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A taxi company over here had a contractor build them their own hailing app. Cost them less than €600k, it's pretty slick.
by varjag 6y ago
A 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.