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I have not but my co-founder worked at Uber for 5+ years. He said they had engineers basically building whatever anyone wanted. He said they built their own Slack more or less just because they could.

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It's sad, because if they would just travel the world (or look at the data) instead of building unnecesary infrastructure, they would realize how broken the Uber experience is in less developed countries.

Data quality issues, like missing tolls, intersection being different on Uber's map than in real life means that Uber is underpricing drivers, which leads to driver cancellations. It was very frustrating for me to start the whole process again mutiple times after waiting 5-10 minutes and try to haggle with the drivers all the time.

I think it's likely that they don't put much value in delivering a quality product in these markets, where the revenue is relative peanuts compared to first world countries. It's enough just to exist there and claim the territory for the brand. And they can always just blame the sub-par experience in these areas on bad infrastructure. Retaining talent by keeping their engineers happy with pet projects is probably much more important to the company.

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