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Uber lays off around 350 more across Eats, self-driving and other departments
- rainyMammoth 7y agoThe first wave of many waves for Uber. They are still overvalued by a factor of 4 or 5 X.
- cheschire 7y agoThe article starts by saying this is the third and final wave.
- techntoke 7y agoThey will just use new terminology to describe the next ones.
- jarsin 7y agotsunami
- goatinaboat 7y agoThere is a standard management speech that goes something like “these cuts hurt me more than those former employees but now we are perfectly sized for our amazing new plan for growth”? Don’t worry, you will hear it one day...
- gvb 7y agoThere is no full stop after "phase" in the article: "third and final phase of layoffs of the process it began earlier this year" That does not preclude another "layoff process" in the (near) future.
- xbeta 7y agoThey said this is a "final wave"
- rainyMammoth 7y agoah well, if they said so we should just believe them.
- ithinkinstereo 7y agoPerhaps. But obviously they'd want to make this appear as the "final" wave to not overly-agitate existing employees. It'll be interesting to see how this quarter's earnings go (especially since the lockup expires in Nov). If the market reacts poorly, expect additional cost cuts.
- brink 7y agoNo, that would erode trust. Saying "this is the final wave", and following that up with a fourth wave of layoffs would be even worse for employee agitation, and have a worse long-term effect. I doubt Uber management is that dumb.
- rainyMammoth 7y agoSo you think there will NEVER be another waves of layoffs? This is obviously a statement they needed to make in order to calm down the current employees.
- rainyMammoth 7y agoNo. Do you really think they can promise anything? It will depends on the direction of the Stock in the next month.
- modestmasse 7y agoIf they want another wave after saying 'final wave' they just tell their managers to manage their bottom N% out during the next two quarters and call it a day. Or they can just talk about changing priorities and keep on cutting. It'd be fine in the long run.
- Scuds 7y agoWeird. Recruiters were calling me last month for some well paid contract gigs there.
- majora2007 7y agoEven weirder, they are building a new HQ in Dallas and just last week, they reconfirmed and signed the contracts to build a new skyscrapper.
- saalweachter 7y agoWas it Google that was famous in its early days for using the headquarters of other companies that went bankrupt building them as its own headquarters, rather than building one itself?
- bojanbabic 7y agoGoogle HQ used to be Silicon Graphics building
- lacker 7y agoFacebook HQ is also the old Sun building.
- QuixoticQuibit 7y agoAny ideas what Dallas office will be doing? And what does it mean to build an entire skyscraper for themselves? I thought these things were leased out by floor to multiple companies.
- Judgmentality 7y agoIt's for Uber Elevate (flying taxis) and they plan to use Dallas as an initial test city. Supposedly they're going to start testing next year but it's a little hard to imagine they'll hit that deadline.
- 7y ago
- mark_l_watson 7y ago“” In total, the layoffs represent about 1% of the company”” That seems like a very small lay-off. From reading the article it sounds like this is full time employees, not gig workers.
- tyingq 7y ago1135 employees total across three waves. They say they have approximately 19,000 actual employees. So about 6% total laid off.
- asah 7y agoIIRC it was normal for large companies (Sun, Intel, Oracle, etc) to terminate the "bottom n%" where n=5+ by some performance metric?
- Judgmentality 7y agoSure, and most (not all) consider that a horrible practice that encourages backstabbing politics. And it's definitely bad for morale. And the people that defend the idea say it's nice to cut the flak once a year, but it's obviously better to just fire people for being bad as needed rather than create this constant annual layoff. The main reason it's done it's because it's so much easier than managing companies correctly.
- jandrese 7y agoIt creates perverse incentives for managers to hire one sacrificial goat per year so they don't have to cut into their otherwise effective team. A lot of this is just managers that don't want to be confrontational and firing the guy who just isn't working out but seems perfectly happy to just keep sucking at his job. These 10% haircuts give them the excuse they need to do their job.
- throwing838383 7y agoIt's to keep fear of lay offs high thus making people work harder. this is especially effective with H1Bs. However, some well qualified engineers won't be bullied by such routines: they'll simply go work somewhere they're appreciated.
- burlesona 7y agoI wonder at what point this kind of thing is enough to tip the Bay Area tech labor market into a new equilibrium. In the recent past there have been a lot (hundreds?) of startups and a few dozen larger players fighting to hire in an environment with virtually zero unemployment. There are thousands of empty jobs waiting to be filled. Hence if you live around here and have tech something on your resume, it's 3-5 recruiter emails a day. Across three rounds, Uber has let go ~1000 people. I have no idea how many are in the Bay Area, but to pick a random number and say "half," that's ~500 new people in the labor market who are probably well qualified for the rest of the open jobs. By itself that's pretty healthy, and should actually help a lot of smaller companies in particular to be able to get "butts in seats." But with this whole thing of "the window being open," and a lot of recent IPOs, if we start seeing a lot of the other IPO companies engage in similar layoffs, it's not hard to imagine we end up with a few thousand qualified people suddenly looking for jobs. Is there still so much demand that the market swallows that up without noticing? Is it just enough that it helps take some of the pressure off locally, that labor demand dips but remains healthy? Or is it enough that employers can start being pickier, or stingier with their offers? I don't know, and I'm not sure how you estimate the impact of something like that, but it's an interesting question to me. Anyone with a labor economics background have an idea how many layoffs it would take to get Bay Area supply/demand in balance?
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoArm-chair speculating here... I think as long as the VC investment keeps growing the layoffs won't matter much. If the layoffs continue and VC investments steadies or declines, I don't think it takes many months until there's suddenly more supply than demand, and companies start being more selective about who they hire, and offered salaries stop increasing (and maybe even decline). Think about it. Uber is the biggest IPO by far. They're laying off only 1000 people. Even if they're all in The Bay, and even if all the other recent IPOs go through similar (but proportional) layoffs -- you're talking about maybe 5000 layoffs max. That's a lot. Bay Area investment in 2018 was $27.5B [1]. Nationally, since 2007 (and I pick that since it's the last peak), VC investment has increased by 11.13% per year. If the Bay Area gets an extra ~$3B next year in VC money, that could absorb the 5000 layoffs pretty easily. Obviously there could be any other exogenous shock that causes even more layoffs. Obviously VC investment could fall off a cliff. Obviously I can't predict the future. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/venture-capital-still-flowing-to-silicon-valley-and-bay-area https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/ventur...
- uwuhn 7y agoCurious to know how many of those are iOS engineers. It could easily be dozens or even 100+ given how many Uber has in SF alone.
- hintymad 7y agoThis is hardly surprising at all. There used to be lots of complaints, both internally and publicly, about how bloated and ineffective Uber's engineering organization was. Many engineers were bitter about many overlapping projects in Uber. It's also funny that Uber engineers used many bogus reasons to implement NIH projects. A typical example is that Uber had a team to implement their own Bazel-like system because "Bazel (or any other tool) does not scale in Uber-scale". Same went for their own GPU database, their own SQS, their own key-value store, their own resource scheduler, their own datacenter, and their own deployment system. The end result was that almost everything sucked. Engineers suffered productivity loss for years. I kid you not that Uber's docker system didn't support persistent volume for more than three years, so anyone who wanted to build a persistent system like Elasticsearch had to jump hoops and spent weeks even just to get machines. And the sad fact is, Uber did not have a "Uber scale". The traffic and complexity it had to handle was far less than other internet companies. I wish they didn't hire so irresponsibly back in 2015 and 2016.
- fishywang 7y agoI can understand Uber wanting to build other tools in house because the existing open source ones might not scale in Uber-scale. But Bazel? That's just absurd.
- lhorie 7y ago> A typical example is that Uber had a team to implement their own Bazel-like system because "Bazel (or any other tool) does not scale in Uber-scale" Citation needed? AFAIK Uber was using Facebook's Buck and decided to move to Bazel for stacks where Buck is admittedly not good at (e.g. Go). I'm not aware of any org within Uber reinventing Bazel. The web org might be closest to what you're claiming, but even there, it merely wraps over Bazel to bridge over its shortcomings (i.e. package management is typically done "outside" of Bazel, via yarn/npm in web, as seen in the official rules_nodejs and other 3rd party spin-off rulesets)
- mooted1 7y agoThis was under consideration at one time by the Seattle build team and was a recurring point of discussion during infra summits. Unclear if we actually broke ground.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aresant 7y agoRe: The target of UBER EATS this especially interesting news given they will likely be reporting Q3 results soon. - Last quarter of UBER's $1.2b operating loss almost 50% of that is from UBER eats subsidies. They paid $544m more to drivers to deliver food than they took in. Why? (a) It is their fastest growing (by %) division (2) It's arguably the most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a "last mile" delivery network at scale. - Their core business - ridesharing - has improved their gross margin and unit economics quarter-over-quarter to the point that operating and discounting losses here are almost non-material (less than $22m total worldwide this quarter, representing less than 1/2 a percent of total ride sharing revenue). - In addition another area of analyst criticism has been losses in their "other bets" which is almost certainly their freight brokering network at -$50m, and the losses appear to be diminishing. Seems to me like these layoffs are analyst signaling that there are still inefficiencies in those departments, UBER is aware and working on in preparation for Q3 finances. (1) https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2019/Uber-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
- tempsy 7y agoSo are the unit economics any different for DoorDash, which has raised a ton (from SoftBank, no less) at a $12B valuation?
- iamasoftwaredev 7y ago> from SoftBank, no less Is this supposed to be evidence of a sound company or a strike against them? After Wework I really can't tell.
- shadowtree 7y agoThe funniest piece is a16z bragging about how many startups they're now funding that are run by ex-Ubers. Yes, let's assume people who did not work in a sane environment, who have never seen how to make a profit, yes, let's give them funding. Same BS as all the ex-Googlers who immediately ran most of their start ups into the ground (after 6-7 awesome funding rounds of course). Let's be clear, the ex-Uber founders will make mint, given what happens in those endless funding round pyramids. But for anyone considering joining those rackets? Goooooood luck.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoCan you name a couple ex-Googlers who ran their startups into the ground after 6-7 rounds of funding? Or even 2-3 rounds...
- luckydata 7y agoAndy Rubin comes to mind but the list is very large and full of people you never heard of. Google is not very good at teaching their employees what it takes to run a successful company, their cash cow is just too successful and most people don't realize their contribution is close to zero and most of what they do doesn't make any difference.
- ndesaulniers 7y ago> most people don't realize their contribution is close to zero and most of what they do doesn't make any difference. I'm just here for the free pizza. :P
- mav3rick 7y agoAh right, like all other companies do ? At least Google engineers have the technical chops to master the tech side of a product. Everything else is mostly upto the individual anyway. Many Xooglers are quite successful at startups.
- luckydata 7y ago
- yalogin 7y agoHow much money does Uber Eats make? For that matter do any of these delivery companies make money? Its pretty hard to see how. Someone has to take a hit, enter the restaurant, delivery company or the user. One cannot expect the user to fork a lot of money, and the delivery company probably wants to make money at some point, so it will mean the restaurants have to be willing to eat these costs over the longterm. Is this sustainable? I cannot imagine the delivery/routing algorithm to find optimum routes every time to merge or make the delivery efficient.
- jddj 7y agoGlovo say they become profitable (in that city) six to nine months after arriving. They seem to be run quite differently though to Uber / Deliveroo, probably because VC money doesn't or didn't flow quite as easily in Barcelona as it does in California. They talk about how it's a matter of timing and not entering markets with two established players, but I think the key for them has been only bothering with places which have a combination of low salary expectations/requirements and high densities (southern Europe, Latin America, Africa). I imagine that it's the driver pay in high-pay societies which blows up the economics of it.
- throwaway66920 7y agoI think food delivery will come to be won by pseudo food trucks. Vehicles with minimal cooking capabilities, perhaps just warming, that go around delivering standard uncustomized meals. The economics of one driver picking up one order and delivering it just don’t make sense to me.
- CydeWeys 7y agoFood delivery in cities doesn't use cars, it use bicycles (increasingly of the e- variety).
- fjp 7y agoMaybe in NYC and somewhat in SF, but Chicago is too cold and snowy for at least half the year for bikes to be a big factor, and LA is way too big
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoDelivery people in NYC still race around on their bikes during blizzards.
- bobthepanda 7y agoSeattle is extremely hilly so I see e-bikes, I assume e-bikes would help with long distances.
- Muuuchem 7y agoLol there is PostMates, but my experience in SF and Boston is that Uber Eats and other car=based services are most common...
- rossdavidh 7y agoThat's not what I see in Austin (not that I've been paying particularly close attention).
- kickopotomus 7y agoDo you happen to have a source for this? Also perhaps the average full trip distance/time for a runner? I.e. from where they are when they accept the delivery, how far do they travel to the store and then to their destination? I suspect that Uber Eats, Door Dash et al. do not want those figures published because it makes the profitability issues glaringly obvious.
- myth_buster 7y agoIf I'm not mistaken, the lockout period expires Nov 10th. Also give how aggressively they were hiring in the run up to IPO, a lot of people are probably nearing the 1yr cliff.
- joeblau 7y agoNov 4th: Q3 Earnings[1] Nov 6th: Blackout ends 2 days after earnings Nov 6th: Lockup expires ...not that I'm counting or anything [1] - https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2019/Uber-Announces-Date-of-Third-Quarter-2019-Results-Conference-Call/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
- cavisne 7y agoIf you get laid off before the lockout period do you lose the stocks? (I assume the cliff still applies).
- joezydeco 7y agoThey just signed a 10-year lease on half a million sqft of office space in Chicago. How's that going to go?
- tanilama 7y agoGradually move their workforce there to reduce cost is what they will do.
- stevietopsiders 7y agoI think ORD is for Uber Freight, which is closer to profitability.
- ejcx 7y ago350 people across a 25,000 person company sounds more like performance management than layoffs, especially since they are still hiring. I think Uber has way overhired but this doesn't seem to be the signal a lot of you all are making it to be.
- tbrock 7y agoUber EATS was the worst eating experience I’ve ever had in my life. It was super bowl a couple years back and After 2 hours this guy in a black Honda Accord rolls up and hands me a sack of wings that were disgusting and smelled like pine air freshener. Glad that one is getting axed.
- rolltiide 7y agoA) Uber EATS isn't getting axed, their engineering efforts are because it doesn't need more bloat since it functions efficiently enough. B) You ordered from a restaurant that had poor service, two years ago. You should have ordered from a better restuarant, and you still can. Maybe from one you recognize and have eaten at before. That has very little to do with Uber EATS.
- quickthrower2 7y agoI don't think you have a strong point with just 1 data point. If Uber eats is delivering mostly bad food to most people then you'd probably have a good point that they should clamp down on quality control.
- cryptozeus 7y agoStrange that they are also ramping up hiring in other cities at the same time. Could this be because they just want to clean house and lay off high paying employees and replace them with newly hired low paying ones. Also they can force to sell the stocks and they dont have to give it to new employees.
- throwing838383 7y agoi think it's just standard hire/lay off routine. It's not about the employees that get laid off. The purpose of the lay offs is to keep everyone else working even harder. People will work even harder to keep their jobs.
- RoyTyrell 7y agoI have never found Uber eats, or Grub Hub for that matter, to be particularly great services. Only twice have I ever not received my food but my god the delivery is expensive. I could either order 3 items from Taco Bell or an entire pizza plus wing and a 2L of Coke for the same amount of money. Also the local chain pizza delivery is almost always faster. While I'm not in one of the big cities like NYC/LA/SF or in a big tech area, my state or metro area isn't tiny either. I've since stopped trying all of the tech-company food delivery services and likely won't be going back. Also, not too keen on them skimming tips.
- malandrew 7y agoOnly Doordash and Instacart skimmed tips. Instacart reversed course on it as soon as they were called out. Doordash defended the practice for a while before paid lip service, but last I heard they were still skimming tips.
- danpalmer 7y agoI’m with you on this. Takeaways have existed for a long time, and at least in the U.K., US, and other big markets, delivery is often a relatively cheap option. Uber Eats and competitors like Deliveroo offer generally much better food, restaurant quality (just colder), but always do it at a much higher price. I think there’s a market for it, but I wonder if when the VC funds run out and the subsidies dry up, will much of the market move back to just ordering “normal” takeout? Maybe this is the top end of the market and maybe it’s a much smaller business.
- librish 7y agoHow expensive are you seeing? Paying someone on the order of $10 in total (fee + service charge + tip) for them to bring you your food can make a lot of sense if you consider the amount of time saved.
- anon1m0us 7y agoThe ultimate problem here with all these startups like this is the financial strategy. That strategy is precisely: Get big fast. That means hire a bunch of engineers, build out an expensive infrastructure, consume a lot of office space. Sell. Nowhere in that strategy is: Earn a lot of money. Do it cheaply. The VC world doesn't care about earnings. They don't care about profit. The value of a business to VC only comes when it is sold to someone else. You don't need something really good to sell it to someone else. You just need someone to believe it is worth the amount of money you want to sell it for. The problem with that strategy now is that the public is wising up to them. We ain't your fool anymore VC. Go home.
- amelius 7y agoI don't understand why Uber would need so many engineers, give that their business is so easily shardable, and scaling is not even a major issue. In that sense, the Whatsapp team of 50 engineers solved a tougher problem. I know, it's difficult to compare these companies, but still I'd expect the labor force to be within a factor of 10 at most.
- 0xB31B1B 7y agoThis is... not correct. The engineering difficulty of WhatsApp was in reliably supporting a bunch of old feature phones. The engineering uber does uses a bunch of economics/models to match prices, and a bunch of automated customer support as well.
- sytelus 7y agoUber does almost 1 million rides per hour. About 100 million monthly active users are driven around 26 billion miles each year. Think about all these car locations, requests, passenger details, messages, prices, tips, customer support etc landing into their system every second. Think about price predictions that can be off by just few cents and could make a dent in your earnings or push customers to the competition. Add onto this reliability in at least 3 or 4 nines, latencies across the globe, security, fail-over, multi-platforms, privacy etc issues. Don't forget you need to operate in 700 cities worldwide with all kind of regulations, customizations and geographic/culture adaptation. Uber accomplishes 230,000 trips per employee and earns $500,000 per employee - which is on par with other tech companies. I think you will find that the scaling system without falling on your face every day, every hour is a pretty significant undertaking at this point.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mari13 7y agoInteresting website to put your resume: https://jobcolab.com/ https://jobcolab.com/ Geared towards people recently laid off.
- jerrya 7y ago> The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." > So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
- djhaskin987 7y agoThey lost around 1185 people over the last 3 months. They claim that this is all that they will lose for a while. 1185 x $150000 average salary per employee (guessing at the numbers) yields annual savings for the company of $177.75 million. A sizable chunk, I suppose, but they lost 656 million EBITDA just last quarter, or around three times that amount.
- Flowsion 7y agoUberEATS just shut down their entire operation in South Korea.