Comment by dntrkv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dntrkv | Hacker News Reader

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A good place to start would be to go through the Uber UI and click through every button and every page that exists.

Now create a driver profile and do the same thing.

Now create the multitude of other special profiles they have and do the same.

Now do the same for Uber Eats.

Now do the same for Eats but using the restaurants version of the app.

And the couriers.

Now get in on Uber Freight (and any other projects they have) and do all of the same.

Now do all of that again for their other platforms (iOS, Watch OS, Wear OS, Android, Web)

Now access their internal tools that make all of this possible and do the same.

Now think about localizing all of that. Handling special cases for different places/languages/legalities. Think of all the different payment integrations. Security issues. Infrastructure. Technical debt. AB testing. Metrics. Dev tooling.

And I've only begun to scratch the surface here. The point is there is a lot more than meets the eye, especially when operating on a global scale.

This is a common but specious argument. It is possible to make large, complicated apps without creating a monstrosity. That you are making something like this is a manifestation of an engineering culture that has too many cooks in the kitchen, a lack of specific engineering talent spent on finding issues and telling the teams shipping them to stop, people shipping libraries that they don't need and tech debt that was never pruned away. An app with 100x more people working on it should not be 100x larger, because it certainly won't have 100x more features in it. Sure, Uber is more than "a map and a couple views" but the fact remains that their app should never have been in the state that it was.

For my own curiosity, what large, complicated apps are not monstrosities in your eyes?

The Apple Maps app on iPhone, for example? If you make it fair and count the code that goes into the frameworks specifically for it, it's still tens of megabytes at the most. There is a huge part of it running server-side to support it, of course, but it is difficult to say that it is not a complicated app. Or consider the Mail app? It needs to deal with IMAP, and has custom flows for a number of named mail services (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), and then it has to have special code to handle all the edge cases of "what happens if the user deletes a message here but it didn't sync, or Google sends us 503s sometimes if we do this, or…" You can make arguments that maybe it is slightly less or more complex than Uber, but it is just a couple dozen megabytes and not hundreds.

10s of megabytes? Where did you pull that number from? Since it is a system app, its true install size is hidden away from users. The comparable google maps app is 190 MB.

I counted up the system frameworks it relies on that can be reasonably considered to exist for the purposes of serving the app.

We used to pack entire operating systems with userspace in a couple dozen Megabytes. I bet they had more screens than the Uber app.

You should scratch below the surface because this isn't really explaining much - it does not sound like something that requires more than 100 people. Their legal team sounds like it should be twice that alone.

Or am I crazy?

Take look at this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346

My point is that there is 100s of screens/features in the Uber app that you don't even know exist. And you have those same 100s of screens across their other apps. Multiplied across all of the different platforms. Plus any internal tools they use.

I'm curious, have you worked at a software company of Uber's scale? Not trying to be a dick here, genuinely curious because I hear these types of comments often here on HN and I wonder how many of those commenting have seen the scale from within.

My whole point here is I don't understand why "Uber scale" is so large. I have worked in large organizations - smaller than Uber, but we did more stuff (as in more complexity and diversity in products - shipping software and the hardware to run it, for example).

"100s of screens" is as meaningless to me as "thousands of lines of code" and wholly uninteresting because it seems like the front end is the least significant reason why Uber requires so many people to operate. That's why I'm interested in seeing how many people are assigned to projects and what they actually spend their time doing, because at scale you begin to experience inefficiencies due to scale for bad reasons if your incentives aren't aligned. From the original twitter thread that sounds like it was rampant at Uber.

Not sure how long you've been around, but "Uber scale" used to be a joke a few years ago because no one could understand why they would reinvent so many wheels because "they don't work at Uber scale." The joke being that Uber didn't need to be Uber scale to begin with, they just had investor money to burn.

I'm just a layman, but I often ponder this same "Why are some companies so big when a small team could do about the same thing?" and my mental theory currently is:

1. The amount of engineers scales very badly with respect to application complexity. I.e. you may need 100 or 1000 engineers to do something that "looks" about 2x as complex as something 10 engineers can do, and

2. The more complex solution tends to win in the market because on the one hand people value the application handling edge cases better, having shiny graphics, having slightly better UX, etc. and on the other hand you redeem the cost of paying those 1000 engineers thanks to software being free to copy and network effects / monopoly.

But like, why? Do all of these things make them tons of money? It's a dumb taxi app, ultimately.

You're not answering the question except as a tautology:

- Q: Why is Uber's engineering team so ridiculous and bloated?

- A: Because they need a ridiculous bloated team to make this ridiculous bloated app.

Just like Alphabet is just a search engine, and Microsoft is just an operating system, and Amazon is just an online store.

Companies grow into new products, services, markets, etc.

Google really is just an advertising company. Everything else "Alphabet" does is a rounding error next to ad revenue.

Microsoft and Amazon have multiple profitable lines of business.

Is Uber more like Google or more like Amazon? Is "Uber Eats" (underpaid contractors drive around takeaway dinners) distinct from "Uber" (underpaid contractors drive around people), or "Uber Black" (underpaid contractors with unwise car leases drive people around)?

> Google really is just an advertising company. Everything else > "Alphabet" does is a rounding error next to ad revenue.

It's not like people would go and visit a page with just a list of ads; no matter how little revenue the other products around ads bring in, they bring eyeballs to the ads, and serve as a moat around ads.

> Google really is just an advertising company. Everything else > "Alphabet" does is a rounding error next to ad revenue.

It's not like people would go and visit a page with just a bunch of ads; no matter how little revenue the other Alphabet products bring in, they bring eyeballs to the ads, and serve as a moat around ads.

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