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

Huh. I had a phone screen scheduled for next week. The recruiter emailed me to say they had some updates to share. I guess this is it...

Just the beginning of the ending of the round of tech boom we have seen. Overhiring might be a cause of it, but big companies overhiring isn't particular unique to Uber, and when they start to curb hiring, some fundamental correction of perception is probably under way.

So almost $4B of their losses were were from stock costs to employees. All hell might break loose if the drivers ever found out how much Uber employees made/make!

Seems at their scale, they could operate their app/infrastructure by charing drivers 10% per ride or less and still rake in the money.

tl;dr:<p>1. laid off 400 &quot;marketing&quot; staff(global)<p>2. hiring freeze in U.S.(&amp; Canada) for engineering(software) &amp; PMs, due to reaching hiring quota for this year<p>3. $5.24B net loss(biggest ever)<p>4. hiring continues for logistics, autonomous-car etc..<p>Interesting facts indeed.<p>Why does Uber(&amp; the likes) need to continue hiring engineers&#x2F;PMs really? Unless they are opening new products every year, can&#x27;t their existing engineering handle all of the existing products? Given how well they pay(heard info), am curious whether engineers still leave after a while, needing constant replacement every year?<p>Am not demeaning anything, am really curious. I assumed places like Uber&#x2F;ABNB&#x2F;Lyft don&#x27;t lose staff easily.

Recession is in the air and the tech gravy train fueled by the VC culture stops here (Hopefully!).

It turns out that selling things for less than it costs is a bad business model.

They could save a substantial amount of the salaries by offshoring their technical team.<p>Even to the UK, where tech salaries top out around $100k.

Let’s be honest, Uber massively over hired in tech, either to create the illusion of being a tech company (to help raise VC), or because some within the company truly believed they were. They are no more a tech company than WeWork or Airbnb is. The company blog gives a clue to this, they seem to do an awful lot that is cool and fun and completely unrelated to regulatory arbitrage (or booking taxis). Uber could ditch anywhere between 50-90% of their techs tomorrow and it would not impact their operations one iota.<p>Anyone working in tech there needs to polish up their resume and hope that the many scandals at Uber hasn’t tainted them too.

the start of the end? nice. what a scummy company...