5 ms·

Uber engineering layoffs expected tomorrow

55 points by sbuccini 6y ago

smcl 6y ago
This is odd, isn't it standard Silicon Valley practice to do layoffs on a Friday?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Not if they fear something might leak first.
- swyx 6y ago
  omg it happens elsewhere too? at prev_job we called it "Fire Fridays", wasnt sure how common it was
samfisher83 6y ago
That sucks for for a lot of people, but I don't think Uber/Lyft and many other startup afford to pay what they have been paying. I can understand google, facebook, apple etc. paying 300-500k salaries, but how can companies that don't generate that kind of cash flow afford to do the same?
- chosenbreed37 6y ago
  I think they generate cash flows. It's just that they're not as profitable as the others you mentioned. They've got be badly affected by the pandemic and the fallout. It's going to be a long way back...
  - samfisher83 6y ago
    They have generated negative cash flow from operations for the last few years. Also giving away stock is diluting investors.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  How can they not? Its supply and demand, Facebook and Google are setting the price of supply for top engineers. If Uber and Lyft want those types of engineers then they have to pay what the market demands. The assumption being that five 100k engineers won't be able to solve complex problems as well as one 500k engineer.
  - almost_usual 6y ago
    The 300k-500k range is risky RSU paper money outside of FAANG. Uber and Lyft engineers know that now. Pretend money met reality.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      There's always risk that the stock price will drop due to a large scale economic event. Lyft and Uber were hit particularly hard this time due to their markets however in past recessions large tech companies weren't immune except long term. As for layoffs, it's still only a small percentage of Lyft and Uber engineers. So not that risky all things considered and they did pay better than FAANG to make up for that.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > Pretend money met reality. Do you realise you can sell it to get real money? If you were doing that every year and treating your RSUs are a normal part of your compensation then you would have been taking home your entire half-million or so pre-tax as an engineer at Uber. That's not pretend money.
      - almost_usual 6y ago
        > Do you realise you can sell it to get real money? You do realize they’re worthless until you vest right? I’m pretty sure Uber and Lyft are on a one year cliff. That’s one year of risk and what do you know, those RSUs just vaporized.. The only non FAANG RSUs making money now are real tech companies, not these service industries masquerading as tech.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > I can understand google, facebook, apple etc. paying 300-500k salaries, but how can companies that don't generate that kind of cash flow afford to do the same? You just explained it yourself. It's either pay 300-500k or the people you need to hire will go Apple instead. There's no option to pay less if you need highly competent people.
chosenbreed37 6y ago
Not ideal for the people affected. Didn't read the entire article so not sure what regions are affected. Hopefully they'll all get a good severance package. Not too bad if you can add "Ex-Uber" to your list of titles..
jennyyang 6y ago
The linked article has a really bad title. There was another article I think by The Information as well that said that Uber was planning 800 layoffs for engineers, which would still bring them over 3000 engineers. That seems quite high for a company whose main revenue has been catastrophically impacted globally. Asking employees to take a pay cut is always a bad idea. Having gone through the dotcom bust, I can tell you that paycuts across the board will demotivate employees, even if they keep their jobs. As soon as this pandemic is over, they will flee to another company willing to pay them more. The best way to handle crises like this, or the dotcom bust, or the next recession, is to cut deeply once. Too many times you get into situations where you want to do the least amount of damage and you don't have the courage to make the cuts you need. And then you end up going through multiple cuts over and over again, which paralyzes the company. Cut deeply, and preserve the cash bonuses and promotion cycles for the ones who remain. Show that you will take care of the employees laid off with generous severance packages, and then you will take care of the employees that stay, and this will cement loyalty.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The article also says engineering is moving overseas. The Uber Engineering era is over. Cutting deep vs pay cuts is moot, any talented engineer will be headed to greener pastures. “Uber by McKinsey” [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins...
  - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
    That article doesn't seem to be relevant?
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    Totally, totally agree with this. I have a ton of respect for Dara Khosrowshahi, but if I were a good engineer, I would get out. The second the "we're going to move engineering overseas to save money" line comes out, the bean counters won. I'm not even going to argue one way or the other if this is good or bad for the company, but after having been through it before it is DEFINITELY bad for the engineering team. I wouldn't make it an emergency to get out in the current market but I would definitely leave as soon as I could.
jarym 6y ago
I don't live in the Valley but I have been wondering how engineers are going to cope when the supply-demand ratio changes in favour of employers. With the spate of SV layoffs I think we are about to head into challenging times. Now is the time to:- - Get your resume up-to-date - Keep on top of friends/ex-colleagues who are at other companies still hiring - Be ready (to move out of state, start your own gig, etc.)
- gfodor 6y ago
  Why do you think the demand for programmers is going to decrease?
  - 5986043handy 6y ago
    It may not, but the effective supply will increase due to remote work's acceptance
  - casefields 6y ago
    It's the supply you need to worry. When Gates and his ilk talk about an engineer shortage, it's baloney. Same thing going on in the trucking industry. There's a shortage of cheap engineers, which getting everyone and your mom into coding, will help alleviate.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      > which getting everyone and your mom into coding Are any of them any good?
    - theredbox 6y ago
      The problem is the delusion in the valley. Not everything is a tech problem and not everyone is a tech company. I am sorry but Uber is just a glorified taxi middleman and I have seen a good enough alternatives in some local markets that blew Uber out of the water. What does Uber bring to the table if they cant even win in some super small countries?
  - higeorge13 6y ago
seibelj 6y ago
I can't read the full article because of paywall. But the headline: > Uber Managers Asked for Pay Cut to Save Jobs. The CEO Said No In a small startup the "company-wide pay cuts" might fly for a while, if everyone is truly motivated. But in a massive public company, where the majority doesn't feel connected to leadership, this would never work. The star employees would jump ship immediately if there weren't carve-outs for some people to avoid the cuts, which defeats the whole "we are in this together" purpose of the company-wide pay cuts. I'll say this straight - if I was a non-upper management employee and they asked me to lose 25% of my income, I would leave ASAP.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Except the market is rather bad right now due to all the engineers looking for jobs and all the companies with hiring freezes.
sbuccini 6y ago
Here's the tweet by the article author discussing the timing of the layoffs: https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21 https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21
swyx 6y ago
i imagine a lot of Uber people are reading this. what an awful way to for them to find out about impending layoffs... through a news scoop instead of their own boss.
- fullshark 6y ago
  I'm confused, this article is from may 12, is this the old news that Uber was laying off 14% of workforce or a new round?
- gundmc 6y ago
  As much as I hate citing blind for anything, the scuttlebutt on there the past few days from Uber employees makes it sound like this was an open secret.
franze 6y ago
Honestly, sucks for a lot of people. But an organization might be better off if they cut the workforce if " effective work needed in the future" < "work that can be done by workforce". Work tends to always fill the available work capacity. Creating fake work that holds up the whole organization. Wasting time and money. The first one is much more important than the second. I wrote about Overhiring in a much too long article here https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/overhiring-b966a6ff383d?source=friends_link&sk=2c4e3013c14534e1ec9a7f464da6be80 https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/overhiring-b966a6ff383d... (free to read medium link, must migrate away from them soon).
m0llusk 6y ago
The thing that gets me about this is how hard they had to work to hire those people. Uber is infamous for hard interviews and not hiring people who turned out to be superstars. The amount of value being flushed away is astonishing.
dang 6y ago
This is an announcement of an announcement, which is off topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... On HN there's no harm in waiting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Edit: actually, the fault here seems to be that the submitter rewrote the title in an editorializing way, which is against the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20editorializ&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for plenty of past explanation. Edit 2: the article isn't buried for that reason but because of the hard paywall. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23214650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23214650
- almost_usual 6y ago
  Thanks for the transparency, was wondering why this fell off the front page so quickly.
  - dang 6y ago
    Actually that is for a different reason: the article is hard-paywalled (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). If the article had been readable with a paywall workaround, I'd have fixed the title rather than burying the submission. I sent an email to The Information asking if they'd unlock this one for HN readers: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20information%20unlock&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... They do that sometimes. If they do, and it isn't too late, we'll unbury the submission.
- sbuccini 6y ago
  My apologies, I saw a tweet[0] discussing the timing of the layoffs but decided to submit the source article with more context linked in the tweet [0] https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21 https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21

55 points by sbuccini 6y ago

smcl 6y ago

This is odd, isn't it standard Silicon Valley practice to do layoffs on a Friday?

MattGaiser 6y ago
Not if they fear something might leak first.
swyx 6y ago
omg it happens elsewhere too? at prev_job we called it "Fire Fridays", wasnt sure how common it was

samfisher83 6y ago

That sucks for for a lot of people, but I don't think Uber/Lyft and many other startup afford to pay what they have been paying. I can understand google, facebook, apple etc. paying 300-500k salaries, but how can companies that don't generate that kind of cash flow afford to do the same?

chosenbreed37 6y ago
I think they generate cash flows. It's just that they're not as profitable as the others you mentioned. They've got be badly affected by the pandemic and the fallout. It's going to be a long way back...
- samfisher83 6y ago
  They have generated negative cash flow from operations for the last few years. Also giving away stock is diluting investors.
marcinzm 6y ago
How can they not? Its supply and demand, Facebook and Google are setting the price of supply for top engineers. If Uber and Lyft want those types of engineers then they have to pay what the market demands. The assumption being that five 100k engineers won't be able to solve complex problems as well as one 500k engineer.
- almost_usual 6y ago
  The 300k-500k range is risky RSU paper money outside of FAANG. Uber and Lyft engineers know that now. Pretend money met reality.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    There's always risk that the stock price will drop due to a large scale economic event. Lyft and Uber were hit particularly hard this time due to their markets however in past recessions large tech companies weren't immune except long term. As for layoffs, it's still only a small percentage of Lyft and Uber engineers. So not that risky all things considered and they did pay better than FAANG to make up for that.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > Pretend money met reality. Do you realise you can sell it to get real money? If you were doing that every year and treating your RSUs are a normal part of your compensation then you would have been taking home your entire half-million or so pre-tax as an engineer at Uber. That's not pretend money.
    - almost_usual 6y ago
      > Do you realise you can sell it to get real money? You do realize they’re worthless until you vest right? I’m pretty sure Uber and Lyft are on a one year cliff. That’s one year of risk and what do you know, those RSUs just vaporized.. The only non FAANG RSUs making money now are real tech companies, not these service industries masquerading as tech.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> I can understand google, facebook, apple etc. paying 300-500k salaries, but how can companies that don't generate that kind of cash flow afford to do the same? You just explained it yourself. It's either pay 300-500k or the people you need to hire will go Apple instead. There's no option to pay less if you need highly competent people.

chosenbreed37 6y ago

Not ideal for the people affected. Didn't read the entire article so not sure what regions are affected. Hopefully they'll all get a good severance package. Not too bad if you can add "Ex-Uber" to your list of titles..

jennyyang 6y ago

The linked article has a really bad title. There was another article I think by The Information as well that said that Uber was planning 800 layoffs for engineers, which would still bring them over 3000 engineers. That seems quite high for a company whose main revenue has been catastrophically impacted globally. Asking employees to take a pay cut is always a bad idea. Having gone through the dotcom bust, I can tell you that paycuts across the board will demotivate employees, even if they keep their jobs. As soon as this pandemic is over, they will flee to another company willing to pay them more. The best way to handle crises like this, or the dotcom bust, or the next recession, is to cut deeply once. Too many times you get into situations where you want to do the least amount of damage and you don't have the courage to make the cuts you need. And then you end up going through multiple cuts over and over again, which paralyzes the company. Cut deeply, and preserve the cash bonuses and promotion cycles for the ones who remain. Show that you will take care of the employees laid off with generous severance packages, and then you will take care of the employees that stay, and this will cement loyalty.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
The article also says engineering is moving overseas. The Uber Engineering era is over. Cutting deep vs pay cuts is moot, any talented engineer will be headed to greener pastures. “Uber by McKinsey” [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins...
- jkinudsjknds 6y ago
  That article doesn't seem to be relevant?
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Totally, totally agree with this. I have a ton of respect for Dara Khosrowshahi, but if I were a good engineer, I would get out. The second the "we're going to move engineering overseas to save money" line comes out, the bean counters won. I'm not even going to argue one way or the other if this is good or bad for the company, but after having been through it before it is DEFINITELY bad for the engineering team. I wouldn't make it an emergency to get out in the current market but I would definitely leave as soon as I could.

jarym 6y ago

I don't live in the Valley but I have been wondering how engineers are going to cope when the supply-demand ratio changes in favour of employers. With the spate of SV layoffs I think we are about to head into challenging times. Now is the time to:- - Get your resume up-to-date - Keep on top of friends/ex-colleagues who are at other companies still hiring - Be ready (to move out of state, start your own gig, etc.)

gfodor 6y ago
Why do you think the demand for programmers is going to decrease?
- 5986043handy 6y ago
  It may not, but the effective supply will increase due to remote work's acceptance
- casefields 6y ago
  It's the supply you need to worry. When Gates and his ilk talk about an engineer shortage, it's baloney. Same thing going on in the trucking industry. There's a shortage of cheap engineers, which getting everyone and your mom into coding, will help alleviate.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > which getting everyone and your mom into coding Are any of them any good?
  - theredbox 6y ago
    The problem is the delusion in the valley. Not everything is a tech problem and not everyone is a tech company. I am sorry but Uber is just a glorified taxi middleman and I have seen a good enough alternatives in some local markets that blew Uber out of the water. What does Uber bring to the table if they cant even win in some super small countries?
- higeorge13 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago

I can't read the full article because of paywall. But the headline: > Uber Managers Asked for Pay Cut to Save Jobs. The CEO Said No In a small startup the "company-wide pay cuts" might fly for a while, if everyone is truly motivated. But in a massive public company, where the majority doesn't feel connected to leadership, this would never work. The star employees would jump ship immediately if there weren't carve-outs for some people to avoid the cuts, which defeats the whole "we are in this together" purpose of the company-wide pay cuts. I'll say this straight - if I was a non-upper management employee and they asked me to lose 25% of my income, I would leave ASAP.

marcinzm 6y ago
Except the market is rather bad right now due to all the engineers looking for jobs and all the companies with hiring freezes.

sbuccini 6y ago

Here's the tweet by the article author discussing the timing of the layoffs: https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21 https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21

swyx 6y ago

i imagine a lot of Uber people are reading this. what an awful way to for them to find out about impending layoffs... through a news scoop instead of their own boss.

fullshark 6y ago
I'm confused, this article is from may 12, is this the old news that Uber was laying off 14% of workforce or a new round?
gundmc 6y ago
As much as I hate citing blind for anything, the scuttlebutt on there the past few days from Uber employees makes it sound like this was an open secret.

franze 6y ago

Honestly, sucks for a lot of people. But an organization might be better off if they cut the workforce if " effective work needed in the future" < "work that can be done by workforce". Work tends to always fill the available work capacity. Creating fake work that holds up the whole organization. Wasting time and money. The first one is much more important than the second. I wrote about Overhiring in a much too long article here https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/overhiring-b966a6ff383d?source=friends_link&sk=2c4e3013c14534e1ec9a7f464da6be80 https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/overhiring-b966a6ff383d... (free to read medium link, must migrate away from them soon).

m0llusk 6y ago

The thing that gets me about this is how hard they had to work to hire those people. Uber is infamous for hard interviews and not hiring people who turned out to be superstars. The amount of value being flushed away is astonishing.

dang 6y ago

This is an announcement of an announcement, which is off topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... On HN there's no harm in waiting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Edit: actually, the fault here seems to be that the submitter rewrote the title in an editorializing way, which is against the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20editorializ&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for plenty of past explanation. Edit 2: the article isn't buried for that reason but because of the hard paywall. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23214650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23214650

almost_usual 6y ago
Thanks for the transparency, was wondering why this fell off the front page so quickly.
- dang 6y ago
  Actually that is for a different reason: the article is hard-paywalled (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). If the article had been readable with a paywall workaround, I'd have fixed the title rather than burying the submission. I sent an email to The Information asking if they'd unlock this one for HN readers: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20information%20unlock&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... They do that sometimes. If they do, and it isn't too late, we'll unbury the submission.
sbuccini 6y ago
My apologies, I saw a tweet[0] discussing the timing of the layoffs but decided to submit the source article with more context linked in the tweet [0] https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21 https://twitter.com/amir/status/1262019344692723713?s=21