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>> 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 ord

>> 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. The third interpretation is that we have no idea what else Uber is working on besides the operations that are visible to us as consumers. Uber can afford to pay 100s of engineers to build out a few technical concepts/prototypes that will never see the light of day. They basically need to do this, because their unicorn valuation isn't based on chasing the vanishing margins of the taxi industry, its based on owning an entire market that won't exist until they create it. I suspect its a mix of all three.

stillsut 10y ago
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.