The biggest engineering disaster Uber had was when it intentionally disabled the automatic safety brakes on their 'self driving' car and killed a person.
Less a engineering disaster and more a human one.
A former Uber engineer's disaster story
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Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#72Not a mobile developer - Was the move to Swift inevitable and they started too early or should they have stayed with - and still be using - Objective-C?
If they had stuck with the Swift ban they would certainly be facing a hiring problem today.
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#73Posting stories as Twitter threads personally for me make me loose all respect for you as an engineer. I mean what in the hell is the abysmal way of reading? How could any person allow themselves to post something like this?
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#74I wonder if you tried to do the same thing today, but with different tools, let's say Flutter, how it would turn out?
If you think how the Uber app looks and works, it should be a major relief doing it in Flutter, I don't see any major breakpoints.
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#75This may be an egregious question, but what does the Uber app actually do that makes it so big? It displays a map with some moving dots on them, allows you to pick a location, and asks the server for a route and price. Plus a bit of workflow for signup, credit card, reviews; not a huge number of screens. I appreciate the difficulties of getting an app to fit in a fixed space having worked on a point of sale system th…
I’ve often wondered the same thing about Airbnb, DoorDash, and other unicorns where they hire the best engineers from Silicon Valley, yet their product seems like a rather basic CRUD tool.
Apparently with Uber it’s the infrastructure design and back-end algorithms for trip routing and driver management that are “so great.” The SV hype machine helps a lot too.
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#76[deleted]
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#77Many engineering horror stories involve an entire system rewrite. My recommendation is to never rewrite a large system. Literally never. If the people proposing the rewrite aren’t capable of adding the features incrementally, they aren’t capable of rewriting the entire system to “easily” support those new features.
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#78Are webview apps still possible on IOS? Given that the Uber app has to work online anyway, it seems like a lot of this headache could have been avoided by keeping most of the logic on the server.
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#79The biggest engineering disaster Uber had was when it intentionally disabled the automatic safety brakes on their 'self driving' car and killed a person.
I was working at Uber ATG when Elaine Herzberg was killed. They kept the details secret from the other employees, citing fears of "too many cooks". I recall being offered grief counseling.
Uber disabled Volvo's automatic emergency braking system, which probably would have saved Elaine, to develop their system on public streets. I left the company and took a pay cut to work on ethical robotics instead.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/ped...
Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story
#80The "curmudgeon" ending line in this story rubs me the wrong way. The ObjC people were right, basically, and it seems like the problem was essentially no one in the right place was going to drop Swift at that point. Seems less like they weren't offering answers, so much as the answer wasn't "but we'll do some stuff and fix Swift!" Though the 6 library limit and how that wasn't a gigantic red flag on the language is b…
Wasn't really clear what benefit the rewrite offered anyway other than a new UI, which brought it's own problems and couldn't that have just been written in Obj-C?