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One of their execs literally pitched me this very vision when I turned Uber down for an eng mgr position several years ago. I thought it was comical that his p

One of their execs literally pitched me this very vision when I turned Uber down for an eng mgr position several years ago. I thought it was comical that his pitch was "The reason we're going to be successful at Problem 1 (taxis) is because we're going to be successful at ridiculously-difficult Problem 2 (self-driving) which we're not close to solving". Pass.

Apocryphon 6y ago
Not to mention, a ridiculously difficult problem that can't only be solved by technical breakthroughs, but also relies on legal and social advancements in order to see widespread adoption.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  Ubers not been one to shy away from legal skirmishes though.
  - coddle-hark 6y ago
    Even so, profitable self driving is binary; either there’s a human driver in the car or there isn’t. Uber is ”bold” but not bold enough to put thousands of self-driving cars on the road illegally.
- Fordec 6y ago
  As time goes on I find more and more parallels with designers and legal/policy writers. One just builds a specification of a technical system while the other builds a specification of a societal system. Societal systems just have much more legacy code and inertia with very little in the way of mechanisms for in house testing at scale. There's no development server, just keeping tabs on competitors (ie other countries) to see how the change in production (ie a new law introduced) had second order effects.
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- astrange 6y ago
  Also a problem that when solved completely changes their business model (not owning cars) into a different one (owning robot cars) that’s much less profitable and they have no expertise in.
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
I love it when job interview pitches fall flat like that. Many years ago, I had a job offer from IBM for a class of server I wasn't familiar with. The guy explained it to me like this: "You see, desktops these days are running Linux, and mainframes are running (IBM OS something?). We represent a class of server bigger than desktops but smaller than mainframes. It's an exciting space. The desktop class of PCs are handling bigger and bigger workloads every day, and the mainframes are getting cheaper and smaller all the time, too...." and then he sort of trailed off and we sat quietly for a few seconds, and then he started talking about the nice office.
- nl 6y ago
  IBM "Midrange", aka AS/400: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i They were an interesting - but dead - sideline of computing evolution. I never used one, but they had a interesting object-based (instead of file based) operating system.
  - janosett 6y ago
    A friend used one of these (the shorter models) as a coffee table -- I distinctly remember how hard it was to move the big, dense metal cube in and out of his room!
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    My only experience on them was interacting with some API hosted in an AS/400 via FTP protocol. Felt like I was going back to the 90s.
- ablekh 6y ago
  If my guess is correct, it seems that you have missed a chance to work on relatively popular AS/400 servers ... :-)
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    I have no idea, but the engineer I was talking to was describing the unique challenge of working with the OS, as it was the sole system compiled in that language, and how about half of the bugs they fixed were OS bugs and the other half were compiler bugs, and I ran away from there as fast as I could. This would've been somewhere around 2005, so it could've been.

Apocryphon 6y ago

Not to mention, a ridiculously difficult problem that can't only be solved by technical breakthroughs, but also relies on legal and social advancements in order to see widespread adoption.

notyourwork 6y ago
Ubers not been one to shy away from legal skirmishes though.
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  Even so, profitable self driving is binary; either there’s a human driver in the car or there isn’t. Uber is ”bold” but not bold enough to put thousands of self-driving cars on the road illegally.
Fordec 6y ago
As time goes on I find more and more parallels with designers and legal/policy writers. One just builds a specification of a technical system while the other builds a specification of a societal system. Societal systems just have much more legacy code and inertia with very little in the way of mechanisms for in house testing at scale. There's no development server, just keeping tabs on competitors (ie other countries) to see how the change in production (ie a new law introduced) had second order effects.
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astrange 6y ago
Also a problem that when solved completely changes their business model (not owning cars) into a different one (owning robot cars) that’s much less profitable and they have no expertise in.

CobrastanJorji 6y ago

I love it when job interview pitches fall flat like that. Many years ago, I had a job offer from IBM for a class of server I wasn't familiar with. The guy explained it to me like this: "You see, desktops these days are running Linux, and mainframes are running (IBM OS something?). We represent a class of server bigger than desktops but smaller than mainframes. It's an exciting space. The desktop class of PCs are handling bigger and bigger workloads every day, and the mainframes are getting cheaper and smaller all the time, too...." and then he sort of trailed off and we sat quietly for a few seconds, and then he started talking about the nice office.

nl 6y ago
IBM "Midrange", aka AS/400: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i They were an interesting - but dead - sideline of computing evolution. I never used one, but they had a interesting object-based (instead of file based) operating system.
- janosett 6y ago
  A friend used one of these (the shorter models) as a coffee table -- I distinctly remember how hard it was to move the big, dense metal cube in and out of his room!
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  My only experience on them was interacting with some API hosted in an AS/400 via FTP protocol. Felt like I was going back to the 90s.
ablekh 6y ago
If my guess is correct, it seems that you have missed a chance to work on relatively popular AS/400 servers ... :-)
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  I have no idea, but the engineer I was talking to was describing the unique challenge of working with the OS, as it was the sole system compiled in that language, and how about half of the bugs they fixed were OS bugs and the other half were compiler bugs, and I ran away from there as fast as I could. This would've been somewhere around 2005, so it could've been.