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Would they be profitable if they fired all of their engineers and just let the already working product keep working? I mean...it works. It already works. It doe
by ebg13 7y ago
Would they be profitable if they fired all of their engineers and just let the already working product keep working? I mean...it works. It already works. It does everything that it's supposed to do. Millions of people use it happily. Could they just ride it into money?
- aetherson 7y agoIt's hard to say. They recorded $630M of expenses into R&D this quarter, but I think they're including a lot of their one time items from the IPO there. Year ago quarter was $60M ish. Hard to believe that they've 10x'd their ongoing expenses on development in one year. If their ongoing expenses in R&D are only 2x what they were last year, then no, they could cut those expenses to zero and still not be profitable.
- alkonaut 7y agoThis strikes me as odd also for Uber. I mean I get that they are a large high-tech company, but I don't get how they are developing huge js frameworks and similar. They are a taxi company. Don't they basically just need a reasonably simple web app, a mobile app and some infrastructure that runs on a (relatively) small AWS bill? Why is Uber and Lyft trying to reinvent the web? Is it to attract talent, because good talent really wants to develop cutting edge stuff? That's an argument I can understand. But how can Uber have 2000 developers who make 1000 microservices?