Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#101

Post by cworth » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

exhaze wrote: post #61

As someone who worked at Uber from 2014-2018, I'd like to weigh in with some observations based on my experience. 1). While Uber has been very Bay Area-heavy, it has had a distributed engineering team for many of its core operations for a very long time. For example, many of its core infrastructure was built in Europe. Cross-timezone collaboration hasn't been the smoothest, but of all the large "FANGish" tech compani…

> of all the large "FANGish" tech companies, Uber actually has the most experience with non-HQ teams building business-critical systems.

Tangential, but the core product of AWS, EC2, was developed in South Africa and (largely) continues to be today.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#102

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #100

ghaff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley (mostly) is "the suburbs." Although there are more tech jobs in downtowns than there used to be, in a lot of areas most of the tech jobs are in suburbs/exurbs.

It's a bit different here on the East Coast. While there are plenty of options in the suburbs - the number within an individuals commuting radius drops.

There are a lot of pretty bad commutes in SV too.

I live (well) outside of Boston. About 20 years ago, there wasn't a single real tech employer in the city. That's changed primarily with Kendall and the Seaport. But there's still a huge amount in Metrowest and some in the northern suburbs going up to southern NH.

I've been lucky that through several jobs I've never had a really bad commute except into Boston for a time--but I didn't have to do it every day and there is a commuter rail.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#103

Post by anonms-coward » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

just-juan-post wrote: post #52

ageofwant wrote: post #25

Well this has worked great for Boeing, a once great American engineering company. On the other hand India has an excellent education system and highly skilled engineers, and any capital flow away from the five big cities in the world that sinks the vast majority of it can only be a good thing.

> India has an excellent education system and highly skilled engineers This year old article disagrees. https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/indian-engine...

That article is misleading. India has a huge amount of people going into Engineering, and calculating what % of engineers (not CS engineers, or even CS+ electrical engineers) can code, is a useless metric. Not to mention, a textile engineer not being able to code doesn't have anything to do with engineering quality. And the survey has many useless stats like that.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#104

Post by new2628 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #99

new2628 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of your peers is an important feature of any educational system (if not the most important) -- by that measure alone the top institutes in India are excellent. The top researchers/professors at those institutes are also a product of the same institutes, and the same selection process, so the top institutes are generally of a high standard (in terms of workload, choice of topics, teaching quality, etc.). A…

I don't think that is relevant to the education system still. That is a very small share of Indian student population. 15k/37.4 million. What do you think about reservation in those institutions? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian_I... 2. https://theprint.in/india/education/iits-take-womens-quota-t... 3. For 10% poor all catch reservation which will be implemented soon - https://www.hindust…

I'm not indian, so I only see the surface of all the socio-economic issues, some of which go way back -- as far as I know, the reservation issue is highly charged and sensitive (similarly to gender/race issues in the US), and I have no strong opinion on them.

As far as I see, all energy spent railing against the reservation system is better spent improving yourself.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#105

Post by searchableguy » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

new2628 wrote: post #104

searchableguy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is relevant to the education system still. That is a very small share of Indian student population. 15k/37.4 million. What do you think about reservation in those institutions? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian_I... 2. https://theprint.in/india/education/iits-take-womens-quota-t... 3. For 10% poor all catch reservation which will be implemented soon - https://www.hindust…

I'm not indian, so I only see the surface of all the socio-economic issues, some of which go way back -- as far as I know, the reservation issue is highly charged and sensitive (similarly to gender/race issues in the US), and I have no strong opinion on them. As far as I see, all energy spent railing against the reservation system is better spent improving yourself.

I only mentioned it because you said that the consistent brutal selection process is a feature.

> As far as I see, all energy spent railing against the reservation system is better spent improving yourself.

You have approximately 60% seats reserved, the remaining 40% seats are left for everyone else to compete on equal grounds.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#106

Post by slenk » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

cworth wrote: post #101

exhaze wrote: post #61

As someone who worked at Uber from 2014-2018, I'd like to weigh in with some observations based on my experience. 1). While Uber has been very Bay Area-heavy, it has had a distributed engineering team for many of its core operations for a very long time. For example, many of its core infrastructure was built in Europe. Cross-timezone collaboration hasn't been the smoothest, but of all the large "FANGish" tech compani…

> of all the large "FANGish" tech companies, Uber actually has the most experience with non-HQ teams building business-critical systems. Tangential, but the core product of AWS, EC2, was developed in South Africa and (largely) continues to be today.

Huh, I didn't know that.

Although I would argue that S3 is the core product

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#107

Post by playeren » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

tijuco2 wrote: post #88

I was a Uber driver for two years and year after year they keep saying they are struggling. I really don't get it. On a ride where passenger pays 20 bucks, they usually keep something like 8 dollars. How can it not be profitable? The computational and human resource necessary to make a ride happen can't be that high. Maybe they should fire their CTO and CFO.

It's the growth that costs money.

Operational costs have only recently become a concern, after becoming publicly traded.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#108

Post by KingOfCoders » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

wobbly_bush wrote: post #85

KingOfCoders wrote: post #32

The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times. Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the quality of the engineers. Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).

> The challenge with outsourcing This article is not talking about outsourcing but offshoring. Uber still has total control on the people, the project and rewarding the right behavior. It will just happen in India instead of the US.

Working for a very large tech company as a technical manager with lots of offshoring to India and outsourcing to East-Europe and the Middle-East it didn't feel there was a difference between how outsourcing and offshoring worked regarding engineer quality or turn around times.

But you are right.