Uber is freezing hiring for software engineers and product managers across its US and Canadian workforce, the company acknowledged to Bloomberg on Friday. The shift was reported by Yahoo earlier in the day. The freeze does not apply to Uber's autonomous vehicle and freight shipping divisions.
The news comes a day after Uber reported second quarter operating losses of $5.4 billion—a new record for the company. That figure exaggerates Uber's quarterly burn rate because it includes more than $4 billion in one-time charges related to Uber's initial public offering. Still, excluding IPO-related charges still leaves around $1.2 billion in operating losses, worse than the $1 billion the firm lost in the first quarter.
Uber recently laid off 400 marketing workers. According to Yahoo, Uber employees are worried that this could be a prelude to broader cuts as the company's struggles to stem its losses.
Related Stories
Uber Sells Off Self-Driving and Flying Taxi Units
Uber sells its self-driving unit to Aurora
Uber's self-driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), is being acquired by its start-up competitor Aurora Innovation, the companies announced Monday.
The deal, expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, values ATG at approximately $4 billion. The unit was valued at $7.25 billion in Apr. 2019 when Softbank, Denso and Toyota took a stake.
[...] Uber's co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick had viewed self-driving as an essential investment, saying in 2016 he believed the world would shift to autonomous vehicles. ATG had been a long-term play for Uber, but the unit brought high costs and safety challenges. Throughout the course of a pandemic-stricken year, Uber has made efforts to stem losses in its ride hailing business, control business costs -- including with major layoffs in the spring -- and to grow its delivery business.
Uber is also reportedly selling its flying taxi division to Joby Aviation, presumably putting an end to its involvement with the U.S. Army.
Uber has been scaling back its driverless car efforts since it caused the death of a pedestrian in 2018. Uber has never had a profitable quarter.
Also at NYT, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, and The Verge.
Previously: The Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Uber Pulls Self-Driving Cars After First Fatal Crash of Autonomous Vehicle
Uber Shutting Down Self-Driving Truck Division
Uber Allegedly Ignored Safety Warnings Before Self-Driving Fatality
Will Car Ownership Soon Become "Quaint"?
Uber Freezes Engineering Hires Amid Mounting Losses
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:19PM (13 children)
When you're fucking Uber and your only competition* is Lyft, why the fuck would you need 400 marketing staff? Everybody knows who you are, and most normies prefer Uber out of it being the most well-known of the two. Hell, getting a rideshare is called "getting an Uber" like all copying machines are called "Xerox machines."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:53PM (7 children)
What the fuck are you on about with funneling money to warlords? Holy shit, this place is more fucked up than slashdot.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Booga1 on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:59PM (6 children)
You must be new here. Nomad perhaps due to Slashdot disabling anonymous coward comments?
Anyway, Ethanol over here will sometimes make somewhat interesting comments occasionally and then find some way to derail any point he had by the end of his post.
This one is par for the course.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:56AM
Oh wait, there is a legitimate answer to that question. They were probably just in the "Social Media" wing of marketing, shillposting positive reviews and comments of Uber and throughout the internet at large.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:13AM (4 children)
Yeah, I’m new here. And that dude went straight fucking psycho paranoia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:06AM
It happens... Just make an account. Post a bit and mod him...
(Score: 4, Informative) by edIII on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:46AM (2 children)
Think of it this way. You went to a zoo, and an angry psychotic monkey flung poo at you in the first few minutes. Understandably, you might put off from seeing the rest of the exhibits.
It would be shame, the rest of the animals around here are more interesting :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 12 2019, @12:52AM
Oi!
Who are you calling an animal?
Woof! Grrr!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 12 2019, @07:47PM
That's animalist. Some of us are plants.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:16AM (2 children)
why the fuck would you need 400 marketing staff?
C'mon, they stole 5.4 bil in one quarter! And they're getting away with it! This is great shit!
"operating losses" - oh, murrrder!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:53AM (1 child)
That comes out to about 400,000 thousand PER employee. Yeah nothing nefarious going on there....
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:03AM
They were Ashkenazi Jews... lots of fringe benefits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:29PM
That's just stoopid. Stop it.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Monday August 12 2019, @08:10PM
Every company needs assholes to play golf and buy drinks.
(Score: 1) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:45PM (15 children)
They need self driving cars to cut their biggest expense - drivers. But without engineers to create those self driving cars, they can't cut the drivers, so they can't cut their biggest expense.
Maybe Boeing can tell them where to get some at $2 - $9 an hour. (The !9 an hour group started out at $2).
Now their forward-looking SEC disclosures should say that they probably won't make a profit instead of just may not make a profit. Otherwise they leave themselves open to investors lawsuits because it's now obvious that they're in trouble with the whole self-driving cars thing.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:57PM (4 children)
Considering that the drivers only cost them 6cents per mile above the cost of the car itself, that isn't the problem. The problem is that they set the price too low in an effort to undermine the taxi companies and as a result, they're in a business that effectively can't be run profitably, even without paying drivers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:37AM (3 children)
Came here to say the same thing. "Ride sharing" was just a smoke screen for the real goal of Uber, which is to undercut and strong arm the traditional taxis out of business. Now it's a race to see if their venture capital (subsidizing rides) will last long enough to really eliminate the competition, or if their investors/mafia will cave first.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:55AM (1 child)
Well you Jews fight this out. The rest of us will be laughing and still standing. Perhaps I can give advice to those of you who are still standing.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:44AM
I love it when I can send my mother-in-law food shopping with an app while knowing it costs some crooked-nose money.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 12 2019, @01:06AM
Which is just not going to happen in my city, because the taxi industry was deregulated about 25 years ago. We have a really good taxi industry now, not the filthy taxis driven by rude, lost idiots I sometimes read about in the US.
The reason people use Uber where I live is because it's cheap, and we know why now don't we?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:02AM (9 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:06AM (8 children)
As an industry insider, I will tell you this: Self-driving is big, especially for the sensors that make it happen. The method that most interested parties are using is radars (I've posted better details here before) but there are a lot of issues that are still being worked out related to those radars. I can't go into details, but what I can tell you is that Boston Dynamics, my employer, is working on the small details that Uber and others use as band-aid fixes to prevent reflections from the car metal and reject sidelobes.
When you think self-driving, and even see my own employer's robotic success, you think LIDAR or computer vision. The problem with LIDAR is its dependence on moving parts, which are a point of failure; and the problem with computer vision is that it projects 3-D space into a 2-D plane, which makes confounding anomalies a lot more lethal.
As an industry insider, I will tell you this: being a first adopter with the latest model of iPhone can be inconvenient, being a first-adopter with self-driving cars will send you to your death. You wouldn't believe the discussions we all have laughing about how that Tesla steered its owner under a semi at highway speeds, or how that Uber car killed the pedestrian in Arizona.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:32AM (3 children)
The tesla idea is not terribly far fetched if you stop and think about it. I have 2 eyes. It is basically 2 spherical 2d arrays mapped over time into a fading memory array with continuous input that my brain makes sense of. If my neck does not hurt I can move my eyes effectively 180 degrees vertical and horizontal with fine motor control at about 100 degrees.
So I think to get it to work correctly we would have to get rid of the idea of frame rate, sample rate, bits per pixel, and refresh. Computers are not analog though so it could be a lot of an issue. Which is where those odd errors come from at the root of it. The other techs will have similar issues of aliasing but in just different ways.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:23PM (2 children)
Yes and our eyes regularly deceive us. Why bother replicating what we have when we can add additional sensors to give a much better sense of what's going on around us?
The arrangement of eyes we have is to enable us to hunt things down and kill them, not to react to things behind us. And we do so only under certain lighting conditions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:09PM (1 child)
Yes, but billions of people can drive a car and walk around. So it must work pretty good...
My point was aliasing. Which is created by these techs is something that needs to be worked around. My brain does not have aliasing. It has a cascading network that ignores things at random and is easy to trick. The hardware itself works. The network behind it is not reliable. Pretty much 99.9999999% of the computer sensors out there use sampling and have a alias to get it 'close enough' that we think it looks good. But the reality is there are gaps and jaggies everywhere. Those are the weak spots in the current systems being made. Working around those will create blind spots and weird anomalies.
Your point is you can enhance them. Which is true. But to simply discard the existing designs is a bit short sighted?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday August 12 2019, @03:53AM
Humans do drive, but we're actually not very good at it [wikipedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:34AM (1 child)
> The problem with LIDAR is its dependence on moving parts,
I figured that everyone in the autonomous driving game was using expensive military/aircraft LIDARs to get things working. By the time they are ready to go into big production solid state LIDAR will be available at automotive prices (crazy cheap). Here's one player from a few months ago, I believe I've seen other press releases as well,
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/lumotive-says-its-got-a-solidstate-lidar-that-really-works [ieee.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:59AM
We're using radars, not LIDARS. But hell, I suppose that theirs too is a workable solution. HahahhahahheeeeheeeehOOOOOOO!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:41AM
The first adopters of stairs fell to their deaths. Hell, people still fall down stairs and die quite often. You would think we'd have worked out all the issues with stairs throughout the millennia. As it turns out, living is quite dangerous; the death rate is 100%.
Maybe self-driving cars still have issues. But Waymo has driven first adopters around for eight months and I haven't heard of any of them dying, yet. Maybe one of them will get T-boned by a drunk truck driver before the end of the year, but I'm not really seeing any glaring reasons to FUD self-driving cars.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:37PM
You're not an "industry insider". You're about 12 years old. And from your posts, I'd say there's a high probability you are intellectually retarded or otherwise mentally challenged.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:55PM (4 children)
It's clear their model isn't going to work, or if it does another company without Uber's debt will take advantage of it. This is the point where, if I was still working, I'd be updating my resume and hitting linkedin hard. They can't think their stock options are gonna be worth anything, can they?
Then again, I'm old and saw a lot of companies with "stock options" fuck their early employees over. So maybe I'm jaded, and they're naive.
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:00AM (3 children)
If they're not turning a profit now, then they likely can't ever. They're paying virtually nothing for the drivers' time as it is. I'm not sure how they turn a profit without raising rates. But, the only reason anybody uses them is because they're cheaper than taxis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:13AM (2 children)
Unless you're living in NYC, another reason people may use them is because they are the only driver service available at reasonable cost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:28PM (1 child)
They pay 6 cents a mile on top of the cost of operating the car. That's not a sustainable business model. And even at that they're losing tons of money each quarter. They undercut the cost of taxi service by paying sub minimum wages to the drivers. At some point, the money will run out, regardless of whether or not people are willing to pay the cost of professional cabbies.
I personally would not consider it to be a reasonable cost when it's not even making enough money to break even. Initially they didn't even have insurance.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 12 2019, @07:55PM
Yeah, but (assuming your numbers are good and I don't doubt them) they cut out that 6 cents a mile and take advantage of fleet maintenance on a fleet of no-driver cars and does that change the numbers given how many miles they drive? That's a serious question but I don't want to chase the numbers.
And for the moment while they are losing money it is also on the backs of their
employeeser, contractors, who think they're getting a hell of a deal in what they're paid not really realizing they're burning their asset while doing so. (Then again, for people who do it as a second job they may look to the first job to be paying for the cost of their car anyway, which is how a friend of mine who drives for them rationalized it. "I've got a car already and have to have one, so why not put it to use part time?")This sig for rent.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:08AM
Gotta love this whole "disruptive technologies" stuff! If only Uber could 3D print Bitcoins! Technology SO disruptive, it is self-disruptive! Literally. And I mean "literally" literally.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:57AM (3 children)
Seriously. Both Uber and Lyft lose fucking billions every year(OK, Lyft is only around a billion a year, while Uber has recently been about a billion a quarter, and then five...fuck, together these guys lost more than DJT claims he's worth!) and stay in business with multi-billion valuations?
Did they take over drug running from El Chapo and keep a secret set of books?
And with both going public, how in this strange dimension of upside down economics would they ever be considered a good investment?
Hey, popcorn stocks are up!
https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/quote?Symbol=NY%3ACAG [financialcontent.com]
At least their valuation is based on making a profit every year.....
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @07:47AM
Why don't you check if your 401K has any money invested in it? Governments push everyone to have retirement accounts but unlesss you're vigilant that just aggregates a nice big pot for some investment manager to lose while collecting a nice commission.
That $5Billion Uber just lost came from somewhere, and I bet it won't be out of the pockets of the 0.1% that control the people that 'manage' your pension funds.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:14AM (1 child)
Around the height of the dot-com boom, the joke was that Amazon lost money on each sale and made up for it in volume. There was some truth behind this: they did lose money on each sale, but doing so let them get enough market share that they were eventually able to bring their costs down and make it profitable at that price. I suspect that a lot of investors are expecting Uber / Lyft to do the same thing. The problem is that there were a lot of inefficiencies in the markets that Amazon was competing in (and Bezos was willing to accept razor-thin margins), whereas that isn't nearly as true for taxi companies. Their biggest costs are labour and fuel. Uber may be able to cut fuel costs by going all electric (there's an airport taxi company here that's moved to using Teslas for their entire fleet and is able to slightly undercut their competitors as a result - though that's largely possible because the fleets for airport taxi companies are already at the high end so the cost difference between a Tesla and their competitors' cars isn't so huge). They may be able to eliminate the drivers with self-driving cars.
The bet for Uber is that, once self-driving electric cars drop the costs of operating a taxi fleet to a fraction of its current value, they will have the customer lock-in and the scale of supported markets so that it will be easier to plug in a fleet of Uber or Lyft self-driving electric taxies in a given city and see high utilisation than it will be to do the same with an independent fleet. The problem is that their value is solely in the user interface: go to a new city, use the same app to book a taxi. If someone comes up with a federated mechanism for doing the same thing, there goes Uber's margin. Amazon could do this quite easily: they already sell other things for third-party sellers and take a tiny cut, they could easily offer a unified payment mechanism to any legally registered taxi company and remove Uber's advantage entirely.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:50PM
Bezos has been losing money for like 20 years. Someone kept him going. Only cloud has started to make operations profitable in the last years.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:41PM (2 children)
Uber needs to go away as quickly as possible before its stock finds its way into the portfolios of every day investors who are not paying attention to the composition of their portfolios via market funds, etc. It would have been better if they’d never gone public and confined the investor losses to the insiders that could afford it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:12PM
What do you think that IPO was for? It was so they can offload their losses on to everyone else. Which is what they just did.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 12 2019, @08:03PM
Motley Fool thought back in June that Uber is a pick only for the *really* long term and with the real possibility that it could still tank. ( link.) I have negative love for Uber, am not an investor, and actively hope they fail. But there's still a place for that stock if one is aware of what one is buying. And investors who are unaware of their portfolio composition will get what they deserve for not paying attention to it. As to market funds, again there are people who are paid to place the appropriate amount of risk into a given fund, and if they tank it this is sad but a risk of investing in market funds. (Although it's far more likely to be just a hit and not a tanking, one of the reasons someone invests in market funds anyway.)
Heinlein once threw out the idea that it was people who had no idea what they were doing playing in the market that caused the Great Depression. I still find it an interesting theory and we might get there again.
This sig for rent.