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posted by janrinok on Wednesday September 11 2019, @06:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-they-get-a-lyft-home? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Uber lays off hundreds more, this time from its engineering and product teams

Uber announced even more layoffs on Tuesday, following an earlier round in July. The ride-hailing company confirmed it's letting go of hundreds of employees in its engineering and product departments to "reset and improve how we work day to day." The total number of staff it laid off this time was 435 people, or about 8% of each department.

"We need to shift how we design our organizations: lean, exceptionally high-performing teams, with clear mandates and the ability to execute faster than our competitors," an Uber spokesman said in a statement. "Today, we're making some changes to get us back on track, which include reducing the size of some teams to ensure we are staffed appropriately against our top priorities."

The layoffs, first reported by TechCrunch, come during a rough period for Uber as it attempts to gain footing as a public company. After debuting on Wall Street in May, the company has seen plummeting stock prices, quarterly revenue loss and an exodus of high-level executives. Three of Uber's board members have stepped down since then, along with its chief operating officer and chief marketing officer.

[...] With this latest round of layoffs, the Uber spokesman said Khosrowshahi asked his management team if they were satisfied with the design of their organizations.

"After careful consideration, our engineering and product leaders concluded the answer to this question in many respects was no," the spokesman said. "Previously, to meet the demands of a hyper-growth startup, we hired rapidly and in a decentralized way." That worked in the past, the spokesman said, but it doesn't anymore.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:24PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:24PM (#892932) Journal

    Firing their engineers will be a big help in creating more lethal autonomous taxis.

    That's already dead, whether they know it or not [techcrunch.com]

    Bratic’s report provides details of internal analyses and reports codenamed Project Rubicon that Uber carried out during 2016. A presentation in January that year projected that driverless cars could become profitable for Uber in 2018, while a May report said Uber might have 13,000 self-driving taxis by 2019. Just four months later, that estimate had jumped to 75,000 vehicles.

    The current head of Uber’s self-driving technologies, Eric Meyhofer, testified that Uber’s original estimates of having tens of thousands of AVs in a dozen cities by 2022 were “highly speculative” “assumptions and estimates.” Although Meyhofer declined to provide any other numbers, he did say, “They probably ran a lot of scenarios beyond 13 cities. Maybe they assumed two in another scenario, or one, or three hundred. It’s a set of knobs you turn to try to understand parameters that you need to try to meet.”
    ...
    If Uber had maintained a $20 million monthly run rate since beginning its AV program in early 2015, and allowing $200 million for its Otto purchase, TechCrunch has calculated that Uber could have spent more than $900 million on automated vehicle research. In contrast, Waymo spent $1.1 billion on its own self-driving cars from 2009 to the end of 2015, and could be spending as much as $1 billion a year today.

    $1B/year and still in "research mode"? Uber not gonna generate that much profit.

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:46PM (1 child)

    by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:46PM (#892940) Journal

    So this Meyhofer guy can’t explain the basis for the estimates that his own team generated? And he refers to the team members as “they” rather than “we”? Wow...

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:53PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:53PM (#892943) Journal

      See, the benefit of the age? You can see signs others can't.

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      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford