401–410 of 611 posts
Hello Uber Engineer here! Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team ha…
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Slack was evaluated a few times. The reason it was initially rejected when we first considered it is because it wasn't able to handle our scale at the time and the team over at Slack was not interested in prioritizing scaling for us over other things on their product roadmap.
An organization involved in as much sketchy drama as Uber has probably doesn't want its internal communications on someone else's server.
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But the difference is that Han came around at the end of A New Hope , joined the Rebellion, and saved Luke’s ass, which lead to the Death Star’s destruction. This proved he wasn’t a complete scoundrel and had good within him. Uber’s corporate culture was ugly and toxic from the start. And it never got better or “came around” to a good cause. A better analogy would be Anakin moving from small-time massacres of Sand Pe…
The Old Republic was OK with slavery and left Anakin’s mother to die. Any one of us would have done the same in his place.
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I read the book last weekend and am going with my memory (I’ve since lent it out). In the book Travis found out about Lyft’s planned rideshare service and raced to launch UberX first. Alas google has become useless for finding useful information so I hope somebody who still has the book can confirm.
That was referring to Pool / Lyft Line. As others said, Sidecar was technically the first to the "ridesharing" model
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Same in Slovenia, yeah. Call, wait 15 minutes, cab shows up... or not . Again, Uber / Smart Phone tech improves on that, at least they tell you immediately if the driver cancels. (Admittedly, in the old days, the drivers didn't actually cancel, just gave up when they couldn't find your house or you weren't waiting outside at the very right moment... still Uber solves that, mostly.)
> Same in Slovenia, yeah. Call, wait 15 minutes, cab shows up... or not ...I had that happen _once_, and: > at least they tell you immediately if the driver cancels. ...exactly that happened. Amazing, it's like they ask you for your phone number for a reason. This wasn't much of a problem pretty much since cell phones became a mainstay. I am not sure how Uber improves on that, guesses from the travel path that the dr…
With cabs, you're expecting a cabby to call to dispatch that they're not picking you up. A cabby can easily be on the way to pick you up, find someone on the way and never let you know. That's a big difference in both what's possible, and what the reality is: cabbies never let you know if they're not coming in my experience. That said, many cab companies have an app now.
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> None of their application is data heavy Really?? They have O(thousands) of drivers in O(hundreds) of cities with the app open, sending and receiving data approximately all day. What companies in your mind are data heavy?
Can't speak for OP, but I'd imagine most of the data in the system is metadata - i.e. very tiny. Sure they're moving a lot of packets, but an entire ride's data could probably fit in 100KB. If they have a million drivers active, what data do they actually need on them? Profile, GPS location, type? Few KB. Keeping the log of all rides probably takes up the most, but still, relatively small. In any case they essentiall…
Uber gives estimates of when your ride will show up.
They do lots of stuff in fairly real time with that data and a lot of it is probably compute intense.
Not at all comparable to Instagram.
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> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because…
Yeah and why would anyone ever buy a tailor made suit when you can get them off the rack for cheaper?
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> None of their application is data heavy Really?? They have O(thousands) of drivers in O(hundreds) of cities with the app open, sending and receiving data approximately all day. What companies in your mind are data heavy?
Can't speak for OP, but I'd imagine most of the data in the system is metadata - i.e. very tiny. Sure they're moving a lot of packets, but an entire ride's data could probably fit in 100KB. If they have a million drivers active, what data do they actually need on them? Profile, GPS location, type? Few KB. Keeping the log of all rides probably takes up the most, but still, relatively small. In any case they essentiall…
FWIW an Instagram pic, 1080x1080 is around 100kb.
Uber has to do a lot more processing on it's data. I'm sure there are real challenges and the OSS projects from Uber I've seen/remembered on HN seem to be the type one builds because existing tools don't solve the problem well enough for their cases.
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AWS is the opposite of homebrew. Lyft has no business maintaining its own data centers and operational overhead. There is a huge opportunity cost involved with running your own infrastructure. AWS and the like free your own teams from worrying about how to provision new systems, upgrading DB server versions, etc. Running your own data center is hard. Running your own DC is the same as building your own chat app. It i…
I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice. What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet only handles 1M rides per day.
It is sizable, not ridiculous. And optimizing your cloud cost is definitely your own responsibility and deserves every bit of attention.
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AWS is the opposite of homebrew. Lyft has no business maintaining its own data centers and operational overhead. There is a huge opportunity cost involved with running your own infrastructure. AWS and the like free your own teams from worrying about how to provision new systems, upgrading DB server versions, etc. Running your own data center is hard. Running your own DC is the same as building your own chat app. It i…
I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice. What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet only handles 1M rides per day.
That doesn't really sound that bad, considering that rides can easily cost dozens of dollars. Just about any other non-tech business would kill for such low overhead.