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Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

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Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#11

Post by simonw »

hilariously wrote: post #6
simonw wrote: post #2

Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea - especially decisions that shipped and ran in production for several years. This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to whe…

Do you think that the social climbers who approved these obviously crappy projects learned anything? I have worked with all levels of engineers who come into a project glassy eyed about some technology, sure, but if you are part of the team approving a project and you cant produce a realistic budget then your management is bogus as hell. I have worked on a ton of these vanity projects, and when I voice my concerns it…

I've certainly learned a great deal from my own crap glassy-eyed decisions throughout my career.

Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#12

Post by fontain »

Everything is a good idea until it isn’t. The entire industry was enamoured with microservices for far too long. We can look at these mistakes in hindsight and learn from them but we can’t judge them without the context of the time. Software was very different even just 10 years ago. $8m is a rounding error.

Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#14

Post by Esophagus4 »

Hate to say it but kind of a lousy article... zippy writing but lots of Monday Morning Quarterbacking for something the author doesn't seem to show much knowledge of. Maybe this is his style to gin up subscribers, but I'm not a fan.

> But nobody was optimizing for cost. They were optimizing for their next promotion. Each rewrite was a new proposal, a new design doc, a new system to put on a resume. The incentive was never to pick the boring, correct choice — it was to pick the complex, impressive one.

...I guess it could be possible nobody thought about cost at all, and this was all misaligned incentives and resume-driven development, but I find that kind of hard to believe? As someone who has made cost mistakes in the cloud, this claim seems a bit silly.

Not to detract from his experience, but I didn't actually see much payments experience at all on his resume, so I'm curious why he's branding himself as a payments guru. Kind of tech content creation fluff, I guess.

Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#15

Post by websap »

> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe.

People forget how quickly Uber scaled, and the user impact of not being able to track your trips could be catastrophic to retention. There's a class of tech-influencer who think they can dissect past decisions on a blog post without being in the room when the technical constraints were being laid out. This is Monday morning quaterbacking at it's most grotesque.

Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#16

Post by skizm »

In general is there any practical way to fix the issue of "Every rewrite was someone's promotion project"? There doesn't seem to be any incentive for employees to care about projects long term. Keeping something running smoothly is never rewarded the same as launching something new or fixing something broken.

Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#18

Post by pc86 »

hilariously wrote: post #6
simonw wrote: post #2

Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea - especially decisions that shipped and ran in production for several years. This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to whe…

Do you think that the social climbers who approved these obviously crappy projects learned anything? I have worked with all levels of engineers who come into a project glassy eyed about some technology, sure, but if you are part of the team approving a project and you cant produce a realistic budget then your management is bogus as hell. I have worked on a ton of these vanity projects, and when I voice my concerns it…

> Do you think that the social climbers who approved these obviously crappy projects learned anything?

Just the framing of this question makes it seem like you simply don't like people in management / decision-makers, and you want something bad to happen to them. Maybe that's wrong, hopefully it is, but the rest of the comment doesn't do much to dissuade me of that impression either.

Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?

#19

Post by mannykannot »

havnagiggle wrote: post #5
simonw wrote: post #2

Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea - especially decisions that shipped and ran in production for several years. This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to whe…

I went to school with a guy that dropped a $100k-200k VNA at Apple during an internship. He didn't get a full-time offer despite their investment :P

I cannot, of course, speak about this particular incident, but a person inclined to skip procedures expressly implemented to avoid the problem which occurred, or who ignores clear warnings that a problem is developing, is a liability, not a trained asset.
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