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To me the question isn't "Think you can build it in a weekend?" You mentioned 5 product "concerns" that Uber must contend with to make a point. No doubt if we

To me the question isn't "Think you can build it in a weekend?" You mentioned 5 product "concerns" that Uber must contend with to make a point. No doubt if we brainstormed more we could come up with perhaps 10 or 20 more such "concerns". Now let's be very generous and assign 10 engineers to each concern. I still come up with a maximum of 200 engineers for Uber. But Uber has 2000 engineers. I don't see any creative ideating that would justify that many engineers _as necessary for the top or bottom line operation of Uber_. They are there for other reasons but not because Uber needs that many engineers to operate.

thisisit 10y ago
To repeat myself from an earlier comment. How does one even arrive at the number 200 based on the complexity of the problem? Secondly not all 2000 will be working on their core app. There will be solutions required at each level. For example in some countries cab services are provided by larger contractors employing drivers and not individual drivers themselves. So Uber needs to have a billing system which collates data from their individual drivers and then calculates the payout to the company. This requires a separate set of engineers, not working on the core app. And then there are HR systems, Finance Systems, every bit they are not contracting to an Indian Service company has to be handled by an "engineer".
- wellpast 10y ago
  Okay. Then how many engineers would Uber need to have for you to say "that's too many"?
  - thisisit 10y ago
    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.
  - ufmace 10y ago
    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?
dpark 10y ago
> You mentioned 5 product "concerns" that Uber must contend with to make a point. No doubt if we brainstormed more we could come up with perhaps 10 or 20 more such "concerns". > Now let's be very generous and assign 10 engineers to each concern. > I still come up with a maximum of 200 engineers for Uber. But Uber has 2000 engineers There's two ways to interpret this: 1) Uber is overstaffed by an order of magnitude. 2) You are underestimating the complexity of Uber by an order of magnitude. Uber might be overstaffed, but I suspect the answer is mostly that you are drastically underestimating and don't see the complexities of running a large-scale service in multiple countries, dealing with regulations, worldwide scalability, time and cost estimates, surge pricing, tracking and mapping, payroll, billing, payments, apps, internal IT, etc., etc., etc. There aren't 10-20 "concerns". There are hundreds. I bet they have at a hundred engineers just working on billing and they're all overworked. > I don't see any creative ideating that would justify that many engineers Because most of Uber's engineers aren't there to build "creative" solutions. They're there to enable the business.
- wellpast 10y ago
  I agree with your two interpretations. But to clarify that is my position: I believe Uber is overstaffed by an order of magnitude. It seems after reading through this thread that I am definitely in the minority on that opinion, but I'm not sure if I understand the position there. How many engineers would Uber need to have before one would say "okay, that's too many". 3000? 5000? 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. Google has in the tens of thousands of engineers, which they can afford to have because of Search. I highly doubt they are anywhere near reasonably utilizing those engineers to top line or bottom line product value.
  - twic 10y ago
    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.

thisisit 10y ago

To repeat myself from an earlier comment. How does one even arrive at the number 200 based on the complexity of the problem? Secondly not all 2000 will be working on their core app. There will be solutions required at each level. For example in some countries cab services are provided by larger contractors employing drivers and not individual drivers themselves. So Uber needs to have a billing system which collates data from their individual drivers and then calculates the payout to the company. This requires a separate set of engineers, not working on the core app. And then there are HR systems, Finance Systems, every bit they are not contracting to an Indian Service company has to be handled by an "engineer".

wellpast 10y ago
Okay. Then how many engineers would Uber need to have for you to say "that's too many"?
- thisisit 10y ago
  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.
- ufmace 10y ago
  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?

dpark 10y ago

> You mentioned 5 product "concerns" that Uber must contend with to make a point. No doubt if we brainstormed more we could come up with perhaps 10 or 20 more such "concerns". > Now let's be very generous and assign 10 engineers to each concern. > I still come up with a maximum of 200 engineers for Uber. But Uber has 2000 engineers There's two ways to interpret this: 1) Uber is overstaffed by an order of magnitude. 2) You are underestimating the complexity of Uber by an order of magnitude. Uber might be overstaffed, but I suspect the answer is mostly that you are drastically underestimating and don't see the complexities of running a large-scale service in multiple countries, dealing with regulations, worldwide scalability, time and cost estimates, surge pricing, tracking and mapping, payroll, billing, payments, apps, internal IT, etc., etc., etc. There aren't 10-20 "concerns". There are hundreds. I bet they have at a hundred engineers just working on billing and they're all overworked. > I don't see any creative ideating that would justify that many engineers Because most of Uber's engineers aren't there to build "creative" solutions. They're there to enable the business.

wellpast 10y ago
I agree with your two interpretations. But to clarify that is my position: I believe Uber is overstaffed by an order of magnitude. It seems after reading through this thread that I am definitely in the minority on that opinion, but I'm not sure if I understand the position there. How many engineers would Uber need to have before one would say "okay, that's too many". 3000? 5000? 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. Google has in the tens of thousands of engineers, which they can afford to have because of Search. I highly doubt they are anywhere near reasonably utilizing those engineers to top line or bottom line product value.
- twic 10y ago
  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.