Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one.
It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either:
(A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon went from books->everything->AWS, Uber could have gone rides->platform-for-all-the-multi-sided-marketplaces.
OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.
Instead, they did neither, muddling around building random tech as if they had ads/search/social media margins while losing sight of the customers needs. There's a reason DD crushed them in food.
Edit: Since the primary response seems to be "You don't understand!" I was there 5 year, saw how the sausage was way over-made.
Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact.
Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.
Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about.
I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these big companies is making a difficult problem (or, rather, set of problems), especially at scale, look trivially easy.
An example I think proves this: In Austin, TX, Uber and Lyft stopped operations in the city for about a year in 2016-2017 when voters passed a law requiring fingerprint checks (the state legislature eventually overrode this law, which is a common feature of Austin city-Texas state relations). During that time, Austin was flooded with a host of startup rideshare apps, some funded by some technology high-fliers. Even though I liked to use the RideAustin app because it was a non-profit, paid drivers more and funded a charity I support, there is no denying the apps were a far, far cry from Uber and Lyft's apps. Even after a full year there was really no comparison in the quality of the apps.
Just the ride-sharing part of Uber does about 15 million rides a day, in thousands of cities, each with different regulations and legal frameworks. Uber on-boards about 50,000 new drivers a month. Anyone who thinks this can all be managed with "15 engineers" has not thought through the problem.
I remember that time quite well. These alternative apps would always fail over the weekends when demand skyrocketed. They just didn’t work, when most people needed them the most (drunk and trying to get home from bars/clubs). That really hurt their reputation in my eyes and in the eyes of others like me (which in Austin was a lot!). I personally remember wandering around at 4am trying to get a ride back… not an experience you can forget easily.
It also wasn’t just a single weekend thing. These other apps had almost a year to fix themselves and they couldn’t. I guess they just couldn’t muster the capital to build something really solid. But in any case it just made it very clear that this isn’t an easy problem. And when Lyft/Uber came back, the other apps were dropped immediately lol.
> These other apps had almost a year to fix themselves and they couldn’t. I guess they just couldn’t muster the capital to build something really solid.
They really didn't have time or money because everybody simply assumed Uber/Lyft would use their gigantic piles of VC cash to come back shortly and sweep everybody aside even at a loss.
The most important factor that is completely lost in this argument is "scale".
Simple looking things are very complex at large scale.
Even if no new features were built, the current api and apps won't scale to meet the demand as the user base continues to grow. And at any point in time there are thousands of bugs that need to be fixed within months before they cause big issues. 15 engineers will take years to fix them.
Another big factor is cyber security. This alone will require more than 15 people. Monitoring and defending against active threats, updating libs with patches and migrating from deprecated dependencies spanning 100s of services.
Uber was designed to be incredibly overcomplex and scaled from the beginning; you can read people’s accounts of the fancy technology they invented to scale other employees’ stuffing code in nonstop. Of course, those other employees had no reason to write that code, and were just doing it because Uber had a lot of money and decided to hire a lot of people to do random busywork.
If “it could be done in a weekend with less people” is true for anyone it’s true for Uber. They should be replacing systems with ones that may scale worse but are cheaper. Scaling=complexity comes from companies like Google/Meta where the engineers practice promotion-based development.
The problem is legal regulations. Wanna know why SAP is so successful despite their software being practically a legend for horrible UI, slowness and other nightmares at an absurd-seeming price point? Because they invest an absurd amount of money into lawyers, process engineers, developers and QA to keep track on law, judicial precedent and XO changes all across the world, so that their customers only have to pull in the latest monthly update and their processes (assuming they didn't deviate too hard) are automatically compliant with all possible kinds of bullshit.
Uber, AirBnB, Amazon FBA and other globally active marketplace companies deal with the same thing - their business is in facilitating other people's business without having to think about local laws and regulations.
Payment alone is a real hard thing: people wish to pay with whatever payment card scheme is most popular in their specific home country - which may not be the usual Mastercard/Visa duopoly -, they may wish to do so in wherever country they are at the moment, there may be international sanctions at play, different regulations about CC fees, clawback periods, taxes, VAT...
Uber was mainly successful by just ignoring the regulations nobody liked and hoping it’d work out, though. It really looks like they just managed to convince everyone that taxi routing is hard and can only be done by hiring 1000 geniuses to write 1000 queueing systems in Scala.
Wasn't Uber famous for shirking regulations until it had cornered markets?
And FBA appears to be borderline fraudulent for both producers and consumers as Amazon comingles inventory with no guarantees.
That said I can see the legal-based marketing pitch. Not sure how well companies who advertise that actually deliver. There's also the risk it becomes theater or regulatory capture
They're not saying it would take 15 to build, they're saying that maintaining it does not take nearly as many staff as they currently have. Which is correct: if Uber is simply a rideshare company, then with the technology established it should be winding down it's dev teams.
If it's instead a "every market" company then it should be doing that with its considerable on-payroll staff.
I mean I'm reading that as hyperbole - the point is that the head count to keep it running should be a lot lower then the head count to build it, keep building it, etc.
It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is
Sometimes I wish it were simpler. I’ve had multiple situations where I couldn’t get a ride into my local city recently.
The app says there are rides within 10 minutes, shows me a cheap rate and I hit yes. In 10 minutes no matches have been found. In 10 more minutes it finds someone 20 minutes away. 15 minutes later the driver cancels and I’m back to square one.
Now the thing is the cost of the ride is a pittance and I would gladly pay double the cost just to get to my destination in a reasonable timeframe. Instead I just call a cab now, request a pickup at a certain hour and they send a driver.
FWIW I’m 20 minutes drive from downtown Montreal, so this is not like I’m out in the sticks or anything, and couple years ago it was much easier to find a ride. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s even another ride sharing company taking the drivers, it’s just a lot of drivers pivoted to doing Uber eats instead.
I had a mostly similar experience in the France. The "gladly pay double" would translate in using a different app (the ones provided by traditional taxi companies) depending on the circumstance and the margin of error.
Uber's app was still hands down the best to use, and I had so many issues with the others, like credit card registration being flakky, or the app straight crashing on specific screens. It looked a lot like they paid a dev company a lump sum to make the app and would proceed to pay for some more fixes every six months instead of keeping an ongoing maintenance contract.
I kinda wish that now that the legal frameworks and service viability has been explored, Uber dies completely, and the gap is filled with local startups working closely with the local market to maintain ride services from there.
I think that HN has crossed a threshold where the stereotypical HN reply is not someone condescendingly declaring that some problem they don't understand is easy, but instead someone who admits that they don't know how hard a problem is, condescendingly assuming that the person they're talking to is as ignorant as they are about it, and admonishing them to respect their betters and to make the assumption that the decisions that have been made and the methods that have been used by bigco X are rational.
This is a weird forum. An argument that a company is big and successful so must have some process for making decisions that works well, so criticisms of those decisions by internet randos are necessarily badly informed and egotistically presumptuous because they can't have the understanding of the people directly involved yadda yadda yadda i.e. a standard status quo argument, generalizable to dismiss any criticism independently of the specific facts of any situation or the institution being defended - when you're making that argument, you could be making it to someone very highly placed or otherwise knowledgeable about the institution that you're defending.
I think people don't care about it because at the end of the day all this mind bogglingly complex stuff just exists skim money off a transaction that should ideally be done between two individuals -- a buyer and a seller.
Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain.
Why can my ISP string up fiber optic all over my city and put routers and switches or whatever in boxes that can survive all kinds of inclement weather and end up charging me $100 a month for gigabit internet? Isn't that a much harder business than Uber?
>Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain
The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right.
It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value....
Think about what you're saying. You don't "care how complex it is". Well that complexity determines whether or not it is rent seeking. You say ideally a transaction between two individuals. The major problem being solved here is finding the two best matched individuals based on their current location and destination over time. You need some system to aid this discovery no matter what.
Here's the definition of rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline
> reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources
Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0]
>reduced wealth creation
Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1]
> lost government revenue
How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2]
I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole purpose of Uber is to make people entirely dependent on it by driving out alternatives like local cab companies and public transit through low prices subsidizes by Saudi money.
I think it's great that Uber has forced cab companies to modernize and make their services more convenient but we both know what will happen if Uber gets a stranglehold on this market. You'll see jacked up prices for the captive market and declining service.
Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay.
In addition to their legal entrepreneurism their next skill lies in hiding externalities. They push costs to everyone else (drivers, riders, cities by massively increasing traffic, everyone who lives in those cities who have to deal with the noise and pollution of the additional traffic, etc) without having to bear any of it themselves.
Where I live you have to work a full 8 hour shift to be a taxi driver.
So the real benefit of Uber was enabling mums to drop off children at school and then work until time to pick them up again (one example), casual self determining work not available to many in other ways.
I live fairly central, guy around the corner from me is retired, hangs at home picking up the odd job as he feels like, great for him, plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits.
not if you are retired, the way it works here the marginal tax rate of a pensioner could end up around 80% when means tested pension payments are taken account of.
For someone that has worked all their life and paid a shitload of tax I find that a little offensive and have no problem with them optimising their returns in their golden years.
Now you are talking about getting welfare subsidies when people are retired? I hope when you are retired you have pension pot or a (paid off) house you can leverage so you need to get welfare money from the government
It's called the pension and everyone who has paid tax more than ten years and over a certain age (it's migrating over time, basically 65) who is not means tested out on income and assets is eligible.
But there is a grey area where you partially qualify, the ideal retirement strategy can be to spend your savings at a rate to allow a comfortable life then at a certain point you drop down into pension eligibility and then you supplement your own savings with the pension.
Unfortunately, in the parts of the zone of grey the way it works out is if you earn too much the combined impact of income tax and reduced payments is equivalent to a tax rate of 70 or 80%, so it sort of makes it an incentive not to work in those cases unless you really like it for some reason, but there is every chance you are 75 or 80 by then so I think you've probably done your bit by then and entitled to take it a little easy.
Then ride a cab? You're involving a middle man because they do a pretty damn good job taking you from point A to point B. It's the same reason you might want to use Amazon to buy something and "take money out of your community."
I take the bus, but I noticed lately that I haven't seen a cab in my city in months, whereas pre Uber I used to see dozens of them a day.
For better or worse I think that Uber destroyed the cab industry in my city.
Either way, I still think that we could have some sort of decentralized ride sharing platform that doesn't suck so much money out of local communities.
I think that this would be better for communities and therefore society a a whole.
In what sense? The taxi's and their drivers will still be there, they're locals. They're not completely dependent on Uber so if a vacuum would arise, it would be filled quite fast I believe.
How is Uber anything similar to a utilities company? Those companies are rent seeking because they provide an essential service in a de-facto monopoly. Uber literally created the demand from both sides of the marketplace while facing steep competition from incumbents. There are many things wrong with them but how can you criticize them for rent seeking? They're one of the most capitalistic companies around and their origin story is literally the opposite of rent seeking.
> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact.
This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well.
Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.
I think the point is that it doesn't need to be. We are seeing that the marginal benefits of extreme price optimization is minimal. Taxis have been simply charging flat rates for time and mileage for decades. Certainly there was room for improvement and Uber already did that and continued deep optimization is probably not worth it. 15 is hyperbole of course as any billion dollar company will need more than that but probably not multi-thousands.
> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact.
This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well.
Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.
As a customer, I would get the wrong food about half the time in NYC even pre-pandemic. I complained and got a refund the first couple of times but then they stopped refunding me when it kept happening. Clearly thought I was fraudulently trying to get meals for free. Thing is, I’ve been a customer since the black car only days. Been Uber VIP for my high rating as a customer. Problem wasn’t with me. If they can’t get quality control done with their restaurants then they don’t deserve my money. I’d rather go direct. I’ve never had a problem go unresolved going direct. In fact, I’ll often use Uber to find a restaurant near me and then call them direct to order to avoid their lousy customer service.
I had the same thing happen with Deliveroo despite being a "volume customer" ordering multiple times per day and providing proof of the wrong orders every time the app asks.
My conclusion is that these services are based on the idea that the customer will "eat" (pun intended) a certain amount of wrong or missing orders. Completely illegal and in breach of card network regulations (I won a chargeback against Uber for the same reason) but the law doesn't apply to big companies.
Most restaurants are horrendously incompetent when dealing with delivery apps.
I know because I once drove delivery for a few apps for about 6 months. The vast majority of restaurants treat delivery apps as easy side cash and don't take it very seriously. Depending on the restaurant, since the employees don't see you as a real customer, they'll rush things and miss items. They almost never report orders as being ready through the app, which would make it easier for drivers to schedule their drives and get in and out faster. The result is drivers show up and end up waiting because even after 30 minutes the food still isn't ready when they arrive. The tablet the restaurant is using could be completely off or dead but they won't bother signing on to the GrubHub/Doordash website to stop taking orders. Most of the time, restaurant staff doesn't give a fuck, which is stupid because restaurant staff also tends to hate delivery drivers. Why the hell would you not get the manager to sign in to the website and prevent drivers from coming in and wasting your time?
On the other side of the coin, these delivery apps also don't give a fuck. I was way above average in terms of the effort I put in as a delivery driver, but no matter what you're gonna get customers blaming you for things you couldn't have prevented. A bunch of times the customer opened the bag at the door (this was before the pandemic), find an item missing, then scowl at me while telling me they're gonna complain to the app. Not once did I ever get reprimanded by an app or receive fewer orders. I kept in touch with a bunch of other delivery drivers, many of which were far lazier than I was and admitted to screwing things up, and none of them every got so much as an email for forgetting drinks too many times or being way too late. The only way you can really get fired from these apps, absent doing something illegal, is if the area the driver is in just doesn't have enough people ordering food to make it worth paying the driver.
Oh yeah, I did a little driving for Uber Eats, btw. Most delivery drivers I knew at the time looked at Uber Eats as the "slut" of delivery apps. It paid the worst, the customers were cheapskates, but you also got lots of McDonalds and KFC orders through it, so it was only really good for if you could fit one of those orders in on the way to another delivery. I stopped doing it pretty early on because Uber Eats effectively had no meaningful driver support. At least GrubHub could be reached, even if it wasn't always helpful. Good luck reaching Uber as a driver in 2018. IMO, Uber had no business competing in the food delivery space.
I think people overlooked all these issues because we've been in the honeymoon phase of the post-2008 economy with all these "innovative" mobile apps doing amazing things, so we largely overlooked both the bad customer service and ridiculous pricing. Gradually, the rest of the economy will adapt to not rely so much on the likes of Uber unless something changes. And I would say the same thing about a lot of other aspects of the food economy as a whole. Much of it is of underwhelming quality and the customer service tends to suck, and now it's more expensive than it's worth. If you're gonna eat a bunch of carbs and glorified dog meat with some fake cheez product, you might as well do it at home for a third of the price, if not less than that.
I think your NYC centric anecdote kinda reinforces my point, in an old-man-yells-at-cloud kinda way. The eats usecase was supposed to be around delivery for places that did not already offer it. If you are talking about the eats experience vs in house delivery, that's kind of an edge case...
I’m not sure I agree. People in NYC are in for the market - you just have to beat the existing haphazard setup, create a unified payment and support and order taking platform, and do as well as the incumbents in delivery quality.
“Supposed to be around delivery for places that did not already offer it” is beside thee point. It isn’t an excuse to be so terrible across the board (but note this isn’t unique to Uber and DoorDash is pretty terrible as well)
I love the "small team of focused engineers" trope for apps like uber. It's so easy to blow past that number. Website? That's a team. iPhone app? That's a team. Android? Another team. Data collection and A/B testing platform for all the front ends? Another team. Backend? A team. Infrastructure? Another team. AI solutions for problems like delivery time estimation? Another very expensive team. BI for the executives? You guessed it, another team!
Fairly recently I moved from a company of about 8,000 to a company of 54 or so. At first I wondered how the tiny company got anything done, but they've been around for 30 years so I figured they must have some skill. Now I wonder what the hell all those 8,000 people actually did. Each team you just named is 1-2 people at the current gig.
Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out:
1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. People start losing more and more context and you start needing full time jobs just to keep everyone pushing in the same direction without stepping on each others toes. I don't know you in particular, but most engineers seem oblivious to how many business functions a company trying to operate internationally often needs.
3. As engineers, there's often a wall between us and huge amount of effort that goes into sales, marketing, and customer service (even if the last is only provided to enterprises). One way to keep headcount down is keep this to a minimum, but you're usually leaving most of your profits on the table.
Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams. I don't think we're anywhere near on par with Netflix, but we can read their engineering blog ;)
My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.
> I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams
Netflix has over 1000 engineers, maybe close to 1500? Uber has ~3,000.
If we assume these companies are handling similar amount of work, Netflix has only managed to do 2-3x better in terms of headcount to work ratio. (talking to friends at these companies, I think this paints a rosier picture of Netflix than is reasonable).
As another commenter pointed out, there's also a real step change when you go global. The requirements in terms of governmental compliance and engineering effort to outcompete local software shoots up headcount significantly. With a global audience you generally need to be providing an excellent experience in more ways as local values and tastes can vary more significantly than you expect.
It doesn't. Your unit is tiny. A few thousand users doesn't even break the threshold of "death by Hacker News".
Uber's 93 million in 80 countries means that (very roughly) in each country they have three orders of magnitude more users than you: 93 mln/80 countries = 1+ mln in each country = 1000 times more than you = 3 orders of magnitude.
As I said, just dealing with payments in each country is often a full-time job for a dedicated tema even if you process payments through a third party like Adyen.
Are Uber operating at 100% efficiency? Hell no. Will you have several orders of magnitudes fewer people than Uber when you grow to Uber's size? I very highly doubt it.
Of course, there are exceptions like WhatsApp, but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale), and was (and still is) very slow in rolling out features.
I have seen how it multiplies out in traditional engineering.
One guy/girl was doing stuff, might be quite a bit, so it's decided it is really needing 2.something people, so they send two more, because you can't have part of a person.
Then they need a manager, and a doc controller and maybe an admin. Then the service people need a manager, and you need a manager of the managers, and they needs an assistant and who knows who else, maybe a HR and next thing know what one person was doing is all of a sudden a ten person team.
And instead of going to just talk to someone in another team, it's no "my manager will confirm with your manager" etc etc
I worked in one place where to send a document to the guy in the next office from me for official review had to go through a document control office in a another country. That was not unusual, apart from being unusually frustrating and time wasting.
That really doesn’t say anything. Those teams all do very different thinks depending on the problem space. You’re not really making an argument though you are just stating two situations and hoping people arrive at your conclusion of big company is stupid.
I think anyone who has interacted with a big organization (company, government, religion, etc...) comes to the conclusion that they're disfunctional in some way. I agree that it doesn't say much, but I do wonder, how many engineers built the original Uber app and how many does the company employee today? I'm betting it's more, and I wonder how much additional functionality they've added over the years.
The bigger the organization, the more calories have to be burned to keep the organization from flying apart at the seams, and the core value producing parts from being eaten, confused/mislead, or destroyed.
At big organizations, it’s often 90% or more of all work the entire organization is doing (depending on how you calculate kt).
I work a startup with less than 15 technical employees and have experience at tech companies ranging from 100s to 100s of thousands of employees. Suggesting that one could accomplish or maintain a platform like uber with so few heads is a farce.
A team of 15 probably couldn't. A team of 50-100 probably could maintain something of similar complexity to the core uber app. Copycats exist using many fewer resources.
How many countries would this be offered in? Would you shut down your service outside of US business hours or will your 50-100 person staff not need sleep?
An underappreciated aspect of computer programming is that maintaining a program often requires less work than writing it in the first place. Once you finish writing the iPhone app, you've finished writing the iPhone app, and you can get by with a much smaller team--possibly just one person--to handle bugfixes and maintenance.
Unicorn tech companies generally don't realize this, which is why they all redesign their apps over and over and add poorly-thought-out features all the time. They're still paying for a build-an-entire-iPhone-app-from-scratch-sized team, and all those engineers are desperately looking for stuff to do!
You've never done iPhone development it seems where there's neverending new or deprecated versions of iOS and "kits". I've had clients that try this without a dedicated team, and each time was a nightmare for them(and hence us) where nobody remembered how anything was done
I have done iPhone development, and I can say with confidence that it is less work to take an iOS 17 app and update it to iOS 18 than it is to take nothing and create an iOS 18 app from scratch.
You still need a non-zero number of people who know how the iOS app works, but the number you need is smaller.
As long as you have good product requirements, creation is actually very simple. You have freedom to choose the technology and the tools.
However, The moment that you discover that your AWS bill exceeds your engineering budget, you will have a different view of maintenance. People will now start calling it resilience, scale, optimization, etc. And then one day, the db will need to be partitioned (almost always, if the product is successful) and then the people who created the mess [almost always using a nosql database as it was available ]will run for the exits. You (or the poor unthanked ‘maintenance’ engineer ) will start learning about why distributed systems are hard to maintain.
Oh, they realize it - which is why the managers and execs whose ongoing career trajectories require managing larger and larger orgs spend so much time coming up with more work!
Most line engineers often realize it too pretty quickly, which is why we end up with so many new frameworks every time there is a huge boom cycle.
These aren’t unique apps though. In my deregulated taxi market all taxi companies (dozens) have Uber functionality where you track cars on maps, pay via app, book rides in the app and so on.
And many of the largest ones use the same app. Because they aren’t in that business, they are in the taxi business. If there is a margin to be found in scheduling or pricing, then their app supplier should provide it.
This is perhaps what Uber should be doing: making the white label apps for local companies doing ride services.
Not sure how many taxi markets are that unregulated that they allow it.
> fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.
Uber operates in multiple countries, each of which have very different rules.
There's millions of rides happening in each of those places.
It's difficult to keep everything running with just a few engineers.
Im sorry you think you can maintain the rider and driver app with 15 engineers… I really can’t take anything else you say seriously as your knowledge of uber as a business discredited the rest of your thoughts.
The problem really is that Uber isn't in a markets that are "tech". Neither is Amazon retail for that side... Taxi and food delivery are horribly thin margin businesses and you really can't change that. Just because someone is middle man there doesn't mean they really are in tech, specially when they are the contact point for both sides.
Now if they were selling platform for other people to operate, I could see them being tech...
Just wondering where the credibility to make statement (2) comes from? This is a pretty big thing to say about a company that has generally been tackling some major technical challenges for quite a few years now. Yes, the economics of the whole thing has changed drastically during their journey, and there have certainly been leadership failures along the way, but they have obviously had technical leadership for quite some time now.
The way the app performance has deteriorated I thought they already had sacked most of their engineers - it used to be rock solid, now it glitches all the time for me.
I mean you’re saying it, and they’re clearly starting to offer it in ny and other places, but perhaps there’s a reason that didn’t work? I can see a million logistical and practical reasons why you couldn’t just make a generic “app for both sides” and let other market owners embrace it. Uber succeeded initially by actually doing the “dirty and unethical” ground work beyond software. I really doubt their tech stack had anything to do with their success.
Yea sure ~15 engs can operate the tech stack of a 50B company. If you worked there for 5 years and still hold these opinions, what you really signal is that you don't know what you are talking about regarding your company's business model and likely just oversimplify how sausage was made with your experience in probably only 1-2 orgs.
I always felt that the business was just a branding excercise to be leader of the pack when self driving taxis became a reality.
On May 5, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Uber announced plans to layoff 3,700 employees, around 14% of its workforce - Ahh I see what you mean, that is a lot of employees
Well Uber is logistics/CS company which a tech approach. I would think that makes it a tech company. Their stack is complicated and there are plenty of logistic giants who could've beaten them if only they were as tech focused.
I agree that a small team of engineers can do big things. But 15 engineers to run Uber ride share in maintenance mode? That's insane. I would love to see a breakdown of each engineer's responsibilities in that scenario.
The problem with the “many markets” idea is that outside of taxis and food delivery, there’s often not enough consistent demand for “on-demand”
Plumbers and masseurs and dog walkers didn’t build up reservation books because it was hard to make real-time bookings (phones enabled that), they did it because it’s the most efficient way to plan working hours so you’re not sitting around your entire life waiting for work.
DoorDash. Uber Eats in Vancouver is hot garbage, and my wife and i have switched from Skip to DD because Skip’s quality has plumetted. DD has really captured reliable service in Vancouver.
Can people please stop making statements true for America as if they are true for the world? In my country we have UberEats, Deliveroo and a few others, but DoorDash doesn’t even exist.
it always makes me happy to see the "tech bros come in here and think that everything we do is simple and easy to replicate" trope every other industry complains about holds true even when applied to the tech industry.
Nowhere did voz_ say or imply that Uber was simple or easy to replicate. In fact he didn't say anything all about replicating them. What he is speculating about is a hypothetical where Uber itself stops development and just maintains their existing systems.
Regulatory compliance is the one I suspect would be the hard one when it comes to switching a company like Uber to maintenance mode with greatly reduced developer staff on their apps and backend code. They would have to deal with regulations changing in areas they are already in, and in area they expanded to might have regulations that aren't just a trivial variation of regulations they have already figured out how to handle elsewhere.
For dealing with growth, there are two kinds of growth to deal with. One is growth within a given metro area that they already serve. The other is growth into new metro areas.
For things like ride scheduling, driver scheduling, routing, and similar they only have to grow their software to handle that in the largest single metro they serve. Multiple metro areas could then be handled by running separate copies of that software in each metro area. That would require an IT staff that would grow as they expanded into different metro areas, but wouldn't increase the number of developers needed to maintain the app and service code.
It would be the things that are shared between multiple metro areas that might need a growing developer staff even in maintenance mode. That would be things like the login system and payment processing. But note that these are things that a bazillion other online companies have to deal with too. It's well known how to do them and there are a ton of libraries and frameworks and services to support that. These are things you get working and then rarely have to touch.
It's the stuff in the first category, dealing with the details of what Uber has to do that isn't something every other online site with a large nationwide user base has to deal with, where the hard problems for such a business lie.
As far as security goes I think the number of developers needed to deal with security goes up much slower than the number of users. It is mostly a function of the amount of code you have, not how many people use it.
So, aside from dealing with regulators, I think a company like Uber could if it wanted go into maintenance mode and greatly cut the number of developers (although not down to the 15 voz_ used in his comment), once they have gotten the parts unique to their kind of business to the point that they can handle the largest single metro area they are in or want to be in, and they have a good enough debugged enough feature set that there isn't room for someone else to come up with a better enough feature set to matter.
This isn't specific to Uber or other taxi-like services. It is that way for nearly any nationwide business where the actual goods or services provided are essentially local.
It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either:
(A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon went from books->everything->AWS, Uber could have gone rides->platform-for-all-the-multi-sided-marketplaces.
OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.
Instead, they did neither, muddling around building random tech as if they had ads/search/social media margins while losing sight of the customers needs. There's a reason DD crushed them in food.
Edit: Since the primary response seems to be "You don't understand!" I was there 5 year, saw how the sausage was way over-made.