They're a global company that operates in 900 cities. I don't understand why so many people on this site seem to think it should be a few programmers and some suits to sign the checks.

because for the past 11 years, and people tend to forget how long this company has existed, they have been burning through money faster than star athletes after retirement while inventing increasingly convoluted metrics to claim to be actually profitable.

Many people are just tired of seeing glorified sales and taxi companies disguising themselves as tech companies.

The defining feature of a technology firm is reduction of marginal costs at scale. If you're adding human labour with every city you expand into you might have a problem on your hands if your banking on making facebook margins.There is an underlying exhaustion among some people, myself included, who want to see investments into basic research and real technological advances rather than yet another app delivering pizza being valuated at 50 billion dollars.

Uber’s engineering infrastructure is nothing to scoff at.

Yes, and I think that's the problem. The infrastructure is actually a cost for Uber. It's better to have less infrastructure. I have sometimes the feeling the infrastructure team at Uber is trying to build the tower of Babel to touch the heavens or something rather than considering that the end goal is giving people rides and not building more infrastructure.

I think people should recognise that the taxi market has an advantage. It's a distributed system and a market. Taxis organise themselves.

If you're going to replace an entire market with a centrally planned system and a giant electricity and compute eating machine then you better have something to show for it in terms of efficiency.

Exactly. It's like measuring the success of building an airplane by how much it weights.

What's especially interesting to me here is how the landscape has changed since Uber launched 10 years ago. In 2010, you legitimate had to build a lot of your own stuff; at that point Amazon hadn't even launched SNS or Redshift. [1] Docker didn't exist. Etc, etc.

So the question for me isn't, "Can Uber justify their apparently large infrastructure?" It's more, "If somebody started an Uber competitor today, how much of the work could they get from open source, PaaS, and SaaS providers?"

A really interesting question indeed. While Docker containers are a blessing from many perspectives, their orchestration is far from easy (yes k8s I am looking at you). Another consideration of a CTO, when choosing buy vs build, would be the cloud vendor lock-in and pricing consideration. Big cloud vendors may be a good offering for startups, when you need to move fast, growth is more important than margin and vendor lock-in is not an issue. However, as you grow, these things become increasingly important. Just to provoke some constructive thinking, I urge you to consider what businesses would become possible if running cost of IT & online payments equaled zero :)

But their competitors like Bolt have figured it out and can do it cheaper.

They won't survive this pandemic..

"anywhere in the world" being the challenging part. If you're think about it from the perspective of a local taxi company, sure, it doesn't make sense. If you're a global service then it's probably different.

There's no such thing as a "global" taxi service. All cabs are local.

The only people who care about being able to use the same app in Bangalore that they do in Palo Alto are Uber investors and a tiny handful of globetrotting Davosians too lazy to install a new app or send an SMS.

Yes but there are plenty of people interested in having the same service in both Bangalore, Bombay and Ahmadabad, all three cities are quite far but people (including me) regularly travel between them. The local laws are completely different, but I don't have to worry about it. I know uber has figured out the cheapest fare, most convenient route from traffic conditions and the safest driver. If you think its a trivial thing or its somehow not needed then you are kidding yourself.

Also one thing I find is that taxis can be pretty dodgy depending on where you are. They're OK in my neck of the woods, but I've had some overseas that made me uncomfortable. I'd rather go with Uber.

Agreed. I do the same circuit (AMD/BOM/BLR) on a regular (read almost monthly) basis, and the ability to stick with ola or uber is a blessing that eliminates so much friction when I'm travelling!

I've never heard of "Ola" so it sounds to me like you're agreeing that a sub-global cab company in fact serves you fine.

Ola operates in 250 cities, that is pretty global I would say. Also it is the second choice for everyone I know and it is reflected in the fact that it operates in only 58 cities in India and still commands over 50% of the total market share.

edit: removed the royal we

The cabs themselves might be local cars driven by local people but in this instance the rides are being requested and serviced by the same infrastructure globally. That's a taxi company that has operations globally. The customers only travel locally but the company isn't limited to one geographic region.

(Serious questions, seeking clarity in my own mind)

Is Netflix a tech company?

Is a company that sells ebooks a tech company? What about scientific journals? Are they tech companies?

Is Instagram a tech company? What about ad brokers?

I'd suggest the OECD definition:

Hatzichronoglou, Thomas: "Revision of the High-Technology Sector and Product Classification", OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 1997/02, OECD Publishing, Paris.

https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/revisi...

Page 7 specifically divides manufacturing industries (it doesn't address services) into four technology levels, high, medium-high, medium low, and low:

High technology: Aerospace, computers, office machinery, electronics-communications, pharmaceuticals.

Medium-high technology: Scientific instruments, motor vehicles, electrical machinery, chemicals, other transport equipment, non-electrical machinery.

Medium-low technoogy: Rubber and plastic products, shipbuilding, other manufacturing, non-ferrous metals, non-metallic mineral products, fabricated metal products, petroleum refining, ferrous metals.

Low-technology: Paper printing, textiles and clothing, food, beverages, and tabacco, wood and furniture.

Given J.S. Mill's wonderful definition of technology, 'the study of effects", there's little in human activity which is completely atechnological. There remains, however, much that is quite some remove from the cutting edge.

(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12004/12004-h/12004-h.htm#FNa...)

In the technology adoption lifecycle, high tech are innovators. An early-adopter firm is itself still not high tech itself.

(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884971)

Yes, Netflix is a tech company. Eventually all companies that are enabled by technology and software become tech companies. Even banking is becoming a tech industry.

That's 30 employees per city, for those who didn't do the mental math. Seems way more reasonable considering for each given market, you'll need a number of support staff + supervisors, marketing people, staff to support drivers and their enrollment, and staff to support an office if one exists. Divvy up corporate HQ heads (engineering, exec team, etc.) and I can see that number hitting 30 per city.

Don't forget people that deal with all sorts of compliance issues.

Most programmers are completely oblivious to the world of sales and how large it is.

> I don't understand why so many people on this site seem to think it should be a few programmers and some suits to sign the checks.

I don't, either, but then again I never said that. I'm merely wondering how the jobs break down.

An article that gives some insight into why these tech companies seem to have a bloated workforce is https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/.

Part of it is that the MVP might be easy to create, but scalability and edge cases add a lot of extra complexity. The other part of it is that it's not so much that a company _needs_ every employee it has, but it will keep hiring until the marginal benefit of an employee is no longer positive.

Every time there is any discussion about the number of employees at a large company there is some comment like this. Whether it be Uber, Airbnb or twitter.

No large organization is going to be 100% efficient with their workforce, but what's more likely? 1) They (and judging by HN comments, every large company) just massively over hired without realizing it or 2) running a global company is more complicated and involves more moving parts than it appears on the surface.

I guess it is 1. If your competetive edge is running a slick taxi operation, having that many employees seems ... counterinuitive. That is probably why Uber gets a "what are they all doing" alot.

In the same way Netflix is just a slick tv station, google is just a slick search engine and amazon is just a slick e-commerce site. Calling Uber’s operation just a “slick taxi operation” doesn’t hold water and purposely ignores all the complexity operating at scale and globally entails.

I mean how many corporate employees would you have if you ran Uber?

Amazon does logistics, Netflix does their own content and Google mainly do advertising and is surely not a slick search engine. Neither are slick.

Uber on the other hand is an app together with some driver administration. The main operation of the taxis are on the drivers.

Uber operates in: ride sharing, food delivery, bike messenger, corporate travel, freight, helicopter, and gig economy jobs, and more - and these are just the publicly launched products. Each of those lines has its own external _and_ internal products, with their own features, and their own regulatory burden. They each have their own cost structure and incentive models. They're live in over 900 cities across 85 countries, many of which have their own local regulatory burden such as NYC.

Then, on top of that, you've got 91 million monthly active users. Assume each one takes only one ride per month, and only 1% of them have some kind of issue that requires them to reach out to support - that's still 30,000 new issues per day many of which will require coordinating between both parties involved in the transaction.

Do they have more employees than they need? Define need. It's easy to hire above what's necessary to sustain operations when the cost of capital is cheap. More people can develop new products and grow margins for the business overall. But Uber is seriously far from "an app together with some driver administration" any more than Amazon is "a website with some seller administration."

How many customer support agents do you think it takes to support millions of drivers and almost 100 million monthly riders across the globe in various languages? How many people in operations to onboard the drivers that come in and deal with local regulations? How many internal tools to automate as much of those processes as possible?

w.r.t "Uber is an app together with some driver administration" : this is true, but taxi drivers (even highly organized ones, such as taxi companies that have employees for drivers) are intrinsically incapable of producing something like the Uber app and operating it at scale. Uber did bring something to the taxi industry that it never had.

Compliance with local laws, localized marketing, localized support, localized administration, etc. It adds up quick.

If they can lay off 20% of their employees then it appears that 1) is true. Overhiring 5400 employees isn't just about something being "more complicated".

This isn’t really a useful line of reasoning. It’s true that businesses will cut their workforce to remain a functioning business, and just that fact does not imply there was “waste”. Longer term investments are cut, which can affect the competitiveness of the business. Corners are cut where they can be. Is it a productive use of Ubers time trying to hyperoptimize their finances versus focusing on their actual business?

Marketing is probably a lot of it. And I'd bet they have a substantial legal department given their history.

They also have a substantial “public policy and government relations” department on K street and globally.

> comes as the 3,800-person Uber engineering group could be slashed by nearly 800 people in the coming weeks

That leaves 23,000 people to account for.

[deleted]

I did read the following on the internet, not long time ago, I don't know if they are legit numbers, they could be fake :

  Rides: 
  - Operations: 12k (+ 2.4k) 
  - Engineering: 3.8k (+ 700) 
  - Marketing: 1k 
  - Finance: 1.2k (+ 1.7k) 
  - HR: 1k (+ 2.4k) 
  - Legal: 0.9k (+ 1.2k) 
  Eats: 2.2k (+ 1k) 
  Self driving: 1.4k (+ 150) 
  Freight: 1.2k 
  Elevate: 100

So many lawyers.

They'll be coming after OP for the staffing disclosure, especially when someone in HR sees the comment

This..

I'd recommend removing the above orgchart comment, especially since it was extremely easy to figure out who you are. (WebDev at Uber)

I don't think I'd get in trouble, but better safe than sorry, I guess </shrug>

But now the context is here - maybe everyone should scrub their comments so it's unclear what was discussed.

So many regional variations. Sounds terrible to have to work with.

well, that company is going into entrenched businesses, so of course the incumbents are going to defend themselves and not just go away..

A bulk of those positions are probably sales and marketing and customer service.

They're not. Most of them are operations.