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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?

#21

Post by otherme123 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #7
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…

> Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea I mean, if we're considering factors that could make fire a developer, suggesting, pushing and eventually failing to implement bad designs and architectures probably ranks among some of the more reasonable reasons for firing them. It doesn't seem to have been "Oops we used MariaDB when we should have used MySQL" but more like "We made a bad…

> But on the other hand, I'd probably fire the manager/executive responsible for that move, rather than the individual developer who probably suggested it.

And you just teached all your workers to be as cautious as being freezed, never be proactive, keep the status quo as much as they can, avoid being noticed, and never take a step without being forced or having someone else to take 100% blame (with paper trail) if things go south.

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

#22

Post by AbrahamParangi »

the author overestimates how much ~$5M/yr actually is. a business like uber isn't happy about that but it's not even in the top 10 of things they're wasting money on. moreover this isn't the engineer's sole fault it is more the fault of whoever actually approved the expense.

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

#23

Post by pimlottc »

websap wrote: post #15

> 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 gro…

Yeah, I don't know the specific trade-offs here, but taking on some tech debt for two years of successful growth is not necessary a bad deal.

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

#24

Post by Aurornis »

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

> Somebody Should Have Been Fired For This

This person is not a good resource. Uber was a very fast growing company, both in terms of their product and staff. Turnover in architecture happens. Calling this a catastrophe and click baiting about firing engineers over a rounding error in Uber’s overall finances is gross.

I understand this person is trying to grow their Substack with these inflammatory claims but I hope HN readers aren’t falling for it. This person’s takes are bad and they’re doing it to try to get you to become a subscriber. This is hindsight engineering from someone who wasn’t there.

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

#26

Post by refulgentis »

skizm wrote: post #16

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.

Not really: it’s a lazy pejorative, in this case written by an LLM, not a description of reality. It’s honestly one of the stupider ideas that has caché, it seems to only survive by repetition.

Here, the tell is you’re not gonna get a multibillion dollar company on hockey stick growth to switch storage because you want to get promoted.

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

#27

Post by Aurornis »

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

Letting interns carry six figure equipment, which would also be unexpectedly heavy especially if this happened some years ago, would be a weird thing for any lab I’ve worked in. There are too many things that can predictably go wrong in the hands of an inexperienced person, as happened here.

Interns wouldn’t even be allowed to use $100K VNAs without a lot of supervision because so many things can go wrong. Damaging one of those small precision connectors is easy to do and can be a costly repair that brings delays to the lab, and that’s before you even start making measurements.

I wonder if part of the offense was that the intern was breaking protocol by moving the equipment. Alternatively they probably failed to explain the rules and expectations to the intern. Or maybe some lazy engineer tried to pawn off their work on to an intern without thinking about the consequence.

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

#28

Post by Aurornis »

pc86 wrote: post #18
hilariously wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cutting down anyone who gets a promotion or finds success is a culture in itself (see Tall Poppies Syndrome for example). Factual accuracy is not a concern, they only want to be angry at people in higher positions.

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

#30

Post by mattmanser »

pimlottc wrote: post #23
websap wrote: post #15

> 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 gro…

Yeah, I don't know the specific trade-offs here, but taking on some tech debt for two years of successful growth is not necessary a bad deal.

You can read the article and see it's not a tech debt trade off but someone not doing a back of the envelope guesstimate about how much DyanmoDB would cost to run their payments system on it.
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