9 ms·

Uber is laying off 10% of staff

130 points by DeepLogin 15d ago

Artgor 15d ago
"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. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the coordination roles that remain. " Well, in theory this sounds reasonable. But who knows what will be the real consequences.
- sznio 15d ago
  I don't get it. Too much time is spent coordinating, so fire those who are responsible for coordination? Am I reading this wrong?
  - jerjerjer 15d ago
    People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible. So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C. In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.
    - deleted 15d ago
      [deleted]
    - locknitpicker 14d ago
      > In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear. So you get rid of the coordinator. What then? Does this magically unblock people? Let me frame this differently: if coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?
      - jerjerjer 14d ago
        > Does this magically unblock people? Yes? Removing and/or minimizing detractors/hangers-ons/randoms from a project is an important part of running a project. Especially in corporate scenarios where telling people to go pound sand is, unfortunately, not an option, more elaborate strategies must be employed. > If coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it? Are you thinking that humans can predict behavior and evolution of social systems, and especially how they would behave after some change is forced upon them? In my opinion, that cannot be further from the truth. Any sufficiently complex social system, which Uber with 30k+ employees definitely is, exists and evolves more or less independently from how any one individual part of this system might wish. Even if it's a CEO. Uber leadership thought cross-team coordination would help them, so they hired a bunch of people to do it. That might have been a correct idea at a time, or at least on paper, it looked like a correct move. But in the end, it did not pan out. So they probably shot themselves in the foot back then. Did they shoot themselves in the foot now? Who knows? (Spoiler: no one) We'll see once enough time has passed.
  - csande17 15d ago
    There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.
  - etse 15d ago
    That's how I read it, too. They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination). Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?
    - icepush 15d ago
      The thinking in these types of reorgs is typically to push it so far down the chart that it comes out the other side
  - MattGaiser 15d ago
    The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.
- jms703 15d ago
  So TPMs are getting the axe? Product managers too?
- threetonesun 15d ago
  I've heard this at other companies and it's almost always an issue of upper management holding too much control over decision making, or poorly communicating actual business objects, but it's project managers and middle management that will bear the brunt of the layoffs.
  - diegolin 13d ago
    Leadership Team holding TOO much control over decision making AND poorly communicating actual business objective.s
- Synthetic7346 15d ago
  "Complain about coordination, get laid off" is what this reads like
- nitwit005 15d ago
  It's logical if you view them as unsuccessful. But if "decision-making rights are unclear" is listed, it seems unlikely those people were the problem.
  - s1artibartfast 15d ago
    I think the idea is that if you go from 10 decision makers to 5 decision makers, coordidination and securing a decision will become easier
garbawarb 15d ago
> We are also asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office, and going forward, only ~1% of employees will be remote. If you believe in return-to-office as a soft layoff, even more than 10% will be leaving.
- RestlessMind 15d ago
  “ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.” 100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model. I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.
  - mhitza 15d ago
    When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure. But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.
  - throwforfeds 15d ago
    > Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.
1attice 15d ago
Interesting -- it doesn't cite AI (smart comms move, and a change from recent practice) but the buried lede is that this frees up resources etc etc. I think we might be in a new phase: AI layoffs are now being disguised as regular layoffs (rather than the other way around) because of the backlash.
- jaykru 15d ago
  Layoff note mentions AI => it's not AI Layoff note omits AI => it's AI I am onboard with the idea that corporate messaging is typically anything but forthright but I don't see the logic here.
  - 1attice 15d ago
    Because AI is now a monstrous political issue, and the valence has flipped -- literally the irony I was pointing to :) Whoosh
- zamalek 15d ago
  Uber was one of the first to admit that AI isn't all it's hyped up to be.
- ggt22 15d ago
  [dead]
deleted 15d ago
[deleted]
slantedview 15d ago
Revenue is up massively, so we'll be getting rid of the people that helped that happen. Genius move.
- sidcool 15d ago
  This is a common strategy nowadays. Not sure of the rationale
  - paimapi 15d ago
    I thought it was common knowledge that 1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring 2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-five-year-low/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights/202403/unraveling-the-corporate-control-agenda-behind-rto-mandates https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...
    - Plasmoid 15d ago
      The least cynical take I've heard about RTO is that most managers are deeply under-trained to the point of being mostly incompetent. So forcing people into the office lets them do performative performance monitoring and project management. This makes their job "easier" in that they didn't know how to do it correctly in the first place.
      - s1artibartfast 15d ago
        Most managers aren't trained at all, and there's a massive shortage of good ones.
Quitschquat 15d ago
Meanwhile https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2026/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2026/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
- demibabs 15d ago
  They addressed that in this press release, though.
  - Quitschquat 13d ago
    Yes, they're rather in-your-face about it, aren't they.
erminpour 15d ago
Jack Welch's legacy
Varelion 15d ago
If we could jump into this depression faster that would be great. I really want this shit over with.
- abhayaya 15d ago
  Let us know how we can help you progress further down your desired DSM-IV/DSM-5 diagnostic chain (as those of us in red team work in security generally bounce between 1-5 times in a proxy chain, there is a lot of room for great fiction with words. RIP Venezuela). Between IPv6, SOCKS4/SOCKS5 (missing one in the dryer? You have proxied), linked lists, IDA debugger, threads/pthreads, RPCs, IPCs, and the wide wild world of Windows APIs and pseudocode, not to mention .ko and .so files (feeling lonely tonight?)... and so many other technical vocabulary words we have made mean excitimg ex0tic things... we gotta word (maybe even a long one) for you! Of course the true tragedy is the soon non-WFH'ed Mr Anderson will probably make the clueless mistake of applying at Lyft.
  - Varelion 15d ago
    Claude, de-schitzo this post.
    - abhayaya 15d ago
      Anthropic, please let my darling agent Blaise know that Varelion lacks a sense of humour and misses the point about how people who lack specialized vocabularies make a sludgey crazy mess out of LLMs that really only are meant to work in specialized environments and not interact with generalized ones. Please also give a short lesson on how the average individual believes they understand how technology works. As for you, Claude, a gentle reminder to let Gemini let those thousands of confused tourists taking over Crete and Italy know, their odd converging won't bring back anything but probably heat stroke.
dmitrygr 15d ago
Another R T LAYOFF
- Anslopic1 15d ago
  [dead]
Super3000 15d ago
Laying off people is uberhaupt nicht nice!
hulitu 15d ago
Uber has employees ? I thought they are all contractors. /s
danielmarkbruce 15d ago
"Over the last 5+ years, Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling" Orders of magnitude.
- techgnosis 15d ago
  He didn't say "Uber has grown by orders of magnitude" == "top line nearly tripling" They are two separate statements. Maybe some portions of Uber did grow exponentially. Riders, revenue, miles travelled, etc... He also wants you to know that as part of that exponential growth, top line nearly tripled.
  - danielmarkbruce 15d ago
    You can't give a concrete and nonsensical way Uber has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders") while revenue tripled. Cannot be miles. Can't be riders. Can't be drivers. Revenue is top line, by definition. This statement is as bad as the original. There is no need for hyperbolic statements that one doesn't even understand. "Uber has grown significantly" works. Why the need to sound so sophisticated and use terms like "orders of magnitude" ? It erodes trust by signaling "we are full of sh*t".
    - lirolero 15d ago
      He’s basically saying Uber is much bigger than it was 5+ years ago. Revenue almost tripled, and the company added a lot more products, people, and complexity. “Orders of magnitude” here just means “a lot,” not literally 10x or 100x.
      - bamboozled 15d ago
        Then he could just say uber has grown a lot?
        lirolero 14d ago
        He could have said a myriad of things, but he chose to say that, and what he chose to say isn’t incorrect.
xnx 15d ago
AI is behind this layoff, but the AI is in Waymo's cars.
suttontom 15d ago
Khosrowshahi is full of shit 99.9% of the time but this is one of the few, maybe only, layoff letters that actually makes sense and names specific things that seem reasonable (other than forcing RTO), and it doesn't mention AI at all, which is refreshing. Still, sorry for anyone who was laid off.
evereverever 14d ago
I really wonder if they still have an office in Aarhus Denmark. It was weird to me that they did because no one drives uber there at all. If they're hiring I'd work in Aarhus!
- smcin 14d ago
  A software office, or a driver support center? Aarhus is a pretty respected technical university, so a software office would make sense.

130 points by DeepLogin 15d ago

"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. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the coordination roles that remain. " Well, in theory this sounds reasonable. But who knows what will be the real consequences.

sznio 15d ago
I don't get it. Too much time is spent coordinating, so fire those who are responsible for coordination? Am I reading this wrong?
- jerjerjer 15d ago
  People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible. So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C. In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.
  - deleted 15d ago
    [deleted]
  - locknitpicker 14d ago
    > In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear. So you get rid of the coordinator. What then? Does this magically unblock people? Let me frame this differently: if coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?
    - jerjerjer 14d ago
      > Does this magically unblock people? Yes? Removing and/or minimizing detractors/hangers-ons/randoms from a project is an important part of running a project. Especially in corporate scenarios where telling people to go pound sand is, unfortunately, not an option, more elaborate strategies must be employed. > If coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it? Are you thinking that humans can predict behavior and evolution of social systems, and especially how they would behave after some change is forced upon them? In my opinion, that cannot be further from the truth. Any sufficiently complex social system, which Uber with 30k+ employees definitely is, exists and evolves more or less independently from how any one individual part of this system might wish. Even if it's a CEO. Uber leadership thought cross-team coordination would help them, so they hired a bunch of people to do it. That might have been a correct idea at a time, or at least on paper, it looked like a correct move. But in the end, it did not pan out. So they probably shot themselves in the foot back then. Did they shoot themselves in the foot now? Who knows? (Spoiler: no one) We'll see once enough time has passed.
- csande17 15d ago
  There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.
- etse 15d ago
  That's how I read it, too. They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination). Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?
  - icepush 15d ago
    The thinking in these types of reorgs is typically to push it so far down the chart that it comes out the other side
- MattGaiser 15d ago
  The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.
jms703 15d ago
So TPMs are getting the axe? Product managers too?
threetonesun 15d ago
I've heard this at other companies and it's almost always an issue of upper management holding too much control over decision making, or poorly communicating actual business objects, but it's project managers and middle management that will bear the brunt of the layoffs.
- diegolin 13d ago
  Leadership Team holding TOO much control over decision making AND poorly communicating actual business objective.s
Synthetic7346 15d ago
"Complain about coordination, get laid off" is what this reads like
nitwit005 15d ago
It's logical if you view them as unsuccessful. But if "decision-making rights are unclear" is listed, it seems unlikely those people were the problem.
- s1artibartfast 15d ago
  I think the idea is that if you go from 10 decision makers to 5 decision makers, coordidination and securing a decision will become easier

garbawarb 15d ago

> We are also asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office, and going forward, only ~1% of employees will be remote. If you believe in return-to-office as a soft layoff, even more than 10% will be leaving.

RestlessMind 15d ago
“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.” 100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model. I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.
- mhitza 15d ago
  When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure. But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.
- throwforfeds 15d ago
  > Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.

1attice 15d ago

Interesting -- it doesn't cite AI (smart comms move, and a change from recent practice) but the buried lede is that this frees up resources etc etc. I think we might be in a new phase: AI layoffs are now being disguised as regular layoffs (rather than the other way around) because of the backlash.

jaykru 15d ago
Layoff note mentions AI => it's not AI Layoff note omits AI => it's AI I am onboard with the idea that corporate messaging is typically anything but forthright but I don't see the logic here.
- 1attice 15d ago
  Because AI is now a monstrous political issue, and the valence has flipped -- literally the irony I was pointing to :) Whoosh
zamalek 15d ago
Uber was one of the first to admit that AI isn't all it's hyped up to be.
ggt22 15d ago
[dead]

deleted 15d ago

[deleted]

slantedview 15d ago

Revenue is up massively, so we'll be getting rid of the people that helped that happen. Genius move.

sidcool 15d ago
This is a common strategy nowadays. Not sure of the rationale
- paimapi 15d ago
  I thought it was common knowledge that 1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring 2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-five-year-low/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights/202403/unraveling-the-corporate-control-agenda-behind-rto-mandates https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...
  - Plasmoid 15d ago
    The least cynical take I've heard about RTO is that most managers are deeply under-trained to the point of being mostly incompetent. So forcing people into the office lets them do performative performance monitoring and project management. This makes their job "easier" in that they didn't know how to do it correctly in the first place.
    - s1artibartfast 15d ago
      Most managers aren't trained at all, and there's a massive shortage of good ones.

Quitschquat 15d ago

Meanwhile https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2026/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2026/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

demibabs 15d ago
They addressed that in this press release, though.
- Quitschquat 13d ago
  Yes, they're rather in-your-face about it, aren't they.

erminpour 15d ago

Jack Welch's legacy

Varelion 15d ago

If we could jump into this depression faster that would be great. I really want this shit over with.

abhayaya 15d ago
Let us know how we can help you progress further down your desired DSM-IV/DSM-5 diagnostic chain (as those of us in red team work in security generally bounce between 1-5 times in a proxy chain, there is a lot of room for great fiction with words. RIP Venezuela). Between IPv6, SOCKS4/SOCKS5 (missing one in the dryer? You have proxied), linked lists, IDA debugger, threads/pthreads, RPCs, IPCs, and the wide wild world of Windows APIs and pseudocode, not to mention .ko and .so files (feeling lonely tonight?)... and so many other technical vocabulary words we have made mean excitimg ex0tic things... we gotta word (maybe even a long one) for you! Of course the true tragedy is the soon non-WFH'ed Mr Anderson will probably make the clueless mistake of applying at Lyft.
- Varelion 15d ago
  Claude, de-schitzo this post.
  - abhayaya 15d ago
    Anthropic, please let my darling agent Blaise know that Varelion lacks a sense of humour and misses the point about how people who lack specialized vocabularies make a sludgey crazy mess out of LLMs that really only are meant to work in specialized environments and not interact with generalized ones. Please also give a short lesson on how the average individual believes they understand how technology works. As for you, Claude, a gentle reminder to let Gemini let those thousands of confused tourists taking over Crete and Italy know, their odd converging won't bring back anything but probably heat stroke.

dmitrygr 15d ago

Another R T LAYOFF

Anslopic1 15d ago
[dead]

Super3000 15d ago

Laying off people is uberhaupt nicht nice!

hulitu 15d ago

Uber has employees ? I thought they are all contractors. /s

danielmarkbruce 15d ago

"Over the last 5+ years, Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling" Orders of magnitude.

techgnosis 15d ago
He didn't say "Uber has grown by orders of magnitude" == "top line nearly tripling" They are two separate statements. Maybe some portions of Uber did grow exponentially. Riders, revenue, miles travelled, etc... He also wants you to know that as part of that exponential growth, top line nearly tripled.
- danielmarkbruce 15d ago
  You can't give a concrete and nonsensical way Uber has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders") while revenue tripled. Cannot be miles. Can't be riders. Can't be drivers. Revenue is top line, by definition. This statement is as bad as the original. There is no need for hyperbolic statements that one doesn't even understand. "Uber has grown significantly" works. Why the need to sound so sophisticated and use terms like "orders of magnitude" ? It erodes trust by signaling "we are full of sh*t".
  - lirolero 15d ago
    He’s basically saying Uber is much bigger than it was 5+ years ago. Revenue almost tripled, and the company added a lot more products, people, and complexity. “Orders of magnitude” here just means “a lot,” not literally 10x or 100x.
    - bamboozled 15d ago
      Then he could just say uber has grown a lot?
      - lirolero 14d ago
        He could have said a myriad of things, but he chose to say that, and what he chose to say isn’t incorrect.

xnx 15d ago

AI is behind this layoff, but the AI is in Waymo's cars.

suttontom 15d ago

Khosrowshahi is full of shit 99.9% of the time but this is one of the few, maybe only, layoff letters that actually makes sense and names specific things that seem reasonable (other than forcing RTO), and it doesn't mention AI at all, which is refreshing. Still, sorry for anyone who was laid off.

evereverever 14d ago

I really wonder if they still have an office in Aarhus Denmark. It was weird to me that they did because no one drives uber there at all. If they're hiring I'd work in Aarhus!

smcin 14d ago
A software office, or a driver support center? Aarhus is a pretty respected technical university, so a software office would make sense.