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A comment on Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off more than 180 employees. Parent comment

Re:Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off more than 180 empl... by necubi on Saturday January 23, 2021 @09:01PM (#25888250)
Not surprisingly, software engineers think that the only thing going on with a company like Uber is software engineering. Which is way more complex and requires way more people than it is frequently given credit for. (Uber isn't just an app; it's a bunch of apps, supporting a 2-way marketplace with complex dynamics and many millions of participants.)

But the vast majority of Uber's employees are not software engineers. Running a physical service in ~70 countries is /hard/ and requires a lot of people. Support and operations eat up a lot of the headcount, and can't be scaled like software. Similarly you need a lot of accountants and lawyers to operate globally, along with all of the infrastructure to support a global workforce.

[Disclaimer: I work for Lyft]

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Re:Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off more than 180 empl... by gverrilla on Saturday January 23, 2021 @10:43PM (#25888966)
why do you think uber dynamics are complex, exactly?
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Re:Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off more than 180 empl... by throwanem on Saturday January 23, 2021 @11:46PM (#25889356)
Why do you think they aren't?
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Re:Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off more than 180 empl... by AlotOfReading on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:41AM (#25890161)
They're doing complicated things, but is that headcount in proportion to it? For comparison, Apple's HQ headcount is under 20k, and entire state level governments for small to mid-sized states are in the low tens of thousands of employees. We all know human things generate lots of work to employ lots of people, but the scale still feels a bit off, even if no one can point to exactly why.
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Re:Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off more than 180 empl... by throwanem on Sunday January 24, 2021 @07:49AM (#25891605)
It doesn't feel off to me. As others have discussed in considerable detail, operating in a lot of countries worldwide is a lot more complex than it intuitively seems to be, and the complexity scales superlinearly.

I suspect they might be a few percent overstaffed, but I don't think that hurts a company focusing on growth over all else, and I don't think it's even all that uncommon for such companies. It wouldn't surprise me to see a round or two of layoffs once that growth tops out, but it would surprise me if they added up to more than 10% of headcount.

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