Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers working on tooling, R&D projects, and at least partially on open source projects, roles that could presumably go away if a company had to focus strictly on the core product.
I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having a massively more complicated hierarchy of bosses and managers and project leaders and it seems like everybody is chief of something and everybody loses sight of the big picture as they just become focused on a single aspect of a given product. What was once a lean startup with a vision is now struggling to get new products out of the pipeline even though they have ten times (or more) the manpower.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
>suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product
At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.
When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development.
That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
For what it's worth, this isn't unique to unicorns. Almost company successful enough to get to the scale of tens of thousands of employees likely has huge amounts of waste within it. The situation you describe of niche projects being scrapped after several person-years of effort had been invested, incomprehensible management hierarchy, and no coherent strategy perfectly matches my first job out of college, a year at Sprint in 1999. Me and two other new hires spent a year doing next to nothing on a team of 20+ building a complicated Java service with a purpose I never understood, but which had been going on for about a year, with half the team made up of contractors. Pretty sure I never wrote any actual code, though I did have to fill out time sheets every week. I had two managers, neither of whom I ever talked to. After a year, I got a 15% raise and a promotion. Then soon after I found another job and quit, our project got cancelled, but everyone on the team just got moved to other teams doing similar "work".
Oh, you might be surprised how many people are not working on anything of consequence. Some of these companies don't even do much in the way of building stuff outside of the product teams, and even then, they frequently fizzle after some point.
You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.
R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.
Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).
If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).
I see it more as scaling problems that make it look like people aren't actually busy.
As the userbase scales, infrastructure scales, and what was once a simple "ALTER TABLE" is now a system with a team managing it because a single Postgres instance didn't scale.
As the engineering headcount scales, code changes, builds, even understanding the system become slower. You overcome that with better engineering, but mostly more engineers.
As the product matures, there's still a drive for growth, but the low-hanging product fruit has been picked, so you get lots of product teams trying to either optimize their little part because, at scale, it makes a big difference, or product teams working on new, crazy ideas--the startup within a unicorn-startup--that will most likely fail.
I'm at Airbnb (opinions strictly are my own). The number of engineers working on tooling for us is actually not that large. The vast, vast majority are product engineers and with our most recent layoffs the majority of the cuts were for those types of engineers. My own opinion is that we simply had way too many product engineers for the amount of actual output we got from them.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
These are complete guesses for the pre-covid era, but it gives an idea of scale difference. The average Airbnb user probably books 2-3 times per year. The average Uber user probably books 2-3 rides per week. At 50x the volume, the infrastructure is different, and probably more complicated to handle the volume.
> Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
This seems so strange to me. As a lead, most of my work is management, organization, and planning. To scratch the development itch I usually have 1 pet project going on that I either use when I'm taking a break from actual work or work on in my spare time. But even that pet project has pretty clear long or short term value and the only reason why it's not being worked on by my team is because it hasn't been prioritized yet. I can't imagine working on a pet project that has no clear value to the company.
Worth pointing out that Uber is no longer a unicorn. It is a large publicly traded corporation with a market cap of $58B. I suppose you're asking your question about large tech companies generally, not so much unicorns? Most unicorns are still quite small (revenue and employee count-wise) relative to large publicly traded corporations like Uber and the FANGs.
Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years.
That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
Yeah, I was taking artistic license with the term, but "large tech" is probably a better term, though I'd filter it down to those on the lower profitability side. (even those with large IPOs are often just a startup at scale)
As someone who has hired many engineers and PMs, and runs a hiring budget today, there are some reasons to feel at least fairly secure if you're an engineer at a growing company:
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
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Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
It's not about in unicorns or not. It's about the scope and impact of your projects, both of which have more to do with the size than the PR status of a company. When the quantity of people in a company exceeds the quantity of work, you'll be much more expendable.
Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.
A few heuristics that I find useful:
1. Revenue per employee
2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months
3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.
I agree this is a great way to think about it. At the end of the day “business impact” per employee is the thing that matters most to your individualized risk. If your expertise is essential to the continued improvement of the company’s core business model, you have nothing to fear.
It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.
This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).
However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.
Let's say you like the Warriors. You and a group of friends get together every game to cheer for them. You're the one everyone looks to for bringing the beer, and you enjoy the group you hang out with. And when the Warriors win (or lose), there's a huge energy you get to be a part of.
I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much different than working at a startup day-to-day. And as a bonus you get to be a part of the large-scale wins and loses. Much like how it's exciting when the Warriors win, it's exciting when something big comes out of your company. Even if you did nothing but cheer.
Everyone is expendable. Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable. So are people at large companies or small startups. But within your team, you get to do good work, and it doesn't feel that way.
Much like the Warriors in the last year, it's hard to ignore your team taking losses, especially when success was so easy in the past, and thinking about finding a new team if things don't improve.
> Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable.
I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.
Definitely. The company just felt bloated. Feature teams needed 7 or 8 people working constantly on single screens that would be an afterthought in an MVP, just to keep up with the constant changes in architecture and infrastructure. Lots of over-engineering and NIH from veterans that didn't want work on teams. Lots of rewrites due to performance issues. All that without any noticeable change for the customer (other than the website becoming slower). VCs and middle-management kept asking for more developers, though, so everyone was happy, but the general perception was that we would do just as well (or better) with a half, or a third of the staff.
All developers are expendable. If 5% of all developers at any of FAANGM's got hit by a bus, the company would keep moving.
I work at company with less than 100 people, I know where many of the bodies are buried, etc. But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
> But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least.
If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty minimal if your cause of death is meteor strike. It would likely cover a percentage of the income you would have earned for your remaining years of work.
But opening a req seems totally reasonable when you are demonstrably not coming back.
It's a double edged sword, on the one hand you have the freedom to work on interesting projects, new technologies and get well compensated. On the other hand most engineers working at uber should be able to critically think about their job and say "Is what I'm doing contributing to the noticeably to the core business or am I part of a gamble the company can afford to make right now"
I'm saying that large companies in tech tend to have a large developer headcount, often working on projects outside of the core business. As such, I think those employees are more expendable.
I worked for small and big. Everyone is expendable. Running lean or efficiency is not something those companies optimize for. That's why they have so many employees. They optimize for growth. Until something bad happens.
"Developers at unicorns:" Prato principal crystallized. Look at any big repro or any large company. There is usually about ~5 ish people that know wtf is going on. I think uber could be ran with 10 people.
I've noticed that, as projects or entire companies grow, the effort spent on the product decreases relative to the effort spent on things _about_ the product.
Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.
It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.
I wish we would take a hard look at corporate culture from a systems perspective, as self-professed systems professionals intent on "solving hard problems" and see how we ourselves contribute to the culture of disenfranchisement through our cumulative individual actions which we often attribute to "that's just how it is" rather than taking extreme ownership and fixing things in our own favour
I think for large companies this is true and by design. Companies don’t like single points of failure so by design should be able to afford to loose x% if engineers (or marketing etc).
Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers.
The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.
Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc.
These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing revenues or decreasing costs. Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
>>Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove.
Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.
I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.
Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs?
I've never been at a unicorn, but I have been at many startups. The story is the same everywhere. Almost no one is irreplaceable. When times get tight, cutting overhead means letting people go.
All the big startups hire all the best people mostly to stop them from getting hired anywhere else until they can't sustain it. Having 1000 extra developers is better than having 200, 5 person engineering teams working against them.
Arguably everyone from the CEO to the intern pulling gofer duty seeing as how that is the vast, vast majority of their revenue and profit and everything else is just more advertising for Google itself.
Anyone working at Uber, can you share how is morale in Uber at this moment? How might this affect hiring in the future when they need more people, but people don't want to go there?
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
Well, everyone knew it was coming. Dara has been pretty transparent about the timelines, plus there were a ton of leaks in the news about details over the course of the last few weeks. It looks like everyone in eng got an email this morning that stated in bold italics whether they are affected or not. Gotta say I appreciated that clarity.
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
I don't understand why the firings are waves. Is this a logistics thing, or a morale thing somehow? Because it seems like it would negatively impact morale, more than anything.
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
Not me personally but a close friend I know that works there says morale is at an all time low understandably. Luckily he wasn't fired but a close coworker of his who was the #25th employee of Uber was removed. 6+ years at Uber and was managing and running a team that wasn't deemed essential to Uber core services apparently. Kind sucks but these people are at a position where it shouldn't be difficult to find another position elsewhere.
I remember being at Droidcon or some Android specific conference years ago.... When Uber was presenting the speaker said "I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to work on an app that hundreds or thousands of devs are all contributing to at once!" and the entire crowd just looked at each other like dogs do when they hear a very high pitched sound.
Seems reasonable when your core business has been massively impacted. Being a public company can't make it easier.
Also as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
I honestly wonder what the strategy is. Obviously they are heavily impacted in the short term, but also this is a company that has been losing money from the get go. If the intent is to build and build and build and search for profit eventually, then I'd think they'd weather this storm more than they are. They invested heavily in building up a world-class engineering team and just cut a huge chunk loose. It makes me think they aren't just cutting costs, they are refocussing the business and probably won't reenter some markets.
Hard to let go of that many people without losing critical knowledge, Uber will come out of this a diminished company in many ways. Best of luck to those laid off.
Not so sure about that. The company was notorious for having teams constantly rollout competing internal libraries/tools and rewrite them over and over, obviously not having enough bottom-line work to keep everyone busy. A smaller workforce may be able to focus on the work that matters, it doesn't have to imply a lower productivity.
I have never witnessed a company at least the size of Uber where this wasn't the case. This isn't exclusively a culture thing, it's a bandwidth thing. There is limited human IO available to coordinate, and available bandwidth diminishes in proportion to org size. The org can either choose to slow down to match available IO, or run at closer to natural pace and accept duplicate work. I guess the latter must be the obvious choice, or the automatic tendency
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
Even if a tool should not have been written, the ability to troubleshoot it is still critical to its consumers. And making hundreds of dependent teams spend a month migrating is easily more expensive than 3 headcount to maintain it.
IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
Then you get to the critical component where you fire the lead architect/programmer and then it keeps working fine for few weeks, but you find more bugs and you need to upgrade/fix it. Only to find out the documentation if they exist don't help at all and the first 2 tries builds fine so you put it in production only to see everything destroyed. And after 1 year of back and forth you hire 10 other developer to maintain this thing and then 50 others to write a new one.
> IMHO Unicorns are built with the assumption that almost every developer is replaceable. At that scale the critical knowledge is not with the developers.
Critical knowledge is with the developers unless:
1. The system is stable and feature-complete.
2. You've employed about 10 FTEs documenting every aspect of the thing.
If those two criteria aren't met, they system becomes tech debt, a larger risk, and will likely decay until replaced.
I've seen engineering orgs cut in half and become a lot stronger as a result. Fat is trimmed across the stack. Processes are automated. Runbooks and documentation is written. Applications are 'operationalized' to be easily maintained. You'd be surprised how constraining resources makes it really clear what is important and what is not.
Dara's email was really well written, and felt as compassionate as one can for a letter from a CEO announcing job cuts.
The full email:
Team Uber:
These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly that we had to take tough action to resize our company to the new reality of our business, and that I would come back to you this week with the specifics.
Today I have the specifics: we have made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce by around 3,000 people, and to reduce investments in several non-core projects. As a leadership team we had to take the time to make the right decisions, to ensure that we are treating our people well, and to make certain that we could walk you through our decision making in the sort of detailed and transparent manner you deserve.
Where we started and hard choices
We began 2020 on an accelerated path to total company profitability. Then the coronavirus hit us with a once-in-a-generation public health and economic crisis. People are rightfully staying home, and our Rides business, our main profit generator, is down around 80%. We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape.
You’ve heard me say it before: hope is not a strategy. While that’s easy to say, the truth is that this is a decision I struggled with. Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear. Ultimately, I realized that hoping the world would return to normal within any predictable timeframe, so we could pick up where we left off on our path to profitability, was not a viable option.
I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect our stock price, or to please our Board or investors. I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world—our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us—demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.
We have to take these hard actions to stand strong on our own two feet, to secure our future, and to continue on our mission.
I know that none of this will make it any easier for our friends and colleagues affected by the actions we are taking today. To those of you personally impacted, I am truly sorry. I know this will cause pain for you and your families, especially now. Many of you will be affected not because of the quality of your work, but because of strategic decisions we made to discontinue certain areas of activity, or projects that are no longer necessary, or simply because of the stark reality we face. You have been a huge part of this company and every day forward we will build on the foundations that you established, brick by brick.
Our decisions and the road forward
We have decided to re-focus our efforts on our core. If there is one silver lining regarding this crisis, it’s that Eats has become an even more important resource for people at home and for restaurants; and delivery, whether of groceries or other local goods, is not only an increasing part of everyday life, it is here to stay. We no longer need to look far for the next enormous growth opportunity: we are sitting right on top of one. I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses. I have every belief that the moves we are making will get Eats to profitability, just as we did with Rides, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
So we need to fundamentally change the way we operate. We need to make some really hard decisions about what we will and won’t do going forward, based on a few principles:
We are organizing around our core: helping people move, and delivering things.
We are building a cost-efficient structure that avoids layers and duplication and can scale, at speed.
We are being intentional with our location strategy focused on key markets/hubs.
Mac will now lead a unified Mobility team, which will include Rides and, as of today, Transit. Mac will continue to manage our cross-cutting functions like Safety & Insurance, CommOps, U4B, and Business Development, the latter of which will be centralized across Rides, Eats, and Freight under Jen. Pierre will lead what we will call “Delivery” internally, encompassing Eats, Grocery and Direct.
Given the necessary cost cuts and the increased focus on core, we have decided to wind down the Incubator and AI Labs and pursue strategic alternatives for Uber Works. Due to these decisions, Zhenya has decided it makes sense to move on from Uber. Zhenya is customer-centric to her core, and I am deeply grateful for all of her hard work.
We are also looking at our geographic footprint. While it served us well for many years to cast a wide physical net, it’s time to be more intentional about where we have employees on the ground. We are closing or consolidating around 45 office locations globally, including winding down Pier 70 in San Francisco and moving some of those colleagues to our new HQ in SF. And over the next 12 months we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services.
Having learned my own personal lesson about the unpredictability of the world from the punch-in-the-gut called COVID-19, I will not make any claims with absolute certainty regarding our future. I will tell you, however, that we are making really, really hard choices now, so that we can say our goodbyes, have as much clarity as we can, move forward, and start to build again with confidence.
How we are helping departing employees
As we previewed last week, we have taken a lot of feedback and worked to provide strong severance benefits and other support for those leaving Uber, like healthcare coverage and an alumni talent directory. We’re also taking care to support people in special situations a bit differently, like those on US visas or parental leaves. While the details will differ slightly by country, you can see a summary here. Every departing employee will have a 1:1 to receive the details of their individual package.
Given the global nature of these changes, and the local rules and regulations involved, the individual experience today will vary by country:
All other countries (those not listed to the right)
Argentina, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland (COE only), Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan (Karachi only), Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, UK (ULL only)
In these countries, we can communicate about individual impacts today.
Everyone in these countries who is affected has already received an email, and will soon have a calendar invitation to a private meeting with a manager and HR.
If you are in one of these countries and you did not receive a separate email this morning, you are not affected.
In these countries, local laws mean that we cannot be as specific about individual impacts today.
In some countries, we will start a consultation process. In others, there are restrictions on making changes during the COVID lockdown.
If you are in one of these countries, you will get an email from Nikki describing next steps for your location.
If you are one of the many affected Uber teammates, I’ll acknowledge right here that any package we offer, regardless of how thoughtful or generous, will never replace the opportunity to belong, to make a difference, to establish the kinds of bonds you establish with any important company or cause. We wouldn’t be here without you. We will finish what you started, and we will be excited to see the great things that you will build next.
I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because the resilience and grit you’ve shown has made Uber the company it is and will continue to be. I’ve never had a harder day professionally than today, but Uber has consistently surprised me with the challenges it has thrown my way. But it’s the toughest challenges that are worthwhile, and I know even more strongly in my heart than I ever have that Uber is worth it, and more.
Yep, I agree - it sounds genuine and from the heart. 80% reduction in business is no small thing and especially due to something out of the CEO's control. We can't blame companies from laying off people - it sucks for all of us.
I totally agree with this. I've seen Dara speak before and I've always found him extremely genuine, intelligent, and insightful.
That said, I've seen a number of layoff announcements from CEOs recently where there have been a number of "Wow, really great job announcing those layoffs" comments. And, while I agree with that, part of me thinks that we've become so conditioned to especially shitty layoff announcements and corporate double speak that when someone does something that really shouldn't be that difficult (speak with empathy, genuineness, but clarity on what must be done, and treat employees who are leaving well) that we're all particularly impressed.
I'm in no way saying layoffs are easy, and I know many good CEOs who agonize over those decisions. At the same time, I think we should try to raise our expectations of how employees should be humanely treated.
"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it."
This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for their shareholders. Portraying it as something noble is more than a little tone-deaf.
I feel for the people affected and I hope they find new roles soon.
Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.
Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.
For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.
I dunno. I find services like Uber and Lyft pretty essential. In my smallish city, getting a cab pre-Uber was near impossible. My friends and I had the personal number of 2 cab drivers, and if neither of them picked up, good luck.
Even with the highly publicized Uber failures, no Uber I've ever taken has been worse than many of the cabs I was in prior. Something as simple as knowing the price up front has been key when traveling.
So sure, of course they want to stay an ongoing concern. But, services like Uber and Lyft have become essential to many people.
You are thinking of only US and similar countries where everyone already owns cars. In country like India, there were not much taxis before Uber came. An alternative was autorickshaw which took twice as long to go the same distance, had much worse safety features, exposed one to all the pollution all the time, not to mention the cheating of fares.
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
Uber all but destroyed the existing taxi infrastructure in several major cities. So yeah, in many places they're now pretty essential.
That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
Tell that "Uber is not an essential service" to the millions of otherwise unemployable people that were able to feed their families using it. In countries like Brazil, where I'm from, the fall of Uber will have a gigantic impact. Gig economy apps BECAME ESSENTIAL parts of our lives, there's no denying it. But it was never sustainable. When everybody benefits from a product/service, other than the company that offers it, something is wrong. Uber only exists still, because of the FED's massive amount of money being printed and injected in the markets since 2008. Boomer's 401ks subsidized my Uber rides. The american taxpayers money created an amazing amount of wealth all over the world, lifted a lot of people from poverty. But now the party is over. Every unsustainable business eventually will die, just like the Dodos. I needed to write this, sorry. This ideia of Uber not being essential is such a miopic stance, it can only come from a person that can't see the impact, for the good, that gig economy apps had for the poor of the world.
Ahh - the comment from the person with the multi-car garage, the tesla and the range rover.
Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets.
A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
There is a very simple way to determine if a service is essential or not. If it existed 15 years ago it might be essential, but if it did not, then it is definitely not essential. Human civilization arose and thrived for thousands of years without ride-share. We'll be fine (better off actually) without it.
I wonder how Dara’s approach will pan out if things get much worse (most economists predict that there will be a greater recession than 08 unless urgent fiscal and monetary actions are taken immediately). Friends in the oil industry have described the environment as cutthroat and unpredictable, swaying wildly from euphoric good times to brutal cost cutting when oil prices fall... I was shocked at how they were treated but in a cyclical market that’s the only kind of company that will survive the lows.
Really well written email... This seems like a smart thing to do: `We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.`
I expect this to get downvoted, but: I would say that was a smart thing to say when laying off thousands of employees. That's not necessarily what the top executives believe, or want, as it is much much harder.
> And over the next 12 months we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services.
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
Thanks for posting this. It's been interesting to see Uber's engagement with its other businesses (like freight): they've been running trucks at a loss for several years now, it seems, and folks have wondered how long this can continue. That's a funny thing about Uber and more generally VC cash -- it can really cause 'artificial distortions' in industries. Will these layoffs reduce some of these distortions and return some of these industries to for-profit vs for-profit, instead of loss-leader vs normal business?
Personally, I would prefer "Sorry, we're letting you go, reasons are obvious - it's covid19 not you. Thanks for everything, your last month salary will be paid on X and we're giving you Y months of cash to help you transition."... Why make a movie out of it?
> I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because
I'm just curious, did you take the time to add the emphasis here, or did the original email have the word "everyone" surrounded by asterisk characters?
> I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world
Any company that facilitates or provides an in-person service that has seen a sharp decline from Covid-19 is pretty clearly not an essential service in the minds of their customers.
As a counterpoint, buses/railways are imo 100% an essential service for cities and yet they were running empty during the COVID-19 lockdown where I live. I would hate to see them recategorized as non-essential because of a situation that is clearly completely abnormal.
The numbers are skewed because of the nature of this pandemic. People are scared of being in close proximity with each other.
I would argue some portion of the accommodations industry is essential (avg. occupancy rates of around ~%60 in normal times, so let's say ~%60 of hotels/motels are essential) and yet I know multiple hoteliers who have had to close shop for the next few months due to zero volume. This doesn't mean that day-to-day, hotels aren't an essential service.
Seems like a lot of cuts that needed to happen even without Covid. Common refrain for these companies is why does Company X need Y thousands of employees for a single app/website. For Uber I guess we are going to find out how much they were really needed.
Yes, pandemic is going to force companies to take action that was necessary anyway. Uber's businesses, all of them, everywhere, are garbage. There is no sense, no matter how narrow or convoluted, in which Uber has been profitable. Spare me the discussion of how their empanada delivery business in Jakarta is very healthy. Just spare me. When I was a professional investor, whenever management told me that they had a really profitable business in Uruguay or Crete or wherever I would run, RUN back to my desk and short their stock. "Big in Japan" is not. Anyway the point is Uber is the most-fucked company that ever was. They will never expand into their new Mission Bay HQ. At best, they will retreat into it, abandoning their other real estate in a continuation of the process that began when they bailed out of Oakland. This has been a long time coming for Uber and Covid-19 merely gives them the cover to do what's needed.
Well I think that's one of the benefits of microservices actually.
Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.
What I wonder is how often the "remove" operation happens. I'd wager it's more likely there are many services doing variations of the same thing, but existing ones are hard to kill because there is a web of dependencies.
I think this could be an interesting metric to apply across the board.
R = # of micro services / # of engineers
If R >= 1, this is potentially problematic and may indicate engineers being unable to work with the code of their peers. Operating in this regime would be viewed as risky. R can go to infinity very quickly if you go down this path without very deliberate planning, involving the consensus of both the entire management and engineering staffs.
If R < 1, you have more engineers than micro services. People share code bases and are not afraid of each other. This is probably a safe regime to operate in, even if you completely fuck up the intent of micro services.
I think R could also serve as an arbitrary bus impact scalar for the org chart.
Am I the only one feeling that we should be thankful that these unicorns (whether actually profitable or driven by crazy VC money) have created so many jobs in the past several years?
> not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.
This trope needs to die. Pension funds are heavily diversified investment vehicles of which VC is one part of the asset allocation. If a pension fund CIO (Chief Investment Officer) weights their asset allocation towards too much of the VC asset allocation then yes this is a problem - but they don't. In fact they have made size-able returns as a result of simply being disciplined about the risks and rewards of VC as an asset class.
Readit News
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.
When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Those example pathologies you listed are SOP at all the mature orgs I've worked at.
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You know the line "don't mistake motion for progress"? There's a whole lot of motion up in those SoMa offices... but very little progress. Some of these teams are very good at doing a lot of jiggling around while never accomplishing anything. They manage to snow their manager, which snows the next-level up, and if nobody calls BS, it just goes on like this.
R&D? When the response to building something new is an _immune system flare-up_ from the people who benefit from things remaining exactly as they are, there can be no R&D.
Just like the server situation, the employee situation is bloated beyond belief. You have people making messes and others cleaning it up, instead of just not making the mess in the first place (and then needing neither of those people).
If a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, some of these companies would likewise boil down to "three monkeys, ten minutes" (not my line but I love it).
As the userbase scales, infrastructure scales, and what was once a simple "ALTER TABLE" is now a system with a team managing it because a single Postgres instance didn't scale.
As the engineering headcount scales, code changes, builds, even understanding the system become slower. You overcome that with better engineering, but mostly more engineers.
As the product matures, there's still a drive for growth, but the low-hanging product fruit has been picked, so you get lots of product teams trying to either optimize their little part because, at scale, it makes a big difference, or product teams working on new, crazy ideas--the startup within a unicorn-startup--that will most likely fail.
Uber is on another different plane altogether... they have more than double the number of engineers and from talking w/ colleagues that worked for years at Uber it's my impression that even on infra there's a lot of bloat. Plenty of high level ICs that couldn't produce quality IC work to save their lives and plenty of pet projects.
These are complete guesses for the pre-covid era, but it gives an idea of scale difference. The average Airbnb user probably books 2-3 times per year. The average Uber user probably books 2-3 rides per week. At 50x the volume, the infrastructure is different, and probably more complicated to handle the volume.
This seems so strange to me. As a lead, most of my work is management, organization, and planning. To scratch the development itch I usually have 1 pet project going on that I either use when I'm taking a break from actual work or work on in my spare time. But even that pet project has pretty clear long or short term value and the only reason why it's not being worked on by my team is because it hasn't been prioritized yet. I can't imagine working on a pet project that has no clear value to the company.
That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
This all assumes that 1) the company wants to keep you, and 2) the company is growing, even modestly. Once the financials go downhill companies will cut directly to the bone in order to survive, and at that point nobody in any industry is safe.
(edited for formatting, thanks @mkl)
"""
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.
A few heuristics that I find useful: 1. Revenue per employee 2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months 3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.
It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is.
This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber).
However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.
I think it's the same with big companies. You can be a big part of your individual team, and it doesn't particularly feel much different than working at a startup day-to-day. And as a bonus you get to be a part of the large-scale wins and loses. Much like how it's exciting when the Warriors win, it's exciting when something big comes out of your company. Even if you did nothing but cheer.
Everyone is expendable. Travis, the founder and CEO of Uber, was expendable. So are people at large companies or small startups. But within your team, you get to do good work, and it doesn't feel that way.
I didn’t like the way he conducted himself or ran his company, but the jury is still out on that. TFA is about how that ball is still currently in play.
I work at company with less than 100 people, I know where many of the bodies are buried, etc. But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving.
You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least.
If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty minimal if your cause of death is meteor strike. It would likely cover a percentage of the income you would have earned for your remaining years of work.
But opening a req seems totally reasonable when you are demonstrably not coming back.
1) Are you suggesting that developers should go join a smaller company so they are less expendible?
2) Are you suggesting that developers, now that they are laid off, go work on R&D projects, tooling and open source startups?
I am so confused. What is the take away?
You're wrong, and not just about the Pareto principle.
Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly.
It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.
Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers.
The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.
Through this pandemic experience, companies that were not previously forced to run more efficiently are now having to learn. Once they have figured this out, and IMO that does not take long, then there are few reasons to again carry the same amount of overhead, including employee compensation and benefits, office space, etc.
These BS jobs are not responsible for increasing revenues or decreasing costs. Eliminating them to reduce overhead is a no-brainer.
Having read David Graeber's original article and his follow up book, I believe he went to some lengths to explain why those jobs are so difficult to remove.
Jordon Peterson has also touched on this subject in one of his less controversial lectures. He uses Price's law to explain the proliferation of these jobs, the subsequent demise of the organisation when the handful of useful workers leave, and also that the remaining employees are unable to step up when this happens.
I prefer Peterson's interpretation, mainly because Graeber is quite fundamentalist in his view that a job is either bullshit or it isn't. Peterson's view is that large numbers of employees do productive work but that it is minimal in comparison to the few very productive workers.
I've never been at a unicorn, but I have been at many startups. The story is the same everywhere. Almost no one is irreplaceable. When times get tight, cutting overhead means letting people go.
Honestly, in the beginning of 2020, I was too optimistic and planning to apply to Uber around June, thinking that corona will go away
But the day's just starting so I don't really have a grasp on what teams are still around yet...
In either case, don't feel obligated to answer given the current circumstances. I'm sorry this is happening to you and your company. I'm sending you and the other workers good wishes.
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Also as a startup, good sub-answer to the "Isn't Uber / Twitter / Dropbox etc working on this?". Yes, but in a market downturn, your investors want you to dig in harder while their investors want them to survive and focus on core.
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
Then you get to the critical component where you fire the lead architect/programmer and then it keeps working fine for few weeks, but you find more bugs and you need to upgrade/fix it. Only to find out the documentation if they exist don't help at all and the first 2 tries builds fine so you put it in production only to see everything destroyed. And after 1 year of back and forth you hire 10 other developer to maintain this thing and then 50 others to write a new one.
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Critical knowledge is with the developers unless:
1. The system is stable and feature-complete.
2. You've employed about 10 FTEs documenting every aspect of the thing.
If those two criteria aren't met, they system becomes tech debt, a larger risk, and will likely decay until replaced.
The full email:
Team Uber:
These have been unprecedented and challenging times for everyone—our societies, our governments, our families, our economies, all around the world. They’ve also been challenging for Uber, and many of you, as you’ve waited for us to define the road ahead. I’ve said clearly that we had to take tough action to resize our company to the new reality of our business, and that I would come back to you this week with the specifics.
Today I have the specifics: we have made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce by around 3,000 people, and to reduce investments in several non-core projects. As a leadership team we had to take the time to make the right decisions, to ensure that we are treating our people well, and to make certain that we could walk you through our decision making in the sort of detailed and transparent manner you deserve.
Where we started and hard choices
We began 2020 on an accelerated path to total company profitability. Then the coronavirus hit us with a once-in-a-generation public health and economic crisis. People are rightfully staying home, and our Rides business, our main profit generator, is down around 80%. We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape.
You’ve heard me say it before: hope is not a strategy. While that’s easy to say, the truth is that this is a decision I struggled with. Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear. Ultimately, I realized that hoping the world would return to normal within any predictable timeframe, so we could pick up where we left off on our path to profitability, was not a viable option.
I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect our stock price, or to please our Board or investors. I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world—our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us—demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.
We have to take these hard actions to stand strong on our own two feet, to secure our future, and to continue on our mission.
I know that none of this will make it any easier for our friends and colleagues affected by the actions we are taking today. To those of you personally impacted, I am truly sorry. I know this will cause pain for you and your families, especially now. Many of you will be affected not because of the quality of your work, but because of strategic decisions we made to discontinue certain areas of activity, or projects that are no longer necessary, or simply because of the stark reality we face. You have been a huge part of this company and every day forward we will build on the foundations that you established, brick by brick.
Our decisions and the road forward
We have decided to re-focus our efforts on our core. If there is one silver lining regarding this crisis, it’s that Eats has become an even more important resource for people at home and for restaurants; and delivery, whether of groceries or other local goods, is not only an increasing part of everyday life, it is here to stay. We no longer need to look far for the next enormous growth opportunity: we are sitting right on top of one. I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses. I have every belief that the moves we are making will get Eats to profitability, just as we did with Rides, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
So we need to fundamentally change the way we operate. We need to make some really hard decisions about what we will and won’t do going forward, based on a few principles:
We are organizing around our core: helping people move, and delivering things.
We are building a cost-efficient structure that avoids layers and duplication and can scale, at speed.
We are being intentional with our location strategy focused on key markets/hubs.
Mac will now lead a unified Mobility team, which will include Rides and, as of today, Transit. Mac will continue to manage our cross-cutting functions like Safety & Insurance, CommOps, U4B, and Business Development, the latter of which will be centralized across Rides, Eats, and Freight under Jen. Pierre will lead what we will call “Delivery” internally, encompassing Eats, Grocery and Direct.
Given the necessary cost cuts and the increased focus on core, we have decided to wind down the Incubator and AI Labs and pursue strategic alternatives for Uber Works. Due to these decisions, Zhenya has decided it makes sense to move on from Uber. Zhenya is customer-centric to her core, and I am deeply grateful for all of her hard work.
We are also looking at our geographic footprint. While it served us well for many years to cast a wide physical net, it’s time to be more intentional about where we have employees on the ground. We are closing or consolidating around 45 office locations globally, including winding down Pier 70 in San Francisco and moving some of those colleagues to our new HQ in SF. And over the next 12 months we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services.
Having learned my own personal lesson about the unpredictability of the world from the punch-in-the-gut called COVID-19, I will not make any claims with absolute certainty regarding our future. I will tell you, however, that we are making really, really hard choices now, so that we can say our goodbyes, have as much clarity as we can, move forward, and start to build again with confidence.
How we are helping departing employees
As we previewed last week, we have taken a lot of feedback and worked to provide strong severance benefits and other support for those leaving Uber, like healthcare coverage and an alumni talent directory. We’re also taking care to support people in special situations a bit differently, like those on US visas or parental leaves. While the details will differ slightly by country, you can see a summary here. Every departing employee will have a 1:1 to receive the details of their individual package.
Given the global nature of these changes, and the local rules and regulations involved, the individual experience today will vary by country:
All other countries (those not listed to the right)
Argentina, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland (COE only), Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan (Karachi only), Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, UK (ULL only)
In these countries, we can communicate about individual impacts today.
Everyone in these countries who is affected has already received an email, and will soon have a calendar invitation to a private meeting with a manager and HR.
If you are in one of these countries and you did not receive a separate email this morning, you are not affected.
In these countries, local laws mean that we cannot be as specific about individual impacts today.
In some countries, we will start a consultation process. In others, there are restrictions on making changes during the COVID lockdown.
If you are in one of these countries, you will get an email from Nikki describing next steps for your location.
If you are one of the many affected Uber teammates, I’ll acknowledge right here that any package we offer, regardless of how thoughtful or generous, will never replace the opportunity to belong, to make a difference, to establish the kinds of bonds you establish with any important company or cause. We wouldn’t be here without you. We will finish what you started, and we will be excited to see the great things that you will build next.
I am incredibly thankful to everyone reading this email, because the resilience and grit you’ve shown has made Uber the company it is and will continue to be. I’ve never had a harder day professionally than today, but Uber has consistently surprised me with the challenges it has thrown my way. But it’s the toughest challenges that are worthwhile, and I know even more strongly in my heart than I ever have that Uber is worth it, and more.
Dara
That said, I've seen a number of layoff announcements from CEOs recently where there have been a number of "Wow, really great job announcing those layoffs" comments. And, while I agree with that, part of me thinks that we've become so conditioned to especially shitty layoff announcements and corporate double speak that when someone does something that really shouldn't be that difficult (speak with empathy, genuineness, but clarity on what must be done, and treat employees who are leaving well) that we're all particularly impressed.
I'm in no way saying layoffs are easy, and I know many good CEOs who agonize over those decisions. At the same time, I think we should try to raise our expectations of how employees should be humanely treated.
This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for their shareholders. Portraying it as something noble is more than a little tone-deaf.
I feel for the people affected and I hope they find new roles soon.
Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you or even look at you. Then your best bet is to keep walking, looking for an idling auto driver.
Post-Uber world: pull up the app, enter the destination address, and watch as the car approaches your location. Hop in, driver is incentivized to get you there as quickly as possible. Hop off at the destination, give him 5 stars, and you're on your way. Simple as that.
For me, Uber was always an essential service in India.
Even with the highly publicized Uber failures, no Uber I've ever taken has been worse than many of the cabs I was in prior. Something as simple as knowing the price up front has been key when traveling.
So sure, of course they want to stay an ongoing concern. But, services like Uber and Lyft have become essential to many people.
I agree given no other contexts, but let me refute anecdotally: Brazil for instance has become socially and economic dependable over Uber continuous success. Current situation goes like this:
- Brazil has about 1 million rental cars. Uber drivers have already returned 80% of their vehicles [1][2]. Rentals are down 90%. As cities are beginning to announce harder lockdowns, these will only go further down. [3]
- Rental companies stopped buying new cars for at least a year [4]. At least that matches the fact that almost no new cars are being made since March.[5]
- Rental companies buy directly from manufactures, they're almost half of their sales [6]. And app drivers are a big chunk of their customers.
- Car manufacturers are a big slice of every State's taxes they're in. Less car sales, thousand more layoffs. (lacking links here, sorry)
IMHO, to sum up: at least here, to any politician or car-related executive, Uber success is critical.
[1] https://www.jornalcruzeiro.com.br/sorocaba/locadoras-de-carr... (pt-br) [2] https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/03/23/coronavirus-s... (pt-br) [3] https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/sem-servico-160-mil-mo... (pt-br) [4] https://www.uol.com.br/carros/colunas/autodata/2020/05/15/lo... (pt-br) [5] https://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2020/0... [6] https://www.blogdaslocadoras.com.br/locadoras-de-carros/reco...
That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
Walk me through what folks without good car / transit access should be using? If cab companies are "essential" then uber is essential and preferred to cab companies in many markets.
A lot of folks on HN seems to be approaching this whole situation from the I have a ton of money, can work from home, have a car mental model.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that but who knows.
Wonder where the new APAC hub is? Could it be Hong Kong? They have had the unrest issues but haven't been impacted much by covid, relatively speaking.
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I'm just curious, did you take the time to add the emphasis here, or did the original email have the word "everyone" surrounded by asterisk characters?
Any company that facilitates or provides an in-person service that has seen a sharp decline from Covid-19 is pretty clearly not an essential service in the minds of their customers.
I would argue some portion of the accommodations industry is essential (avg. occupancy rates of around ~%60 in normal times, so let's say ~%60 of hotels/motels are essential) and yet I know multiple hoteliers who have had to close shop for the next few months due to zero volume. This doesn't mean that day-to-day, hotels aren't an essential service.
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Cut out all the services that have deep tribal knowledge from people let go and replace them with new services if the service is actually important or just remove it altogether.
R = # of micro services / # of engineers
If R >= 1, this is potentially problematic and may indicate engineers being unable to work with the code of their peers. Operating in this regime would be viewed as risky. R can go to infinity very quickly if you go down this path without very deliberate planning, involving the consensus of both the entire management and engineering staffs.
If R < 1, you have more engineers than micro services. People share code bases and are not afraid of each other. This is probably a safe regime to operate in, even if you completely fuck up the intent of micro services.
I think R could also serve as an arbitrary bus impact scalar for the org chart.
> reply
not at the expense of pension funds used by VCs.
This trope needs to die. Pension funds are heavily diversified investment vehicles of which VC is one part of the asset allocation. If a pension fund CIO (Chief Investment Officer) weights their asset allocation towards too much of the VC asset allocation then yes this is a problem - but they don't. In fact they have made size-able returns as a result of simply being disciplined about the risks and rewards of VC as an asset class.
Money, better and cheaper transportation where it sucked, and jobs for much more people than just developers.