A former Uber engineer's disaster story

I used to be a game developer at EA. In the middle of one particularly nightmarish 60-hour-weeks-for-months crunch, a twenty-something artist with no known pre-existing conditions spontaneously died in his sleep.

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.

> 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.

> With only a week left we decided eat the 8 figures and drop support for iOS 8.

I'll say this: If I were an Uber investor I would be pretty angry. And the story just gets worse from there.

This is a story of gross incompetence. It's not an engineering disaster, it's a management disaster. This is classic "inmates running the asylum". ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44098.The_Inmates_Are_Ru... )

This is the story of some hackers who got in good at a big company with lots of money and sturm und drang so they had no adult supervision while they partied while pretending to be actual engineers. (That they were pretending to themselves too doesn't make it any better.)

The writing was on the wall, but rather than own up and take responsibility they double down and keep messing things up for months and years.

> This is when the real brilliant engineers started to shine.

This is when they get pulled from other tasks to clean up your mess! (cf. Broken window fallacy.) Those real brilliant engineers should be doing other better things than dark rituals to appease the Swift compiler gods.

Look, we all make mistakes. There's a blog post from an engineer at a company I used to work for complaining about the pointless middleware I wrote years earlier. (I feel ya bro, I told them at the time that it was pointless.) Here's the thing: I got out of that place when I realized that the folks running it weren't really competent. (And, sure enough, they got pushed out by the investors and now the company is a "Wallstreet darling". So... Yay?)

I've burned enough investor money in my career that I don't think it's funny anymore. (I never really did think it was funny, I don't like waste, but I was young. REDACTED was only my second official job, and in hindsight it was really crazy. I mean, they built a skating half-pipe in the office! At the time, everybody thought that was real cool.)