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Is the Ride over for Uber?

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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#151

Post by Hermitian909 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #99
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the "small team of focused engineers" trope for apps like uber. It's so easy to blow past that number. Website? That's a team. iPhone app? That's a team. Android? Another team. Data collection and A/B testing platform for all the front ends? Another team. Backend? A team. Infrastructure? Another team. AI solutions for problems like delivery time estimation? Another very expensive team. BI for the executives? Y…

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.

Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out:

1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude.

2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. People start losing more and more context and you start needing full time jobs just to keep everyone pushing in the same direction without stepping on each others toes. I don't know you in particular, but most engineers seem oblivious to how many business functions a company trying to operate internationally often needs.

3. As engineers, there's often a wall between us and huge amount of effort that goes into sales, marketing, and customer service (even if the last is only provided to enterprises). One way to keep headcount down is keep this to a minimum, but you're usually leaving most of your profits on the table.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#152

Post by ehnto »

vladf wrote: post #76
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…

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.

What I actually would believe could take 15+ engineers is Uber's platform globalization requirements.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#153

Post by voz_ »

menzoic wrote: post #133
voz_ wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The most important factor that is completely lost in this argument is "scale". Simple looking things are very complex at large scale. Even if no new features were built, the current api and apps won't scale to meet the demand as the user base continues to grow. And at any point in time there are thousands of bugs that need to be fixed within months before they cause big issues. 15 engineers will take years to fix the…

Uber won't ever 2x, let alone 10x.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#154

Post by ehnto »

vladf wrote: post #76
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…

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.

What I actually would believe could take 15+ engineers is Uber's platform globalization and reporting requirements.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#155

Post by alexb_ »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #67
tbrownaw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The endless pursuit of growth is usually a byproduct of ego or at the behest of some intangible idea of "creating shareholder value." Previous discussions here have repeatedly told me that it's a condition for or result of getting vc funding.

There is more to life, and indeed more to the economy , than "getting vc funding". There is also such a thing as "HN bias".

You're talking about a tech company here, not a business that makes sense.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#156

Post by hotpotamus »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #151
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.

Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. Peo…

Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams. I don't think we're anywhere near on par with Netflix, but we can read their engineering blog ;)

My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#157

Post by jlmorton »

> This writer, previously an avid Uber Eats user, now avoids it in almost all cases and instead, orders directly from restaurants, which have mostly built an online ordering systems. Going direct means your food isn’t ruined

I don't know if this is confirmation bias, or just a lie to add weight to the thesis, but it's obviously absurd, as anyone who has ever worked for, or even ordered directly from a local restaurant knows.

Your local pizzeria does not have the driver go back to the restaurant for every order and deliver it directly to you. They certainly don't have a fleet of people ready to pickup your order. They pickup every order that's available, it's completely unoptimized in every way, and you get your order on the luck of the draw. Maybe the driver had no other orders, and is a block away from you. Or maybe your fifth in line.

The key difference is they don't have an app that records every step in the process, the precise times involved, and show you the delivery driver's location on a map.

Hard to even keep reading after this.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#158

Post by atty »

wyre wrote: post #134
atty wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with food delivery when used in moderation. I use DoorDash once a week to get a lunch delivered on a day where I have meetings running through lunchtime. It saves me time and hassle, and is a fun change of pace. It also came in very handy when a family member of mine was very ill and I wasn’t in the same city. I could order food and have it delivered to them. The service is nothing like cigaret…

> There is nothing wrong with food delivery when used in moderation. This can be said about any addiction. The problem is addiction. If your not an addictive person that’s great, for you, but others are susceptible to addiction.

The OP said the service adds no value to the customer and I was specifically refuting that claim. Everyone knows that most addictive things are ok in moderation (I say most because I would argue things like cigarettes and certain other drugs have no benefits to society or the individuals who use them).

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#159

Post by dmitriid »

hotpotamus wrote: post #156
Hermitian909 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. Peo…

Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technolo…

> We have a few thousand users

> If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much

Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users.

Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries.

Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#160

Post by mech422 »

jlmorton wrote: post #157

> This writer, previously an avid Uber Eats user, now avoids it in almost all cases and instead, orders directly from restaurants, which have mostly built an online ordering systems. Going direct means your food isn’t ruined I don't know if this is confirmation bias, or just a lie to add weight to the thesis, but it's obviously absurd, as anyone who has ever worked for, or even ordered directly from a local restauran…

The key difference for me, is actual pizzeria drivers usually have hot bags..

Whereas, 75% of the time 'app' drivers dont.

Doesn't matter if I'm first or last in line, if the food is cold either way. Its gotten so bad, we're actually surprised when we order straight from say..dominos, and get hot food, instead of cold.

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