Joking aside I enjoyed that video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY - for those who didn't see it), the presenter was pretty honest and way more open than I expected. I'm just so curious how those services break down - if it's genuinely on the "lstrip as a service" level or whatever, whether that's "1,000 services" figure was actually a relatively simple API with 10 versions at various levels of deprecation, whether he meant it was 1,000 different service endpoints (250 services each with POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) or what. I want to know more basically :)

I am usually not someone who falls into the "what do they need so many people for, it should be simple"-trap but I was still surprised to learn that Lyft has 400 engineers and Twilio has around 300 too. I am note sure they would be that big if they had to finance everything out of their profits, but i guess it's a good way to maximize progress, on the other hand they also had a lot of challenges with growing dev teams.

They definitely have sales roles in more recent years and have a sales ops team [1][2][3]. The Federal channel manager description even acknowledges that there's unique challenges in selling to the government that necessitates someone that knows the different contracting vehicles. What they've done with little turn to sales culture is pretty admirable but at the same time only possible with organic, engineer-to-engineer driven growth Github and Atlassian suites.

Salesforce grew somewhat similarly via rogue accounts on expense accounts, but to actually clinch the biggest growth there was no way to avoid salespeople to get over $500MM in revenue probably.

[1] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/99086565 [2] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/95395260 [3] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/93068238

Yea, looking at the employee page for Stack Overflow shows a vast majority of the staff being in sales.

Well VCs want to know what their money does. So expect a large part of controlling.

I'm definitely not claiming to know what's good/bad for a company I've never worked for, I'm saying the perception from outside is that companies hit these sizes, hire massive amounts of people to do something, and then the products almost universally become worse.

Maybe it's just big-company-itis.

What features has Twitter shipped? Moments??? Pfft.

On the contrary I'd argue they've hardly done anything new, and that is why they are struggling. Think of all the things Facebook has done and abandoned in the same time.

But I like Twitter - I just wished they fixed some pretty obvious issues. I mean... Tweetstorms are like a request for a feature right there, and Twitter's response is... silence.

Dod that small expert team polish the product and maintained it for the next 2 years?

Something about 80%/20% rule...

Slack also jsut recently hit 3 million users. 100 million people were using AOL Messenger at it's peak, and 12 million were using ICQ when AOL bought Mirabillas.

Whatsapp is a good example too.

Yes, but that's something a lot of people are arguing here and I agree. The "I could build in a week" is ridiculous, but "I could what this 1000 engineers company do that with a small team of 10, in a lean way in 18 months" is very frequent in the market.

MSN and AOL come from the 90s, and Skype is from 2003. Slack is from 2013 - the web has more than doubled in age for Slack compared to the others. Computers are ridiculously faster, browsers are more mature, language libraries are more complete.

Slack also took much longer than a week, and to be honest, the actual chat part of slack is pretty meh. Where Slack unbelievably shines is in the buttery-smooth onboarding process and the management around the chat accounts.

git is a great example of this.

Certainly not if you are VC driven.

What the hell that's insane...

heres a youtube link for those interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY

Does that include everybody working on autonomous driving and related 'side projects'?

I agree with you and parent that it is (and should) be a > 20 person job for its scale, but the career page is probably not the best example.

Many of those positions are perpetually open or rotated periodically (see: "You're leaking trade secrets" by Michael Schrenk) while the actual position was given to someone internal or someone connected to someone else internal to the firm.

Most of these pages are used for resume harvesting so that [if the firm has resources] an HR or technical recruiter can periodically evaluate the rest of the field. The firms holding out for the "rock star" often are more aggressive in recruiting them (whether at Job fairs or through LinkedIn headhunting).

Are you serious? With many 9s of uptime, low latency requirements and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the line? Uber employs over 2k developers right now.

Don't forget cars that drive themselves

Did you read the article? In it, the author discusses the engineering issues that arise from trying to deal tackling problems in different languages. Now, granted, Uber in this particular thread of discussion does not have to deal with tokenization issues of Japanese/Chinese character search strings but I think it is naive to not think that the nuances of individual communities of 400+ cities intra-country, let alone dealing with separate nations, will add significant engineering overhead... (even if the relationship is not linear)

Perhaps you're right when it comes to scaling, but you're assuming that the system was designed correctly in the first place, which would be impressive imo. There is also a lot of failure handling and recovery that needs to be done gracefully, which I think would be complicated for a session-based system.

Again, I'm no expert, just making educated guesses!

I agree with you completely. I think a lot more effort is required once you are running the system at scale. Since I don't have experience with running Uber, I'm simply making an educated guess as to what kind of complexity is involved.

In addition the whole "we code for a better world" is just HR marketing to attract engineers. Sure there are companies that have innovative areas and oppurtunities, but many engineers are just code monkeys fullfilling daily duty without glory.

I read an article the other day that claimed Uber was beating Lyft because they had a strategy of opening a physical office in each city, having an office for drivers to sign up, and a human being who tailored things for that location. Their rival on the other hand assumed that some programmers in SF could do everything neccessary from a distance. Not sure how true it is, but it seemed an interesting theory.

Most apps are crud at the end of the day. Making them scale is the hard part.

Well, that's the thing - they are just a CRUD app in a lot of ways. Even at "uber scale" it really isn't that bad, it'd be a few incremental challenges but nothing a small team couldn't handle from a technical perspective. The catch though is that on top of that CRUD app is a business which involves some serious legal and marketing divisions to make that app work.

The tech may be simple, but the business side of it certainly isn't. The "I could hack that up in a weekend" attitude is often true - but it only covers the bare basics of the software it doesn't even attempt to address the business, which if often where the real struggle is these days. Especially if your background is development. I think many engineers still say this knowingly though, just to (perhaps incorrectly) scoff at the value of good business people.

It could just use the open the doors button with some hysteresis for opening/closing doors few times in a row in some short time.

That's how it works in our (German) city. It works great.

How often do you want the driver to press buttons? And how do you mark the intermediate positions in between bus stops? Because on any remotely complicated high congestion route, you will not get reasonable estimates if you only update at bus stops.

I think you missed the implied /s

I think the GP was being sarcastic ;)

That's why bus drivers get training. And if they don't perform as expected, it's not that hard to hire a better one.

I am so glad you said this. With the boom of the tech industry, it feels like a lot of stuff is getting over engineered these days. Instead of products that focus on something that does it really well, it does its job mostly alright with half-broken bells and whistles.

Then make the delay for the announcement of the next stop adjustable, configured according to the timetable.

A skilled engineer weighs the costs and benefits of a system before architecting it.

Is it more economical to pay for constant cellular connectivity across 1,000 buses, support IT staff for when the system fails or needs upgrades, etc. or to have the guy you're already paying $15/hr press a button after each stop?

At least on most UK buses, the driver already needs to tell the computer where on the route the bus is so that it can issue the correct tickets to customers. This has been the case for decades.

Ha, indeed. Just thought of another - even lower tech - a printed list of all stops, visible to passengers on the bus, then clear signage for each stop. If the bus stops every stop by default, then this is simpler, if not then the passenger needs to be able to see this on the approach, with another time to signal that they want to get off. Can this get even lower tech?

I see you have never tried it in practice. Train conductors in Austria/Czechia/Germany – which tend to be more trained and less busy than bus drivers – tend to stumble around for half a minute for each unintelligibly badly pronounced sentence. Even the pre-recorded messages in buses are of so bad quality that tourists prefer asking other passengers rather than trying to figure them out.

There's a standard by Google for transit timings, and Translink, the public transport authority in my state, outputs these times. They're live.

Apps like 'Transit' also (accurately) show the current GPS location of the bus as it approaches, and it updated every minute (I believe)

Not necessarily. I think some of the systems use radio links to a central location and transponders at fixed points on the route to track the buses.

Oslo, Norway has realtime data available for all stops as well :)

http://reisapi.ruter.no/Help/Api/GET-StopVisit-GetDepartures...

Returns a List of StopVisits (departures) from a Stop. If no time parameter is supplied, departures in realtime will be returned.

There is an API for London: https://api.tfl.gov.uk/

The TFL system will remove a bus if it doesn't get an update often enough that includes actual progress on the route. This is in fact the opposite problem of what you mention, in that they don't do a very good job of predicting based on past performance. E.g. I used to take a specific bus to pick my son up from nursery that always would "disappear" for a certain number of minutes at a certain part of the journey because a very short stretch of the route was always extremely congested at that time of day.

It's a tricky one, because they have big concerns about over-promising (e.g. the bus could be stuck behind an accident instead, in which case guessing that it's 5 minutes away because of past behaviour will really annoy people) so in some situations they err on the side of caution.

But they are unable to get rid of all of the corner cases. E.g. a bus that moves rapidly for a short stretch, then gets "stuck", will often appear, disappear, appear, disappear, with much less progress in time estimates than elapsed time should indicate.

The thing is, the team working on it has a huge amount of gathered info on how to give these predictions in a way that tries to minimise surprise and avoid making promises that cause problems for people. E.g. often it's better to take a bus off the list so people who are in a hurry will grab a taxi, rather than "promise" the bus will be there in just another few minutes. They still get it wrong too often, but I really don't envy them trying to get the right balance between promising too much and too little.

This is available for public buses in NYC. The city added GPS to their buses and then the ability to query distance from current stop via SMS.

Then they opened their APIs, and now I have a half dozen apps to choose from that will show the approximate time until the next bus from a particular line will reach any given stop.

(Not always 100% accurate, but useful enough to know when to wait indoors for 5 min if it's raining, or pick another line/choose to walk because of delays.)

GPS is insufficient to give accurate enough estimates these days. It may or may not work depend on your local routes and stops, but it's too imprecise for a lot of locations and traffic conditions to give decent precision. It's good as a "first approximation" and if you don't have anything better. Most systems today end up integrating data from multiple different sensors to improve on gps.

Over the past few years they've rolled out a new electronic ticketing system which is used exclusively.

On some bus routes (and/or outside of peek times) you can pay a cash fare on the buss, but even that is still a single-use paper RFID card that should be tapped on and off. These sales are in the extreme minority though - the elderly require an electronic card to get their discount IIRC.

TripView has it.

This is the only thing I want. Displaying a bus timetable can be done just fine with laminated paper, and I'm not convinced that the ability to update (with cancellations, route changes, etc) justifies a tech solution.

Displaying the actual bus status, though, is huge progress.

You don't get that kind of accuracy in any system that has to deal with congested roads, or any dense major city. E.g. there's plenty of bus-stops near me where stops on the same route involves going around corners and traffic machines and stopping close enough that GPS would be insufficient to be guaranteed to tell the stops apart if you don't get a good enough fix on additional satellites quickly enough.

Even with all the extra data, and a lot number crunching, in London it's a challenge to get it to withing a few minutes during rush hour.

So, sure, if you're dealing with simple, small systems with little congestion, you can simplify.

Runs on some windows if I remember correctly and routes are probably hardcoded along with the data for the segment display outside above the windscreen.

Many cities also have an app that displays how many minutes the bus is expected to run late, based on when it passed the previous stop.

The announcing the next stop could be achieved with a dual radio setup, one high powered and low powered. The high powered could be used to detect an upcoming stop and the low powered could be used to detect proximity to the stop.

(Lets ignore the security issues that have been shown with amplifying the low powered radio in cars for a second) It's a method used in keyless entry in cars. A higher powered radio is used for button press on the cars key so you can unlock the car/open the boot/sound the horn to locate the car at a distance but keyless unlock should only work at a much closer distance.

Not saying its the correct way to do it (my local bus network doesn't do this) but stop proximity can be worked into their idea.

I was surprised my local network didn't do something similar as it seemed like a logical choice. But after some research I found nothing about them using RDS to do this.

I would love to be able to talk to a tech at the travel network about this. My own research came to the suspicion that because where I am in the country they would of had to strike up deals with multiple transmission sites to get the coverage needed.

What special announces? Either the bus driver does it or it's one that's used frequently (like 'Please move down inside the bus'), in which case there is a button for it.

They use GPS receivers on the bus, which calculates the position then transmits back using GPRS for central reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBus_(London)

Same in Munich. I think those work offline, also the driver can pick the next stop.

I guess it is easier in the long run to have all routes mapped and instead of GPS you use something like doors open / doors close as a trigger to jump to the next entry.

I work part time at the company that manages the new style signs for bus stations (EDIT: in London, to be clear), so we've gotten to see a bit of the size of the operation TFL has to deal with gathering and processing the bus information. He might have some details wrong, but he's certainly not gotten the complexity level wrong.

Get better managers.

I've never had this problem.

And then when the driver accidentally hits the button and needs to go back?

Notice how we're now adding more complexity now anyway though...

While active RFID is possible, other radio tech designed to work as beacons is more likely

Consider a bus stuck in traffic. It is not unusual, at least in London, for a driver to open/close the door multiple times between stops when traffic moves slowly enough, often with longer intervals in between than there usually would be between stops.

Set a minimum time until next stop can be announced

This feels like a dangerous hack that will come back to bite you in any number of unexpected scenarios that probably occur frequently during an average bus driver's day.

Bluetooth beacon (estimote?) at stops would help.

For an robust system I would use multiple data streams including bust status data/beacons/GPS. I've seen busses with offset stations.

3G is necessary for live ETA, if you want to get fancy. All these complications, in my view, are worth it if you want a system that works 24/7 and serves thousands of people daily. The HW and SW dev costs are acceptable, but it does need a decent team, depending on what the starting point is and the ability of the team members.

Oh right, that makes more sense. I guess you could just keep a record of all the different routes in every bus though? And skip to the right spot manually as needed.

Then the bus changes its route number - certainly in the UK I see the drivers punching in the route details when they take over a bus.

cannot see why you would want to do it manually. it is done automatically in munchen.

For maximal accuracy simply have an electronic beacon of any sort broadcasting an ID that corresponds to the stop and you've got it solved.

Yeah, and now we need to install and manage thousands of beacons in bus stops in pretty hospitable conditions.

Of course, GPS isnt perfect either. It tends to fail in CBD areas.

This has all kind of usability issues (now you're expecting the driver to pay attention to and correct mistakes), while providing less accurate data (buss pulls away from stop, gets stuck in traffic; estimates at next stop are based on the bus having pulled away and average times; customers gets angry) and less ability to do traffic management (e.g. spacing out buses by slowing down later buses slightly) without having drivers guessing and reporting data back.

For maximal accuracy simply have an electronic beacon of any sort broadcasting an ID that corresponds to the stop and you've got it solved.

That's not remotely accurate for the reason above.

And the entire data set for the route should be able to live offline onboard the bus. Changing bus/numbers routes should include the step for updating route data.

It can. E.g. the old London system used odometers. But that was sufficient only for showing "next stop ..." and for reporting very rough estimates. Today it uses odometers, gps, rate gyros and turn rate sensors to be able to more accurately position the buses along a route, and they still regularly "give up" and take a bus off the schedule when traffic conditions means the uncertainty is too high.

Generallly my approach if engineers disagree significantly on a timeline is to multiply the worst case estimate by a large factor, on the assumption that odds are good it means neither one has a clue what the actual complexity is if they don't manage to get to rough agreement...

Absolutely impossible. There is hardware involved.

I'd say something like 3 people for 6 months to 1 year (not all 3 being needed 100% of the time).

You've just described a cellphone running apps that already exist.

Far more useful is the system which tells you, at the bus stop, what the ETA of the next bus(es) is. And that really does need the whole GPS+data system, along with physically robust signs. But on the other hand, that can still be done by a small company - I know there's one here in Edinburgh but I can neither remember their name nor find them in a search.

You can do quite a lot with a small local company. It's global reach that's expensive, as soon as you start needing any kind of high-touch sales.

Half of your points assume that current transportation companies don't have any digital data about bus stops and reroutes.

The question is what is more work: Using the existing data that is stored in some obscure format for which you first have to write an importer/converter or just recreating the data. Add the fact that the existing data might need some cleanup/additions (e.g. times on timetable are only stored with minute precision and you want second precision for more accuracy).

Alternatively, you could have the driver press a button.

This seems like a problem that has been solved many times in the Western world.

You generally want to make the announcement before the bus stops so that people can be ready to get off when the bus stops. Also buses don't always stop at every station on it's route so have to deal with what happens when stop is skipped.

You can certainly do it with an RPi - although you might have to keep rebooting it every hour or so. :)

GPS and 3G/4G are trivial add-ons. There are stacks for mobile data.

RFID doesn't have the reliable range, so that won't work as a solution.

It's not really a hard problem for a competent small engineering team with a mix of embedded hardware and software skills. It's not quite a trivial problem, because there are some interesting edge cases, mostly when a bus is diverted. But there is absolutely zero rocket science required.

You could hack something unreliable together in a weekend, but it would take up to six months to get all the bugs out, do the production engineering for a bullet-proof solution, standardise the installation process (if retrofitted), and so on.

Double that if management is poor. :)

Those last parts often get forgotten in software. Hacking something together that kind of works if you don't look at it with a visible frown is hobby coding, not engineering. Engineering is the boring work that happens after that, to build something with a quantifiable many-9s uptime that meets or exceeds a standard spec with comprehensive test cases.

That sounds expensive.

Usually the announcement is not "we have stopped at Foo and Main". The announcement is "Next stop Foo and Main" while you're on the way to it, so you have time to sling your bag back over your shoulder, get your coat back on, and make your way towards the door. Depending on the density of stops along the route this can come anywhere from 1-7 blocks ahead of the stop.

Source: I don't drive,and ride the bus a lot.

They want conductors back

That's just faster horses though.

Conductors aren't a solution to a problem in themselves, they're a means to solve a problem. So what's the actual problem? WHY do they want conductors back?

Move to China, every bus in Shenzhen has a lady conductor.

Besides what would the other language be? French, German?

I guess the names of the stops are untranslatable anyway :)

Sorry, meant Montréal.

Check out APRS[0]. Solves most of the above already by centralizing data-collection. Would just need a beacon on every vehicle. No need for internet connectivity. Receiving stations can be scaled up as required. Logging of course not an issue as can be logged on-board and/or externally.

The on-board display can overlay a map and call the next stop based on proximity. Not a weekend project, I'll admit, but many existing moving parts available off the shelf.

Hams play with this stuff... a lot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...

You are massively overthinking the problem. The very first system of this type I saw didnt even have a microcontroller. Just an eprom for driving LED array, bunch of TTL logic and two inputs. One linked with 'open doors' switch, the other going to undo switch. And it worked fine for couple of years in a >million city.

Complicated, but not that bad... just need to optimize for the worst case and the best case will purr along happily.

Some sort of near-field beacon on the stops might be more durable than relying on GPS, but it won't help with missed stops.

Every variation of this comment/mindset drives me nuts. It's unbelievably thoughtless.

See making crc 4x faster in redis by keeping precommputed values in a lookup table: https://matt.sh/redis-crcspeed

Maybe something like that ?

crypto?

No idea, but it would be a fairly reasonable way to test a prime-finding algorithm - or to replace a prime-finding algorithm with something less complicated.

Because the alternative: generating the primes at compilation time with a template functional expression would be too slow, and quite possibly would explode the compiler's memory limits. (No Turing Machine here), and doing it at run-time or deliverying it as a "resource file" is obviously out of the question.

I find I've had to bar myself from thinking about many of these factors, after I realised how many projects I stop myself from pursuing because I know about the hard bits, and realise how many of my past projects I'd never have taken a shot at if I knew what was coming up and was thinking like that.

It's great to know, but often it's not so great if it leads to inaction...

E.g. if you have a "I could do that in a weekend" impulse, sometimes it's worth following that impulse. If you're right, you've spent a weekend building something potentially great. If you're wrong, you've spent a weekend learning about things you clearly didn't know in advance, and the lessons can often be very different from the objections you'd have throw up if you thought about it without doing, and sometimes what you learn may provide the impulses for another new idea.

But it's hard. E.g. my first impulse for anything that requires collecting money is how painful it is to deal with credit card processing and reporting and VAT and accounting, because I've done big complex billing systems with heavy reporting requirements, and compliance complexity etc.. It's very hard to put that impulse aside, and "just do it" and think about how to solve the payments afterwards. But that's how I did things he first few times I needed to handle payments.

Yeah right, except that you can't. It takes so much time to nurture something and build it in a way that satisfies the user.

The sad truth is that in the majority of cases the quality or time taken over the implementation isn't particularly important other factors matter much more:

* building something people actually want. * advertising * engaging with users * aggressively promoting your product. * customer service

It doesn't matter if what you did was hard or not. It matters that you can acquire and retain customers.

Yes and if you look at the footnote where the arithmetic is laid out, it seems quite confused. It conflates querying with indexing and also flatly assumes that each machine will index 5M pages, which seems low to me.

Too high. See http://news.appbase.io/scaling-elasticsearch-writes/ for example:

In doing these tests, we indexed over 1 billion documents under just two hours. The peak merge rate we saw was 129 MB/s, yes our ElasticSearch cluster on a 24 node setup is gobbling data at this speed.

Most mind boggling of all: At our peak sustained ingestion rate, we would have added over 13 billion documents in a single day and this would have cost us a mere USD 244.

Their test documents are much smaller (100 bytes) than a typical web page but if you multiply that figure by 50 to get to 5kb documents (probably a realistic average web page size minus all markup and assets), you get 12200$ for 13 billion documents or 1220$ for 1.3 billion documents (assuming that scales linearly). I'm probably way off in my estimate myself but I'm convinced that a few thousand dollars is much closer than the proposed 12M$.

Resizing a browser window is hardly as involved as tweaking CSS or browser settings.

Au contraire, it's a lot more readable than your link, because it respects my window size.

It's readable for some subset of people, but on a 32" monitor it's worthless - I tried to read it, but just abandoned it in frustration.

There is a great incentive to obfuscate when your "value delivery" is skimming (mutual funds that charge 1.25% management fees for underperforming the S&P), privatization fraud (health insurance in the US, government contractors, and pretty much everything related to real estate since "home appreciation" is now supposed to pay for people's retirements instead of pensions), taking advantage of stupid people (lottery, penny auctions, telemarketing, almost all advertising), education fraud (textbook industry, "student loans now, regret later" private colleges and universities - which since many student loans are federally guaranteed is also a form of privatization fraud), or "intellectual property" racketeering.

I think that a lot of this is because things that seem quite pointless on an individual level are actually very important at scale. When I started at Google my job was pushing pixels around on the search results page, and when I left my job was leading a team pushing the pixels around (in the middle I got to do actual cool stuff). On an individual level, this is pointless and boring. On a corporate level, some of those pixels were worth literally $1B+. I would love to have a billion dollar business, but I can't get there from scratch by pushing pixels around on a page.

Graeber's biggest point is that even when he talks to people and asks them if their job is valuable, and they should know better than anyone else, they often say 'no, not really.'

Yeah I know that's his point and that's why I describe his point of view as being naive.

It may be true that for some percentage of workers at any given time their role is experimental and may turn out to be unimportant or a failed attempt at change, and it may be the case that it take a while for these sorts of inefficiencies to be rooted out or resolved because the cost and time associated with doing so make it a low priority but that is something that people who are in those positions would not necessarily be aware of.

This is the same as when people say things like "I don't know why we are so precious with our kids these days. I never wore a bike helmet and I survived!".

Without the proper perspective people frequently form wildly inaccurate opinions.

I don't think he thinks "anyone not involved in hammering steel" is unnecessary, that's a bit of a strawman.

If all I have to do in order to make it a straw man is replace the word iPhone with horseshoe he's doing a pretty good job of constructing his own straw man.

The argument goes that big corporations have a tendency to hire more people than necessary because middle managers are rewarded based on how many people work under them. Or that people looking to keep their jobs, try to make themselves look more busy and valuable than they really are.

That story is completely ridiculous.

People waste a lot of time at offices doing things that aren't work. But our culture demands we be at work 8 hours a day, even if the work only requires 4 hours.

Then businesses have an opportunity to compete for talent by offering better working conditions. If they can do so profitably then they win.

Economists in the 1930's thought the world would be so rich by today, that people would only need to work a few hours a week. And the economy has grown vastly since then, and we are much richer. But I don't think most people have the option of working that little, even if they want to.

This is more a result of the spoils of productivity increases not being distributed evenly.

By having massive unemployment and under employment then expecting the remaining workers to work harder for less pay on average while more and more income is paid towards servicing private debt the finance, banking and real estate sectors have made out like bandits.

But that's a different subject entirely from automation.

I don't think so. It has a lot to do with automation because that is where the productivity increases have come from, but rather than the federal government guaranteeing full employment and setting a floor price for labour and a minimum set of conditions below which we consider employment to be exploitation, which would not only maintain demand in the economy but also reduce the inequality with which the spoils of those productivity increases are distributed, they have left people to fend for themselves and the economy has languished as a result.

Those jobs can really be valuable and still be vulnerable to automation. AI has improved a lot in the last 5 years. I don't think it's implausible at all to imagine most jobs done now being partially or totally automated.

Maybe in 1,000 years but I disagree that automation will have the type of impact people (particularly in the UBI advocacy camp) claim it will.

Weird example, where it's assumed that a single machine can only hold 50GB of document data, which results in the assumption that you'd need 200k machines to store 1T documents...

I feel if you have something better to offer, say a better way to look at information, not just a better page rank algo, but a different way to look at information that is scattered across, one that enables a better insight into existing web pages and less overhead of constant 'searching' by typing a query, something that automatically helps to "see" relevant information with less effort, then it can be an alternative to what a Google search does today and can position itself as a competitor in the long run even if it does not exist today.

I have worked with one-man companies that did this and often they are shoddy products. Healthcare just seems to suck at software.

Full-stack developers are already a very fast evolution from the front/back end developers, which were an evolution from a guy doing just HTML/CSS in the 90s. Now you have to include sales, marketing, negotiation, project management, and business management skills on top of your full-stack development skills. The result is that something is going to suffer unless you are a genius, the product is super-simple, or you have 20-30 years to have learned all of this.

There's a much more interesting question in the form of: "Why's that company so big? A tight-knit team could do that in a weekend".

Apps aren't just a pile of features, they're also ecosystems.

In the early years of Twitter, it would have been relatively easy to clone Twitter, but you won't have had the ecosystem.

Poster example: Google+

Besides underestimating the scope of the problem, one logical fallacy that programmers fall for is believing that a single developer should be able to juggle lots of tasks easily. If a small team can create a SaaS application, why do large companies need so many engineers for so many specific things?

I think, at a certain scale, it becomes necessary for organisations to ensure that there are certain people keeping specific things running. Let's say, a company doesn't have any specific person assigned for server administration and then one day, is confronted with a DDoS attack. Who is supposed to handle it? Whose responsibility is it? You have few people who know the basics of operating servers but no one who can swiftly respond to it. If no clear role is established, then the company is bound to face more attacks and possibly, lose more customers.

Features and scale are huge things.

Maybe you could make, say, a Twitter clone, in a weekend. But you couldn't make one that can handle anything near Twitter's scale nor that is as feature-rich as the actual thing, and besides, nobody will be using it.

Everything seems easier when you're not doing it yourself. It's only a minor variation on the grass being greener. Everything gets way more complicated when you're doing it at scale, with high reliability, for real users, with some hope of making money. Practically nobody adds complexity for its own sake. Usually, if you think something is much more complicated than it needs to be, it's because you don't have any idea what the real requirements and constraints are.

Those 1998 extra staff don't have to make the product 1000x or even 2x better (however you might quantify that). They just have to make it sufficiently better to maintain or gain market share.

Always reminds me of: http://i1.wp.com/beckybendylegs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

Apps that stop working because the company folds definitely suck.

Caring or not caring about the rules is irrelevant if those rules make it impossible for you to operate.

Uber has famously skirted rules and has gotten away with it largely because they've been able to throw VC money at PR, lobbying, and paying fines. Unless you happen to be similarly lucky funding-wise, your first round or two of fines for breaking rules can easily shut you down permanently.

Maybe it's a bit hyperbolic to say that this would mean "your app sucks", but the end result is that you built something that no one can use and you can't make money of of. That sucks.

I don't think that's really true in this case. In the few cities I know any details for, the Uber answer was, "we'll just do it until the city sues us". That doesn't really take any special knowledge, just preparedness with the lawyers.

Having an effective strategy to skirt regulations probably requires just as much knowledge of the regs as a company who complies with them.

Not really. The "effective strategy to skirt regulations" seems to be "when someone makes an issue out of it, we'll burn investor money on PR and lobbying against the regulations, and on paying any penalties that get assessed for violations".

For that, you don't need much advance study of the regulations, just a deep supply of investor funds.

Ignoring regulations is easy.

Getting regulations to ignore you is the hard part.

They don't "ignore" regulations. They violate regulations. They do so strategically or they would have been shut down long ago.

For example, if public opinion weren't on their side, perhaps due to, say, Uber rides being as dangerous as they're sometimes claimed to be rather than as safe as statistics show them to be, some of those "little" city lawsuits could have blown up much worse.

Unfairly, IMHO. It certainly helped, but they did so much, and better, than the other apps and they made legit, value-improving changes to the ride-hailing process: actually acting on feedback, dynamically setting prices, coordinating a movement away from tipping, applying modern IT.

Remember, their core product was not violating regulations: it was filling empty spots for legit black limo drivers, and was more expensive than taxis but still competitive because of the quality of service.

That and the economic recession where lots of people who had vehicles were now trying to make ends meet. Also, they paid their drivers better initially until they build up their driver network. Of course leveraging the media helped and a symphony of other things all pushed them to where they are now.

Something I find really interesting is that Uber drivers in the US are ordinary people. In the UK, they are straight up taxi drivers. It's the same brand for two totally different implementations of the idea.

Describe the app generally, and leave it to them to form their own teams and solutions. Hackthon style, and hackathons at least usually have functional prototypes by their end.

You are correct, but are taking these guys too seriously. They know about the mythical man month and are just riffing, for better or worse.

So Dilbert got promoted then demoted...

Just use one "10x woman".

Unless you pipeline them.

Also, it's often the case that it's better to buy a tool and integrate it into the company than build from scratch. It's especially true with a small team. It's not the most romantic idea and sometimes engineers feel that they could build the solution themselves in a weekend.

I use to live next to a highway with the closets exit being a few miles away and I would constantly get drivers on the highway as my closest driver. I always had to cancel since they were actually ~15 minutes away, not 3-5.

I have found that Uber's estimates get better with time. When Uber was newer in my city, it used to give ridiculous underestimates. They've become far more realistic now.

Or the passenger in the case of Uber Pool. I couldn't believe what Uber expected of a driver when a new Pool request came up. They had to hit a button, look at the screen, rethink how they were going to go somewhere. Oh and then worry if the requester will cancel.

That happened on my last trip. I felt bad for the driver so I helped him out finding the best way to pick up a passenger after the first two cancelled.

I think Pool is a good thing but not in rush hour traffic where going slightly off the route adds 10 minutes to a trip minimum.

I doubt Uber would have gotten started without leaning on Google for both mapping and directions. This benefited them both as Google incorporated Uber back into it's Maps product.

Now. But they initially bootstrapped it with Google Maps, which was sensible to do for their initial MVP, which is all an "I could do that in a weekend" project is.

http://driveubernyc.com/tlc/

They also use a home grown solution for routing: https://eng.uber.com/engineering-an-efficient-route/

Ha!even this sounds like a mistake to me. How about "Make the simplest thing work for one person.". Make sure they get some value, and then iterate and repeat. Once you've clearly solved the problem at hand then start to scale, optimise etc That is of course all after you've presold the solution.

I know it's not always easy to do this, but that really is part of the challenge. There's still too many deathmarch projects lead by people trying to do things 'the right way'. If you're working on a new project for the love of science, please make sure you're releasing something valuable every single week if not every one or two days!

Sometimes it is the tech... just not in obvious ways. You have to look beyond the basic spec.

Uber and Lyft are not just taxi apps. They are massively polished. When I use them I am astounded at how good they've gotten the UX and then I shudder at how hard that must have been across two mobile platforms and in the presence of very unreliable networks. I've ordered an Uber with no cell Internet using barely usable coffee shop wifi from a block away.

Then you have scaling, which brings up or creates issues you just do not see at smaller scales. Big O type considerations and weird edge cases that only come up once every billion transactions start mattering.

Then there is all the big data stuff. These services do tons of route optimization and analytics.

So yeah marketing, sales, fund raising, management, etc. also matter but tech often matters as much or more. It's just that junior engineers usually only see the tops of icebergs. This is why despite decades of pure biz people saying "tech doesn't matter" you still rarely see founding teams succeed without at least some tech founders but you do occasionally see even lone tech founders make it. (But those tech founders do have to know or be willing to learn the non tech stuff!)

Internalizing that has been difficult for me as an engineer.

Technology exists largely to accelerate the pace of development and of course, it's never a sole driver of any business. There is no reason why you can't create a small-scale uber with call centres and excel spreadsheets but I doubt it would reach the scale and impact of what Uber is today. Granted that, it's hundred times easier to figure out to technology than business, I won't trivialise role of engineering because it's something allows a business to near its global maximum.

It has a lot to do with the technology. It's not the only or even the most important factor, but it's still one of the most important.

I think a big part of the disconnect being discussed originates in the myth that CRUD-based apps are fundamentally easy. This simply isn't true. The challenges of building a modern, complex, scalable CRUD app with good UX and a maintainable code base are not 'less than' challenges rooted in algorithms or bit bashing. Doing it well enough and fast enough to be competitive in the market is HARD.

Maybe. Just to muddy things even more, some successes are failures.

Have you ever met a billionaire who said, "I was lucky" and left it at that?

Yeah. At least with a success you have a data point that it could be successful - with a failure, you don't even know that.

It's not the technology success/failure axis in question, but how much weight to give it relative to other factors.

AKA in predicting overall success would a team with low tech expertise, but high sales expertise be have a better chance?

Of course software is eating the world. Wheels ate the world. Fire ate the world. Written language ate the world. Plumbing ate the world. Electricity ate the world. Radio communications ate the world.

Not every project or human endeavor that involved wheels, fire, written language, plumbing, electricity, or radio ate the world, but every project that did not involve them eventually got eaten, for the simple reason that you needed to keep up with technology as a minimum. But beyond that, projects succeed or fail for the same reason they always have: understanding the actual problem you're trying to solve.

Uber's success is not due to software. Uber's success is due to its understanding of the transportation market and how to play the regulatory game to its advantage while never getting permanently in trouble. Uber's ability to deliver on the huge market opportunity they saw—i.e., its lack of failure—is due to software. We quite reasonably call this "success" when talking about technology, but if we're talking about companies succeeding or failing, that's not a discussion about technology.

The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology

Have you considered broadening your personal definition of technology past computing and engineering?

From Wikipedia:

Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, etc. or it can be embedded in machines, computers, devices and factories, which can be operated by individuals without detailed knowledge of the workings of such things.

Technology is the creation of systems. Those systems run as much on the users of that technology, and the members of the organisation supporting it, as they do inside of microprocessors.

Probably why a lot of professors say that University is often about networking opportunities just as much as it is about learning.

But aside from knowing talented people, it takes visionaries to generate fantastic outcomes. Walt Disney for example stopped drawing cartoons himself early on because he had better artists around him. However, he had the vision that ultimately brought the best out of each artist.

The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology.

Execs love to think this but it's just not true. Top heavy companies waste money. It's true that tech of not the only ingredient but for a tech company it's critical. Good tech is not a commodity. Top-tier engineers are worth as much as a good CEO. That is if you want to remain lean.

I second this. Additionally, get a grip on your queues!

I have yet to find a better text on how to properly manage software projects than, "The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development"[0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-G...

"...precise from an engineering perspective?", this (in my experience[0]) doesn't work. Because requirements are messy and always change. As they say, " No plan survives contact with the enemy." and "No requirement survives contact with implementation." The reality is that you need to come up with a timeline that accounts for this problem (say 8 weeks) and only scope the release to fill 50% (4 weeks). An 8 week release cycle may even be on the long end of a release cycle.

Why 50% of a release's entire timeline? Because you're going to have overruns, errors, re-dos, and any number of random unplanned elements creep into the scope of your release. And the reality (I may get blasted for this blasphemy) scope creep is fine. As long as it pertains to the originally scoped requirements and is clearly adding value. "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.", Shigeru Miyamoto. The important part of that quote is "delayed", you still need to make sure you release otherwise you're just spinning and wasting company time and money.

And whatever you do, don't try and "fill in weeks". If the release is ahead of schedule, let it be. Let it finish weeks early if it has to. Then, rinse and repeat. Admittedly this type of release process can be hard to sell because there's usually a negative emotional response to the idea of only scoping 50% of the total allowed release cycle and that somehow the other 50% is waste. It isn't, it's there to guarantee that the items scoped initially actually get done on time. That way QA can get to them in a reasonable amount of time, give feedback, and (during the second half of the release) engineering can fix the issues raised by QA. Business development can also rest comfortably knowing that the features scoped into the first half of the release are actually going to come out on time.

I know it sounds like "You're just adding slack." But it's intended to be more than that. If you see teams attempting to squeeze more items into the 50% release you know there's a prioritization problem within those teams. Which can be remedied by either: 1) reducing the overall size of the release cycle further (eg 8 to 4 weeks with 2 weeks as the 50% mark) to provide more flexibility into what goes into the product in a shorter time frame. 2) Helping those teams clarify what the high-level product direction and priorities should be.

Hopefully this 15 minute rambling comment is valuable to you. If not, I apologize.

[0]The mistake I made and the advice I can personally give, don't focus on up front high-accuracy estimates and designs. Come up with a reasonable design, your best guess estimate, and then implement as furiously as possible (coding best practices should still be enforced). You'll know much earlier in the release cycle what the real timeline for your feature will be than if you'd tried to spend all that time up front.

I'm not sure you agree with the parent if the parent is saying "no, it's not possible, because the tech is so hard", and you're saying, "it's not an issue of technology, but the business side".

Internalizing that has been difficult for me as an engineer.

I suspect this is because everyone wants to not only feel as part of something but they want to make an important contribution. I venture to guess accountants at Google do not feel they make a difference to search. The culmination of parts is what makes the company whole and all those parts are required.

Its hard to accept you are not as important as you wish you were. Its a great step in the maturation process of one's professional career though.

The tech is necessary, of course, but so are desks and an accounting department.

Internalizing that has been difficult for me as an engineer.

After I got over that particular hurdle, I would still think:

Ok, so "build it and they will come" is not a thing, got it. But still, engineering is most important by far. Without sales, support, marketing, or legal, you still have a product, just one that is adopted slower. Without engineering you don't even have a product to sell in the first place.

And that's true. But in the end it's just splitting hairs. It doesn't matter. Over the longer term, no successful, scalable business is ever going to exist solely as an engineering team. Every job function has a purpose[0] and gets you where you want to go faster; in some cases, lack of certain non-engineering job functions will make it impossible to even do certain things.

So sure, you can bootstrap a product with just a few engineers and nothing else, but unless you're ok with it being a niche-market product that you spend all your waking hours working on, an engineering-only org is never going to cut it.

[0] With the obvious exception of those people hired to satisfy the latest management fad du jour, or to give the CEO's deadbeat nephew something to do with his time.

I thought like those junior devs for a while, too, and I agree to your sentiment.

The feeling that the CEO I was working with was doing mundane tasks was astonishingly - he even said that he could to his whole job using his smartphone.

But after trying to do the business stuff myself I realized that no one in all of this process is irreplaceable - finding a good software developer may not be easy, but it's also not easy to find a good CEO. This is important to realize that software developers shouldn't see themselves as some type of elite.

The main problem is that junior devs don't realize that 90% of business is based on networking and being friends with people who are in middle management and want to increase their reputation in their big corp. You don't get big clients because you're a genius hacker, most of the time those B2B applications are simple CRUD apps. You won't get that $500k because you simply didn't play golf with the key partners. I'm not even exaggerating, I've seen that the best deals are made in ones "spare time".

Maybe startups are another breed than the software companies I know, but don't drink the cool aid and don't assume that technology is your main differentiator. It's working with people all along.

I think it isn't even about scaling high-performance systems, it even starts with the mindset of those who think that software developers are entitled in some way, usually junior devs and people who never did any real business work.

After several startup failures, the number one lesson I have learned is that you better have the right team who can execute. Uber has the right team http://www.businessinsider.com/the-power-players-of-uber-201...

I don't really know. What I do know is people seem to misunderstand engineering team size as a simple sum of people working on the Uber app. It is not only the android/ios developer or the full stack developer who is an engineer in Uber. An IT administrator who helps people, technical or non-technical, with their work laptops also qualifies as an engineering team staff to the outside world.

What makes it your or my place to decide that? They're a private company, and they have plenty of profit motive for efficiency. If they didn't think they were getting value from all of those engineers, then they would fire them and save themselves some money. Or are we going to argue that corporate executives aren't greedy enough?

You clearly have never worked anywhere close to payments :)

Kidding aside, the regulations around anything that handles money are quite complex, and the liability issues mean that you'll spend a lot of time on getting it right, too.

In theory, payment is super-easy. In practice, any payments solution that is not just a toy eats engineers for breakfast. Stripe is probably one of the leanest ones - and they have 400+ engineers, lean on existing infrastructure, and cover only 25 countries.

Netflix is another example. A couple of thousand programmers and tens of thousands of VMs to build a top drawer e-commerce site. I built a drawer-below-top e-commerce site with twelve people in a year, and a third of them were muppets.

I interviewed at another well-capitalised streaming video place, and they also seemed overstaffed. They had a permission service that worked out what people could watch, based on purchases, subscriptions, and bundles. Something that's basically one SQL query. They had something like six people working on it full time.

How many engineers would Uber need to have before one would say "okay, that's too many". 3000? 5000?

However many it takes before the cost of an engineer is higher than the value added. I have no idea where that line is for Uber. Maybe it's 10K. Maybe it was back when they hit 50.

Uber can afford 2000 engineers. That doesn't mean they are anywhere near good at utilizing them, which seems to be the implicit assumption in many comments on this thread.

This might be true but it doesn't support your point. If Uber is bad at utilizing engineers, that doesn't mean they should employ fewer. In all likelihood, they'd be about as bad at utilizing their workforce if they cut it in half.

Exactly, Uber needs to scale along axes in a way most traditional web companies do not.

The axes have been pointed out are heterogeneous city/state/nation regulations, labor law, naviagation/connectivity issues, etc. And onto each of these diverse cases, there needs to be a way to analyze results consistently and deploy business objectives from a centralized corporate strategy.

As you point out: to justify its unicorn status, Uber needs to prove that it can succeed not just in competing with taxis in the major markets where it already exists, but that it's technology platform can be deployed to the edge cases, and the areas where it hasn't.

So what the extra engineers are doing finding a way to acheive user reliability under the reality of accelerating changes to requirements and sharding of policies for separate operational units that will result from forced-growth into non-optimal markets.

I think the critic has the benefit of hindsight which may translate to 1000s or hours saved in DEV. E.g. Copying Uber verbatim versus all the experimentation to get there.

Hence it's not uncommon to see clones of things (e.g. Dropbox, slack, etc) developed at fractional cost.

Your junior may be onto something , get shares in his. Ew startup quick !

Sorry for the late reply, Just noticed your comment. I don't know a way to do it in node. If you have setup devise a few times recently you could possibly get it done with ROR + the devise gem + scaffolding. This is a pretty terrible interview question though, as testing if someone has practiced a canned solution ( which is really all you could do in that time) doesn't seem that great, and actually taking the time to make your own solution would take much longer and an 8 hour unpaid interview question also seems bad </rambling>.

What about user editable profiles with the associated valudations on email change ;)

Meteor is not at all equivalent to Django. I've used both, and they're leagues apart. Meteor still can't even use SQL.

If you choose Meteor, it's going to dictate your entire stack from database to frontend framework. That's fine if what you really want is an all-in-one solution but it's definitely not a Django equivalent.

Express + Passport can easily be done in less than an hour. It's super simple to setup. I've got my default template for every site I whip up. Now writing that from scratch is a completely different story. I doubt any of their current engineers could just put that together in a day.

With something like cookiecutter-django a registration site takes about 5 minutes.

https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django

"If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook." The Social Network.

"An absolute MVP (Or a proof of concept) like this product could be built in a weekend".

Maybe, theoretically, in some cases. But even so that's very different from the original "I could build that..." bloviation.

Consider this then: If you could build an app as polished as Uber's, there are hundreds of minicab companies in the UK alone, most of which have apps massively inferior to Uber yet has to compete with them, and that are thus a market for better apps.

There probably is a lot of luck involved in becoming Uber, but if you can make an app that good in a short amount of time, then the opportunity cost in doing that and sending a demo round to a few dozen minicab companies is very, very low.

Yet these companies are still stuck with horrible apps, because in reality it takes a lot of time to develop a good one, even if a prototype is fairly trivial.

Data federation is the key to complex data. In a month or two, the first cut anyway, I doubt it could be done in a week-end.

Nope, that is the point.

And then you have to get a million people to say, "I'm just going to Uber there." Except replace Uber with the name of your new app.

The hardest parts of starting and running a business generally have nothing to do with tech. That is even true for most software businesses. This is what most developers who have not started or ran a business don't truly understand.

Oh yeah, infrastructure & marketing ;)

Also, all the edge cases which become visible only after real users start pounding the service exposing all "this should never happen" conditions.

The evidence of good tech being important is at your finger tips.

I'm not really sure how you got that from the words I wrote. There's tons of work in addition to the tech which leads to a success story like Uber. That doesn't imply that the tech doesn't matter, just that other stuff does also.

An engineer costs roughly $150k / yr

This number is far too low. Uber is headquartered in San Francisco.

A lot of the work is convincing people:

1. Convince customers to download the app, give their credit card, and then trust their rides and selves to a driver

2. Convince drivers to clean up their cars, download the driver app, and turn it on, and wait for customers to ask them for rides

Great insight there.

Additionally, the new guy will be much happier when he's treated the way you suggest. I know I would have appreciated that instead of the bs I got at my first proper job in the beginning.

I always try to point out to the junior folks when a thing is janky and broken for "historical" reasons rather than technical reasons, in the hope that their fresh eyes on the problem will find a better solution. Sometimes we're still just coasting on the best solution we could come up with 2 years ago, and in those cases it's likely that we could do better if we re-think the problem from scratch.

I think you can ask a simpler question: how do you get traction, drivers and passengers included? You application will be invisible, nobody will see it.

And my answer to your question is: your reply is pretty far off base. Quite simply: when Uber first launch, Uber was not the Uber you are describing. Telling an engineer they need all these things from the start is completely wrong.

Yes, competing with Uber now, with "this can be done in a weekend", is naive. But that's not the point.

The point is, that there are plenty of problems you can make a lot of money on, with a timeline anywhere from a week to a year. Some will be sustainable, and some will be simple cash grabs. The hardest part is identifying not just what, but when. If you have enough connections in the industry, it can be much easier to predict this than if you are on the outside of things.

I have built plenty of things people would say "I could do it in a weekend". And yes, a weekend is a little short, but many of them took just a week, at least initially. The answer is not "Uber does all these things, you need to too." The answer is, "you need to predict the next Uber, so you don't have to do all the things Uber currently does."

True, but they don't have to find the optimal solution, or even anything close to it. They just have to find a solution that's slightly better than the next-best solution, which in most cases is very far from optimal.

I think a related thing people say (that makes me cringe) is that xyz is "just a CRUD app", quite dismissively. You could argue that the vast majority of applications are "just CRUD apps"! Once you get up to a certain scale, even "basic CRUD apps" are complicated.

Thanks for the nice specifications!

You couldn't build the Uber of today without significant resources, however you could indeed build the version of Uber that made them popular and got them access to those resources in a weekend. Uber started out as a black car app. They got lucky, went viral, and the founders were well connected enough to get funding to build out much of the advanced functionality you're referring to after the app already became popular.

It isn't the advanced functionality and scalability you're talking about here (that was built in reaction to its popularity) that made it popular. It was their MVP.

Even more than that: code is only a tiny part of a tech business, even one that has code as its most critical foundation.

A classic example is banking or money transfers (like paypal). So many people think that financial services are nothing more than moving bits around, which seems like an easy thing to code. Aside from the fact that it's not as easy to code as one might imagine, that part is maybe only 1-5% of the business. Paypal got where they are not because of the quality of their code or their operations but because of their relationships. They established relationships with banks, with regulatory agencies, with governments, and they spent years and years doing these things. They signed contracts, they established trust, they created systems for interfacing with many different banks and governments (not just tech systems, but policies and personnel). The result is that paypal is now one of the easiest ways to move money around the world with minimal friction. Cloning paypal's tech wouldn't enable you to clone their success, for those reasons.

Same thing with Amazon. Amazon's user facing software is only a fraction of their operations, their main competitive advantages are selection, price, fast fulfillment, and customer service.

You're going to talk about Uber? Watch this video: [1]. He talks about every regret regarding their infrastructure. At first you kind of nod your head along with "yeah, it's not that easy", but as he keeps talking you can't help but wonder why the company has absolutely no internal technical direction whatsoever.

They employ over 2000 engineers (just devs, excluding support staff, etc.). They use micro-services designed to the point where teams can't reuse pre-existing services. They are rewriting the same functionality over and over, and over and over again, as separate teams don't even have a clue what has already been written. Pick a piece of functionality you need. There are straight up 20 different APIs that do the exact same thing, but good luck figuring out which one you should be using - oh wait, why bother when you can just write the 21st version of the same thing. They are at the point where they have no clue what their repositories contain. In the video, he can't even provide an accurate number of deployed micro-services. THEY CANNOT EVEN ASSESS WHAT THEY ARE RUNNING IN PRODUCTION. They're literally drowning, and cannot recover.

The point of the article is wrong. It's not about what can be done in one weekend, it's what can be done in 12-24 months by a competent team. Yes, Uber operates internationally which comes with a very crazy set of challenges. 2000 engineers worth of challenge? Not even remotely close. You should need fewer than 100 people who really know what they're doing, and another 300-400 people who can follow the lead of the first 100. If you need more than that for a single product (ie: Google does not apply as they have 100+ full products), you are doing things wrong.

If you're going to provide the anti-thesis, don't use Uber as your example. They don't even understand how their business is managing to remain afloat from a technical perspective.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY

And on top of all of that, can you get 100K people to use your app?!

I think you're making a related mistake, which is to overestimate the importance of the tech to the business.

When Uber first released, my guess is they probably couldn't do most of what you list above. But it didn't matter, because they had one compelling feature: they routed around regulation. This allowed them to pay drivers more and charge riders less than traditional taxis, while taking a cut for themselves. This is a clearly profitable position to be in, which means that they have the money to bring in capable business analysts and programmers, and the rest of what you say above will happen naturally.

The taxi apps before Uber didn't recognize that the killer feature was routing around regulation, and the taxi apps after that didn't do it first.

Sure, I can't write Uber in its current state in a weekend, but I could absolutely write Uber's minimum viable product in a few days. The problem is having the right combination of a good idea, the correct understanding of why it's a good idea, and the expertise to execute it (not just technical expertise).

I think you chose a bad example. Imho Uber has waaay to many engineers for what they are doing: to the point where they need to invent work for themselves with no business value.

From 2009, still relevant: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

In the US, most companies aren't hiring janitors, they outsource it to a facilities management firm or it's handled by building management.

I'm also not sure how that's relevant.

Ever thought that maybe that 1:20 or 1:10 isn't about handling steady load but about handling pre-/post-lunch peak loads without half hour lines?

(And I've seen the half hour lines, in an office that had two WCs for 100 people. THEN you end up with people spending 10% of their day doing something other than work.)

Do you stop thinking on the loo? I don't. For knowledge workers, that time isn't completely lost...