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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 throu

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.
dpark 10y ago
> 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.

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.

dpark 10y ago

> 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.