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> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expen
by spookthesunset 7y ago
> We even started building and maintaining our own chat app
God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?"
Boom, now the company is straddled by a shitty, homebrew chat application that is maintained by nobody because the original author left for greener pastures. Nobody dares replace it though because that would be sacrilege. That chat app is part of the company, after all!
Arg.... I hate, hate, hate when engineers with a bad understanding of business and too much time on their hands lock their organisations into homebrew crap that has nothing to do with the value delivered by the business.
/rant
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoI love how the solution to this is always: "Let's build our own thing!" instead of: "Let's just use something free and/or open source."
- nabakin 7y agoEngineers like to build haha
- spookthesunset 7y agoI mean, it probably wasn't in the right programming language and was missing one little feature the org thought it needed and hell.... how hard is a chat application, right?
- rrix2 7y agoUber's chat platform is based on the open source mattermost
- ryanSrich 7y agoInstilling a culture of relentlessly outsourcing to open source is insanely hard. I’ve been trying for years.
- wheels 7y agoOpen Source chat tools are sadly almost universally disappointing. I believe I tried just about every one of them before giving up and just using Slack. I detailed the reasons here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623005 I have the impression that Slack has gotten worse. We're again having problems of notifications not showing up.
- behringer 7y agoHave you tried out wire? I like it, but never used it in a work environment.
- mehhh 7y agoMatrix has been a better fit at my company, though it was a bit rough a year ago. Bridging in Slack, Gitter, IRC and other platforms makes working with external teams a breeze, everything is in one place.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derefr 7y agoIf you were willing to use Slack after all, then I guess you were willing to consider non-FOSS alternatives? In which case, one service you don't seem to have considered: Discord. Yes, really, for business. Look past the theming. Discord has a much more solid tech base (and engineering team) behind it than Slack, IMHO. A better API, too; and—unlike Slack—real support for third-party clients! I built my own niche team-collaboration app back in 2012, and I tried out a lot of things, but ended up building my whole own stack. That was back then. If I was doing it again today? I'd just make it an alternative Discord frontend. (There are also offerings specifically designed for the "build your own custom frontend for our chat backend" use-case, like https://pusher.com/chatkit https://pusher.com/chatkit, but IMHO Discord even has these beat.)
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
- cle 7y agoAt big companies, this is often the preferable alternative. Making and releasing quick bug fixes on internal projects is way faster than open source and public projects. Ownership and control is critical.
- 0x4a42 7y agoBig companies can't fork?
- secfirstmd 7y agoDam. I could have saved them a fortune by recommending Mattermost. Maybe even got Uber to make some e2e encryption commits also :)
- this_user 7y ago> God I love the Not Invented Here disease. Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" And even then they could have just used Matrix, which ticks all of those boxes.
- uber_throwawa12 7y agoSlack was evaluated a few times. The reason it was initially rejected when we first considered it is because it wasn't able to handle our scale at the time and the team over at Slack was not interested in prioritizing scaling for us over other things on their product roadmap.
- spookthesunset 7y agoWhat about all the other chat apps? Why wasn't the whole thing dumped into a pile of hot lava the second slack could scale to an org the size of uber? What what does scale mean anyway? Just employees using it or employees + contractors? It's easy to armchair quarterback on this stuff, but I find it hilarious how tech companies that employee supposedly smart people justify writing this kind of stuff. I'm sure some junior engineer did a cost/benefit that completely neglected the total cost of ownership for writing a chat app and focused on the sticker shock of having to pay tens of thousands a month for a chat app.
- tmh79 7y agoanother issue was data domiciling and retention policies around 2016 when uber was evaluating slack.
- spookthesunset 7y agoWere these actual concerns that were raised by the actual legal council of the company, or were they issues invented by engineers who are not lawyers but suffer from engineers disease and think that knowing to code means they are experts in everything else? 'Cause I know plenty of those! I've worked in plenty of companies with engineers who think they are legal, privacy and security experts. If we made business decisions based on these folks, we'd never do anything. Hell, every damn text change we makes invokes a few who worry about the legal ramifications ("should we file a JIRA ticket with legal?"). Sadly without somebody stepping in, people actually listen to them instead of the actual experts employed by the company... thus you wind up wasting tons of engineering bandwidth building a feature / platform / product that has no business existing all (or worse, not building some feature / platform / product) because nobody bothered to check with the legal / privacy / security team that some concern by a engineer was actually a genuine concern. And even then, in any good organization legal / privacy / security teams exist only to point out all the risks in any business decision... sometimes it is worth the risk despite what legal / privacy / security say. What appetite the company has for the risk depends on a lot of things that are well outside of legal/privacy/security.
- r29vzg2 7y agoWhile you're not wrong about most of this. uChat is actually built by a pretty large team https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
- spookthesunset 7y ago> uChat is actually built by a pretty large team Which is even more scary. Why isn't uber laying all these people off and paying cash money for a real chat application? What competitive advantage does uber have maintaining a chat application?
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agoPreventing engineers who are working on it from working at the competition?
- echelon 7y agoThat's pretty stupid. If this was truly their strategy, they're just raising everyone's costs. They can't out-compete Google at this game.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoGoogle has a chat app? What's it called this week?
- segmondy 7y agoThey might have to pivot into a chat company
- sdan 7y ago"Uber Chat -- because that's one thing you didn't know you needed!"
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
- derefr 7y agoThe part I don't get is how > hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' gets followed up immediately (almost inevitably, in my experience) with > so lets write our own chat application.... how hard can it be?" ...rather than, say, "hey, I googled and there are a few FOSS alternatives for 'group chat with history': Zulip, for one; Mattermost, for another. Let's see if either of those fit our needs. If they don't quite, though, let's also see if either one of them has a solid, customizable codebase to fix up!"
- mpeg 7y agoBut... they did, uChat is a fork of Mattermost, and they contributed the changes back to the open source project.
- derefr 7y agoThey did. Which makes them not an example of the GP's comment. Most companies do, in fact, end up literally attempting to "write our own chat application" from the ground up. (After all, that's where Slack itself came from—NIHing an MMO-game's chat middleware!)
- andylei 7y agoThis is exactly what they did https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
- liveoneggs 7y agothey wrote that fancy blog post but couldn't scale ejabberd to 50k users? Whatsapp managed to scale ejabberd into whatsapp so..
- BenoitEssiambre 7y agoYeah and why would anyone ever buy a tailor made suit when you can get them off the rack for cheaper?
- utopian3 7y agoPride?
- iroe0jjr 7y agoContrarian view: not your company or resources. Management was enabling it until now. Since when did wanting to be a software developer mean there’s “one true way” to do software dev? Why are developers supposed to be budget babysitters for a huge company with tons of people watching budgets? I don’t owe my employer being an expert in all contexts to the benefit of their business. I am not their servant. I write code to serve contexts they want served.
- iamleppert 7y agoHow do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The real issue here is a lack of vision at the top. The current CEO needs to step down for the health of the company. He has a clear lack of vision for the company, as evidenced by his statement of "do your divisions look like what they should if we had to start over?" Who says that? Something so vague that is basically grasping at straws and shows a complete lack of strategy. Would Jeff Bezos say something like that? I highly doubt it, because he has complete control over his company and a vision that has worked at micro and macro levels. You can do things that aren't directly related to your core business and these things should generate value both internally and externally. If you can't do this, eventually, your company will stop growing.
- dmix 7y agoWhat does AWS have to do with an internal chat application? Is Uber going to roll out another Slack clone because they thought of something marginally better? This where understanding business matters. AWS makes sense as a business and it benefits mostly from economies of scale which is something unique that a massive company like Amazon can provide the service which few other companies could. NIH stuff is also rarely externalized outside of the business. Even as open source. Which as the OP pointed out needs proper investment of human capital. Not some side project of a bored engineer or two. Most innovation happens outside of mega companies by small teams for a good reason. Even the Skunkworks type approach is only useful for certain types of work like Googles X projects. Some B2B SaaS programs roll out of parent organiations but typically they are started by teams who quit the bigger company to solve the problem they had.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y agoIn Amazon’s defense, there wasn’t anything as useful to their needs as AWS before AWS. If a different company had dominated the on-demand computing space before Amazon’s peak load issues became too big a problem, they very may as well have gone with that and not made AWS. Almost nobody needs to write their own chat app. Slack is fine.
- otterley 7y ago> How do you explain Amazon, then? They invented AWS to sell books on the Internet. The first AWS service was launched over 15 years after Amazon.com started selling books on the Internet. It wasn’t even a separate brand until after Amazon S3, SQS and EC2 were launched.
- tolmasky 7y agoHeh, this is the story of how Slack got built. Slack was built as an internal tool while building Glitch, an online game. From Wikipedia: > Slack began as an internal tool for Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck during the development of Glitch, a defunct online game.[13][14] "Slack" is an acronym for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.
- tbyehl 7y agoSome day, Stewart Butterfield will launch a gaming company that is successful in the gaming space instead of becoming the inspiration for an entirely unrelated startup.
- bobsil1 7y agoButterfield needs to fail at an enterprise app so his side game blows up.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cecilpl2 7y agoFun fact: Tiny Speck was actually Stewart Butterfield's second game company. His first game company also didn't do well, so they pivoted to release Flickr.
- monsieurbanana 7y agoI simultaneously wishes for him to continue trying to make video games, and to continue failing to do so. Seems to be working pretty well.
- dahart 7y ago> Somebody, somewhere, thought "hey, slack is way to expensive, we don't want to get 'locked in', and 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' [...] Like I completely agree with your overall point about reckless overengineering, but you also just listed three true and really good reasons to avoid integrating Slack.
- 22c 7y agoI setup an enterprise-grade Mattermost server in a weekend. The hardest part wasn't even Mattermost itself, but getting SMTP working reliably in the age of DKIM/SPF/DMARC policies. This could be sidestepped by using any of the well-established email providers. No reason to use Slack when such options exist, but also no reason to write your own chat app, either.
- raz32dust 7y agoIf the company relies on Mattermost, I would assume they'd need at least one maintainer per ~100 users, just to make sure that the SMTP keeps working reliably, there are backups etc. One person to maintain Mattermost would cost a company at least 150000 USD in the bay area. That's $100+ per month per user. Slack is way cheaper than that.
- dx034 7y agoReally, 50 maintainers for a 5000 user system? I'd think it scales much better, probably 2-3 people for the whole company. And in that case, it can quickly be cheaper than slack
- linuxdude314 7y agoThis is a more realistic scenario. I own/operate shared services for thousands of users on a team of 3. If it takes you that many engineers you are either using the wrong software or using it incorrectly.
- amerine 7y ago
- creddit 7y agoUber didn't make their own chat app. They just use Mattermost. It was a comical sham internally perpetuated by the team that rolled it out that it was "built in-house".
- jjeaff 7y agoI heard about that. That the team responsible tried to pass it off as their own. However, according to the CEO of mattermost, Uber has made extensive alterations.
- jclulow 7y agoHaving used Mattermost a lot for the last few years, you'd really _want_ to make extensive modifications to at least the mobile clients if you want things to work properly.
- ekianjo 7y agoYour rant is misinformed, Uber uses Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/customers/uber/ https://mattermost.com/customers/uber/
- romski 7y agoI work at Uber and we do use an internally built chat app.
- yahnu 7y agoDecision to build a chat app might seem wrong now in hindsight but this could have been a strategic move (as hinted in original comment). Look at their competitors in Asia (all-in-one services like WeChat, GoJek etc. where search, chat, ride hailing, banking etc. are all built in one app) and it would make sense for them to have an engineering team building a chat app.
- afterburner 7y ago> because the original author left for greener pastures Well that's the incentive for that kind of behaviour, pad your resume and get another job.
- deepGem 7y agoI think this could be one of the reasons for Uber pulling out Twilio. Someone must have said 'hey we will build our own telephony suite .. '. I wonder how that has panned out.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- solotronics 7y agoIs there any "chat app" that is really better than github/gitlab and a good IRC or XMPP server? I am constantly disappointed by slack. I wish google waves was still around...
- iamsb 7y agoI recently worked with a ex-uber engineer, hired by a ex-uber engineer manager. We were piloting use of launchdarkly, and he suggested we just build it ourselves as he has already done it few times and would take him only few months to build.
- piyushpr134 7y agoIt cannot be shittier than slack. My slack desktop app consumes like 20% of my macbook's ram and phone app misses important notifications
- thecleaner 7y agoI have found the over-consumption problem with electron based apps in general. However I didn't really miss notifications.
- birdyrooster 7y agoNow imagine they did it like 4 times. Am I talking about Apple or Google?
- fergie 7y ago"Enterprise" slack is $15 per head per month. This would equate to an recurring annual expenditure of nearly $4.86million for Uber's 27000 employees. Given that Slack can be seen as IRC with some pretty decoration glued up to an Elasticsearch instance, and that Uber already has a highly trained tech org in place, if it wants to make a Slack "clone" for less than, say, $25million (cost of Slack to Uber for 5 years), it could actually be a pretty sensible decision- especially when you take into account the tax and stock-price benefits of capital expenditure.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoZulip is already a thing. Not to mention other floss alternatives.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoUnless NIH/buy are truly the only options. `docker run whereverthatactuallyis/mattermost` looks like a cheaper option that doesn't require building from scratch.
- thecleaner 7y ago+1 for mattermost. Works out of box for most applications. But I think people will find it surprising how quickly one starts to run out of space. People can be very chatty.
- arbol 7y agoFunnily enough, mattermost seems to list Uber as their client on their home page. https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app.
- aryamaan 7y ago> Maybe they realised it was a superior solution to building their own app. Uber's internal chat tool is built on top of Mattermost.
- dagw 7y agoI hate, hate, hate when engineers with a bad understanding of business and too much time on their hands The equal and opposite problem is managers who don't understand the sunk cost fallacy and refuse to throw out home grown solutions. Sometimes there might have been a good idea to homebrew a thing years ago because nothing good existed. Now several better solutions exist but the company refuses to adopt them because doing so would mean "throwing away" years of work, and the managers who signed off on that work are afraid they'll look bad.
- mnky9800n 7y agoYou aren't wrong, but if someone paid me to write a chat application I probably wouldn't fight it. It sounds like a lot of fun.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoBack in 1994 I worked at British telecom on one of the first high profile web projects for our intranet. Apparently there was a serious suggestion that this new www was shoddy and we needed to write our own version of http - this got stamped on by some senior people at Martlesham (UK version of bell labs)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- reeves23423 7y ago> 'mumble mumble privacy cloud evil stallman' RMS was always right especially with regards to privacy.