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On one hand, I don't understand why they need so many employees for a ride-sharing platform. On the other hand, I can understand that people are just so eager t

On one hand, I don't understand why they need so many employees for a ride-sharing platform. On the other hand, I can understand that people are just so eager to find another growth point so anything looking like a growth point could get almost unlimited capitals then hire a lot.

draw_down 6y ago
Over 25 minutes until the first “Why do they have so many employees” post. You’re slipping, HN!
jfim 6y ago
That's the case for many tech companies, why does Twitter need thousands of employees? Turns out there's lots of employees to do all kinds of things, the app side is only the tip of the iceberg. There needs to be people collecting metrics and analyzing them, people building the platform that employees use to deploy code and run batch jobs, maintaining infrastructure (IIRC Uber did onprem -> cloud -> onprem), people interacting with customers and drivers, local expansion teams, and so on.
- dclusin 6y ago
  Does twitter really need those metrics? Just because people want metrics doesn’t mean they need to or should be collected. I have seen over the years posted here and again that highly targeted advertising and the ensuing surveillance infrastructure that that entails hasn’t really resulted in a significant improvement over non-targeted generic advertising like keywords and brand based advertising. So they could probably be as effective from revenue perspective without all the infra to spy on people and the manpower that requires. Huge revenue slumps like these tend to facilitate come to Jesus moments with regards to staffing and mission priorities. I suspect if twitter had or was going to losE confidence of the stock market and needed to show improvement a lot of the so called mission critical metrics would probably go.
  - nindalf 6y ago
    Any change deployed by large software firms are checked to make sure that no team wide and company wide metrics are adversely affected. How do you do that if you don't have the metics in the first place?
  - jfim 6y ago
    Most metrics aren't really related to advertising or personal data collection, though. Things like monthly active users (part of the quarterly shareholder report), conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, feature usage, active minutes, and so on are all part of the usual development process. These are used pretty heavily when launching new features or changes to existing features, in order to make sure that no key metrics are adversely impacted. For example, if one launches a new feature but users are confused by it, they might be less likely to succeed at completing a transaction, thus negatively impacting revenue. The change will then be re-evaluated or even rolled back.
thelean12 6y ago
This is a common trope on HN that's strange to me. I feel like people are unable to see the complexity of an organization from the outside, but normally accept the complexity and need for employees while on the inside.
- Slartie 6y ago
  Might have something to do with the paycheck you're receiving regularly while on the inside...
  - thelean12 6y ago
    Or just a better understanding of the organization and the problems they face. The inability to use that understanding and apply it elsewhere is what's strange to me.
    - bentcorner 6y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
      - thelean12 6y ago
        Uhh that doesn't really apply here. I'm sure executives could make a lot of money if they could get the same output with 20% of the workforce. I'm not the one convincing people my services are needed. I'm the one being poached because they are.
  - nindalf 6y ago
    This is needlessly personal, bordering on ad hominem. I've never received a paycheck from Uber but I have worked for large organisations. 3800 people on engineering doesn't seem unusual to me. I can't justify the employment of each of those 3800 but I know for sure that this product could not have been built by 100 engineers.
- cwzwarich 6y ago
Consultant32452 6y ago
According to Price's Law 50% of the work is done by the square root of the number of people. As the amount of stuff you need to do grows linearly, the amount of people you need to do that stuff grows exponentially.
- lultimouomo 6y ago
  I think you mean quadratically.
  - jmeister 6y ago
    In popular usage of the term, anything above linear is “exponential” unfortunately.
- johnvanommen 6y ago
  Price's Law is great. I think it provides insight into so much of how the world works. I am curious to see how Red Hat performs now that it's been swallowed up by IBM.
- probe 6y ago
  Is there any empirical evidence of Price’s law? Would love to see it. I could only find this study (admittedly from 1986) that disproved the original hypothesis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0306457388900490 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030645...
eagsalazar2 6y ago
Uber has tons of regional offices for local expansion, lobbying, marketing, loans, etc. Not sure what % that adds up to but I can imagine they have many many employees in that category internationally.
legohead 6y ago
Read up on Uber's infrastructure, and you will be quick to reconsider.
pragmatic 6y ago
How else would they re-write all their "data science" code from python to go?
grumple 6y ago
Their ride sharing platform is very sophisticated, though. Pathfinding based on gps locations, maps, traffic, and other obstacles, and solving traveling salesman problems with constantly changing variables are generally not simple problems (every ride sharing platform does it, sure, but that doesn't mean it's easy, or that they all do it well). Plus they are at a very high scale and high reliability, both of which require large amounts of employees (things don't just scale themselves). On top of that they have a lot of vertical / horizontal integrations.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  They are powered by Google,so travel routes, traffic info and all other difficult things come from them.Not saying it's easy, but main challenges are definitely somewhere else.
  - deltaeerie 6y ago
    None of the above are powered by Google. And marketplace difficulty comes from regional constraints, product differentiation, and incentives to try and achieve equilibrium (e.g. demand forecasting). The resources required for these are massive.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    From people I’ve spoken with, the only mapping thing google provides that they use is the base map and road segments. In some markets they use Open Street Maps or TomTom when the data is better than Google. All the routing tech is their own and works atop these three data sources. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/uber-adds-tomtom-navigation-data-to-its-driver-app-not-replacing-google-maps/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/uber-...
feifan 6y ago
TL;DR, every marginal employee generates enough marginal revenue at scale that they more than pay for themselves, and so it's worth it for the company to keep adding people (at least while the business is doing well)
jdminhbg 6y ago
Think about landing at an airport in the before times and getting an Uber. You don't just put a marker on a map view, you have to be directed to where the airport set up ride share pickups. The drivers who want to wait in a queue to pickup airport riders need to be told where they're allowed to wait. There are millions of little edge cases like this, all with different, non-standard laws in every city they operate in. It's not just running a big server that keeps a table of pickup coordinates.

draw_down 6y ago

Over 25 minutes until the first “Why do they have so many employees” post. You’re slipping, HN!

jfim 6y ago

That's the case for many tech companies, why does Twitter need thousands of employees? Turns out there's lots of employees to do all kinds of things, the app side is only the tip of the iceberg. There needs to be people collecting metrics and analyzing them, people building the platform that employees use to deploy code and run batch jobs, maintaining infrastructure (IIRC Uber did onprem -> cloud -> onprem), people interacting with customers and drivers, local expansion teams, and so on.

dclusin 6y ago
Does twitter really need those metrics? Just because people want metrics doesn’t mean they need to or should be collected. I have seen over the years posted here and again that highly targeted advertising and the ensuing surveillance infrastructure that that entails hasn’t really resulted in a significant improvement over non-targeted generic advertising like keywords and brand based advertising. So they could probably be as effective from revenue perspective without all the infra to spy on people and the manpower that requires. Huge revenue slumps like these tend to facilitate come to Jesus moments with regards to staffing and mission priorities. I suspect if twitter had or was going to losE confidence of the stock market and needed to show improvement a lot of the so called mission critical metrics would probably go.
- nindalf 6y ago
  Any change deployed by large software firms are checked to make sure that no team wide and company wide metrics are adversely affected. How do you do that if you don't have the metics in the first place?
- jfim 6y ago
  Most metrics aren't really related to advertising or personal data collection, though. Things like monthly active users (part of the quarterly shareholder report), conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, feature usage, active minutes, and so on are all part of the usual development process. These are used pretty heavily when launching new features or changes to existing features, in order to make sure that no key metrics are adversely impacted. For example, if one launches a new feature but users are confused by it, they might be less likely to succeed at completing a transaction, thus negatively impacting revenue. The change will then be re-evaluated or even rolled back.

thelean12 6y ago

This is a common trope on HN that's strange to me. I feel like people are unable to see the complexity of an organization from the outside, but normally accept the complexity and need for employees while on the inside.

Slartie 6y ago
Might have something to do with the paycheck you're receiving regularly while on the inside...
- thelean12 6y ago
  Or just a better understanding of the organization and the problems they face. The inability to use that understanding and apply it elsewhere is what's strange to me.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
    - thelean12 6y ago
      Uhh that doesn't really apply here. I'm sure executives could make a lot of money if they could get the same output with 20% of the workforce. I'm not the one convincing people my services are needed. I'm the one being poached because they are.
- nindalf 6y ago
  This is needlessly personal, bordering on ad hominem. I've never received a paycheck from Uber but I have worked for large organisations. 3800 people on engineering doesn't seem unusual to me. I can't justify the employment of each of those 3800 but I know for sure that this product could not have been built by 100 engineers.
cwzwarich 6y ago

Consultant32452 6y ago

According to Price's Law 50% of the work is done by the square root of the number of people. As the amount of stuff you need to do grows linearly, the amount of people you need to do that stuff grows exponentially.

lultimouomo 6y ago
I think you mean quadratically.
- jmeister 6y ago
  In popular usage of the term, anything above linear is “exponential” unfortunately.
johnvanommen 6y ago
Price's Law is great. I think it provides insight into so much of how the world works. I am curious to see how Red Hat performs now that it's been swallowed up by IBM.
probe 6y ago
Is there any empirical evidence of Price’s law? Would love to see it. I could only find this study (admittedly from 1986) that disproved the original hypothesis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0306457388900490 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030645...

eagsalazar2 6y ago

Uber has tons of regional offices for local expansion, lobbying, marketing, loans, etc. Not sure what % that adds up to but I can imagine they have many many employees in that category internationally.

legohead 6y ago

Read up on Uber's infrastructure, and you will be quick to reconsider.

pragmatic 6y ago

How else would they re-write all their "data science" code from python to go?

grumple 6y ago

Their ride sharing platform is very sophisticated, though. Pathfinding based on gps locations, maps, traffic, and other obstacles, and solving traveling salesman problems with constantly changing variables are generally not simple problems (every ride sharing platform does it, sure, but that doesn't mean it's easy, or that they all do it well). Plus they are at a very high scale and high reliability, both of which require large amounts of employees (things don't just scale themselves). On top of that they have a lot of vertical / horizontal integrations.

cosmodisk 6y ago
They are powered by Google,so travel routes, traffic info and all other difficult things come from them.Not saying it's easy, but main challenges are definitely somewhere else.
- deltaeerie 6y ago
  None of the above are powered by Google. And marketplace difficulty comes from regional constraints, product differentiation, and incentives to try and achieve equilibrium (e.g. demand forecasting). The resources required for these are massive.
- malandrew 6y ago
  From people I’ve spoken with, the only mapping thing google provides that they use is the base map and road segments. In some markets they use Open Street Maps or TomTom when the data is better than Google. All the routing tech is their own and works atop these three data sources. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/uber-adds-tomtom-navigation-data-to-its-driver-app-not-replacing-google-maps/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/uber-...

feifan 6y ago

TL;DR, every marginal employee generates enough marginal revenue at scale that they more than pay for themselves, and so it's worth it for the company to keep adding people (at least while the business is doing well)

jdminhbg 6y ago

Think about landing at an airport in the before times and getting an Uber. You don't just put a marker on a map view, you have to be directed to where the airport set up ride share pickups. The drivers who want to wait in a queue to pickup airport riders need to be told where they're allowed to wait. There are millions of little edge cases like this, all with different, non-standard laws in every city they operate in. It's not just running a big server that keeps a table of pickup coordinates.