> Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8 Million Ledger Mistake?
> Somebody Should Have Been Fired For This
> And nobody got fired for this?
Not once do they explain what firing someone would actually improve?!
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you think that the social climbers who approved these obviously crappy projects learned anything? Just the framing of this question makes it seem like you simply don't like people in management / decision-makers, and you want something bad to happen to them. Maybe that's wrong, hopefully it is, but the rest of the comment doesn't do much to dissuade me of that impression either.
Something bad to happen to "them"? There's no diaphanous them, just the specific social climbing crap decision makers facing no consequences of any type. I have worked with many hard working and caring managers, and they are generally eclipsed by said social climbers presenting at conferences every other week about know-nothing topics jumping from place to place leaving bankrupt companies and massive layoffs in their…
>There's no diaphanous them
Autocorrect mistake? I doubt anyone was imaging semi-transparent beings wafting gently in a summer breeze.
So what would you call your alternative to blameless postmortems? FWIW, "walking the plank" is already in use.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you think that the social climbers who approved these obviously crappy projects learned anything? Just the framing of this question makes it seem like you simply don't like people in management / decision-makers, and you want something bad to happen to them. Maybe that's wrong, hopefully it is, but the rest of the comment doesn't do much to dissuade me of that impression either.
Something bad to happen to "them"? There's no diaphanous them, just the specific social climbing crap decision makers facing no consequences of any type. I have worked with many hard working and caring managers, and they are generally eclipsed by said social climbers presenting at conferences every other week about know-nothing topics jumping from place to place leaving bankrupt companies and massive layoffs in their…
Why are you thinking more about the people that piss you off than the ones that you consider hard working and caring?
You have a massive chip on your shoulder, dare I say that's why you've had many caring managers and now you're seeing them all as 'social climbers'.
Did one manager call you out on something and you torched the entire thing?
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#74> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe. > Somebody Should Have Been Fired For This This person is not a good resource. Uber was a very fast growing company, both in terms of their product and staff. Turnover in architecture happens. Calling this a catastrophe and click baiting about firing engineers over a rounding error in Uber’s overall finances is gross. I understand this person is trying t…
Uber does extensive leetcode interviews to weed out the best of the best developers just like FAANG. How could such a bad developer have been hired with this process in place and proceed to make such an expensive bad decision?
It’s almost as if gatekeeping the correct developers isn’t working. So yeah somebody should get fired. They screened to prevent this. It wasn’t prevented.
Otherwise admit the screen doesn’t work and fire the gatekeepers who are relying on it and the inverted selection of correct engineers.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#75$8M sounds like a lot, but (a) the cost of making a material financial mistake c an easily dwarf this, and (b) the cost of the engineers maintaining the system was likely about this expensive anyway. And infra is expensive when you're Uber. It all seems rather overblown to me.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#76> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe. > Somebody Should Have Been Fired For This This person is not a good resource. Uber was a very fast growing company, both in terms of their product and staff. Turnover in architecture happens. Calling this a catastrophe and click baiting about firing engineers over a rounding error in Uber’s overall finances is gross. I understand this person is trying t…
I don’t know if the author here is intentionally clickbaiting or somehow ignorant about the scale Uber is operating at.
This was particularly egregious:
> If you’re building a system that makes the economics of your company impossible, you’re better off not building it.
If I’m understanding the timeline here, Uber replaced this system in 2019, and saved 8 million doing so. In 2019 their revenue was something like 13 billion dollars. In no world was this system making the economics of Uber impossible.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#77Hate to say it but kind of a lousy article... zippy writing but lots of Monday Morning Quarterbacking for something the author doesn't seem to show much knowledge of. Maybe this is his style to gin up subscribers, but I'm not a fan. > But nobody was optimizing for cost. They were optimizing for their next promotion. Each rewrite was a new proposal, a new design doc, a new system to put on a resume. The incentive was…
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Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something bad to happen to "them"? There's no diaphanous them, just the specific social climbing crap decision makers facing no consequences of any type. I have worked with many hard working and caring managers, and they are generally eclipsed by said social climbers presenting at conferences every other week about know-nothing topics jumping from place to place leaving bankrupt companies and massive layoffs in their…
Why are you thinking more about the people that piss you off than the ones that you consider hard working and caring? You have a massive chip on your shoulder, dare I say that's why you've had many caring managers and now you're seeing them all as 'social climbers'. Did one manager call you out on something and you torched the entire thing?
Are we reading the same comment? GP clearly separated the "caring managers" from the "LinkedIn corposlop ladder climbers", and even explicitly stated the issue with the latter is that they are usurping the former in moving up the ranks of the corporate hierarchy.
This isn't unique to GP either, it's not exactly uncommon nowadays for people to hate the corpo-techbro MBA LinkedIn archetype.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#79Can I do a mea culpa? This is more than 3 decades back. I was a junior programmer (2-3 years in industry) sent to a client site in europe. You can imagine the state of systems those days. I wrote (or rather updated) a fix which would updated the discount and tax rates on orders based on new terms. It would run every day to account for ... whatever. You pick the values from master file, update all the orders and move…
If a single non-malicious code change can break a thing like that with nobody noticing that's a catastrophic failure in testing, QA, and operations (nobody noticed 20% of euros transacted just stopped). It's hard to blame that on IC engineer.
I know that, now. But apart from this incident being in the annals of time as it relates to my work, there absolutely was no fallout, which my mind could not comprehend in those days.
Re: Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something bad to happen to "them"? There's no diaphanous them, just the specific social climbing crap decision makers facing no consequences of any type. I have worked with many hard working and caring managers, and they are generally eclipsed by said social climbers presenting at conferences every other week about know-nothing topics jumping from place to place leaving bankrupt companies and massive layoffs in their…
>There's no diaphanous them Autocorrect mistake? I doubt anyone was imaging semi-transparent beings wafting gently in a summer breeze. So what would you call your alternative to blameless postmortems? FWIW, "walking the plank" is already in use.
I was imagining it, as the people who are the ghostly images of the "them" out "there" that are often referred to when people are generally upset at authority or the system, that's not what I was trying to talk about.
I'd say the pirates had it right and keel hauling is the way to go.