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A former Uber engineer's disaster story

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Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#191

Post by renewiltord »

kingnothing wrote: post #172
gregdoesit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Uber engineer/EM here: I worked on the Rider app. The “there are only a few screens” is not true. The app works in 60+ countries, with features shipped in the app that often for a country, and - in rare cases - a city. The app has thousands of scenarios. It speaks to good design that each user thinks the user is there to support their 5 use cases, not showing all the other use cases (that are often regional or…

I also worked for Uber but on backend systems in the payments flow. Every single piece of app functionality mentioned above has at least one, if not multiple, backend systems and teams supporting it. Like in the app, "payments" sounds like it would be a simple Stripe integration but it isn't. For one, that's way too expensive at Uber's scale. They build their own payment integrations to save fractions of a point that…

It genuinely blows my mind anyone who has written software couldn't have guessed at all of this from the beginning.

Uber PMs and engineers should be super proud. The fact that each user thinks that their one use-case is "all the app does" is fucking brilliant product design.

I've had over a thousand Uber rides (used it to commute) in 10+ countries and it's obvious there the way it seamlessly adjusts to each region but even otherwise I think I could have guessed just from the difference between SF and Seattle. There was a sort of joy of opening the app in a new region and finding unique options. Some sort of (maybe intentional) superstar-level product design.

Rickshaws in Seattle? Cash payment in India? Uber Taxi in SF? Sweet!

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#192

Post by lock-free »

dntrkv wrote: post #108
lock-free wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of ways to frame these problems as interesting algorithms but it doesn't really strike me as something that is troubled by scale. I've worked on similar problems where "everything is a special case" in some vein and it takes a few very clever minds to construct the algorithms and datastructures that can come to a good solution. But that's just it, it's the work of a few engineers and not thousands wri…

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…

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?

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#193

Post by madeofpalk »

brundolf wrote: post #170
gregdoesit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Uber engineer/EM here: I worked on the Rider app. The “there are only a few screens” is not true. The app works in 60+ countries, with features shipped in the app that often for a country, and - in rare cases - a city. The app has thousands of scenarios. It speaks to good design that each user thinks the user is there to support their 5 use cases, not showing all the other use cases (that are often regional or…

I'm now wondering why Apple doesn't let you ship different binaries for different regions?

They do (well, you can have different listings limited to different regions).

But basically the only time I use Uber is when I travel to another region. I don't want 30 different Uber apps on my phone...

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#194

Post by dntrkv »

lock-free wrote: post #192
dntrkv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#196

Post by sethammons »

linseed_213 wrote: post #169
sethammons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an app developer, so ignorant. Why not have different apps? Uber-India, Uber-Mexico, etc? Or if it is to be all one Global Uber app, why not have expansions that are downloaded for other regions as needed?

Would you want to download a different app every time you traveled to a new country? If you're in the EU/APAC with many countries close together and travel for business? Uber works relatively well in every country you go to, including at one point, China. Not many apps have ever accomplished that.

I wouldn’t mind if the app started up and said, “download the $country_or_region extension,” but that is just me (assuming it doesn’t require re-creating an account, or re-entering billing details).

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#197

Post by pavlov »

Apocryphon wrote: post #190
pavlov wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “which, of course, they never will be” That’s the problem. Apple knows by now that their developer community laps up absolutely everything they put out and regularly gets burned. (I’m old enough to have rewritten code for Cocoa Bindings in 2004. It’s the next big thing! And garbage collection in 2008. It will fix everything! And GCD... and...) For such an enormous change as Swift, they should have switched off the…

What's wrong with GCD?

It's a great library for a lot of things. When originally introduced it was also heavily oversold by Apple as a magic bullet for concurrency.

Here's one account: https://tclementdev.com/posts/what_went_wrong_with_the_libdi...

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#198

Post by andrewprock »

quasse wrote: post #84
asimpletune wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s kind of bizarre that after writing everything leading up to that, the author would still frame the ObjC folks in that way. Like, this or that eng. was so brilliant with their hack, but all those obj-c eng. who advocated boring but stable solutions all along were just curmudgeons with no helpful advice.

The problem from the author's perspective is that the Obj-C "curmudgeons" were proving the right solution to save the app (drop Swift and cut losses + go back to a functioning language) but not the careers of the people who had gotten them into this terrible situation.

This perspective is reflexive. The "ObjC curmudgeons" didn't feel like the adventures that the "Swift zealots" were generating helped their careers in any way.

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#199

Post by wwweston »

lhorie wrote: post #148
oefrha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the last time I was throttled to 2G speed due to a problem with my carrier, the Uber app couldn’t even start (getting to the first interactive screen) in like five minutes. What’s the point of distributing the entire world’s data, which gotta change from time to time, when you can download the tiny requisite piece each time, especially considering that a relatively high speed Internet connection is required to u…

Uber actually has a not-so-well-known product for this very problem: the mobile web version (m.uber.com) It doesn't have nearly as much functionality as gregdoesit mentioned, but it's enough to service the use case of getting you from point A to point B when you're stuck w/ crappy connectivity.

Wish they still had what they did when I started using it: send an SMS to a shortcode number with your pickup location.
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