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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#101

Post by brap »

bastawhiz wrote: post #92
brap wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project requirements are never fixed, they’re always evolving. It was only a matter of time before users would’ve complained about features being missing/broken, especially since what they’re used to is Excel and this was meant to replace it.

> this was meant to replace it. I think that's a very generous read of what I said the requirements for this product were.

> "The city teams only know how to use Excel, just make it like Excel."

With those expectations, sooner or later someone would have said "hey wait a minute, why isn't this like Excel? Excel knows how to do X, but this can't do X! I thought we talked about this, just make it like Excel!", repeat until you have a full blown Excel.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#102

Post by Tao3300 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #32
sublinear wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite. Software written off the clock that does not compete with the employer is not only not the property of the employer, but any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable. Many businesses even actively encourage their developers to contribute to open source projects.

> any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law? You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?

Because no programmer is going to sign that. They'll go somewhere else. Musicians and writers don't usually have as many options, if any.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#103

Post by yard2010 »

Retric wrote: post #44
erulabs wrote: post #23

I read this article looking forward to the complex bespoke code to be ripped out and deleted - but the author clearly grew as an engineer in a way I didn’t expect: > Sometimes that’s just how it is. The devops saying “Cattle, not pets” is apt here: code (and by proxy, the products built with that code) is cattle. It does a job for you, and when that job is no longer useful, the code is ready to be retired. If you tre…

Exactly, in 2016 there was several off the shelf options for doing the exact same thing. It’s a perfect example of a young engineer feeling a huge accomplishment from reinventing the wheel, and then realizing the clever solution wasn’t actually worth anything like the effort required to create it. I had a long conversation to convince someone not to go down that path in 2006, and I am sure someone’s going to do it in…

I would say what you talk about is experience. To have an experience, you must go this path to realize what to not do. It feels like a catch 22 kind of thing.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#104

Post by bastawhiz »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #99
bastawhiz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the city teams were in China, we didn't have this luxury. Everything had to be behind Uber's beyondcorp equivalent, and there was no real way to auth folks from the Chinese mainland. Our only surface was the browser.

A dedicated satellite link cross pacific is not that much money. Then again maybe the CFO didn't know so he took the easiest known option.

I've always been fond of container ships loaded up with entangled qbits. Much lower latency!

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#106

Post by lph »

Excel is an ancient and complex beast. I get the appeal of building this project---it sounds fun---but trying to duplicate the Excel engine to the level of producing identical outputs is, frankly, bonkers. The author caught the one discrepancy they noticed, circular reference handling, but how many did they miss? How do they know different inputs won't cause it to deviate from Excel? I didn't get the sense from the blog post that this had extensive test coverage. Putting it into use for a business-critical financial calculation is a massive risk, but I guess that's how Uber rolls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It would have been less fun but way, way less risky to wire a headless Excel up to a javascript front-end.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#107

Post by santoshalper »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #57
migf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also absolutely gob smacked at this. Will they care? Probably not. Are you putting yourself at the absolute mercy of them deciding not to care? Absolutely. I would have a hard time sleeping... like this would be like being in IT and knowing the backups were bullshit.

Is this a thing in the US? Here, if the code was written of your own volition outside of work hours then it's yours.

That story just doesn't seem plausible. Maybe for Box, but it feels like a stretch, and definitely not for Uber.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#108

Post by idkyall »

JohnMakin wrote: post #97
idkyall wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the biggest growth areas for junior engineers to reach mid-level and senior is recognizing when you're re-inventing the wheel. E.g. If you are given a programming task to do anything related to Excel or the Microsoft Office suite, it's worth googling it first, because some engineer somewhere was probably tasked with doing the same thing a decade ago and has written a blog post or made a GitHub repo for…

It's not just junior engineers. Senior/management can fall into this trap as well. At one of my former companies we had a small problem with whitelisting cloudflare IP's that don't typically change super duper often but definitely cannot be assumed to be static. My boss at that time decided the solution was this big initiative he called "whitelist maker" and assigned it to me. I don't remember what implementation det…

That's true, it's misleading to say this is a mistake only junior engineers make. Perhaps the real lesson is in having the maturity to put your ego aside and reflect clearly on whether you are solving the right problem in a sustainable way before jumping into the how.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#109

Post by dihrbtk »

bastawhiz wrote: post #81
brap wrote: post #62

> He simply couldn’t believe that I’d written a full spreadsheet engine that ran in the browser. I can't believe it either, and I don't mean this in a good way. Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. We used this in my old workplace for exactly the same reason (functions, cell references, the whole thing), it worked great. You found the ‘circ’ problem wit…

> It seems to me like a bit of googling and >90% of the work here could have been avoided. I had a deadline and the only idea on the team for shipping a working product, and I shipped a working product on time. Uber ran (runs?) their own data center. Getting a Windows machine/VM procured to actually run Excel would have taken an act of god. I was able to spin up a new front-end service in about thirty minutes. And I…

they still run data centers but there is a cloud migration ongoing.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#110

Post by Tao3300 »

pagnol wrote: post #13
mrintegrity wrote: post #2

I get a strangely dystopian feeling from this article, like it's almost about a character in a black mirror episode

I reflexively swiped left when the inevitable newsletter modal started to appear at the bottom, so didn’t finish reading the article, but would like to know what gave you the dystopian vibe?

You should have kept going.

Spoiler alert: It turns out they were fulfilling a Babylonian prophecy the whole time. The whole development cycle was a complicated sacrifice to Marduk.

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