551–560 of 689 posts
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Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor. On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.
How can a person working on features tell the difference between critical and non-critical features?
It looks like Dara is executing the Jack Welch & General Electric playbook [1]. Essentially, it comes down to "Be the #1 or #2 company in the market or exit" You can debate whether it was successful at GE. The criticism of Jack Welch was that his approach improved short-term financials, but he left a hollowed-out company to his successor that became irrelevant and lost value relative to the S&P. The way I see this pl…
> I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.
They're mostly focused on the scooters now (or, well, yesterday) but many cities have bikeshare systems backed by Uber.
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"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it." This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for th…
I travel to India, a lot, as I have family there. Pre-Uber days, here's what it took to get an auto-rickshaw (also called "auto"): you walk up to the "auto stand" where you see some auto drivers lounging. As they see you walk up, they size you up; and immediately jack up the prices they're going to quote you as they see you don't seem a local. If you turn one of them down, the others will simply refuse to talk to you…
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right. this recession is actually giving cover to let go of a lot of bloat that has built up over the years.
Well, freeing it up to compete. I expect some of the bloat is just so that someone can't work for a competitor.
Software has way gone out of the stage where one person keep the recipe for the secret sauce, and could change the game.
No one is irreplacable.
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What I wonder is how often the "remove" operation happens. I'd wager it's more likely there are many services doing variations of the same thing, but existing ones are hard to kill because there is a web of dependencies.
If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.
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>suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects. When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situation…
I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment. Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude. But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without…
Three questions.
(1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?"
(2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?"
(3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utterly failed?"
(Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)
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What I wonder is how often the "remove" operation happens. I'd wager it's more likely there are many services doing variations of the same thing, but existing ones are hard to kill because there is a web of dependencies.
If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.
How exactly is their stock price not reflecting this at all? Is the market really that irrational right now?
Their stock price will go up.
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If they're hard to kill because there are a web of dependencies then I would argue they are doing microservices wrong.
No matter what you call it, if something can trivially be killed off, was it providing any real value in the first place? Dependencies aren't just things satisfied by linkers.
That doesn't mean it never provided value, just that there are now better alternatives.
No doubt this is accelerating certain motivators, but I for one am a little sick of the "COVID Excuse" for blaming aspects of these non-business plans that were bad ideas without a global pandemic on which to blame them.