Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
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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?
#2Firing 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 where they are.
Related: the classic line commonly attributed to original IBM CEO Thomas John Watson Sr:
“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#3Firing 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 agree. It is a lot of money, but that's the hope from paying engineers well: to make the chances of very expensive mistakes unlikely.
One thing I did think about was how this could have been architected without sufficient reference to costs, which might have been a process or structure improvement.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#4A single engineer should not get fired for an architectural decision that clearly had buy in from many people.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#5Firing 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
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#6Firing 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 its clear nobody is out to learn anything, they are here to look good and avoid looking bad, that's about it.
Get some articles published, go to some conferences, get a new job with a new title somewhere else, laugh on your way out.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#7Firing 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 design decision, lets cover it up with another bad design decision" and repeat, at least judging by this part:
> So let me get this straight: DynamoDB was a bad choice because it was expensive, which is something you could have figured out in advance. You then decided to move everything to an internal data store that had been built for something else3, that was available when you decided to build on top of DynamoDB. And that internal data store wasn’t good on its own, so you had to build a streaming framework to complete the migration.
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.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#8Firing 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 agree. It is a lot of money, but that's the hope from paying engineers well: to make the chances of very expensive mistakes unlikely. One thing I did think about was how this could have been architected without sufficient reference to costs, which might have been a process or structure improvement.
Right - if your engineering organization ships designs that are bad economically, the solution is to introduce a culture of predicting costs before committing to a design, and processes to help enforce that culture.
Add "expected budget, double-checked by at least one other principal engineer" to the project checklist.
Have the person most responsive for the $8m "mistake" be the person to drive that cultural change, since they now have the most credibility for why it's a useful step!
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#9Spotify was another big proponent of DynamoDB, does anybody know how that went?
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#10Submarine article.
Outside of that, it sounds like the system worked perfectly. They launched, they paid DB costs (the 8M was not a ledger mistake) and then they rebuilt after they wanted more cost savings. Also a bunch of folks got promoted.
The 8M came from VCs lighting money on fire. Honestly this seems like the system worked as planned to me, not a case study in how not to do things.