# Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate



## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

https://www.theinformation.com/arti...eering-jobs-to-india-sparking-internal-debatePaywall

Since Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO of Uber in 2017, he has been steadily pushing his engineering team to move jobs to India as a way of saving money. Despite some resistance from his top technology executive, Khosrowshahi made progress: about 15% of Uber's engineering team, or about 600 people, is now in India. That's up from 80 engineers in 2017.

Now Khosrowshahi, looking to control costs amid the Covid crisis, is taking steps to move a bigger portion of Uber's engineering work to India. That has sparked an internal debate about the pros and cons of having so many of these jobs in India. It comes as similar conversations are occurring at other companies with lots of engineers in high-cost locations such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as businesses hit hard by the pandemic look to save money.

In Uber's case, Khosrowshahi's efforts follow the sudden departure in May of Thuan Pham, Uber's longtime chief technology officer, who had resisted Khosrowshahi's efforts to rapidly move jobs to India as Uber's engineering ranks grew. Pham had argued to Khosrowshahi that hiring more engineers too quickly in that country would require accepting lower-quality candidates, according to two people at Uber who spoke to him. Pham previously told the CEO that if he wanted to go in that direction, he would need to do it with a different CTO, these people said.
His departure, which came as Uber was about to lay off engineers as part of a bigger wave of layoffs across the company, freed Khosrowshahi to take a more aggressive stance on the job shift. Khosrowshahi, a onetime investment banker who later ran the travel giant Expedia, has taken Pham's role himself temporarily while the company searches for a replacement.

Around the time Pham left, Khosrowshahi asked the engineering team to move more than a third of the engineering work related to the hardware and software that powers the company's apps-also known as data center infrastructure-to India by the end of the year, said a person with knowledge of the matter. He also told the team he wanted most of Uber's IT-which oversees the apps and other tech used by its 20,000 or so employees-shifted to India.

In a statement, an Uber spokesman said "We don't believe Silicon Valley has a monopoly on tech talent. We want our engineers on the ground in markets like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Toronto, Brazil, India and the Netherlands, to build locally relevant products where we intend to win." But the spokesman added that "our plans to grow talent at non-US sites" doesn't mean there are targeted layoffs planned for the U.S.

*Team Too Big*

Khosrowshahi has good reason to want to save money: Uber continues to burn through cash rather than make money. Last year, the company went through $5 billion. The pandemic has made the situation worse, as volume in the ride-hailing business shrank 80% during the worst of the lockdowns. And investor worries about Uber's losses have pressured the company's stock price since it went public last year: It is currently trading around $30, well below its $45 initial public offering price.

Moreover, some of Uber's business leaders privately say the engineering team-which totals around 3,700 people after recent layoffs and other organizational changes-is too big relative to the work it does. Others inside and outside the company note that ride-hailing firms elsewhere in the world have lower costs for engineering personnel.

Uber also has recently pulled back from newer businesses and services, including renting electric scooters and developing financial services for its customers. As Uber narrows its scope, it may not need as many people as it did before.

But some in the engineering organization say they are concerned that moving more engineering work to India could eventually make it harder for Uber to keep its systems humming and might endanger a decades long and arguably successful effort to save money by managing data centers-rather than primarily relying on outside companies like Amazon Web Services-while also causing more talent to depart.

Amid recent and upcoming changes to the engineering group, some managers are leaving. Sophia Vicent, the company's head of technical program management, was one of many senior engineers to express concern about quickly moving tech to India. She announced her departure last week after more than six years at Uber, where she helped keep the company systems in compliance with global regulations and was most recently reporting to Khosrowshahi. Another senior departure, Waleed Kadous, previously reported to Pham and helped make sure different engineering teams with Uber were using the same software, a practice known as standardization, so that different teams could collaborate better.

Khosrowshahi did not comment for this article. Pham said in a statement: "I prefer not to discuss the strategy and direction of engineering under new leadership. I am simply very proud of the engineering teams and systems that we have built to power Uber businesses to this day and I hope that will continue to improve."

*Offshoring Options*

Moving engineering resources to India creates some practical challenges, say some engineers. The time zone difference between the Bay Area and India makes it sometimes hard to stay on the same page, according to some India- and U.S.-based engineering managers. "It's a killer to try to synchronize" teams, said one former Uber manager. And finding senior engineering managers for some programs can be difficult, they say. Managers in India may not be as steeped in the details of certain kinds of software development as their counterparts in the U.S.

Still, making the move has its advantages. India in recent decades became home to numerous large offshoring centers for multinational corporations, thanks to its growing contingent of English-speaking software engineering graduates. U.S. banks such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase and retailers such as Target have a presence there. Among software companies, Microsoft has one of the biggest engineering corps in India, ahead of Google and Amazon.

Meanwhile, Uber is one of several comparatively young tech firms, including Airbnb and security software firm Zscaler, to establish India beachheads in recent years. Typically, engineers working for Western companies in India focus on areas such as IT as opposed to designing "IP protected" software or hardware that are core to their businesses, said a longtime manager of and consultant to India-based offshoring centers.

Uber's India engineering team currently works on less-critical functions compared to teams in the Bay Area, such as customer support and services that help Uber's app work better in countries with lower average internet bandwidth, including India. And from Hyderabad, it runs tech that helps Uber's finance team.

Uber also has small, lower-cost engineering teams in Lithuania, Bulgaria and Sao Paulo, working on site reliability (keeping Uber's apps running), tax and compliance-related engineering, and safety-related services, respectively. About 60% of its engineers are in the Bay Area.
Uber's smaller U.S. rival, Lyft, has the vast majority of its engineers in the U.S. but is currently building a small engineering center in Mexico in an effort to save costs without sacrificing quality. That has caused questions among some of Lyft's U.S.-based engineers as to whether the company might move some work out of San Francisco in the future.

*Data Center Question*

Uber is one of the last major Silicon Valley companies to handle its computing needs primarily through its own data centers. It uses public cloud services for some functions and spends about a quarter of its technology operating expenses on AWS and similar firms. Internally, company leaders have said that by running its own data centers, Uber spends at least 25% less on infrastructure than if it handed over the work to AWS or Google, even after taking into account the discounts those providers would offer.

It's unclear whether Uber will move more of its computing work to the cloud as a result of shifting work to India. Another question is what will happen to Uber's Bay Area-based core infrastructure team, which powers all of Uber's services, mainly from the company's own data center servers. The recent layoffs trimmed that team to just under 600 engineers from roughly 650. The group is led by Sumanth Sukumar, flanked by lieutenants Simon Newton and Prashant Varanasi. Many at Uber consider this team, and the software and hardware it develops, key factors differentiating the company from other consumer internet businesses. It's unclear what parts of that team's work Uber might offshore, or whether it would consider shifting more of the work to cloud providers like AWS.

Some within Uber have expressed concern that shifting more software development to India may make it harder to recruit and maintain expertise to manage its data center systems in the long run.

Aside from saving on costs, running its own data centers means Uber has more flexibility to stop spending more money when its business weakens, as has occurred during the Covid-19 crisis, say people with knowledge of the situation. For the most part, Uber merely had to stop adding server racks to data centers to flatten its spending. The company also reduced its planned spending on public cloud vendors such as AWS by 27%, or $62 million, according to a presentation viewed by The Information.

"We have the flexibility and control to throttle our infrastructure spend based on our business needs," said a person who's been involved in the process.

That doesn't mean 2020 hasn't been a rough year. Uber's total data center and cloud spending costs are projected to be roughly the same as last year's, even though its revenue has markedly dropped. Still, engineers say the alternative-relying more on AWS-would have been worse.


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## tohunt4me (Nov 23, 2015)

jocker12 said:


> https://www.theinformation.com/arti...eering-jobs-to-india-sparking-internal-debatePaywall
> 
> Since Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO of Uber in 2017, he has been steadily pushing his engineering team to move jobs to India as a way of saving money. Despite some resistance from his top technology executive, Khosrowshahi made progress: about 15% of Uber's engineering team, or about 600 people, is now in India. That's up from 80 engineers in 2017.
> 
> ...


Tech Row in California will look like Detroit in 5 Years.

Silicon Vally will be empty & abandoned.


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## mbd (Aug 27, 2018)

Everybody knows that ... it costs Uber 10-15k per month for a software engineer in the Bay Area. Cost will be 800$ per month in India, and the talent pool is way higher. Remote working &#128077;

Remote working is going to put huge $$$$ into these tech companies bottom line. FB's total costs maybe 150k for a mid level softie in the Bay Area, and now they can hire somebody in Oklahoma for less than 150k. OK softie can buy a house for 250k, same house in SF will be million plus.


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## goneubering (Aug 17, 2017)

jocker12 said:


> https://www.theinformation.com/arti...eering-jobs-to-india-sparking-internal-debatePaywall
> 
> Since Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO of Uber in 2017, he has been steadily pushing his engineering team to move jobs to India as a way of saving money. Despite some resistance from his top technology executive, Khosrowshahi made progress: about 15% of Uber's engineering team, or about 600 people, is now in India. That's up from 80 engineers in 2017.
> 
> ...


And with those hundreds of engineers the Uber software train still manages to jump off the track!!


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## AdAstra (Jun 26, 2020)

Dara's responsibility is to the Stockholders.
I may not like it,
But, he's doing his Job &#129335;&#127995;

seems uber is already ~ 67% IT Indian led In the USA:
"_The group is led by Sumanth Sukumar, flanked by lieutenants Simon Newton and Prashant Varanasi."_

If I was Simon Newton I'd be updating my CV


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

AdAstra said:


> 67% IT Indian


As I understand, if the US leading team does the analysis and the design, coders from India are at least comparable to (if not better than) their US counterparts. Culturally, the problem they have is that they cannot understand "teamwork" and subsequently operate with the same efficiency as US teams are operating.

Interestingly, Uber announced is shutting down its Mumbai office -

https://www.latestly.com/india/news...ervice-to-its-riders-in-the-city-1865544.html
and Uber might choose to pay its Indian coders as much as it pays its drivers because there is almost no other choice and because Uber can do it.

Remember how Nike paid children from Vietnam, Cambodia, or Pakistan to stich their footballs for only 20 cents per hour?


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## tohunt4me (Nov 23, 2015)

jocker12 said:


> As I understand, if the US leading team does the analysis and the design, coders from India are at least comparable to (if not better than) their US counterparts. Culturally, the problem they have is that they cannot understand "teamwork" and subsequently operate with the same efficiency as US teams are operating.
> 
> Interestingly, Uber announced is shutting down its Mumbai office -
> 
> ...


Globalists= the Corporate World SlaveMasters.


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## Johnny Mnemonic (Sep 24, 2019)

Now that the spigot of compliant H1B's has run dry, Uber can't afford top tier talent.

Not that they could get it anyways. What reason would a top tier coder go to Uber for anything other than money?


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## njn (Jan 23, 2016)

less h1b visas to go around, let's abandon the local econmy and move ops offshore. unintended consequence?


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## tohunt4me (Nov 23, 2015)

njn said:


> less h1b visas to go around, let's abandon the local econmy and move ops offshore. unintended consequence?


The Rich Never care about God or Country.

Only Gold.

Corporations
Are setting AMERICA UP

FOR A " HOSTILE TAKEOVER"!

FACE IT. . . .
















Do not ignore for an instant that this Communist Chineese Plague is Not weakening the Federal Reserve & American Strength.

Covid is a part of a Larger Process !


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## mbd (Aug 27, 2018)

Just the beginning 
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekin...umps-offices-and-moves-1300-workers-to-remote


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