> look at the brain drain claim instead. I could maybe buy that argument if they were facing technical/scaling challenges, but that’s not the case
Eh, yes and no. There's that famous thread about how they rewrote the iOS app and managed to pull it off by what can only be described as a sheer miracle. That was a legit technical/scaling issue. But also, the first round of layoffs under Dara came largely because there were too many teams spending time on projects of dubious ROI (there was even an internal joke about how people would build things first and only then write the RFC for it...) and eng spending was kinda out of control.
Layoffs were extremely demoralizing to be sure, but honestly, employees are over it now and the internal atmosphere is back to business as usual.
Recall that pre-pandemic Uber had projections to reach profitability by EOY 2020. Personally I think it's a bit weird to single out Uber as having difficulty retaining drivers when I see reports of labor shortages across just about every service industry. On the rider side, people complain about prices going up, but again, this is happening across the board due to the inflation spike (and doubly so for Uber due to its supply/demand bound elastic pricing structure). Sooner or later, I think the economy is bound to return to business-as-usual with their bosses shortchanging minimum wage employees and people scrambling to pay for bills flocking to Uber for extra cash.
</two-cents>
Eh, yes and no. There's that famous thread about how they rewrote the iOS app and managed to pull it off by what can only be described as a sheer miracle. That was a legit technical/scaling issue. But also, the first round of layoffs under Dara came largely because there were too many teams spending time on projects of dubious ROI (there was even an internal joke about how people would build things first and only then write the RFC for it...) and eng spending was kinda out of control.
Layoffs were extremely demoralizing to be sure, but honestly, employees are over it now and the internal atmosphere is back to business as usual.
Recall that pre-pandemic Uber had projections to reach profitability by EOY 2020. Personally I think it's a bit weird to single out Uber as having difficulty retaining drivers when I see reports of labor shortages across just about every service industry. On the rider side, people complain about prices going up, but again, this is happening across the board due to the inflation spike (and doubly so for Uber due to its supply/demand bound elastic pricing structure). Sooner or later, I think the economy is bound to return to business-as-usual with their bosses shortchanging minimum wage employees and people scrambling to pay for bills flocking to Uber for extra cash.
</two-cents>