Uber Is Laying Off 10% of Its Workforce
- Reference: 0185375121
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/09/02/161253/uber-is-laying-off-10-of-its-workforce
- Source link:
> According to the email, the layoffs are part of a restructuring exercise that would shrink the number of managers by 20%, and some personnel in these roles would work as individual contributors going forward.
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> The ridesharing giant is reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50%, and letting go staff who are "more than seven layers down from the CEO," per Bloomberg. Khosrowshahi's email said the company is combining its engineering, science, and delivery divisions. The company is also bringing together its delivery operations across restaurants, retail, and direct divisions.
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> Remote jobs at the company are going away, too, with Uber only allowing less than 1% of its staff to work remotely.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/uber-is-laying-off-10-of-staff-or-3300-people/
[2] https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/simplerfasteruber/
The Zuck school of management (Score:4, Interesting)
Round-after-round of layoffs to pause raises (suppressing wages) and demoralize remaining workers with maximum stress in order to do another stock buyback. Stock buybacks used to be illegal because they're a form of stock manipulation from the Securities Exchange Act (SEA) of 1934 until repealed by SEC's Rule 10b-18 under Reagan in 1982.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, neo-liberals. Reagan did set us up for the dystopian future of the films of the 1970's and 80's. I doubt Uber will reach the kind of all-encompassing power that Tyrell or Weyland-Yutani have. I used to work for Dara at Expedia. I thought maybe he was a decent CEO, but that's just bias of working for someone when you want to believe your company isn't going to put you on a dead end path to nowhere while stringing you along with stock options.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would stock buy backs be illegal? When you go public you're basically getting a giant loan from the stock buying public. Buying back stocks is essentially paying off that loan. If you can manage to buy back all the stocks then you're a private company again.
Re: (Score:2)
The OP answered this already:
> because they're a form of stock manipulation
Read [1]https://casten.house.gov/media... [house.gov] . The goal of stock is NOT to enrich the C-Suite! The goal of stock is to foster economic growth and give investors long term returns: stock buybacks aren't necessary for either.
[1] https://casten.house.gov/media/in-the-news/theres-a-reason-why-stock-buybacks-used-to-be-illegal
Re: (Score:2)
Having a lot of cash on the balance sheet makes companies attractive to corporate raiders. Stock buybacks are a way to getting rid of it, when the management is too dull to think of any useful way of spending it. It can give the stock price a temporary bump, but often the overall value of the company (price * number of shares) actually decreases.
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I thought that's why our C-suite kept spending hundreds of millions on stock buybacks, but then we got bought by a company nobody ever heard of at a pretty hefty premium. Meanwhile, people have actually seen their salaries decrease (you tech workers are overpaid compared to the rest of company! actual thing an executive said) and the idea of retaining talent is just an idea they're looking for ways to solve that don't involve paying the proles more money.
I thought they were creating a stock control "moat" b
They have that many employees? (Score:3)
Wow, I had no idea they were that big.. I'm guessing the infrastructure/application are stable enough that some jobs can be let go. Plus some of the jobs can truly be replaced by AI.
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Uber is currently present in more than 15,000 cities worldwide. Every one of these countries with its own quirks, rules, laws, tariffs...
Which is surely extremely challenging and demands lots of workforce. A huge part of these I believe aren't even programmers.
So in the end, around 30,000 people are only about 2 for each city. It doesn't really look that much.
Are they making anything? (Score:3)
Are they making anything, anyway? Their food delivery website is a disaster, and it's been getting worse. The ride-hailing app has also not changed in years.
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They are biding their time until they have robo taxis and won't have to rely on though unreliable humans who keep raping customers any more. Seriously, Uber was temporarily using desperate humans to build an infrastructure which would change very little with non-human drivers.
Uber has been pushing Uber Eats at me hard lately (Score:2)
Which is stuipid, since there is a gate a half my from my house that delivery can't go through, so no delivery service can make it to my house. They could leave it at the gate and hope I get to it before the critters do, but if I have to travel a half mile to get my food, I might as well travel all the was to the restaurant, don't you think? I also keep yelling at my daughter for using Doordash (since I'm paying for her food), although she claims she usually picks it up herself instead of paying someone $10
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Half a metre? Half a km? Half a mile? If it's half a mile just to your gate, I can't imagine you live close to very many restaurants.
Besides, you get an ETA and you can track the delivery people, so you know when it's coming.
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The worst part isn't even whether or not Eats / Doordash suck (and make no mistake, they do) at their core purpose - It's that virtually every restaurant traditionally known for delivering has realized they can cut that nonsense right out of the budget and just push everyone to use a third-party delivery service at the customer's expense.
I know I'm going to sound like a cranky old man here, but once upon a time, food delivery was a sweet job for a late teen / early 20-something - Drive around town rather
Uber has employees??? (Score:1)
I thought they were all independent contractors!!!
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Of course they do, they have 7 layers of bonus receivers.
That's deep management (Score:2)
A company of 33,000 has positions over seven layers deep and teams of only two people? At least they finally realized they have a problem.
Compete with AI and robots? (Score:2)
People didn't want to compete with H1Bs being paid $60k for $120k jobs. Well, soon people will have to compete with AI and robots being "paid" even less. Like bro do you wanna compete with a robot that costs $20k+$1k in electricity who can work 24/7, can work twice as fast, and won't sue the boss?
1. We don't have a choice.
2. In theory robots doing all the work is great .. IF everyone can own a piece of it, and get dividends from it. That means individuals should invest in companies that make or use robots.
Re: (Score:2)
As I sit here watching but not really watching Claude code up a complex fix for a race condition that should have been obvious, I'm tickled by idea that any of the Daras or Bezoses out there would let anyone but other capital-class investors own a piece of the work the robots we unwillingly trained to do our jobs.
The capital class does not want the proles (generally) to own the means of production. If they/we did, the amount of money they could suck out of our pockets would be limited, and would so limit th
4.4 reports on average? (Score:2)
I can't be the only one who computed the seventh root of 33,000 to estimate about 4.4 reports per manager if they were evenly distributed. That seems pretty vertical.
oh I love pulse surveys! (Score:2)
"In Pulse surveys and conversations with many of you, we’ve heard that too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear. I’m sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time “aligning” rather than building, shipping, or serving customers. "
Dara is saying "you asked, and we delivered!"
Mostly we take pulse surveys for granted or know that nothing will come of them, but hey, they actually worked for once!
We've built the company.... (Score:5, Interesting)
And now it's time to get rid of the builders and only keep the maintainers so we can turn a short term profit. Woooooo Investors.
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"Seatbelts, airbags, and doors are extra weight. Let's try without them to save costs."
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"It's cheaper to pay off all the wrongful death lawsuits than it is to add a $2 part to a Pinto to keep the gas tank from exploding in a rear-end collision." -- Ford executives
Re: We've built the company.... (Score:2)
They didnâ(TM)t pay or something? Does a doctor ask you for monthly payments after they cure you? I agree workers should be taken care of, but thatâ(TM)s something the government needs to do . Itâ(TM)s not the problem of a specific company that we canâ(TM)t find work. Ask productivity increases with robotics and AI we will need a Ujiversla Basic income. In fact I think we should implement something ASAP - say $30 a month for anyone who wants it. Presumable 300 million people .. that
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$30? WTF is that going to get you? I can't even go out for a night and get drunk off that much.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing yet (well maybe enough for daily beans and rice if you can cook). But we have to start somewhere, as a pilot. When the economy gets more automated, GDP goes up, and jobs get more scarce, the amount shall increase.
Re: We've built the company.... (Score:2)
But we're already there. Automation and making people stupid so they have kids they can't feed has already made things terrible. This isn't the beginning.
Re: We've built the company.... (Score:2)
Hey, at least they didn't blame it on AI.