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Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner.

Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team had mobile/web, severe shortage on infra teams since head count was already taken by main Uber teams. We even started building and maintaining our own chat app. I disagree that all the cool eng project that we put out and share here is a waste of time or resources. Those project was initiated by real needs on Uber and only the best make it out into the rest of the world. Engineers that shipped those projects are still here and we would've done it regardless of whether the 435 people that were hired in the first spot. I fully realize that it's an insensitive thing to say but I think it's important that it's expressed somewhere. I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress. Learn to plan better and to prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done.

miguelmota 7y ago
Over hiring is a typical mistake after raising a new round of funding. Good to hear that you agree with the layoffs. Like the old saying goes; you can't put 9 women in a room and make a baby in a month.
spookthesunset 7y ago
> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because the original author left for greener pastures. Nobody dares replace it though because that would be sacrilege. That chat app is part of the company, after all! Arg.... I hate, hate, hate when engineers with a bad understanding of business and too much time on their hands lock their organisations into homebrew crap that has nothing to do with the value delivered by the business. /rant
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  I love how the solution to this is always: "Let's build our own thing!" instead of: "Let's just use something free and/or open source."
  - nabakin 7y ago
    Engineers like to build haha
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      I mean, it probably wasn't in the right programming language and was missing one little feature the org thought it needed and hell.... how hard is a chat application, right?
  - rrix2 7y ago
    Uber's chat platform is based on the open source mattermost
  - ryanSrich 7y ago
    Instilling a culture of relentlessly outsourcing to open source is insanely hard. I’ve been trying for years.
  - wheels 7y ago
    Open Source chat tools are sadly almost universally disappointing. I believe I tried just about every one of them before giving up and just using Slack. I detailed the reasons here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 I have the impression that Slack has gotten worse. We're again having problems of notifications not showing up.
    - behringer 7y ago
      Have you tried out wire? I like it, but never used it in a work environment.
simonrobb 7y ago
Yes and no. I would love to use Slack over uChat, don't get me wrong, but uChat is a skin/integration of an enterprise chat app not a greenfield build. Look familiar? https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
deleted 7y ago
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throeaway95479 7y ago
This is golden. Grow responsibily. Don't overhire. Consider overhiring neglegent and treat it as such. Dissmiss managers responsible for neglegence, before or with overhires. This will also alleviate the costs of overhiring.
fzeroracer 7y ago
Not to doubt your own experiences, but if that was honestly true then Uber should also be scaling back hiring and not be opening new major offices with large hiring sprees. There was some earlier discussion here on why trust between employees and employers is so low now, and this is a great example. Employees being laid off while new positions open up for that exact same role so that they can hire new developers at a lower cost or avoid having to promote other employees.
- evancox100 7y ago
  At companies I have worked at, the employees being let go are often given the opportunity to apply for other available positions. Maybe the case here?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aj7 7y ago
This guy thinks he’s safe.
- federicotdn 7y ago
  He isn't?
nighthawk648 7y ago
> Learn to plan better and prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done. I often wonder how accurate the roadmap prioritization can be. I do agree it’s pretty silly to build a lot of infrastructure that will never effect your clients. If you have for instance a billing process that needs to be automated, custom infrastructure is needed. Manual approvals of all transactions is a lot even for banks. Operations can always benefit from something that cuts their overhead time down a significant chunk. Operations approval on transactions seems like an operations problem but clients having to wait for approval means now the problem is shifted.
lastsaga 7y ago
A new chat app or mattermost with customization?
debug-desperado 7y ago
Can you tell me if the M3 (time series db) team is still healthy? I was planning to evaluate it soon.
- alpb 7y ago
  Any open source project without a healthy ecosystem is always at jeopardy. Use something that doesn't require you to question NDA information from some company.
- simonrobb 7y ago
  Chronosphere (https://chronosphere.io/ https://chronosphere.io/) was recently started by ex-Uber engineers to build a commercial ecosystem around M3. M3 is Uber's metrics platform and isn't going anywhere. M3DB (the TSDB built to support M3) is becoming fairly integral to Uber in its own right. I'd say the trajectory is positive. Disclaimer: I work on the M3DB team.
fooker 7y ago
The arrogance in this post is mind blowing!
jholloway7 7y ago
Hey you're still at an order of magnitude fewer layoffs than Sprint ION after they blew off a $2B loss in the early 00s. Maybe get your leadership to look at that case study.
monkeydust 7y ago
Really interesting, it sounds like you overhired in engineering and underhired in product management.
coldtea 7y ago
>Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. I assume you're not on the side that got laid off. I wonder what their opinion is... >I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress. Because those are trivial matters, and they should just suffer through them?
grappler 7y ago
> severe shortage on infra teams Seems like infrastructure/devops always gets short-staffed, presumably due to being considered a cost center. Interesting to hear someone observe this even as they're saying a company "over hired" and "engineers ran out of things to do".
kevstev 7y ago
>Uber definitely over hired in 2016 That's interesting, I interviewed with Uber for an engineering management role in 2016, and was blown away when my potential boss said he had a "hiring target" for next year of close to 100 people. This was a relatively small product offshoot of Uber that is now closed. I thought that was absolutely nuts, not just the magnitude of the number but that getting bodies in seats was a metric that he/I would be measured against, but thought maybe that I just didn't understand how hypergrowth startups work and it would be a good way to gain a new perspective! Full Disclosure: I did not get an offer, even though I walked out of that interview feeling I had never nailed an interview as much as I had that day.

miguelmota 7y ago

Over hiring is a typical mistake after raising a new round of funding. Good to hear that you agree with the layoffs. Like the old saying goes; you can't put 9 women in a room and make a baby in a month.

spookthesunset 7y ago

> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because the original author left for greener pastures. Nobody dares replace it though because that would be sacrilege. That chat app is part of the company, after all! Arg.... I hate, hate, hate when engineers with a bad understanding of business and too much time on their hands lock their organisations into homebrew crap that has nothing to do with the value delivered by the business. /rant

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I love how the solution to this is always: "Let's build our own thing!" instead of: "Let's just use something free and/or open source."
- nabakin 7y ago
  Engineers like to build haha
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    I mean, it probably wasn't in the right programming language and was missing one little feature the org thought it needed and hell.... how hard is a chat application, right?
- rrix2 7y ago
  Uber's chat platform is based on the open source mattermost
- ryanSrich 7y ago
  Instilling a culture of relentlessly outsourcing to open source is insanely hard. I’ve been trying for years.
- wheels 7y ago
  Open Source chat tools are sadly almost universally disappointing. I believe I tried just about every one of them before giving up and just using Slack. I detailed the reasons here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 I have the impression that Slack has gotten worse. We're again having problems of notifications not showing up.
  - behringer 7y ago
    Have you tried out wire? I like it, but never used it in a work environment.

simonrobb 7y ago

Yes and no. I would love to use Slack over uChat, don't get me wrong, but uChat is a skin/integration of an enterprise chat app not a greenfield build. Look familiar? https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

throeaway95479 7y ago

This is golden. Grow responsibily. Don't overhire. Consider overhiring neglegent and treat it as such. Dissmiss managers responsible for neglegence, before or with overhires. This will also alleviate the costs of overhiring.

fzeroracer 7y ago

Not to doubt your own experiences, but if that was honestly true then Uber should also be scaling back hiring and not be opening new major offices with large hiring sprees. There was some earlier discussion here on why trust between employees and employers is so low now, and this is a great example. Employees being laid off while new positions open up for that exact same role so that they can hire new developers at a lower cost or avoid having to promote other employees.

evancox100 7y ago
At companies I have worked at, the employees being let go are often given the opportunity to apply for other available positions. Maybe the case here?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

aj7 7y ago

This guy thinks he’s safe.

federicotdn 7y ago
He isn't?

nighthawk648 7y ago

> Learn to plan better and prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done. I often wonder how accurate the roadmap prioritization can be. I do agree it’s pretty silly to build a lot of infrastructure that will never effect your clients. If you have for instance a billing process that needs to be automated, custom infrastructure is needed. Manual approvals of all transactions is a lot even for banks. Operations can always benefit from something that cuts their overhead time down a significant chunk. Operations approval on transactions seems like an operations problem but clients having to wait for approval means now the problem is shifted.

lastsaga 7y ago

A new chat app or mattermost with customization?

debug-desperado 7y ago

Can you tell me if the M3 (time series db) team is still healthy? I was planning to evaluate it soon.

alpb 7y ago
Any open source project without a healthy ecosystem is always at jeopardy. Use something that doesn't require you to question NDA information from some company.
simonrobb 7y ago
Chronosphere (https://chronosphere.io/ https://chronosphere.io/) was recently started by ex-Uber engineers to build a commercial ecosystem around M3. M3 is Uber's metrics platform and isn't going anywhere. M3DB (the TSDB built to support M3) is becoming fairly integral to Uber in its own right. I'd say the trajectory is positive. Disclaimer: I work on the M3DB team.

fooker 7y ago

The arrogance in this post is mind blowing!

jholloway7 7y ago

Hey you're still at an order of magnitude fewer layoffs than Sprint ION after they blew off a $2B loss in the early 00s. Maybe get your leadership to look at that case study.

monkeydust 7y ago

Really interesting, it sounds like you overhired in engineering and underhired in product management.

coldtea 7y ago

>Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. I assume you're not on the side that got laid off. I wonder what their opinion is... >I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress. Because those are trivial matters, and they should just suffer through them?

grappler 7y ago

> severe shortage on infra teams Seems like infrastructure/devops always gets short-staffed, presumably due to being considered a cost center. Interesting to hear someone observe this even as they're saying a company "over hired" and "engineers ran out of things to do".

kevstev 7y ago

>Uber definitely over hired in 2016 That's interesting, I interviewed with Uber for an engineering management role in 2016, and was blown away when my potential boss said he had a "hiring target" for next year of close to 100 people. This was a relatively small product offshoot of Uber that is now closed. I thought that was absolutely nuts, not just the magnitude of the number but that getting bodies in seats was a metric that he/I would be measured against, but thought maybe that I just didn't understand how hypergrowth startups work and it would be a good way to gain a new perspective! Full Disclosure: I did not get an offer, even though I walked out of that interview feeling I had never nailed an interview as much as I had that day.