Uber's 3,300 cuts: when "leaner" really means greed

Sep 14

Uber is cutting 3,300 jobs, about 10% of its staff, and the reason it gave is that it has too many "managers who manage managers." The company's revenue has nearly tripled in five years. Nobody here is cutting to survive. This is a decision.

Jenni and I spent a good chunk of Episode 74 on Uber's restructuring. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the company needs fewer layers, faster decisions, and "more time building rather than coordinating." In the same announcement, remote work drops to roughly 1% of roles and hybrid staff move to three days a week in the office.

The framing is what got me. A profitable company, tripling revenue, deciding that coordination had quietly become the job. That is a very different story to tell than "we have to do this to survive," and a much harder one to sell to the people being cut.

The leadership language gave it away. When a CEO says the company needs to get "smarter and leaner," my first question is who decided it was dumber and fatter, and when did that start. That call was made at the top. Now it is everyone else's job to fix, and 3,300 people lose theirs in the process. You don't get smarter by walking intelligence out the door.

Jenni pushed on the logic from the other side. If you want faster decisions, that is rarely a headcount problem. It is your processes, your meetings, your organizational rhythm, the layers you built. Cutting 10% of people fixes none of that. It just makes the chart smaller. Real restructuring takes the component parts and rebuilds them into something better. This mostly takes parts away.

Then there is the return-to-office move stapled to the same announcement, three days in and near-zero remote, dropped alongside the layoffs. Ripping the plaster off in one go has an argument for it. But the message underneath reads like a threat: you are lucky to still be here, so here is what is now expected of you. We both landed in the same place. Call it what it is. This is greed with a tidier vocabulary.

The challenging part for communicators is that someone has to write the all-hands note that makes "we have too many coordinators" sound like vision. Every coordinator sees that as "you were the problem." Selling leanness to the people being made lean is one of the hardest jobs in internal communications, and most companies fumble the tone.

Also in this episode:

We opened with employer healthcare costs heading for their steepest rise in two decades, 9% to 11% for 2027, and up 76% over the past decade. The detail that stuck with me: employers quietly cut GLP-1 coverage from 72% to 60% in a single year, the benefit employees want most. My take was simple. Rising costs don't force you to pass them to your people, especially in a record-profit year. Take care of the people making the profit. What a novel concept.
The August job cuts report from Challenger looked grim at a glance, 52,000-plus cuts, up 58% from July. But year-to-date cuts are down 41%, hiring announcements jumped 725%, and AI dropped to the fourth-most-cited reason after five months on top. Jenni's point: the media grabs the scariest number, and "restructuring," the vaguest word on the list, is the one everyone hides behind.
We closed the news with Lindsay Bennett's new communications playbook. Her argument: same job title, different job. Media relations in 2022, AI visibility and generative engine optimization in 2026. Earned media now has two audiences, the human reading today and the AI deciding what to say tomorrow. Bennett says PR is "cool again." The question Jenni and I kept circling is whether internal communications gets that same moment, or watches external comms take the budget and the buzz.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Frequency, with timestamps, links to every story and the full transcript.