Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the Ride over for Uber?

smartcompany.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 304 posts

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#121

Post by csande17 »

iakh wrote: post #117
csande17 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An underappreciated aspect of computer programming is that maintaining a program often requires less work than writing it in the first place. Once you finish writing the iPhone app, you've finished writing the iPhone app , and you can get by with a much smaller team--possibly just one person--to handle bugfixes and maintenance. Unicorn tech companies generally don't realize this, which is why they all redesign their…

You've never done iPhone development it seems where there's neverending new or deprecated versions of iOS and "kits". I've had clients that try this without a dedicated team, and each time was a nightmare for them(and hence us) where nobody remembered how anything was done

I have done iPhone development, and I can say with confidence that it is less work to take an iOS 17 app and update it to iOS 18 than it is to take nothing and create an iOS 18 app from scratch.

You still need a non-zero number of people who know how the iOS app works, but the number you need is smaller.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#122

Post by voz_ »

hackernewds wrote: post #80
vladf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.

It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is I would know.

I worked there for 5 years, it's not that complicated, Uber just made it way too overcomplicated.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#123

Post by zonotope »

greatpostman wrote: post #37
flatline wrote: post #6

I was on work travel last week. No Uber from the airport - three cancelations then I caught a Lyft. It was over $500 for a 50 mi ride to a neighboring city which I was mostly looking at out of curiosity. My friend was recently held up (well, attempted) by an Uber driver in Nashville who had canceled last second so he could not even find who the driver was to file a complaint. It seems like the former gap in user expe…

Counter point: I just got rejected for a short ride from a cab at the airport in nyc. Dude was very angry I was only going a few miles. Hopped out, ordered a Lyft, got a great ride from a dude with a wife and kids.

It's illegal for a taxi at NYC to reject a fare to any part of NYC. He might huff and puff if you're going out of his way, but he has to take you. You shouldn't have gotten out.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#124

Post by voz_ »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #101
vladf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.

Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these bi…

I didnt say it can be built with 15, but at 2017, features peaked, and maintenance is much easier than creation.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#125

Post by pclmulqdq »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #109
hotpotamus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly recently I moved from a company of about 8,000 to a company of 54 or so. At first I wondered how the tiny company got anything done, but they've been around for 30 years so I figured they must have some skill. Now I wonder what the hell all those 8,000 people actually did. Each team you just named is 1-2 people at the current gig.

I work a startup with less than 15 technical employees and have experience at tech companies ranging from 100s to 100s of thousands of employees. Suggesting that one could accomplish or maintain a platform like uber with so few heads is a farce.

A team of 15 probably couldn't. A team of 50-100 probably could maintain something of similar complexity to the core uber app. Copycats exist using many fewer resources.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#126

Post by unity1001 »

voz_ wrote: post #25

Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one. It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either: (A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon we…

> OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services

Yeah. Things are * that * easy to do at scale. You need just '15' engineers.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#127

Post by makeitdouble »

charrondev wrote: post #88
hackernewds wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is I would know.

Sometimes I wish it were simpler. I’ve had multiple situations where I couldn’t get a ride into my local city recently. The app says there are rides within 10 minutes, shows me a cheap rate and I hit yes. In 10 minutes no matches have been found. In 10 more minutes it finds someone 20 minutes away. 15 minutes later the driver cancels and I’m back to square one. Now the thing is the cost of the ride is a pittance and…

I had a mostly similar experience in the France. The "gladly pay double" would translate in using a different app (the ones provided by traditional taxi companies) depending on the circumstance and the margin of error.

Uber's app was still hands down the best to use, and I had so many issues with the others, like credit card registration being flakky, or the app straight crashing on specific screens. It looked a lot like they paid a dev company a lump sum to make the app and would proceed to pay for some more fixes every six months instead of keeping an ongoing maintenance contract.

I kinda wish that now that the legal frameworks and service viability has been explored, Uber dies completely, and the gap is filled with local startups working closely with the local market to maintain ride services from there.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#128

Post by 2143 »

voz_ wrote: post #25

Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one. It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either: (A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon we…

> fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.

Uber operates in multiple countries, each of which have very different rules.

There's millions of rides happening in each of those places.

It's difficult to keep everything running with just a few engineers.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#129

Post by menzoic »

Teever wrote: post #90
hackernewds wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is I would know.

I think people don't care about it because at the end of the day all this mind bogglingly complex stuff just exists skim money off a transaction that should ideally be done between two individuals -- a buyer and a seller. Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain. Why can my ISP string up fiber optic all over my city…

>Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain

The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right.

It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value....

Think about what you're saying. You don't "care how complex it is". Well that complexity determines whether or not it is rent seeking. You say ideally a transaction between two individuals. The major problem being solved here is finding the two best matched individuals based on their current location and destination over time. You need some system to aid this discovery no matter what.

Here's the definition of rent-seeking:

Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#130

Post by ArrayBoundCheck »

sanatgersappa wrote: post #31

Uber started out well as your "personal chauffeur" with premium cars and polite, professional drivers. Then they started chasing numbers and valuation, and it was all downhill from there.

Chasing? I'm pretty sure they only had regular people in regular cars give you a ride when lyft came around. They had to match the service or lose customers
Post reply on HN