Uber says it has laid off 170 people from its product team and 265 people from its engineering team
Uber has laid off 435 employees across its product and engineering teams, the company announced today. Combined, the layoffs represent about 8% of the organizations …
TechCrunchMegan Rose Dickey
Context & Ripple Effects
Weeks after cutting roughly 400 people from its 1,200-person marketing team, Uber is now trimming its core build functions — 435 employees, about 8% of product and engineering. Coming months after the IPO, the move reads as a continuation of the same cost-discipline push rather than a one-off reorganization.
What makes this cut different from earlier retrenchments like the 2017 auto-leasing shutdown is where it lands: product and engineering are the teams a ride-hailing company nominally grows, not shrinks, which signals profitability pressure is reaching past support staff.
First-order effects
435 product and engineering employees lose their jobs immediately, with the two organizations losing roughly 8% of their headcount.
Second-order effects
With marketing already cut and now core technical teams trimmed, remaining Uber managers face a clear expectation to justify headcount against profitability goals rather than growth targets.
Third-order effects
The trajectory holds: by spring 2020 the same logic scales into a 3,700-person layoff followed by 3,000 more cuts and 45 office closures, suggesting the 2019 trims were the early phase of a structural downsizing of Uber's corporate footprint.
The trend: Post-IPO Uber is converting growth-at-all-costs staffing into recurring, function-by-function headcount reduction that ultimately extends deep into product and engineering.
It seems to me that if @Uber fires 8% of its staff in product and engineering while simultaneously lifting its hiring freeze, the company is either admitting that they hired the wrong people in the first place or that they are pivoting their mission. https://techcrunch.com/...
To our friends at Uber, if you're looking for product & engineering roles, please hit us up at http://gojek.jobs/. We would be really lucky to have you join us, and shape the future of Southeast Asia's tech ecosystem. https://techcrunch.com/...
Turning @uber into @expedia, one lay off at a time. In a few years we will realize that @dkhos has led value destruction by devaluing the importance of tech to this company. It be a great part of @IAC then https://techcrunch.com/...
Smart ex-Uber people have explained to me before why Uber has so, so many employees. It all makes sense... kind of. And yet... I can't help but think that Uber is massively overweight on headcount for the kind of product they have. https://twitter.com/...
How did Uber have 265 engineers to spare, but none of them seemed to be working to make pickup times even remotely accurate, or to fix the thing where your incoming driver's car just spins in place on the map? https://twitter.com/...