Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut Costs

Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by morningcovfefe on Saturday August 10, 2019 @05:16AM (#20661040)

Good god you sound ignorant. Uber isn't a post office with multi day SLA. It's a realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities - and that's just one part of the company. Payments is a whole chunk of the tech industry in and off itself. Food delivery is a whole of the tech startup scene in an off itself. As is Freight.

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by drcross on Saturday August 10, 2019 @05:40AM (#20661098)

The Uber apologists on here really boggle my mind. Other competitors seem to do it fine such as Free Now, which operates in multiple cities and I don't even know where their offices are located because they don't need these super 10x Devs people speak about. There is no special sauce in Uber. Once the VC money that uber spend on subsidising EVERY JOURNEY dies up then customers will move to another platform.

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by NeverFade on Saturday August 10, 2019 @06:02AM (#20661154)

How many drivers and riders does "Free Now" have?

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by Macha on Saturday August 10, 2019 @08:01AM (#20661583)

Free now (Formerly mytaxi/hailo) has 70 million passengers and 100k drivers: https://www.daimler.com/products/services/mobility-services/...

This compares to Uber at 90 million passengers and 3.9m drivers: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/

Now unfortunately it's hard to assess Free Now's methodology as they're not a public company (they're owned by BMW and Daimler) so we only have their marketing claims to go on.

Also the majorly divergent passenger:driver ratio is likely down to mytaxi operating primarily in markets where taxi drivers are licensed and Uber's disruption not tolerated. This means they're pulling from a smaller pool that is more likely comprised of full time drivers.

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by ploika on Saturday August 10, 2019 @06:13AM (#20661189)

Lots. They operate all over Europe.

They were called mytaxi until a couple of months ago, and absorbed Hailo and many other ride hailing services over the past few years.

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by coredog64 on Saturday August 10, 2019 @08:20AM (#20661633)

I haven’t used Uber enough to hit the problems that others mention (e.g. drivers playing chicken with your pickup hoping you’ll cancel). With that said, there’s nothing I’ve seen from Uber that Hailo didn’t give me when I was traveling in Dublin 5 years ago.

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by goatinaboat on Saturday August 10, 2019 @06:27AM (#20661247)

It's a realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities

No it doesn’t. For a start there is no overlap between cities, so that’s easy to shard. And secondly that’s not what SLA means - how many 9’s do you think would be in a sub-second SLA? Thirdly Uber offloads it’s payment to third parties, unless I blinked and it’s issuing its own credit cards now.

You seem to be incredibly impressed by Uber’s tech but have you considered that everyone else’s tech works so well that you just take it for granted? No Uber ride comes close to the complexity of sending a package internationally, and orders of magnitude more packages are sent every day than Uber does rides.

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Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by TeMPOraL on Saturday August 10, 2019 @05:30AM (#20661079)

> realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities

That's actually "for thousands of users in one city" executed a few hundred times, and map/PoI/pathfinding parts can be (are?[0]) outsourced to a third party.

[0] - I don't use Uber as a matter of principle, but the competitor I use utilizes Google Maps for these parts. So do food delivery companies I use.

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