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A former Uber engineer's disaster story

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Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#281

Post by Bayart »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #69

I'm reminded of the story of Windows NT and how David Cutler commented at one point after the release that divorces and nervous breakdowns were tracked in the program metrics. I expect that's hyperbole, but there is a real cost to these death marches. I couldn't find that specific quote, though, and being 25 years back it could be a false memory of who said it (I did read it somewhere, if you were on the team at the…

I find it fascinating that so much engineers (arguably « smart » people) are actively hurting themselves over a freaking job and acting as if it were just a fact of life.

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#282

Post by andrewprock »

trimbo wrote: post #88
staplung wrote: post #27

I've lost track of the number of "biggest engineering disaster" stories I've read that begin "so we decided to rewrite it..." The story arc is almost always the same: starts out very promising and moves quickly, then at some point the wheels come off but everyone keeps going. Anyway, Joel Spolsky nailed it 20 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Couple things always to mind whenever this article is referenced. Joel's example is Mozilla, but Mozilla ultimately became more successful than Netscape (in terms of userbase with Firefox). Was the problem really the rewrite, or that a browser company was doomed anyway and the rewrite exacerbated it? Also the article was published just a year before Microsoft pulled off what's maybe the most successful large rewrite…

I don't think you can consider Windows NT to be a rewrite of DOS. They were different products entirely, and existed in the marketplace concurrently for upwards of a decade.

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#284

Post by trimbo »

andrewprock wrote: post #282
trimbo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple things always to mind whenever this article is referenced. Joel's example is Mozilla, but Mozilla ultimately became more successful than Netscape (in terms of userbase with Firefox). Was the problem really the rewrite, or that a browser company was doomed anyway and the rewrite exacerbated it? Also the article was published just a year before Microsoft pulled off what's maybe the most successful large rewrite…

I don't think you can consider Windows NT to be a rewrite of DOS. They were different products entirely, and existed in the marketplace concurrently for upwards of a decade.

Microsoft took their entire userbase and successfully shifted them from DOS (and then Windows on DOS) to NT. They did it in a piecemeal fashion with e.g. Windows 95 and WIN32.

What else you would call it?

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#285

Post by andrewprock »

trimbo wrote: post #284
andrewprock wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can consider Windows NT to be a rewrite of DOS. They were different products entirely, and existed in the marketplace concurrently for upwards of a decade.

Microsoft took their entire userbase and successfully shifted them from DOS (and then Windows on DOS) to NT. They did it in a piecemeal fashion with e.g. Windows 95 and WIN32. What else you would call it?

I would call it "different products entirely".

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#286

Post by sond813 »

spoonjim wrote: post #280
sond813 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an iOS engineer at Airbnb when we were battling binary size increases caused by Swift. I rewrote the watch app twice; once to migrate to watchOS 2 and once to convert it all to ObjC (which saved ~9mb). While Swift does have its problems (and had a lot more back when we worked on this), there are many factors to why the Uber app (and Airbnb) is getting so large. Airbnb is 75% executables, 9.5% assets and 8% loca…

How do you know all these facts about the Uber app? Can you inspect the binary?

Parts of the binary on the App Store are encrypted so we can only get limited information from it, but the whole app bundle is available and the rest of the files are not encrypted. We’re building a startup to help monitor, analyze and reduce app size and I was able to quickly grab these statistics from the tool we’re working on, here’s a link to a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x-hLxxUNm8

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#287

Post by lock-free »

lhorie wrote: post #235
lock-free wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of ways to frame these problems as interesting algorithms but it doesn't really strike me as something that is troubled by scale. I've worked on similar problems where "everything is a special case" in some vein and it takes a few very clever minds to construct the algorithms and datastructures that can come to a good solution. But that's just it, it's the work of a few engineers and not thousands wri…

A helpful way to think of it is by comparing how Uber and an OS GUI are different (since that's the comparison people are making, anyways) With an operating system UI, the developer may reasonably know what the UI will look like, what features are present, where they are placed. With Uber, a single person may not know all the rules for a single feature, and the rules change frequently, sometimes in the most obtuse wa…

That's a bad comparison and I'm not sure why people are making it - you're mistaking fundamentals. This isn't a UI problem, it's datastructures and algorithms. There are plenty of desktop apps with similar issues (representing a complex problem as a set of constraints and writing a solver to find a solution, and querying the solution for the data to display to a user).

I don't reject that there are troubles in concerting real world data into a representation for the constraint solver. But this isn't untrodden ground, and there's no reason a front end developer should need to care about it. The problems you're describing are far behind the UI; and if they're not your organization has immense problems.

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#288

Post by scottlamb »

> As a consequence of all these problems, there began to be a growing movement across all levels of the org that was rallying around the idea of “rewriting the app from scratch” The general sentiment was that the architecture was slowing us down, starting over would be faster.

I've read plenty of these stories where a rewrite was a total disaster. (Most famously, Netscape.) I've seen and/or lived through some too. (One where a major distributed system was completely changing its storage model, and it was thought refactoring was impossible. In hindsight, it was achievable and would have saved _years_.)

Anyone have examples of regretting a refactoring to the same extent?

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#289

Post by hajimemash »

XorNot wrote: post #37

The "curmudgeon" ending line in this story rubs me the wrong way. The ObjC people were right, basically, and it seems like the problem was essentially no one in the right place was going to drop Swift at that point. Seems less like they weren't offering answers, so much as the answer wasn't "but we'll do some stuff and fix Swift!" Though the 6 library limit and how that wasn't a gigantic red flag on the language is b…

The emphasis could be on their behavior of 'complaining without providing much in the way of solutions'. Certainly, though obvious now, they could have empirically presented at least one legitimate case as to why Obj-C was a better choice (app size).

Re: A former Uber engineer's disaster story

#290

Post by notional »

rsp1984 wrote: post #248

The engineering org had doubled in sized almost every year prior ... Teams began shifting all their focus to bringing their features to the new app ... Apple’s recommend maximum number of libraries in a single binary was 6. We had 92 and counting ... But as the app kept growing. Soon we hit the cellar [sic] download limit (100 mb) for our universal binaries ... All this time the Swift code growth continued ... discov…

It's also interesting to look back at the internal politics of Uber at this time. [1]

There's also a bunch of big articles on VPs quitting during this time. It was peak Uber controversy with the sexual harassment scandals, Waymo stolen IP, TK resigning, Fowler, spying, backdoors, etc. Reading the headlines in the algolia search is like a telenovela.

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber (Susan Fowler) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022

I am an Uber survivor - https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...

Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600873

How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564

Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14200486

Uber's Design Meltdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11109272

Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13163895

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1512691200&dateRange=custom&...

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