triple sulk posted:

rip homejoy. another one bites the dust

quote:

dear future homejoy engineer,
so it's xmas eve and i'm in the office with several other folks who didn’t have plans for xmas either. everyone is cranking away. we’ve decided to watch the interview later and then get dinner and drinks together.

personally i'm fixing bugs and adding features to an internal tool i've built to increase transparency and communication. mark, our vp of engineering, is mulling over some scaling project. chris is putting the finishing touches on the app that all our service providers use to get jobs everyday. dima is messing around with an algorithm that’ll predict our future service level capabilities. ankit is iterating on our payments infrastructure. sid is revamping some of our cs tools. ratih is re-configuring her data dumps to match our recent metrics migration. she’s also the one playing the pop music. i think i just heard britney spears.

right now i’m taking a quick break and after a quick lap around the office, i notice actually many more people here. i wonder — how am i so fortunate to be the ceo of a startup where people are so driven? don't get me wrong, many other homejoy folks are back home celebrating a proper xmas with family as they should definitely do! but for others, they could be doing something else on xmas eve and xmas. yet they chose to work on making homejoy better.

i can't be 100% sure but i think people choose to work here because they believe homejoy is not just another cool startup; it’s a mission; it's a passion. we're building things that enable and will change the way people live and work. this is not an overnight venture; we know it'll take a long time, and we’re all committed to it.

given the holidays, my calendar is somewhat lean so if you're around the sf bay area before the new year and think homejoy might be a place for you, shoot me an email (adora@homejoy.com). would love to meet up and tell you more.

talk soon, adora

triple sulk posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956

quote:

Dear Homejoy Community,

In 2012, my brother Aaron and I had a vision. We imagined a platform where people could find and offer any home service, from cleaning to carpentry, with the click of a button. Our dream was to help people keep their homes clean and cared for – and empower our partners to enjoy flexible work so they could study, raise families or ease into retirement.

So, we put on those bright, yellow gloves and cleaned homes to learn the tricks of the trade – and launched a movement that gained the support from some of the most respected investors in the world.

With a small team of great energy and bright minds, we grew a global network of exceptional home service experts, and served hundreds of thousands of homes in 35 cities in the US, Canada, UK, Germany and France. And last year, we expanded to new verticals, including handyman and carpet cleaning services.

We’re proud to be the pioneers of this space – but, above all, we’re grateful for the community of partners, employees and clients that supported us. It has been a joy to see our product grow from dream to reality – and watch partner and client connections blossom into long-term, trusted relationships.

Although we succeeded in many ways, we also faced obstacles. There are still many unresolved challenges in the home services space. We gave it our all, but regretfully, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations. Homejoy will officially close its doors on July 31st.

We’re determined to support you to keep your homes humming and business buzzing, so we will do our best to ensure partners and clients who want to continue to work together get a chance to do so independently of Homejoy.

We bid farewell, and thank you. It was our privilege to be part of this movement and to have helped your homes and businesses shine brighter.

To happy homes,

Adora

Luigi Thirty posted:

what did they do again

triple sulk posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956

uncurable mlady posted:

subj did some good poo poo with the superfish stuff and works at an actual software company

smythe works in a community theater

give us subjunctive imo

quote:

Cleaning services company Homejoy is shutting down on July 31 after struggling to raise a big enough round of funding. The company had already been facing growth and revenue challenges, but CEO Adora Cheung said the “deciding factor” was the four lawsuits it was fighting over whether its workers should be classified as employees or contractors. None of them were class actions yet, but they made fundraising that much harder.

“A lot of this is unfortunate timing. The [California Labor Commission’s] Uber decision* … was only a single claim, but it was blown out of proportion,” she told Re/code. The on-demand space has become a riskier bet for investors in a short amount of time.

the talent deficit posted:

how on earth did smythe get any power whatsoever? who thought that was a good idea?

good job smythe on being less personable than a literal adexec

qirex posted:

vc firms are could get nervous about this homejoy thing, we could potentially see a domino effect since uber is probably the only one willing to spend 100 million dollars and 5 years on lawyers

one of the things that happened in the dot-com bust was firms winding down whole portfolios, when I was at evite we weren't profitable but could have kept chugging for a long time but the fact that they were ad supported meant "toxic" and the board decided to strip it down to maintenance mode and give abck the remaining money

carry on then posted:

it should be a federal offense to call yourself an engineer without certification a la the stolen valor act

uncurable mlady posted:

idk I think andressen and his ilk are true believers and will prop up their unicorns as long as possible

ruby idiot railed posted:

Let's engineer this subforum into a more positive outcome

Shifty Pony posted:

won't that result in a bit of a bitcoin situation where only the true believers are buying so the price is meaningless?

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

lol

A COMPUTER GUY posted:

i am so glad to be getting out of this bullshit industry

Condiv posted:

Uber’s famous for using aggressive tactics. Its latest stunt is aimed directly at New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. The company added a tab to the app to illustrating what would happen if the mayor’s new “Uber cap” bill passes.

When you fire up the app, the new “De Blasio” tab is along the bottom where you usually select what kind of Uber service you want. De Blasio service is terrible. When you select it in Manhattan, De Blasio option gives you a staggering wait time of 25 minutes. In Brooklyn, it says “no cars.” Both options implore you to click on the prediction to find out why you can’t get a car faster.

Fusion reports that the reason Uber will suddenly be terrible is that Mayor De Blasio wants to pass legislation to curb Uber’s driver growth to 1 percent while the city conducts a traffic congestion study set to end in September 2016. The car-hailing service has correctly seen this as a handout to the angry taxicab lobby, which fiercely opposes Uber’s growth.

Uber’s just doing what Uber has always done in contentious situations, so there’s not much more to say about the tactics. As for the larger issue: Uber’s growth poses a number of problems in New York and elsewhere. The service is almost completely unregulated, raising safety concerns, and its workers are treated terribly. De Blasio’s legislation certainly isn’t an immediate fix to these problems. To be sure, Uber’s publicity campaign is an exaggeration, and in the absence of real solutions, maybe it’s not the worst idea for the city to hit pause while officials dream up a solution to Uber’s challenges.

Nintendo Kid posted:

hang all uber execs

Nintendo Kid posted:

hang all uber execs

ayn rand hand job posted:

licensure is strictly a state by state thing, and it is in fact an offense to misrepresent yourself like that

gets complicated because of the industry exemption tho

Nintendo Kid posted:

hang all execs

rrrrrrrrrrrt posted:

out of computers or out of tech bubble?

jetz0r posted:

Condiv posted:

Uber’s famous for using aggressive tactics. Its latest stunt is aimed directly at New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. The company added a tab to the app to illustrating what would happen if the mayor’s new “Uber cap” bill passes.

When you fire up the app, the new “De Blasio” tab is along the bottom where you usually select what kind of Uber service you want. De Blasio service is terrible. When you select it in Manhattan, De Blasio option gives you a staggering wait time of 25 minutes. In Brooklyn, it says “no cars.” Both options implore you to click on the prediction to find out why you can’t get a car faster.

Fusion reports that the reason Uber will suddenly be terrible is that Mayor De Blasio wants to pass legislation to curb Uber’s driver growth to 1 percent while the city conducts a traffic congestion study set to end in September 2016. The car-hailing service has correctly seen this as a handout to the angry taxicab lobby, which fiercely opposes Uber’s growth.

Uber’s just doing what Uber has always done in contentious situations, so there’s not much more to say about the tactics. As for the larger issue: Uber’s growth poses a number of problems in New York and elsewhere. The service is almost completely unregulated, raising safety concerns, and its workers are treated terribly. De Blasio’s legislation certainly isn’t an immediate fix to these problems. To be sure, Uber’s publicity campaign is an exaggeration, and in the absence of real solutions, maybe it’s not the worst idea for the city to hit pause while officials dream up a solution to Uber’s challenges.

Nintendo Kid posted:

no you can guillotine most of them. but the uber ones deserve to hang

Rexicon1 posted:

there is no accurate standardized language between doctors esp if they are from different countries

Citizen Tayne posted:

All the CMU grads I know personally work in tech support.

qntm posted:

this thread is moving insanely fast but what the HELL, how is medical terminology not subject to some kind of international standard

a, heh, linguistic prescription, as it were