I've had to add 'Uber' and variants to my news filter as it seems to have been locked into some sort of media bad-news permafrost for months now. But, it's also a business that has plenty corporate & governmental enemies.
The first option, sorta.
I think b/c large groups of haters means no good news for you since the media is so negative-heavy.
I know I have a negative view of the CEO based on the media reports I have seen. Every couple months there also seems to be an engineer or driver or someone else doing a "tell all" blog post about how bad the company is.
Love the service though and use it almost every time I travel.
As a customer I love it, as a business its a train wreck.
https://twitter.com/mdvex is well worth a follow, he has a pretty critical perspective on the gig economy. Fair bit on uber in his feed but worth reading it all.
See this one?
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber
>seen
No, I hadn't. Reading that, upper-management protecting 'high performers' at all costs seems the be a part of the problem.
I only know one person who worked at Uber, but she was not sad to leave.
Quote from: drcool on February 22, 2017, 09:38:16 PM
I know I have a negative view of the CEO based on the media reports I have seen. Every couple months there also seems to be an engineer or driver or someone else doing a "tell all" blog post about how bad the company is.
Love the service though and use it almost every time I travel.
I think their core product relies on innumeracy on the behalf of many of their freelance workers. And those innumerate types also bounce checks, get stuck in a financial pinch, then express outrage when something goes astray and it all falls apart. Reporters seeing shrinking stability in their own job love writing those stories.
Disrupting an existing field is more sustainable if those temp employees aren't forced to be high churn because the numbers can't possibly work over the longer term.
I think it is a bad idea & major flaw for many tech companies to be based in the bay area where the costs are so high. They could afford to run more sustainable platforms with higher partner revenue sharing if they were not bogged down by the price spiral of living in the epicenter of the tech bubble.
Quote from: nffc on February 23, 2017, 12:49:07 AM
As a customer I love it, as a business its a train wreck.
https://twitter.com/mdvex is well worth a follow, he has a pretty critical perspective on the gig economy. Fair bit on uber in his feed but worth reading it all.
Great Twitter account ... saw a couple good book recommendations in there...who else you recommend? :)
>>I think it is a bad idea & major flaw for many tech companies to be based in the bay area where the costs are so high. They could afford to run more sustainable platforms with higher partner revenue sharing if they were not bogged down by the price spiral of living in the epicenter of the tech bubble.
Our second biggest office is in San Mateo. I can't for the life of me figure out how it makes economic sense to pay the salaries needed to compete in the Bay Area, pay for the office space, etc. It would probably make more sense to give everyone there a $50,000 bonus and move them all to Jacksonville and adjust their salary for the much more inexpensive cost of living here. But I know a lot of the people in the office there like to say they work at a Bay Area tech company and wouldn't be satisfied to work for the same company somewhere else.
QuoteI think it is a bad idea & major flaw for many tech companies to be based in the bay area where the costs are so high.
Funny, but this thought has been running through my mind a lot lately with respect to another controversial "sharing economy" business.
AirBnB: San Francisco
VRBO: Austin
Flipkey/TripAdvisor: Boston
They pretty much track in terms of quality with cost of living of their headquarters.
The VRBO website and app work as if the people who built it have run vacation rentals and hired engineers to fulfill their vision.
The Flipkey/Tripadvisor website and app work as if the people who built it have run vacation rentals and hired engineers to fulfill their vision, but just didn't hire quite enough engineers.
The AirBnB website and app work like a bunch of engineers who can't afford to own their own houses let alone one they can rent out hired a bunch of other engineers to create a disruptive buzzword-compatible service that radically transform the sharing economy and challenge legacy businesses in the lodging space.
Quote from: drcool on February 24, 2017, 07:39:27 PMOur second biggest office is in San Mateo. I can't for the life of me figure out how it makes economic sense to pay the salaries needed to compete in the Bay Area, pay for the office space, etc. It would probably make more sense to give everyone there a $50,000 bonus and move them all to Jacksonville and adjust their salary for the much more inexpensive cost of living here. But I know a lot of the people in the office there like to say they work at a Bay Area tech company and wouldn't be satisfied to work for the same company somewhere else.
This is one of the reasons I never really "scaled" in SEO & hired a bunch of people.
In the bay area it feels like one eats cost for the sake of eating cost.
It felt like if I rented an office & hired anyone local & they didn't work out, well then I would be moving back in with my mom. It gets that way when basic residential rent is over $30,000 a year. And when someone from the midwest hears that sort of rent number they might presume something platial, but no that's...
- an average sized 2-bedroom condo
- with crap construction quality
- a routinely broken elevator
- where 2 of 3 rooms disappear for 1/3 year retrofitting to make up for the molding in core building structure
- where the climate usually feels nice but since it is Oakland the culture is still ghetto enough that...
- people will steal your bike from your house
- people steal some (many?) of the Amazon.com deliveries to the common area
- people rip the outbound mailboxes out of the wall to steal crap out of them (even if you live in a gated community with a lock on the doors to the common area where the mailboxes are located)
- when I took a friend to lunch a few blocks away someone broke the window out of the car in broad daylight to steal his luggage
- my wife left the SUV parked in the driveway rather than garage for under 4 hours, in which time someone smashed in its rear window to search for stuff to steal
- dropping off check to pay quarterlies (can't trust those downstairs mailboxes that are ripped out of the wall!!!) then turn the corner and a bunch of high schoolers egg the car so hard they dent it up (then thinking, hey, I bet I paid for those eggs twice)
- the time at Denny's some ghetto pieces of trash driving a vintage 70s model car drove into a (my) parked car and trashed the bumper
- getting sucker punched by a racist dirtbag (and later getting a septic infection from the tooth they broke when they sucker punched you - a type of infection that kills over a quarter million people in the US each year & costs about $30,000 per person in the US who dares to go to the hospital before dying)
- ULTRA vigilant parking enforcement where they explicitly & intentionally leave some parking meters broken so they can ticket anyone who dares to park there and tries to feed money into a meter that doesn't work & won't get fixed (I've even got a parking ticket where the person who wrote it was already gone & I still had a minute left on the meter when I returned to the car)
- the police department publishes a laundry lists of crimes they won't even respond to
- etc etc etc (I think some people who are struggling to get by yet feel entitled are perhaps quite quick to turn to violence when they hear stories of how much immense wealth there is right across the bay in San Francisco.)
That nice weather really is not worth paying all those extra junk fees on.
And the violence that is common across urban areas in the US is much less common across most of Europe, Asia or in other developed countries.
I was so lucky to be on vacation when that infection happened. It meant my cost was like ~ $50 rather than $30,000 ish. I donated more to the hospital to offset some of the costs, but if that happened when I was in the US ... add in the cost of getting a tooth reset then wired in place (thousands), later getting the tooth pulled after it caused that infection (hundreds), getting a dental bridge (thousands), etc. ... with how the US healthcare system is structured (total scam) you could need to earn at least 6 figures & perhaps a quarter mill in extra income (not counting all the time missed from work dealing with the dental fittings & so on) just to pay for a single incident of routine street level violence (and the bastard who did it was already previously convicted of another violent crime). I've been double billed for any sort of medical services I've ever received for about as far back as I can remember (meaning you pay the bill & then they send it again to see if you will pay it again ... this is on top of the other massively inflated costs).
A person I know had health insurance & paid 5 figures into it & then as soon as they had a fluke $300 expense they were dropped for the unrelated pre-existing condition. That same person got Obamacare (where you allegedly can't be dropped) and then got dropped from coverage based on the insurance company lying to them and telling them they were dropped because they requested it. This same person, when younger, had to move to another country to get treatment because they were financially ruined by the US healthcare system. How many times can a scammy system screw you before you lose faith in it?
I think the lack of concern with cost stuff is a couple fold...
- the big monopolies can afford to pay rates that are not market based, since they are effective toll booths on the broader economy (they also rely heavily on abuse of the H-1B visa system & directly partner with competitors to hold down wages with illicit "no poach" gentlemen's agreements)
- startups get to "sell a dream" & overstate the imputed value of stock options that will likely be worthless (and each layer of investor along the chain gets to add in some new terms which further preference the investors & creditors at the expense of employee shareholders)
- venture capitals like the higher cost structure in part because it justifies raising more money and them getting a bigger slice of the pie (as opposed to a person in the midwest being bootstrapped and not raising funds until they are already so well established they are not desperate)
- media companies that want to claim to be differentiated enough to sell ads at premium prices to dumb legacy brand managers overpaying for hipness have an incentive to be in the bubble for the claimed cultural affinity
- so long as a company is valued on growth VS profits, showing profits is poor form ... so in the VC bubble game it is all about growing as fast as possible & not really worrying about costs until either money can't be raised or market tastes shift to prefer profits. the central banks pinning interest rates at zero is putting a finger on the scales to overvalue anything that smells like growth, but when it becomes apparent the underlying business model does't work (either because it is bad or either because it can't work due to bay area price spiral) most the deaths are pretty fast and quiet, while anything that is alive keeps issuing press releases
The only way being there makes any sense is if a monopoly can charge fixed tolls on the rest of the economy or if one is far away enough from the epicenter of the bubble that costs are lower & people are less violent / ghetto / trashy.
The two big issues with moving a bit further away are traffic & then once you get on the other side of the mountain range it is really hot in the summers & much cooler in the winter, sort of losing that sunshine state feeling. Glad I moved a bit further away & don't have to deal with all the lovely hidden costs of the wonderful bay area.
The bay area weather is nice, but the culture is really really really trash.
- monopolies above regulation
- true believers in "disruption" who believe their crap doesn't stink & have a "me before you" attitude in almost every aspect of life
- fakers, chasers, exploiters, social climbers & other hanger ons
- violent thugs
- and the stressed out normal people struggling to make the numbers work in such a distorted economy
Wow, that makes my boring little town look like a corner of heaven by comparison!