Re:Bolt announces layoffs
by adrr on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @08:44PM
(#31512855)
I heard they had 900 employees. It's just a checkout page that plugs into your payment processor. I don't get why they need so many people. Most complicated thing they are probably doing is tokenizing the credit card themselves so the card info is portable across merchants with different processor.
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Re:Bolt announces layoffs
by iLoveOncall on Thursday May 26, 2022 @05:10AM
(#31516233)
Wait what the fuck, I thought the whole thing was about the Uber competitor also called bolt. No wonder some of the comments don't really make sense, especially in terms of team size.
I say the same about how Uber has thousands of engineers working on an app with 6 screens.
Re:Bolt announces layoffs
by sebdufbeau on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @09:56PM
(#31513340)
This link get's thrown around a lot, but here's a former Uber EM explaining why "an app with 6 screens" is misjudged statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
That adds up to maybe 100-200 people in my head. It's not like they rebuild every payment integration every day.
I worked for a retailer with >$2B in revenue across stores and 5 websites plus internal tools and we had about 100. And probably half were low cost contractors. Software practices sucked, deploys took forever, they had an ivory tower architecture crew and pie in the sky CTO and yet their digital products all worked fine and made tons of money. Why? Their products and branding were excellent.
Others have mentioned scale.
The other thing Uber has to do is optimize well. It needs to state competitive with Lyft for both passengers and drivers, minimize driver churn (but not too much), optimize matching, and charge predicted fares accurately.
Uber also processes an insane number of transactions. Not quite Visa, but I'd guess it's in the top 5% of volume as a merchant.
Uber also was wasting a huge amount of time and energy and most of the engineers didn’t have anything productive to do. At least that’s what I gathered from some ex Uber folks.
Uber has scale, they are processing $15+ billion plus in rides a year. Millions of customers and millions of drivers that need tools built to service them.
Re:Bolt announces layoffs
by throwaway5371 on Thursday May 26, 2022 @01:53AM
(#31515116)
google is an app with 1 screen