Uber Imposes Engineer Hiring Freeze as Losses Mount (yahoo.com) 84
Uber isn't letting tech workers join the ride, at least for now. From a report: The ride-hailing giant canceled scheduled on-site interviews for tech roles last week, and job applicants have been told positions are being put on hold due to a hiring freeze in engineering teams in the U.S. and Canada, according to multiple people who received the communications. In emails sent to job interviewees, Uber recruiters explained "there have been some changes" and the opportunity has been "put on hold for now," according to emails reviewed by Yahoo Finance. The hiring freeze comes after 400 layoffs in its marketing department earlier this month, which raised concerns and fears company-wide. During a recent all-hands meeting, a question about potential layoffs in the engineering department was also raised, but executives didn't provide any timelines. The number of hiring posts for software engineer roles at Uber peaked in March, according to data tracking firm Thinknum. The move highlights the challenges that Uber faces as it scrambles to prove to Wall Street, since its IPO in May, that it's on the right track to achieve profitability. The company, with 100 million monthly active users, reported $5.23 billion in losses for the second quarter last week.
$5.23 BILLION?! (Score:5, Interesting)
How the ever-loving fuck does a company that is essentially a website (and it's drivers wear the costs of a car) loose $5.23 BILLION in a quarter?
DXC Technology, the festering pile of crap that company is, managed to not loose money that quarter.
Uber investors must sure enjoy burning large piles of money!
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How the ever-loving fuck does a company that is essentially a website (and it's drivers wear the costs of a car) loose $5.23 BILLION in a quarter?
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-releamillse-details/2019/Uber-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx
Net loss attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. (1), (2) = $(5,236) million
(1) Q2 2019 includes a $298 million driver appreciation award made in connection with our initial public offering.
(2) Q2 2019 includes $3.9 billion of stock-based compensation expenses, primarily due to RSU expense recognition in connection with our initial public offering.
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You borrow lots and lots of money to pay insiders obscene wages, after all who cares it is all a bankster scam to get it past the IPO post with all kinds of stories, like Uber to replace all public transport, Uber to be the first in Space, Uber to the stars, what ever it takes so that insiders, the venture fund vultures can offload their stock and then bet on the collapse, rake even more in. They also have to off shore fund pension fund management to get them to buy the crap, the digital equivalent of the f
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Ahh, so they only lost $1.04 billion instead. Well, how the ever-loving fuck does a company that is essentially a website (and it's drivers wear the costs of a car) loose $1.04 BILLION in a quarter?
Easy! You pay the CEO and all his cronies a million bucks a month, plus expenses. And you get them offices in the nicest parts of town and private jets to go to lunch.
Because they're worth it.
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Just FYI, Uber's offices are in one of the worst parts of SF.
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Essentially, they "only" lost $1.33bn or so this quarter if you take out (admittedly, 100%) of the stock-based comp due to the IPO. There were engineers working there for years that cashed out. The number will drop again next quarter.
Re:$5.23 BILLION?! (Score:5, Insightful)
How the ever-loving fuck does a company that is essentially a website (and it's drivers wear the costs of a car) loose $5.23 BILLION in a quarter?
Because they are paying the drivers more money than the rides generate.
If they raise the cost of the rides, they lose riders.
If they cut the wages of the drivers, they lose drivers.
So their only option is to continue bleeding and hope that their competitors die first.
Or until they get self-driving cars working.
Disclaimer: I use Lyft.
Re:$5.23 BILLION?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can look at their spending breakout in their financials (now that they are a public company). R&D for things like self-driving cars is just a fraction of their total spend.
Re: $5.23 BILLION?! (Score:2)
That in itself is only a one-time loss, but it's indicative of a much deeper mismanagement that isn't going away.
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but it's indicative of a much deeper mismanagement that isn't going away.
Uber is lucky that good management isn't required to keep such a simple product going.
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The vast majority of their money is spent on rides.
That doesn't indicate that rides are a net loss, that indicates that overall they are a big line item.
Re: $5.23 BILLION?! (Score:2)
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They absolutely do spend more. That's what investor money is being used for: to undercut incumbents, in the hope that incumbents will all die off and they can have monopoly power to raise prices. It's a badly broken and deeply shady business model. It delivers some level of convenience, but at the cost of essentially all regulatory protections for both riders and drivers.
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Autonomy isn't hubris, it's the responsible thing to do. Google/Waymo has the technology working in a limited area and it's only a matter of time before it becomes more widely available, at which point commercial driving as a job is going to see a massive crunch.
Which ever taxi firm gets there first will have a huge advantage. Fewer staff, cars running 24/7 to deliver people during the day and packages at night. They can probably eat a fair proportion of the freight market too, depending on how long it take
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Re:$5.23 BILLION?! (Score:4, Funny)
How do people still confuse 'lose' and 'loose'?
This is about money. When your money is loose, you tend to lose it.
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How do people still confuse 'lose' and 'loose'?
They're probably drunk :-) (nice user name)
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How do people still confuse 'lose' and 'loose'?
It's actually become more prevalent over time. The more that people see "loose" instead of "lose" the more likely they'll think the former is correct. Check back in ten years or so and it will probably be an acceptable variant. In twenty years "lose" will be considered archaic.
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what did they pay out in the self driving death? (Score:2)
what did they pay out in the self driving death?
Re:$5.23 BILLION?! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the breakdown of a ride i did in January , when i was still driving for Uber :
Duration : 48 min 42 sec
Distance : 43.58 mi
I receive :
Base Fare : $1.04
Distance (43.59 mi x $0.6900/mi) : $30.08
Time (48.70 min x $0.2400/min) : $11.68
Tip : $10:00
Wait Time ($0.966666666667 min x $0.2400/min : $0.23
Toll : $3.69
Total : $56.72
Rider Pays :
Rider Price : $54.95
Tip : $10.00
Total : $64.95
Uber receives :
Service Fee : $6.03
Booking Fee : $2.20
Total $8.23
They used to include the waybill breakdown. but I can't find the breakdown anymore.
This $8.23 earning also included regulatory fee's , fee's that I believe were paid to a third party to track the ride for insurance purposes, and for insurance.
The moment a rider enters an Uber and the ride begins the occupants are covered for $1 million until the ride is ended and they exit the vehicle.
Tips are very uncommon, about 5 to 8% of riders tip the driver. (And this was with a 4.96 / 5.0 star rating with over 1500 rides.)
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Also it should be noted that this example is on the extreme end of efficiency for the driver.
Most rides do not break down like this. Most rides are much shorter distance, and inefficiency becomes a problem when you are waiting in between rides. Many rides result in a $3 to $7 payout to the driver. And if you want to accept UberX rides you also have to be willing to accept Uber pool rides, which are slanted more heavily towards Uber profits.
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Re: Uber?!? (Score:4, Informative)
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Ünder
Should be "Unter", with no umlat.
German => English
Über => Over
Unter => Under
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geez, who'd have thunk it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe taxi rides cost as much as they did because it actually costs that much to operate the damned things?
Uber's break even point is well below the price of taxis.
Taxis were expensive because the government imposed fixed prices and artificially constrained the supply.
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My local unregulated market says differently. Our prices for the same distance are twice the amount you'll pay in a regulated area.
Re:geez, who'd have thunk it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or because GAAP imposed specific bookkeeping and financial reporting rules, banks refused to loan money to a business that perpetually lost money, and government agencies working for the elected representatives imposed reasonable safety, insurance, health, and working condition rules to prevent a race to the uber bottom.
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Taxis were expensive because the government imposed fixed prices and artificially constrained the supply.
Governments imposed those rules because unregulated taxis were a nightmare. Unsafe, unscrupulous and clogging up cities (i.e. externalizing costs to other road users).
Remember that the public road network is a shared resource build with public money.
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Ah, the MBA's have taken over (Score:4, Interesting)
This is either a good thing, or a very bad sign. An IPO followed by a labor reduction means things are pretty bad off and the MBA's running the place see the writing on the wall, so this is likely a very bad sign.
Hiring freezes, followed by bad numbers again, usually means layoffs, big ones. If you work for UBER it might be time to update your resume and bail before the bloodletting begins. When this house of cards falls, it's likely to be pretty bad, so staying around for the severance package might not pay off because nobody gets a severance package in the last layoff. You get to turn off the lights and go home, hopefully with your last paycheck not bouncing. At least, that's how it happened in the Dot Com bust for me. "Bye now, take your stuff, turn off the lights and don't let the door hit you on the way out..."
Uber cannot continue to lose money and stay in business now that it's publicly traded. The Venture capitalists got their pay out and now it's going to become obvious if they have a product to sell and can do so competitively or not. It is looking like not...
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I worked as a developer, and only made the mistake of working for a salary once. I learned my lesson. Any job after that was hourly or nothing.
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It's fine by me. Maybe because I don't work in tech.
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If you just work for an hourly wage, then all of the bullshit you described is irrelevant. Why anybody would work for a salary in the day of the 50 hour work week is beyond me. Get paid for when you work, and when there's no more work, there's no more pay. Super, super, super simple (and fair). I worked as a developer, and only made the mistake of working for a salary once. I learned my lesson. Any job after that was hourly or nothing.
LOL.. I work on a salary... That said, I get paid by the hour, in the grand scheme of things. I don't ever work more than 40 hours a week because my hours are billed to the customer directly and they will only pay 40 hours, except on exceedingly rare occasions when they want more and have money to pay for the increase in hours. Then, I work more than 40, but I get paid by the hour for "overtime" but at my same rate (because I'm Salary, not hourly officially).
I've also worked salary, where hours didn't ma
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OK
That's pretty much the definition of "not a salary".
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If I wasn't "salary exempt" they would be forced to pay me "overtime" which is time and a half by the federal Fair Labor Standard Act. I'm actually lucky they pay me at all for hours over 40 hours.
If anything gets a bit hanky it's that I am REQUIRED to bill 40 hours to some kind of charge number, regardless of the available work to get my full paycheck. So if I ever had less than 40 hours of work to do for the customer, I'd be required to take my leave or bill the remaining 40 hours to an approved overhe
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If you have a really nice company laptop, leave it at home. When they ask for it back, offer to bring it when you pick up your final paycheck.
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This is either a good thing, or a very bad sign.
It's the latter (for Uber; for the world it's a good sign they're going under).
recent all-hands meeting
When a major corporation needs to call a "all-hands meeting", they're done.
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The company did an IPO never earning any money.
It's never made any money.
Uber is the "bitcoin" of the stock market.
It made a few people rich while fleecing a much larger market.
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Cost cutting (Score:2)
Let the cost cutting begin. Gotta make next quarter's results look better when your "Total costs and expenses" for the quarter were $8.651 billion
The GIG Economy (Score:2)
Unreal (Score:2)
I don't really get how they can spend as much money as they do. The app is written, the servers are running, and everybody knows who you are. You're Coca Cola at this point. All you have to do is keep everything running, which is way easier than building it.
They need quite a few people to handle the maps, but programming? A couple of front end developers, a graphic artist, and a few back end guys. A bunch of sysadmin guys to handle the servers. A couple of marketing guys. I mean, there's not a whole
Re:Unreal (Score:5, Informative)
They're going after self driving cars. They have a huge tech center in PA.
I interviewed there and it was terrifying. It was the node.js type engineers trying to do self driving vehicles. It was a terrifying interview. They were just throwing stuff at a wall.
They had no hardware in the loop testing. The vehicle that killed someone should have never made it out of proper testing. They were playing very fast and loose trying to be 'first'. Meanwhile Germans are systematically doing it piecemeal getting it 'right' then adding features.
dSpace makes some very nice hardware to do this exact type of testing: https://www.dspace.com/en/inc/... [dspace.com]
Uber did it completely wrong. They went into CMU and just poached their entire self driving car division: https://www.theverge.com/trans... [theverge.com]
Coming straight from academia most of them had no clue how industry ran. They kept working on it as a PhD thesis style project. Uber didn't hire any automotive engineers or managers to run it, they hired SiliconValley flash in the pan engineers.
It was definitely apparent during the interview, it's definitely apparent any news comes out of how their self driving division is run. At this point OEMs are trouncing them with miles driven. Uber tried to be first instead of right and is paying for it.
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You misspelled "developers". If you don't work with an engine of some sort, you're not an engineer.
So all those Mechanical Engineers that design bridges, cantilever roofs, and car door hinges, what kind of engine are they working with?
Software Engineer is a job title where I work. You can argue if what they're doing is Software Engineering or Software Development or not.
I personally think there's a big difference between Computer Science and Software Engineering or Software Development. To me Computer Science is mostly math, figuring out stuff like HAKMEM 169, Boyer-Moore, and Red-Black trees. Sof
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If you don't work with an engine of some sort, you're not an engineer
That will be news to all the civil engineers (and chemical engineers, and electrical engineers, and every other type of engineer who didn't specialize in mechanical.)
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Most mechanical engineers I know work in electronic packaging and wouldn't be able to work on an actual engine (gas, electric, steam, what have you) if their lives depended on it
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I am 'classically trained' a Mechanical Engineer with a heavy back ground in Simulink Embedded Coder and got into software from there. They were trying to hire me to do their ISO-26262 stuff. I asked a bunch of questions to see where they were was horrified. I think the best schadenfreude was that they pulled all of their cars from the road not long after that.
College is a mere 4 years in your entire career. You are absolutely not pigeon holed in what you learned in university as long as you continue to lea
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Way too many peers (most now whining of agism) sat on their laurels.
This is something I see all too often when I ask people in my field (software engineering) who complain about supposed ageism and they always dismiss any criticism of them with nothing more than ad hominems against me for only being in my 20s (30 now).
Not that us who are considerably closer to our days in school than retirement are perfect, far from it, but schools do tend to have a focus on what's currently relevant in industry so it's to some extent natural that older people who don't keep abreast of w
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Engineering isn't getting grease under your fingernails - it's the application of communication practices (requirements, design docs, workshops, scrums, etc, etc.) that enable individuals to work together as a coherent group to create, maintain, and eventually decommission an automated process. That process could be a mechanical device to generate motion or a workflow to manage problem tickets or any of a million other jobs. The point is automation, not lubing up funny-shaped bits of metal. As Alfred North
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Uber ATG in Pittsburgh and he is experienced with node.js
This is the most terrifying sentence I've ever read. NO. NO. NOOO.
There are very skilled, very cheap engineers out of Detroit that don't have CS degrees but *know* what they are doing from bare metal up through shipping a safe, certified product. Uber thought you hire those engineers like you hire web-devs, and is paying for it. It's not how it works. It's not how any of automotive works.
The money was stupid. The skillset made no sense and after my interview everything made a lot more sense about Uber.
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Typical disruptive startup mentality. Don't need to do it the tried and tested way, just disrupt the industry with some node.js and ship it. With luck and an excess of confidence you might make it.
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I would offer the hypothesis that the strategic priority was that Uber not be perceived as being behind in the race for the self-driving car, in the run up for the IPO. Once the self-driving cars actually exist, the reality is that Uber can probably just buy the damn things on the market. They needed to squash the fear that Uber could be decimated by being behind, even though being behind probably does not matter.
Yes, they are willing to throw a few billion dollars of real greenback cash down the drain an
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Yeah the only reason to think that uber would ever produce its own cars is if you are worried that someone else will make a self driving car and would chose to replace uber rather than selling the cars on the market... but even if that was the plan of some crazy startup out there they would just buy uber when the time came (or the other way around).
Wasting profit from a perfectly good business model to develop self driving cars is just stupid.
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They're spending on developing autonomous vehicles, and to recruit and keep drivers for their Uber and Uber Eats services. Those parts of the business are heavily subsidized.
Autonomous vehicles means no longer having to pay drivers and pay bonuses to keep them from leaving. But autonomous vehicles brings another set of problems and expenses to the table which is currently being absorbed by their fleet of under-paid drivers.
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and pay bonuses to keep them from leaving
Why leave? Every Uber driver here is also a Lyft driver. Apart from deciding not to driver for Uber any more, or not to drive at all any more, it doesn't appear that anyone needs to leave.
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I guess in 2070 or so, when full Level 4 autonomous vehicles are on the road and Level 5 are finally within site, the manufacturers and owners will thank the long-departed investors in "Uber" for subsidizing so much research without a hope of a single cent in return, back in the day.
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They've also got a bicycle service in London now - but they're queueing up behind the TFL/government run ones ("boris bikes", even though they were instigated by Ken). Then there's Lime-e (dubious name for a company in the UK, I'd say), there's Mobike and I think one other - then there's Uber's pink bikes. London's a big place, so you've got to have lots of bikes to cover it, and so far, only the TFL ones seem to be where you expect them.
It's a crowded marketplace for those bikes - sure, not so expensive to
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The executive suite needs a new wither yacht.
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Dust off your resumes (Score:2)
If you work at Uber, you should dust off your resumes and start putting feelers out there for positions. This is your red flag.
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Workforce optimization (Score:1)
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Positions are eliminated at most companies due to change in economics which includes bad business decisions. Delivery Driving a common fallback job. Uber can offer staff driver conversion severance. Assist transition to being a driver. This will have limited appeal for many but something a few might need.
Aren't their drivers independent contractors? If it gets bad enough, they'll just say sayonara.
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There are plenty of desperate people to drive for Uber. That's the advantage of a low regulation, low wage economy - there is an endless of gig economy workers trying to pay that month's rent.
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There are plenty of desperate people to drive for Uber. That's the advantage of a low regulation, low wage economy - there is an endless of gig economy workers trying to pay that month's rent.
Desperate yes. Whether it will pay for the rent is another thing. Driving taxi is a legitimate job, but it's at the bottom of the food chain. It's hard to imagine low regulation keeping the driver from his or her desired income.
I'll be pilloried for typing this, but getting a skill and being willing to keep up will go a long way toward putting food on the table and paying the bills. That way you aren't competing with the desperate people.
Uber's goal is not profit (Score:3)
Lyft is likewise hoping Uber goes bust for the same reason. I bet both companies are doing their level best to raise capital and cut costs hoping they can stay afloat the longest.
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That seems like an excessively risky strategy to me. One of them goes bankrupt, the other jacks up the prices and starts screwing drivers (you know they'll do both) and suddenly they've got a bazillion competitors, one or two in every city. It's not hard to make an app, and the network effect isn't as strong as for social media. Most people I know have both Lyft and Uber, and use what's cheapest. Most cars I see have both stickers. Meanwhile, Uber/Lyft has thrown billions down the toilet, enraged their us
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That's just one example. There are other cases. But what we can clearly see is Uber is operating below cost and investors are subsisting it in the hopes that Uber someday will turn a profit.