Probably some reality shaking out. Uber's engineering team puts out some impressive stuff, often as OSS. Their engineering blogs are regularly on HN. I've been genuinely surprised that they churn out some of these things and release them for free given their relatively extreme financial situation.

In contrast to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc. that have mountains of their own money to burn (rather than investors') on research and OSS side-projects, it always seemed to me that Uber was trying to play the same game, but far too early. Paying lavish SF engineer salaries to generate cool, but not revenue generating, software is probably excellent for morale, culture and recruiting, but a dubious use of resources when you are losing money seemingly faster than it would be logistically possible to literally burn it.

Saying they're ~ "culling the low performers" can be entirely true, but it is also a Silicon Valley, meritocracy-culture-friendly way of saying "we're losing far too much money to pay bloated growth-stage poaching-game salaries to engineers, so if you're not working on something that generates revenue, glhf"

You are assuming that these companies are letting engineers to do side-projects that are unrelated to their day to day work?

As far as I know the OSS projects these companies put out are in line what they use internally for day to day work and it is absolutely core to their business.

Examples:

- Amazon: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io - Google: https://github.com/google/guava - Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode - Apple: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb

Am I missing the point? Are OSS projects from these companies that are side-projects?

While on the subject, I am not sure about Uber's contribution to OSS. Their projects tend to be outside of my purview.

>> Paying lavish SF engineer salaries to generate cool, but not revenue generating, software

Nobody is forcing Uber to employ people in California.