Uber is laying off 10% of staff(uber.com) |
Uber is laying off 10% of staff(uber.com) |
If you believe in return-to-office as a soft layoff, even more than 10% will be leaving.
But in the normal case, you are right. Google had extra rounds of layoffs because RTO didn't self-cull enough people. People know this isn't the market to make a stand in without significant leverage.
100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model.
I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.
But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.
When i go to the office it takes 2 hours from each day only for commute, add meetings, lunch breaks, and the office bullshit chitchat and non-stop blabber that distracts you. People on the phone, or just "hanging" out next to you.
Bottom line is when i have to work from the office i get 5% done of what i do from home. I get angry, and unmotivated. I usually also leave early.
Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.
If you feel you work better at the office, more power to you.
That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same, particularly if the best argument you can piece together is that forcing others to do something against their will makes you feel better.
Well, in theory this sounds reasonable. But who knows what will be the real consequences.
So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C.
In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.
Orders of magnitude.
"Orders of magnitude" is three words when one would do, it's used to sound sophisticated, and it's use is off by... an order of magnitude or so... in many cases
They are two separate statements. Maybe some portions of Uber did grow exponentially. Riders, revenue, miles travelled, etc...
He also wants you to know that as part of that exponential growth, top line nearly tripled.
Cannot be miles. Can't be riders. Can't be drivers. Revenue is top line, by definition.
This statement is as bad as the original. There is no need for hyperbolic statements that one doesn't even understand. "Uber has grown significantly" works. Why the need to sound so sophisticated and use terms like "orders of magnitude" ? It erodes trust by signaling "we are full of sh*t".
1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring
2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone
[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...
Nobody believes a single promise of a company anymore. That promo promise after a hard assignment? Yeah fuck that.
If they're hiring I'd work in Aarhus!
Of course the true tragedy is the soon non-WFH'ed Mr Anderson will probably make the clueless mistake of applying at Lyft.
R
T
LAYOFFI think we might be in a new phase: AI layoffs are now being disguised as regular layoffs (rather than the other way around) because of the backlash.
Layoff note omits AI => it's AI
I am onboard with the idea that corporate messaging is typically anything but forthright but I don't see the logic here.
Whoosh
They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination).
Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?
But if "decision-making rights are unclear" is listed, it seems unlikely those people were the problem.
I personally liked how they claimed employees complained that they spend too much time aligning with other teams, and somehow their response to they complain was... Firing the people responsible for facilitating that alignment?
And then there's the comical justification that they will increase development speed with larger teams managed by managers with far more responsibilities and far less time to deal with issues.
Uber's announcement wouldn't sound so silly if they just stuck with the financial angle. They are firing people because they aren't growing, they have no answer for stalling, but they still need to present nice numbers to investors who want to get paid. That would be a more respectable answer.
I get distracted at home, and home is no longer home - it's the office.
I work best when talking through my mental blocks with people. As a consultant I've never gotten over trying to poke my head in via Slack/Teams/etc. In-person huddles and brainstorming get more done in 30 minutes than phone back-and-forth usually does over days.
Being in the office allows some level of personal understanding occur between teams and people.
I like the idea of being able to live where I want, but I haven't moved since going WFH, and I find talking to people in person when I visit gets planning and training done a lot more efficiently. Learning from others and collaborating on problems is something mid-high level IT does a lot more than solo coding for hours at a time.
As for you, Claude, a gentle reminder to let Gemini let those thousands of confused tourists taking over Crete and Italy know, their odd converging won't bring back anything but probably heat stroke.
So you get rid of the coordinator. What then? Does this magically unblock people?
Let me frame this differently: if coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?
Yes? Removing and/or minimizing detractors/hangers-ons/randoms from a project is an important part of running a project. Especially in corporate scenarios where telling people to go pound sand is, unfortunately, not an option, more elaborate strategies must be employed.
> If coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?
Are you thinking that humans can predict behavior and evolution of social systems, and especially how they would behave after some change is forced upon them?
In my opinion, that cannot be further from the truth. Any sufficiently complex social system, which Uber with 30k+ employees definitely is, exists and evolves more or less independently from how any one individual part of this system might wish. Even if it's a CEO.
Uber leadership thought cross-team coordination would help them, so they hired a bunch of people to do it. That might have been a correct idea at a time, or at least on paper, it looked like a correct move. But in the end, it did not pan out. So they probably shot themselves in the foot back then. Did they shoot themselves in the foot now? Who knows? (Spoiler: no one) We'll see once enough time has passed.
Two orders of magnitude is 31.6 to 316 (10^1.5 to 10^2.5), so 32x would be sufficient.
Most Uber 5-year growth numbers seem less than 3x. Steelmanning, some programs seem new in 2021 (Uber One, autonomous driving), and thus might have grown more dramatically as they spun up.
But yes, eep. Maybe misuse will, by getting more exposure for the term, eventually get us more people who know and use it properly? Maybe?
Uber has grown 2 orders of magnitude!
All this concern, when he merely assumed everyone would realize he meant oom base 2. :P
“holing yourself up…”
but it wasn’t about conversation, it was about opinion.
With very few exceptions, all my projects involve distributed teams in a mix of nearshore and offshoring, across multiple locations.
You're confusing things. Collaboration doesn't require you to be continuously in the same room with people 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and your personal needs to be in a room with someone else does not justify forcing everyone under payroll to commute to the office.
You already need to schedule meetings to be in the same room with someone, don't you? Why would anyone have to waste their time commuting to the office if you didn't booked a meeting?
As opposed to WFH where one can simply do that without other people also doing it.
If they didn't say "revenue tripled" and you asked people to speculate how much Uber had grown in 5 years given the statement, you'd get a lot of guesses around 100x.
No. You feel you need everyone around you at the office, but that is you and you speak for yourself. Others have a say on that, don't they?
For you to be around people in a way you don't get in the way of everyone else around you, you need to coordinate. This means you need to plan ahead and schedule meetings with a specific agenda to discuss with the people whose time you want to waste. That doesn't require everyone else to drive all the way to the office 5 days a week,and then send there 8 or 9 hours a day. In some cases a simple message does the work. In some cases a call will do. For the rare occasions where you need to be at arm's reach of someone, you guys can plan ahead.
So why do you believe it's reasonable ti demand everyone around you to bend backwards to accommodate your peculiar requirements of proximity?