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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?

#51

Post by paphillips »

This article does not make convincing arguments to match the strong criticism. Engineering decisions are difficult, especially in high-growth orgs, where one must balance many constraints and risks including opportunity cost. Handling payments is part of Uber's core product.

The financial criticism ('napkin math') appears to estimate DynamoDB costs of USD $8 million for 2017 to 2020. Uber revenue for the same period is roughly USD $42.5 billion, thus this cost weighs in at about 0.02%, or 1/50th of one percent. This is a rounding error for a high growth company, and not something that warrants a witch-hunt and firing. It's easy to blow more than $2 million per year on software engineers in pursuit of an alternative high-scalability solution.

I'm also not on board with the 'resume driven development' criticism as the explanation for solution churn. Perhaps that is actually what happened. I wasn't there and don't know, but if that is being asserted I expect to see evidence presented to support it.

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

#53

Post by pjc50 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #35
otherme123 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I guess if that's your experience of letting toxic people go, maybe everyone you worked with was toxic? The usual reacttion I see from teams when firing people who seem to make a project/product worse instead of better, tends to be a sigh of relief and a communal feeling of "Lets get back to business". Firing people making bad choices, people tend to appreciate that. Firing people making good choices? Yeah, I'd under…

No, he's right.

Remember you can conduct only one of the two different types of postmortem, the air crash style blameless one (to find out what happened) and the blame-based one (to find out who to punish). Once you conduct the latter, everyone psychologically "lawyers up". You get a lot more meetings. A lot more paper trail. A lot more delay. You don't just pick a database, you commission a sub-committee for database choice to review the available options over the next six months.

That's why government / civil service operations are so slow. They operate in a very high blame political environment.

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

#55

Post by mrWiz »

Aurornis wrote: post #41
noodlesUK wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure - the level of scrutiny that usage/abusage of expensive equipment gets varies wildly from organisation to organisation. I've worked in some places where very expensive equipment is handled roughly, or even taken home in some cases. In others, there are meticulous procedures for even $1-5k pieces of equipment. It's just a cultural thing.

For this example it’s the delicacy and fragility of the instrument, the price is just a proxy for that. Expensive VNAs are also precision, calibrated instruments with small connectors that can easily be degraded by even simple misuse. Frontends destroyed or subtly damaged in ways that break measurements by allowing the wrong signal to enter. It’s easy to damage one in a way that will interfere with measurements for m…

The obvious answer is because VNAs are heavy and the person who would otherwise have to carry it isn't the person who has to pay for a replacement.

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

#56

Post by askbjoernhansen »

The author clearly hasn't worked for a big company. An $8m mistake? Meh, not great, but it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Seen worse.

Oh, it was $8m over several years? That's a couple of projects that didn't pan out, or a small team that wasn't firing on all cylinders for a stretch.

Nobody got fired because there was nothing unusual to fire anyone for.

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

#57

Post by embedding-shape »

pjc50 wrote: post #53
embedding-shape wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if that's your experience of letting toxic people go, maybe everyone you worked with was toxic? The usual reacttion I see from teams when firing people who seem to make a project/product worse instead of better, tends to be a sigh of relief and a communal feeling of "Lets get back to business". Firing people making bad choices, people tend to appreciate that. Firing people making good choices? Yeah, I'd under…

No, he's right. Remember you can conduct only one of the two different types of postmortem, the air crash style blameless one (to find out what happened) and the blame-based one (to find out who to punish). Once you conduct the latter, everyone psychologically "lawyers up". You get a lot more meetings. A lot more paper trail. A lot more delay. You don't just pick a database, you commission a sub-committee for databas…

Right, so say we have this situation where you're choosing a SQL database. The organization made a choice that leads to lots of complications, where often times the reason for the complication is because the organization made yet another bad choice. Repeat a couple of times.

We do a blameless postmortem about each one of these, where essentially we only focus on the root causes of the actual problems, but somehow it never comes up that there was one individual who made those bad choices over and over, which lead to the situations arising in the first place.

Do you just never address this? Do you continue to say "Well, it wasn't X's fault, it's the system around X that let X make that decision that needs fixing" even when it repeats, and the humans involved can already see what's going on?

In my mind you need to be able to address bad behavior in organizations where choices have an impact on something produced, otherwise we cannot change the quality what is being produced, or prevent production issues, since it's based on the choices we make, and if "we" make bad choices, the quality will be bad.

Ultimately I agree with you in more serious engineering-heavy domains, like airplanes and what not, and it's a sane default mode, to try to address what's happening around rather than decisions by individuals. But I also don't think that should mean that other domains aren't better served by some hybrid model, especially when it's about producing artifacts of some sort, and similar things.

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

#59

Post by wat10000 »

The breathless tone of this article is irritating. Was this a bad decision? Maybe. Is $8 million some vast amount that merits this sort of wide-eyed crazy ranting? Uber's 2020 revenue was around $11 billion, so I'm going to say no, not really. Obviously you don't want to burn millions willy-nilly, but for such a critical component, this isn't so terrible.

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

#60

Post by infecto »

I have a hard time following the thesis. I know Uber is famous for overbuilding in house but this example does not feel defensible. 2020 revenue was $11bn. 2024 revenue is $44bn. $8mm is not very material in the grand scheme. Could it be optimized? Maybe but I don’t know the full surface area and this article is overly aggressive with opinions. $250k a year just for writes sounds cheap to me when your top line is in the billions.
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