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Uber CEO Vows to be ‘Hardcore About Costs,’ Slow Down Hiring in Memo to Employees

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 11 2022, @01:05PM   

upstart writes:

Uber CEO vows to be 'hardcore about costs,' slow down hiring in memo to employees:

Uber is going to slow down hiring and reduce its costs in response to "seismic shifts" in the financial markets, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a memo to employees.

[...] Uber is the latest company to commit to a hiring slowdown as the labor market tightens and tech stocks in particular have plunged sharply from their heights at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, also said it would slow down the pace of hiring for mid-level positions.

Uber will now focus on achieving profitability on a free cash flow basis rather than adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, Khosrowshahi said, noting that is what the company's investors now expect.

Uber has long been criticized based on the way it calculates its adjusted profits. The company's definition of EBITDA includes an unusually large list of exclusions and is widely seen as an inaccurate measure of the company's overall profitability. The company's stock price is down more than 40 percent year-to-date.

Uber to 'Treat Hiring as a Privilege' as a Way to Cut Costs:

In an email to staff, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi outlined some new and not-so-new cost saving measures.

[...] The rideshare giant is the latest in a string of other tech companies announcing hiring slow downs or cuts. At the end of April, investing app, Robinhood, laid off 9% of its staff. Then, Netflix laid off multiple recently hired writers for blog endeavor Tudum following a dismal quarterly earnings report. And, last week, Meta announced a hiring freeze for the rest of the year.

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Original Submission

• Re:Ah, that dying beast is stil alive? Re:Ah, that dying beast is stil alive? (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @04:57PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @04:57PM (#1244099)

  I don't know if you remember, but craft brewing went through this phase in the 90s. Following on the successes of Sam Adams in particular, and the renewed interest in home brewing, everybody and their brother (especially if their brother was an MBA) opened a brewpub. And since a lot of them had MBAs behind them, they were content in putting out a mediocre product and they were a means to an ends, a gimmick for a restaurant, and a lot of them disappeared by the early 2000s. Does this mean I should stash away my independent contractor rider business plan and wait to pull it out in about 15 or 20 years when these current ideas become new again? :)

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• Re:Ah, that dying beast is stil alive? (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 11 2022, @08:53PM

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday May 11 2022, @08:53PM (#1244165) Homepage

  I wasn't there to experience the US explosion, but of course I'm familiar with its after-effects - it really influenced many of the countries here in Europe. We're basically repeating your script. I should clarify my comments a little perhaps, I wasn't thinking of the "very few -> many" explosion, but the "many -> too fucking many" explosion. The ones in that earlier wave had an easier route to profit, all they had to do was take a tiny slice away from the macros. Many have become very significant even at the national level (BBC as you mention, Sierra Nevada, Bells, Stone, Brooklyn, ...). A fair few were very appealing to the macros for a buy-up too, because they were already profit-making entities (Goose Island to the biggest of the big, AB InBev; Ballast Point - was on the verge of an IPO when Constellation Brands claimed it all for themselves for a sweet billion dollars; Lagunitas to god-knows whom, I'm not a bloody encyclopaedia; ...).

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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• Re:Ah, that dying beast is stil alive? (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 11 2022, @09:38PM

  by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday May 11 2022, @09:38PM (#1244174) Journal

  Either that or move to Colorado. The damn things are like vermin around here!

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