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Software is a little strange sometimes. It’s a different type of systems engineering, that’s more akin to sorcery, than to actual physics. The hardware is, of
by blackrock 6y ago
Software is a little strange sometimes.
It’s a different type of systems engineering, that’s more akin to sorcery, than to actual physics.
The hardware is, of course, limited by physics, like the speed of electrons and heat dissipation. But once you get past that, your computer system is a collection of bytes that you reassemble to form whatever it is your imagination desires.
And while the 747 is a magnificent plane, it did have the benefit of over 50 years of aviation and aeronautical science behind it, all figured out.
Whereas software is still somewhat in its infancy right now. And every few decades, it seems to revolutionize itself, as newer and faster hardware become available.
- varjag 6y agoA taxi company over here had a contractor build them their own hailing app. Cost them less than €600k, it's pretty slick.
- caoilte 6y agofair, but also a lot of Uber's business model is leveraged on top of the basic platform.
- InvisibleCities 6y agoThe functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.
- varjag 6y agoI'm talking about R&D specifically, not infra folks. But let's say designing for scale is 100 times harder than a taxi app for just one national taxi service. Based on my 23 year career in trenches I seriously doubt that's the case, but let's be generous. That would net us into ballpark of €60M expense. Non-negligible, but it translates into a hundred developers pulling €100k a year for 6 years, still at least an order of magnitude below Uber. Very obviously it does not scale anywhere near linear. There has to be a severe case of diminishing returns in technical hiring.
- closeparen 6y agoSo did early Uber. Famously, the contractors were Spanish-speaking, so FTE engineers #1-5 had Spanish-English dictionaries on their desks to understand the code.