As reported by Yahoo Finance and then corroborated by our data, Uber ($UBER) has gone into a hiring freeze period for engineering positions.

Last week, Uber laid off 400 people in its marketing department. Then, days later, interviewees for engineering positions received emails from Uber recruiters saying "there have been some changes" and that the opportunity they were interviewing for has been "put on hold for now". The move came seemingly hours after the company reported losses of $5.23 billion for the second quarter.

The hiring slowdown appeared to have been premeditated, however, as hiring trends uncovered today show. In March, the company had 2,210 job openings posted to its recruiting websites. By last week, that number was down to just 1,490.

Even before that, however, openings for Engineering jobs at Uber saw a massive drop last March, when the company removed several job categories slated to be focused on iOS, Android, and other engineering groups. In fact, on March 13, 2019, the following job categories disappeared from Uber's recruiting website(s):

  • Safety & Systems Engineering, Advanced Technologies Group
  • Android, Engineering
  • iOS, Engineering
  • Site Reliability Engineering
  • Hardware Engineering & Vehicle Programs, Advanced Technologies
  • Data, Engineering
  • Machine Learning
  • Backend, Engineering
  • Engineering Security, Safety & Security
  • Software Engineering, Advanced Technologies Group
  • Data Science, Engineering

It's on that date, as you can see in the graph above, when job listings for engineers were more than halved. It appears that while the categories were removed, engineering hiring at the company was consolidated into other, more general categories.

But the picture for the remaining engineering categories isn't much prettier. That because openings saw a steep decline last week leading into Uber's earnings reporting, foreshadowing what was to come.

Software engineering job openings declined precipitously last week, from 80 at the end of June to 63 by August 6.

Hardware engineering openings saw a similar cliff, moving from 24 at the end of June to just 12 last week.

About the Data: 

Thinknum tracks companies using information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

Further Reading:

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