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Uber Lays Off 3,000 People in Second Big Round of Cuts

posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 22 2020, @09:20AM   
from the hey-hey-goodbye dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Uber lays off 3,000 people in second big round of cuts:

Uber is laying off another 3,000 workers, the company announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. That's in addition to the 3,700 workers the company laid off earlier this month. Uber had 26,900 employees at the end of last year. Uber drivers, whom the company treats as independent contractors, are not directly affected.

"Given the dramatic impact of the pandemic, and the unpredictable nature of any eventual recovery, we are concentrating our efforts on our core mobility and delivery platforms and resizing our company to match the realities of our business," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the SEC filing. "That's led us to some painful decisions today."

Uber's core ride-hailing business has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. The Wall Street Journal reports that Uber's rides business was down 80 percent, year over year, in April.

[...] Uber estimates that it will spend $110 million to $140 million on severance packages and another $65 million to $80 million on expenses related to shutting down offices. The Wall Street Journal says Uber is closing 45 office locations. The two rounds of cuts are designed to reduce Uber's overhead by more than $1 billion.

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Original Submission

• The final stage of any failed endeavor The final stage of any failed endeavor (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday May 22 2020, @06:04PM (1 child)

  by Thexalon (636) on Friday May 22 2020, @06:04PM (#997933)

  This is the point where the organization's leadership grabs as much of the money as possible and heads for the hills.

  Despite their marketing about "disrupting the marketplace" and such, when you look at what Uber's actual business was, it amounted to "an often-questionable car service with a phone app". That's it. To the extent that it offered any value different than a cab company, it was that it was dodging government regulations on car services and cab companies, but those were legal technicalities that were sooner or later not going to continue to work.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

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• Re:The final stage of any failed endeavor (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @02:23PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @02:23PM (#998150)

  But before they came, taxi service in the US (non NYC) was miserable and sclerotized between the incumbent cab companies and their regulators.

  Parent