6 ms·

Sometimes an organization is complex because it has a lot of employees, rather than needing a lot of employees because it's inherently complex. You see the same

Sometimes an organization is complex because it has a lot of employees, rather than needing a lot of employees because it's inherently complex. You see the same thing with large software projects.

thelean12 6y ago
Sure, there's always going to be bloat, but complexity at scale isn't just because there are a lot of employees. Twitter is a great example. I bet they have 20+ people working on a specific anti-abuse system. Another 20+ working on a specific ad type that makes the company money. Another team that just works on account security. Another team that works on internal tooling. Or the shared UI components team. Etc until you get the current state of Twitter. All of those teams don't need to exist when Twitter is small, but do when they scale.
- samcal 6y ago
  We can definitely agree that as a company grows, it needs more employees. I think the point at issue is that there is such thing as having too many employees. There are multiple opposing forces in tension here, and the tricky part is striking the right balance. I think that GP was trying to say that they hired too many people, and introduced complexity.
  - thelean12 6y ago
    A layoff is certainly a sign that they hired too much, I agree. I was going off what I figured the poster was getting at: they don't understand how Uber has even 80% of their employees.
    - samcal 6y ago
      Is that what they were getting at? It seems to me like you made up that 80% number just now, to prove your point.
      - thelean12 6y ago
        I think you forgot what thread you're in. Uber is discussing laying off 20% of employees. 100 - 20 = 80. It's completely reasonable to assume the OP was trying to figure out how they have so many employees, even after the layoffs.
  - x0x0 6y ago
    But it's not about employees. It's about capabilities, and working backwards. eg look at datastores. If you can fit your data in postgres on a single (potentially really expensive!) computer, you probably need two or three of those computers for a primary plus a couple replicas and a DBA. Once you outgrow that, going distributed costs a team. There is a big elbow in the cost and headcount curve. Once you want a different specific capability beyond the standard distributed datastores, that costs multiple teams. Yet another big elbow in the cost and headcount curve. This happens on data stores, applications, translations, currency, etc etc etc. Imagine a Greek person with a Greek bank account driving Uber in France being paid with an American amex card.
nitwit005 6y ago
I talked to a friend of a friend working there. It sounds like they previously hired engineers before having projects they needed them for. It's fairly clear some of these companies just set targets for growth and hire people to match, rather than to meet some fundamental business demand.
yibg 6y ago
Or people just see Uber the app and think to themselves why is that so hard. All the while ignoring / not seeing all the other pieces that are needed to support that app. And this is just from the technology perspective. I don't have any insider knowledge, but I imagine just the support and operations org to manage and respond to all those riders and drivers can't be small.

Sometimes an organization is complex because it has a lot of employees, rather than needing a lot of employees because it's inherently complex. You see the same thing with large software projects.

thelean12 6y ago

Sure, there's always going to be bloat, but complexity at scale isn't just because there are a lot of employees. Twitter is a great example. I bet they have 20+ people working on a specific anti-abuse system. Another 20+ working on a specific ad type that makes the company money. Another team that just works on account security. Another team that works on internal tooling. Or the shared UI components team. Etc until you get the current state of Twitter. All of those teams don't need to exist when Twitter is small, but do when they scale.

samcal 6y ago
We can definitely agree that as a company grows, it needs more employees. I think the point at issue is that there is such thing as having too many employees. There are multiple opposing forces in tension here, and the tricky part is striking the right balance. I think that GP was trying to say that they hired too many people, and introduced complexity.
- thelean12 6y ago
  A layoff is certainly a sign that they hired too much, I agree. I was going off what I figured the poster was getting at: they don't understand how Uber has even 80% of their employees.
  - samcal 6y ago
    Is that what they were getting at? It seems to me like you made up that 80% number just now, to prove your point.
    - thelean12 6y ago
      I think you forgot what thread you're in. Uber is discussing laying off 20% of employees. 100 - 20 = 80. It's completely reasonable to assume the OP was trying to figure out how they have so many employees, even after the layoffs.
- x0x0 6y ago
  But it's not about employees. It's about capabilities, and working backwards. eg look at datastores. If you can fit your data in postgres on a single (potentially really expensive!) computer, you probably need two or three of those computers for a primary plus a couple replicas and a DBA. Once you outgrow that, going distributed costs a team. There is a big elbow in the cost and headcount curve. Once you want a different specific capability beyond the standard distributed datastores, that costs multiple teams. Yet another big elbow in the cost and headcount curve. This happens on data stores, applications, translations, currency, etc etc etc. Imagine a Greek person with a Greek bank account driving Uber in France being paid with an American amex card.

nitwit005 6y ago

I talked to a friend of a friend working there. It sounds like they previously hired engineers before having projects they needed them for. It's fairly clear some of these companies just set targets for growth and hire people to match, rather than to meet some fundamental business demand.

yibg 6y ago

Or people just see Uber the app and think to themselves why is that so hard. All the while ignoring / not seeing all the other pieces that are needed to support that app. And this is just from the technology perspective. I don't have any insider knowledge, but I imagine just the support and operations org to manage and respond to all those riders and drivers can't be small.