Yeah, that's completely ridiculous.
I'm currently working with a very (very) large UK-based retailer, with various outlets globally, and I can tell you from first hand experience that their selection process is ruthless. There are no, or at least very few, lamers in the tech team.
And yet, when you look at the systems, and the way things are built, some of it just seems crazy. Only it's not, and for many reasons, of which here are only a couple:
- The business has grown and evolved over time - with significant restructuring occurring either gradually, or more quickly and in a more intentionally managed way; systems have grown and evolved with it, often organically (which is something I see at every company I've worked with).
- Legacy systems that make it really hard to change things, and migrate to newer and better ways of doing things because they're still in production and depended upon by a host of other systems and services.
- The degree of interconnectedness between systems and services is high across the board; this isn't a reflection of bad design, so much as a reflection of the complexity of the business.
In any large organisation these kinds of things are apparent. I would imagine that in a large organisation that has become large very quickly, like Uber, if anything the problems would be magnified.
To say that they have poor engineers is therefore very unfair: these are people who would have needed to ship RIGHT NOW on a regular basis in order to facilitate the growth of the business. That's going to lead to technical compromises along the way, and there's little to be done to avoid it. There's also a difference between being aware of a problem and having time, or it being a priority, to fix it (e.g., iterating and retrieving).