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A negative / unpopular take: like air in a balloon a startup company will grow as large as its capital allows as it is purposefully using this capital to grow f
by kfarr 6y ago
A negative / unpopular take: like air in a balloon a startup company will grow as large as its capital allows as it is purposefully using this capital to grow faster than natural market forces allow. In other words it has a big engineering team because it raised capital to get a big engineering team. Craigslist is a great example of bucking the trend in this regard.
A more positive take: if you look at the specifics of how many regions Uber is (was) in, and that each region has cities each of which have wildly different regulatory environments, you can imagine the permutations of complexity they had to deal with. Then you add in growing internal business experiments like Eats or mobility (Jump) and it's easy to see how this balloons out of control pretty fast.
- saagarjha 6y agoI think a combination of these is true. Uber certainly deals with more complexity in mapping than almost anyone. Their scale is massive. That being said: their engineering scale is massive as well. And if you have enough people, they will start adding things just for the sake of being busy. There is certainly someone at Uber writing code that is included in the app bundle that never runs. There are certainly assets being shipped that were relevant in 2016 but have since been forgotten. There is an engineer messing with some low-level powerful API for no real reason other than they find it interesting, and hurting the performance of something or the other by an order of magnitude. For political reasons, there is some non-optimal code shipping somewhere. At extremely large team sizes, it can be very difficult to find and fix these issues. But this is a social, not a technical, problem.