A former Uber engineer's disaster story

The Otto due diligence has to be up there as well.

Great thread.

> So said brilliant engineer in Amsterdam, built an annealing algorithm in the release build to reorder the optimization passes in such a way to as minimize size. This shaved a whooping 11 mbs off the total machine code size and bought us enough runway to keep development going.

> This terrified the Swift compiler engineers, they were worried that untested complier pass orders would expose untested bugs

This would scare me too.

> I had privately had the “we need to stop” conversation with my director. He told me that if this project fails he might as well pack his bags. The same was true for his boss all the way up to the VP. There was no way out.

This brings up an interesting point. The author attributes some decisions in the thread to the "sunk cost fallacy". The business costs were sunk, but if the employees and management are too afraid for their job to make the "cut your losses" decision, the costs are not really sunk, at least not in the minds of the right people.

> “biggest engineering disaster”

I just supposed that this was a story about Uber Elevate ElectricVTOL (eCRM) design.[0,1]

[0] https://twitter.com/TheWoracle/status/995107989886353408

[1] https://github.com/OpenVSP/OpenVSP/tree/main/examples/vspaer...

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Making a crappy, slow app is nothing compared to conciously deciding to switch off the built-in autonomous breaking system in lieu of your own(which then doesn't work and kills a person). That's an engineering disaster, not a taxi going to the wrong city block a few times.

Yes, threadreader.app concatenates a thread of tweet replies, and each section is clickable, linking to the original tweet.