Surprising? They're without income in a city where one-bedrooms rent for $4,000 at a time of low labor demand. Not sure what's surprising about being willing to relocate.
Surprising? When you're unemployed during a major economic downturn lots of people would be willing to leave one of the most expensive cities in the country.
No, I think it is, in fact, somewhat interesting. I was at Uber until a couple of months ago and left for mostly unrelated reasons. A significant proportion of the people I worked with had 3-5 years of tenure at Uber, families, homes. Not people who could relocate easily, even if they wanted to.
There's an obvious and boring explanation for the prevalence of "willing to move" on this list, and that is if the layoffs mostly hit recent and more junior hires. Another company I worked for had a significantly younger and more mobile workforce, and it wasn't uncommon for new hires to move to the bay area from across the country, and then relocate to another regional office or even overseas just as easily.
Not surprising in general, but given the reality that SF is the most tech-dense city in the world, it's an interesting observation that people perceive jobs to be scarce enough that the opportunity cost of leaving is worth more immediate employment.
It looks like post layoff they've been going above and beyond what's reasonably expected of a company in their position to treat their employees well. Can't imagine they'd have been like this in the kalanik days. Good for them I guess.
Any idea what the large number of "sales" people in the SF Bay Area do/did for Uber? There isn't an ad business... seems like a marketing-driven customer and driver acquisition program... who is/was Uber directly selling to?
If the alternative is the company going out of business, this isn't the "easy one." I don't like uber (I'm sure my post history has plenty of anti-uber mini rants...), and even I'll admit this is pretty nice of them. Most companies going through mass layoffs don't give people severance/benefits as good as uber did (AirBNB also did this well), and I can't say I've heard of one going this far to set up a site to try and get them hired.
If the executive team doesn't let staff go they will be fired by the board. If the board doesn't fire the executive team they will be voted out by the shareholders. If the shareholders don't vote out the board the stock price will plummet and in the best case scenario what's left of Uber gets vacuumed up by another company or activist investors and they go back to step 1 minus any of the severance packages and good-will.
It's horribly sad to see mass layoffs but the alternative creates a lot more chaos.
Wow, surprising how nice Uber have been during these layoffs. I'm assuming they either cannot afford anymore negative press given that they look like a failing company to the world, OR they've legitimately transformed themselves from the early days. Id say the former, but I hope the latter
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadThere's an obvious and boring explanation for the prevalence of "willing to move" on this list, and that is if the layoffs mostly hit recent and more junior hires. Another company I worked for had a significantly younger and more mobile workforce, and it wasn't uncommon for new hires to move to the bay area from across the country, and then relocate to another regional office or even overseas just as easily.
It's horribly sad to see mass layoffs but the alternative creates a lot more chaos.