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And very clearly LLM written. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but it does. And I know I do it too.
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
31–40 of 86 posts
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#32> Every rewrite was someone’s promotion project.
At least when I worked at Uber, that wasn't really how it worked. The eng org was so big that it was nearly impossible to track all the projects people worked on, and you'd get micro-ecosystems of tools because of it.
Some grew large, others stayed quite "local".
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#33What's an $8m mistake to a company like Uber? They made $9.8bn in profits in 2024.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#34$8m is a lot of money for us working stiffs, but it's about 0.03% of their 2025 profits.
Hindsight is 20/20. Not saying they did the right thing, but they may have had specific performance reasons for originally going with DynamoDB.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 understand that would freeze people and make them avoid making proactive choices, try to not do that obviously.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#36This seems like dramatically overstating the mistake. Yeah it was expensive, and yes this could easily been foreseen, but that’s really small potatoes compared to mistakes I’ve seen. I mean I’ve seen promos off shit that never even fully worked beyond pilot scale and had to be rolled back because it was fundamentally flawed on purely technical level.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#37Firing 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…
Also the article doesn’t attempt to explore the business and resourcing constraints they were operating under at the time.
I have been in situations where I was told “don’t worry about cost just get it done”. Then a few years later the business constraints shift and now we need to “worry about the cost”. It ignores that decisions made under a different set of constraints were correct, or at least reasonable, at the time but things change.
One of my pet peeves is when people say “do it right the first time” but the definition of “right” often changes over time. If the only major flaw of this design was that it was expensive; then I am much more skeptical that it was wrong given the original set of conditions that they were operating under.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#38Firing 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…
Also the article doesn’t attempt to explore the business and resourcing constraints they were operating under at the time. I have been in situations where I was told “don’t worry about cost just get it done”. Then a few years later the business constraints shift and now we need to “worry about the cost”. It ignores that decisions made under a different set of constraints were correct, or at least reasonable, at the t…
I think it's important for leadership to clearly define what right is in these cases, too, otherwise, you get as many ddefinitions of "right" as you have people, times, and places.
Easy to say, but it's a real human cost to relying on people to figure out what you mean rather than explaining what you mean. Not enough time is spent on cultivating effective communication and training. Everyone wants everything done yesterday and don't feel like investing in their own people.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Letting interns carry six figure equipment, which would also be unexpectedly heavy especially if this happened some years ago, would be a weird thing for any lab I’ve worked in. There are too many things that can predictably go wrong in the hands of an inexperienced person, as happened here. Interns wouldn’t even be allowed to use $100K VNAs without a lot of supervision because so many things can go wrong. Damaging o…
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.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#40> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe
I mean, given how quickly things can change I think the language and sentiment here isn't quite right, it's just how businesses can change and we can't necessarily control that.