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I believe you have never worked for major tech company? In the company this size, they have multi product line (Uber, Uber Eats, Uber Freight, ATG etc) which ar

I believe you have never worked for major tech company? In the company this size, they have multi product line (Uber, Uber Eats, Uber Freight, ATG etc) which are supported by their platform and infrastructure. It requires tons of eng work. Unlike smaller company seeks existing solution like open source, Uber needs to solve many of these themselves, which means build from scratch and also build tools to support it from scratch. Also, being the leader, you'll need to gain edge over competitors, e.g for Lyft or others, it’s sufficient to use Google Map or some other third party vendor as routing and ETA service, but Uber has its own Map team to improve the user experience. Hope this helps you understand

goatinaboat 7y ago
Hope this helps you understand Uber’s operations are orders of magnitude less complex than the supply chain and logistics of any major manufacturer. Or government or military. Or the post office or the phone company. Even McDonalds keeping its restaurants supplied and ice-cream machines working. All the cool tech Uber developed they did for fun. Because they had nothing better to do. Hope this helps you understand.
- morningcovfefe 7y ago
  Good god you sound ignorant. Uber isn't a post office with multi day SLA. It's a realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities - and that's just one part of the company. Payments is a whole chunk of the tech industry in and off itself. Food delivery is a whole of the tech startup scene in an off itself. As is Freight.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities That's actually "for thousands of users in one city" executed a few hundred times, and map/PoI/pathfinding parts can be (are?[0]) outsourced to a third party. -- [0] - I don't use Uber as a matter of principle, but the competitor I use utilizes Google Maps for these parts. So do food delivery companies I use.
  - drcross 7y ago
    The Uber apologists on here really boggle my mind. Other competitors seem to do it fine such as Free Now, which operates in multiple cities and I don't even know where their offices are located because they don't need these super 10x Devs people speak about. There is no special sauce in Uber. Once the VC money that uber spend on subsidising EVERY JOURNEY dies up then customers will move to another platform.
    - NeverFade 7y ago
      How many drivers and riders does "Free Now" have?
      - ploika 7y ago
        Lots. They operate all over Europe. They were called mytaxi until a couple of months ago, and absorbed Hailo and many other ride hailing services over the past few years.
        coredog64 7y ago
        I haven’t used Uber enough to hit the problems that others mention (e.g. drivers playing chicken with your pickup hoping you’ll cancel). With that said, there’s nothing I’ve seen from Uber that Hailo didn’t give me when I was traveling in Dublin 5 years ago.
      - Macha 7y ago
        Free now (Formerly mytaxi/hailo) has 70 million passengers and 100k drivers: https://www.daimler.com/products/services/mobility-services/mytaxi/ https://www.daimler.com/products/services/mobility-services/... This compares to Uber at 90 million passengers and 3.9m drivers: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/ Now unfortunately it's hard to assess Free Now's methodology as they're not a public company (they're owned by BMW and Daimler) so we only have their marketing claims to go on. Also the majorly divergent passenger:driver ratio is likely down to mytaxi operating primarily in markets where taxi drivers are licensed and Uber's disruption not tolerated. This means they're pulling from a smaller pool that is more likely comprised of full time drivers.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    It's a realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities No it doesn’t. For a start there is no overlap between cities, so that’s easy to shard. And secondly that’s not what SLA means - how many 9’s do you think would be in a sub-second SLA? Thirdly Uber offloads it’s payment to third parties, unless I blinked and it’s issuing its own credit cards now. You seem to be incredibly impressed by Uber’s tech but have you considered that everyone else’s tech works so well that you just take it for granted? No Uber ride comes close to the complexity of sending a package internationally, and orders of magnitude more packages are sent every day than Uber does rides.
- deleted 7y ago
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goatinaboat 7y ago

Hope this helps you understand Uber’s operations are orders of magnitude less complex than the supply chain and logistics of any major manufacturer. Or government or military. Or the post office or the phone company. Even McDonalds keeping its restaurants supplied and ice-cream machines working. All the cool tech Uber developed they did for fun. Because they had nothing better to do. Hope this helps you understand.

morningcovfefe 7y ago
Good god you sound ignorant. Uber isn't a post office with multi day SLA. It's a realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities - and that's just one part of the company. Payments is a whole chunk of the tech industry in and off itself. Food delivery is a whole of the tech startup scene in an off itself. As is Freight.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities That's actually "for thousands of users in one city" executed a few hundred times, and map/PoI/pathfinding parts can be (are?[0]) outsourced to a third party. -- [0] - I don't use Uber as a matter of principle, but the competitor I use utilizes Google Maps for these parts. So do food delivery companies I use.
- drcross 7y ago
  The Uber apologists on here really boggle my mind. Other competitors seem to do it fine such as Free Now, which operates in multiple cities and I don't even know where their offices are located because they don't need these super 10x Devs people speak about. There is no special sauce in Uber. Once the VC money that uber spend on subsidising EVERY JOURNEY dies up then customers will move to another platform.
  - NeverFade 7y ago
    How many drivers and riders does "Free Now" have?
    - ploika 7y ago
      Lots. They operate all over Europe. They were called mytaxi until a couple of months ago, and absorbed Hailo and many other ride hailing services over the past few years.
      - coredog64 7y ago
        I haven’t used Uber enough to hit the problems that others mention (e.g. drivers playing chicken with your pickup hoping you’ll cancel). With that said, there’s nothing I’ve seen from Uber that Hailo didn’t give me when I was traveling in Dublin 5 years ago.
    - Macha 7y ago
      Free now (Formerly mytaxi/hailo) has 70 million passengers and 100k drivers: https://www.daimler.com/products/services/mobility-services/mytaxi/ https://www.daimler.com/products/services/mobility-services/... This compares to Uber at 90 million passengers and 3.9m drivers: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/ Now unfortunately it's hard to assess Free Now's methodology as they're not a public company (they're owned by BMW and Daimler) so we only have their marketing claims to go on. Also the majorly divergent passenger:driver ratio is likely down to mytaxi operating primarily in markets where taxi drivers are licensed and Uber's disruption not tolerated. This means they're pulling from a smaller pool that is more likely comprised of full time drivers.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  It's a realtime service with second-SLAs that needs to know where you are, where the closest 20 drivers are, the map of the area, places of interest and a dozen other things - for millions of users in hundreds of cities No it doesn’t. For a start there is no overlap between cities, so that’s easy to shard. And secondly that’s not what SLA means - how many 9’s do you think would be in a sub-second SLA? Thirdly Uber offloads it’s payment to third parties, unless I blinked and it’s issuing its own credit cards now. You seem to be incredibly impressed by Uber’s tech but have you considered that everyone else’s tech works so well that you just take it for granted? No Uber ride comes close to the complexity of sending a package internationally, and orders of magnitude more packages are sent every day than Uber does rides.
deleted 7y ago
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