disgruntled employees if they have the weekend to calm down over being let go.
https://www.kornferry.com/insights/articles/bad-news-deliver...
However a Monday layoff in San Francisco means a Tuesday layoff in Asia which won't be separated by a weekend.
Is it because Uber's expenditure will decrease because of the layoffs?
Your explanation seems as good as any.
Yes.
This is Uber's way of saying to their investors that their costs will decrease due to losing billions during the coronavirus outbreak, thus head count must be decreased. But some who are buying now, may see this as a way of selling at the "bull trap" in Q2.
There's not many roles open at the moment, but here's one: https://jobs.ebayclassifiedsgroup.com/job/amsterdam/senior-b...
What context does Uber have now, that they did not when the initial layoff wave happened?
the cut deep, cut once method for layoffs is doing business 101, but still there are 2 rounds of layoffs at uber
Better to give people a heads up so they can start getting their resumes in order, hitting up their networks, etc. rather than telling a blatant lie.
- lie, by saying there is no discussion
- omit, by not saying whether or not there is a discussion
- discuss openly
- don't discuss, just make the decision rashly
Decisions like this tend to follow one of the first two options, but clearly none of them are great. They're all damaging in their own way.
> What context does Uber have now
More data that can be feed into their financials models to understand the short-term and long-term impact of this market on their cash flow. Companies don't do layoffs because things are nice and predictable.
You seem to like that word, it being your nick, but that said, it would seem to me that any management that believes it is omnipotent ought to be fired on the spot. That sort of delusion can only end in tears.
Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-lawrence-b77400b8/
Edit: it's not a snark, just a friendly reminder.
Overall though the severence is healthy, so I'll be plenty ok while I find another gig.
Here's us: https://curativeinc.com/ Here's me: maddox@curativeinc.com
We do testing, all aspects. They're oral swabs, which greatly reduces the barrier for many people who could get tested: They don't want a swab so far up their nose it feels like it's scraping their brain.
We build the software for the full-stack of testing from managing drivethrough sites with healthcare workers, full lab operations, results delivery to patients, integrations with cities and state health departments.
We're now handling hundreds of thousands of tests. We'll probably need at least 100x that to re-open the country with confidence.
Hit me up: maddox@curativeinc.com with questions/comments/anything.
Software team all remote, good pay + equity and benefits, satisfying work, and I love the people I work with.
Some recent (public) things:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/14/texas-prisons-corona...
https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2156392/air-...
https://dot.la/coronavirus-rapid-test-curative-los-angeles-2...
Also building out a data science team—idk what the preferred stack is there.
If you can afford it, I’d suggest taking a break.
https://www.collage.com/careers
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gm5zwu/what_is_t...?
I'm down to see what you have going on there.
Sad times...
Essentially for companies like Uber and Lyft who don't focus on fast growth, VC cash raising and generating little money with huge costs, the actual reality is that this is nothing more than the emperor new clothes. Unfortunately there are no sacred cows being saved here, especially engineering being affected in this.
So whether they are funded by VC's or large institutional buyers who are the majority traders on the public market, there is no difference and the companies continue to lost money.
The issue for Uber is that they need to change the narrative. They don't have the story that Amazon did, that they are losing money because they are reinvesting it back into tremendous infrastructure which will give them scale.
Uber is losing money because they grew very quickly so there were a lot of innate inefficiencies because of that. So these firings are a chance to right size the company and see if the new trimmed down Uber will now be profitable when eventually ridership returns to normal.
I feel bad for the people who got fired, but I also believe is was bound to happen, the current situation with Covid-19 just speed up the process.
The problem is that they have no self-driving cars and thus just represents the most massively over-staffed taxi-hailing mobile app ever.
I’d be surprised if we don’t see much more dramatic job cuts in the future.
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Austin / Salt Lake / Los Angeles / Portland / Atlanta
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Ann Arbor / Chicago / Minneapolis / Miami
This seems to be ranked on eng availability, but in terms of actual city tiers it's more like
T1: SF / NY / LA / Miami / Chicago / Atlanta T2: Seattle / Boston / Austin / SLC / Portland T3: Minneapolis / Ann Arbor
I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the T1s.
I see your logic though, and maybe it's better to just have a T1 and T2.
Ann Arbor is so small and close to Detroit, it is odd to hear it listed as a significant city in its own right (like Madison WI). Heck, they are about the same close-ish distance away from Toledo, and Toledo is much bigger than Ann Arbor.
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
Then you get to the critical component where you fire the lead architect/programmer and then it keeps working fine for few weeks, but you find more bugs and you need to upgrade/fix it. Only to find out the documentation if they exist don't help at all and the first 2 tries builds fine so you put it in production only to see everything destroyed. And after 1 year of back and forth you hire 10 other developer to maintain this thing and then 50 others to write a new one.
This is especially bad for software that are written under tight deadline - no matter how much document you write about it. And sadly, there's more software that are written like that than otherwise.
When the newcomer can't get anything out of that doc, if it exist, he/she just need to ask the creator, who will explain very nicely how everything is done, and that newcomer become a code guru in that codebase, and the cycle continues.
Until you layoff 50% of the team and now suddenly nobody knows how 50% of the stuff work.
Ironically, the worse they are (think 5000 lines of Perl with two functions) then the less viable it is to replace them.
Critical knowledge is with the developers unless:
1. The system is stable and feature-complete.
2. You've employed about 10 FTEs documenting every aspect of the thing.
If those two criteria aren't met, they system becomes tech debt, a larger risk, and will likely decay until replaced.
You can debate whether it was successful at GE. The criticism of Jack Welch was that his approach improved short-term financials, but he left a hollowed-out company to his successor that became irrelevant and lost value relative to the S&P.
The way I see this playing out at Uber is rapidly exiting categories like Scooters, Freight, Works, and AV. And doubling down on Ride Share and Eats with acquisitions in geographies where they have a leading position. I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.
The reason they're treated like trash, by both the company that put them there and by pedestrians, is because that is what they are.
I think the rental bikes which have a fixed docking station are a better design.
Now Santa Monica does have a great bike share infrastructure that I also used quite a bit, but nothing is more frustrating that getting on a well used bike and having the brakes hardly work or the crank constantly slipping as you push the pedal downward. Don't get me wrong, you can totally get a bad scooter that isn't running well, but I think I ran into more worn down bikes, likely due to the bike program having been around longer.
My 2 cents, the more options the better.
EDIT: Also wanted to note, Santa Monica has a lot of bike lanes, which made riding the scooters around much easier and safer from my perspective.
The helmetless riders are a real issue. And the injuries caused by the morons using them are a business model externality that isn't dealt with.
I think I'm the intended use case because I live about 2 miles (3.2km) from an entertainment district. I can walk it, and I have done so, but it takes quite a while, around 45 minutes. On a scooter it takes like 10.
Because of parking costs, scooter is cheaper than driving. It might even be faster. I own a bike, so I could ride that, but I don't like parking it in a busy downtown area.
There's also a bus I can take, and sometimes I take bus one direction and scooter the other if the bus schedule doesn't work for me.
I admit many people park scooters in a very inconsiderate way, but I always park carefully out of the way, so I don't feel bad about that personally.
I’m 100% for walking places but it’s important to have options once you start getting out that far.
I live in a city that banned the companies but see a few people still commuting on them in the bike lane.
They're mostly focused on the scooters now (or, well, yesterday) but many cities have bikeshare systems backed by Uber.
Basically by only keeping the strongest you should get the highest rate of return until these is a failure. A portfolio play gives you more modest returns but more consistent over time -- you should still trim the losers who do not have potential.
All that compared to making concentrated bets where you can win big, or lose big.
If we use the long-term yardstick that Jack Welch suggested we use, he does not come out looking good. We are now at roughly the two-decade mark and GE is trading at the same price that it did in 1992 and 80% below where it was when he retired.
And it's a well-known issue with executive compensation that CEOs will juice numbers in the short-term to get their payouts which is likely why he proposed this as a measure of his performance.
As a factual matter, the measurement isn't meaningless at all. Give Jack some credit.
It's good to be the king, I guess.
1981 • Jack Welch becomes CEO • $1.29 2001 • Jack Welch retires • $37.20 (down from its peak of near $60.00 in mid 2000) 2020 • Nearly 20 years post Jack Welch • $6.28.
20 years of Jack Welch - +2,800% increase 20 years after Jack Welch - -83% decrease
GE = (1+2800%)*(1-83%) = 4.93 = 393% appreciation since 1981.
S&P = S&P has appreciated 2000% since 1981.
GE << S&P
They just sold Jump, while investing in Lime. I think scooters could still be used as a "last-mile" strategy for Ride Share, and maybe acquire teen mindshare and a sort of platform play. But it's a spinoff with a long leash.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyft-expects-to-be-profitable-a...