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Uber imposes engineer hiring freeze as losses mount
- moltensodium 7y agoThe clock is ticking and they seem to have no plan at all. So weird to see such a massive company go public with no ideas or serious attempts at becoming profitable, ever. Congrats to all the investors and employees who were able to cash out before whenever. Everyone else is about to get very, very angry.
- rvz 7y agoI guess if they don't find out how to turn a profit in time, this will probably end in tears for the investors. In alight with the disappointing Q2 even after Q1 due to their IPO cost, soon the most hyped IPO of the year is now turning into a nightmare for everyone else. It sounds like the IPO party was over before it had even started.
- moltensodium 7y agoAll the investors are already counting their winnings. They've been out for months, years. Seems like they are now just burning through a billion a month in stock option compensation before it all comes crashing down. It's bizarre to see such a blatant scam being run out in the open. People used to have shame.
- colejohnson66 7y agoMaybe because it’s not a scam and just not a profitable business venture?
- staticautomatic 7y agoPerhaps. But I think there's a genuine question about whether it was ever reasonable to believe that Uber was going to become a profitable company. Most of the claims I read/heard that there was a legitimate path to profitability amounted to "something something on a long enough timeline something something." We may well never find out if those claims are true. After Uber is dead I'm sure there will be many wishful retrospectives full of counterfactual arguments about "if only Uber had done such and such instead," but we'll never know if those are true, either.
- CamelCaseName 7y agoI'm not sure why Uber wouldn't be successful. After all, taxis were a profitable enterprise for millennia. Uber faces lower costs, and they have scale which allows them to have better targeted offers, surges, and advertising. I noticed that they spent $3B in R&D last quarter. Presumably a lot of that is going into driverless vehicles. Exclude half of that cost, and exclude their one time IPO related costs, and they're profitable.
- tluyben2 7y agoAs someone who was doing projects for several companies when the dot-com bubble burst, companies like Uber and Wework seem like whatever we had then but at a far bigger scale. The fundamentals do not work so how does anyone think this will end well?
- FuckButtons 7y agoIt won’t, it’s going to be another nuclear winter in Silicon Valley.
- leet_thow 7y agoUber's lockup period is 6 months or 180 trading days. https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/uber-technologies-inc-875805-89413 https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/uber-technologie...
- GauntletWizard 7y ago1 year by contract for most employees.
- owenwil 7y agoI think they've gotten "engineering" confused with "engineer"—plenty of people are in the engineering org that aren't engineers.
- sushid 7y agoReally like who? There are only engineers in “engineering” at the company that I work at. Pretty sure it’s always the case unless you’re discounting EMs, which I don’t think you should.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agothis seems reactionary. I mean if they didn't need to hire those engineers in the first place, why hire them?
- rootsudo 7y agoSo another company wouldn't. Spite hiring.
- tyingq 7y agoLots of negative responses thus far. Happy to accommodate any insider views as to why this is not what it seems to be...
- lhorie 7y agoI work there (and conduct engineering interviews) If that's really happening, nobody told me. I had two interviews this week and another one scheduled two weeks from now. And last I heard, my team got approval to increase headcount by 2.
- t-writescode 7y agoAnd Glassdoor is covered in Uber positions in my area.
- tyingq 7y agoThat's VERY interesting given the headline.