Ah! I missed the sarcasm! Sorry! I guess I could have figured.
Honestly, I have no problem with people taking a break during work hours. I think they build up these offices to attract coders, right? It’s become an expectation in the industry and people will leave for cooler offices. Plus it’s an attempt to draw out more work from people (without paying overtime). I suspect that games at the office is also starting to replace good benefits packages as the cost of insuring employees grows. Plus, people move around so much now, it’s not like the old days at Big Blue.
Sure. Few companies think in terms of how to keep employees long term, but in the short term, since “job hopping” in the field seems to be more common now than it used to be. But I’ve never understood the argument that workers need to be the ones to sacrifice to grow the company. I don’t think I can think of another other type of capital investment that one would skimp on that is so critical to the day to day operations of a company, can you?
Not at all. Re-reading my comment, the sarcasm wasn’t nearly as obvious as I intended.
Another good observation. If you skimp on server maintenance and it causes a bunch of problems, you can’t guilt, shame, or scare your hardware into behaving “correctly”.
Wage slaves and contractors on the other hand…
(This is also why it’s possible to underpay nurses, teachers, and other emotional laborers in industries with high proportions of women in the workforce. “I know we’re making you do an extra 6 hours of work per day beyond your classroom duties with no extra pay, but if you really care about the children then you’ll do it with a smile on your face.”)
There was a great article linked here just a couple weeks ago that pretty much explains how they could be spending so much money…
I welcome a re-valuation of Uber because I think their strategy to monopolize ride “sharing” and ultimately privatize our urban transit systems is bad for everyone except Uber shareholders. There’s no reason why the ride-hailing tech can’t be used in a positive way that doesn’t funnel money to one select group. Our public infrastructure could really compete with their service if they adopted the tech at a large scale… maybe incorporating the tech of Uber into small city busses that run ultra-custom routes would a better solution and keep the money invested in the local communities at the same time… It would take a ton of public investment, sigh.
but I’m afraid losing a mere billion isn’t going to be nearly enough.
Remember, Uber isn’t a car service. It’s a bayonet charge at the idea that governance and economic policy and labor rights flow from anything other than the largesse of the richest VC in the room. And it’s being funded by people who don’t give two shits about how easy it is for you to get a ride, but who DO want a piece of something that’s gotten good at steamrolling city councils and turning employees into independent contractors by the millions.
I feel like Uber is just treading water until their ultimate dream becomes reality: replacing all their drivers with self-driving cars and eliminating the whole messy “people earning money” part of their business model.
Uber claim to be just a app, and that all the drivers are independent contractors. But if that was true the independent contractors would set the ride pricing themselves not Uber, because if Uber is setting the price for all of the thousands of “independent” contractors it would be coluding with them in a worldwide price-fixing scheme, keeping the contactors from charging competing rates to Uber app users.
That’s almost certainly true. And they will use their lobbying skills (i.e., droppings sacks of money) to be sure that only “properly capitalized” (i.e., as much money as us) companies can deploy fleets of self-driving cars and not any sort of Mom and Pop competitor.
Just like netflix was founded on DVDs in the mail but turned into a streaming platform. Uber was founded on human drivers but their end game is automated drivers. I see absolutely zero evidence that Uber is going to win the driverless game except their valuation.
