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Which of those two devs will be responsible for ensuring taxes are properly charged and keeping up to date with the tax code? Which will maintain parking and m

Which of those two devs will be responsible for ensuring taxes are properly charged and keeping up to date with the tax code? Which will maintain parking and map zones? Who will work on routing and matching? Who's working on fraud? On safety? Who is working on payments, both from riders and paying drivers? Who is generating required tax reports for drivers? Who's doing driver onboarding? Which will ensure that drivers have the proper paperwork to operate in their market (insurance etc)? And who is working on Android and iOS apps, both for drivers and riders? Who's working on the backend?

agloeregrets 6y ago
My numbers were talking app expenses, obviously a company of Uber's scale would need 100+ employees. I broke down below that if they worked at their current scale and charged just a penny, they could pay their employees an average of $100K per year and still make millions in profit after spending millions on Infrastructure. Uber bills on average more than 100-200 times that and spends insane numbers on unprofitable projects like self driving cars. I've read the whole book, a set of co-ops could easily spend as little as a million dollars, retain devs for work on it, bill a tiny service fee of a penny per ride (plus card processing) and then have local co-ops operate the other half of everything above at a reasonable scale whereas drivers get paid the rest other than management costs. Uber is intentionally using automation to overswamp driver markets to keep prices low and driver pay low to boost ride numbers and eliminate competition.
- aerosmile 6y ago
  Nope, your words were clear - you were flat out wrong, and are now trying to save face. I don't have a tendency to call people out, but blindly applying the "two devs in a garage" axiom is not only wrong when it comes to labor marketplaces, but it also unnecessarily spreads discontent to the point that we have to stop this silliness. I don't care one bit about your recalculated math from now on - for me, you're just another armchair quarterback who speaks before he thinks.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    Yes, OP was wrong to specifically call out "two devs" and HN, as it always is, was technically correct and called him out on it. Congratulations HN! Bad OP! I agree with the overall sentiment though: "What are all these people doing?" is a valid question against lots of Silicon Valley companies who are currently growing for the sake of growing. Yes, you need a few lawyers. Do you need 100 lawyers, each with executive assistants, and lawyer managers of other lawyers? Why? What specifically are they all doing? Why can't you do it with 90 lawyers? or 80? I've worked for companies ranging from 12 people up to 100,000+. I've seen companies that were legitimately understaffed, but also companies where I don't think anyone (including the employees themselves) could articulate why all these people were needed. Outwardly, it's always explained with some nebulous reason like "Oh, what we do is oh-so-complex! We need people to, um, manage the complexity, and uh, create synergies." Yea, and they need exec assistants and interns, and their own staff of sub-complexity-wranglers, who also need assistants, and soon it's complexity-wranglers all the way down, and nobody knows what any of them are actually doing, but they're all sending E-mails to each other! The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure your importance by how many people are under you, so everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get budget for, and build their empire. But it's an empire of paper, of TPS reports! These people aren't really doing anything, but they make this SVP's org bigger than the other SVP's org, and the CEO can tell everyone how huge (i.e. important) the company is getting, and that's what's important.
    - bhupy 6y ago
      > The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure your importance by how many people are under you, so everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get budget for, and build their empire. If we're throwing around conventional aphorisms, one could just as easily argue that most companies simply optimize for maximizing profits by minimizing labor costs, and therefore have an incentive to eliminate redundant labor. Heaven knows that Uber's primary goal for the next few years is profitability. Why, then, wouldn't Uber just get rid of all of these paper TPS report empires? Should be simple enough, right? The reality is that it's a lot more complicated. I think GP's comment about armchair quarterbacking is an important one, and I think this comment as a good example of that. A fun joke I've heard is that the mark of a senior engineer is how often they say "Well, It Depends™". It mostly alludes to the general tendency to avoid simple explanations of complex systems the more senior one gets.I think the same applies in the context of organization building. There was a good comment a while ago from a former Uber engineer that broke down just why the Uber app is so big: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 If you take that, and try to imagine that it's not just engineers, it's also Product Managers, Designers that feed into the raw R&D; and the fact that Uber actually operates in multiple business lines (Eats, Rides, Freight, Bikeshare, Transit) and then the operationalization of all of those features, including customer support, biz ops, product marketing, etc. And then wrap all that up into the core organizational infrastructure necessary to support all that: FP&A, HR, etc. It all adds up! And that's just the current businesses we see, you also have portions of all of that feeding into the numerous exploratory efforts they probably have underway into new business lines.

agloeregrets 6y ago

My numbers were talking app expenses, obviously a company of Uber's scale would need 100+ employees. I broke down below that if they worked at their current scale and charged just a penny, they could pay their employees an average of $100K per year and still make millions in profit after spending millions on Infrastructure. Uber bills on average more than 100-200 times that and spends insane numbers on unprofitable projects like self driving cars. I've read the whole book, a set of co-ops could easily spend as little as a million dollars, retain devs for work on it, bill a tiny service fee of a penny per ride (plus card processing) and then have local co-ops operate the other half of everything above at a reasonable scale whereas drivers get paid the rest other than management costs. Uber is intentionally using automation to overswamp driver markets to keep prices low and driver pay low to boost ride numbers and eliminate competition.

aerosmile 6y ago
Nope, your words were clear - you were flat out wrong, and are now trying to save face. I don't have a tendency to call people out, but blindly applying the "two devs in a garage" axiom is not only wrong when it comes to labor marketplaces, but it also unnecessarily spreads discontent to the point that we have to stop this silliness. I don't care one bit about your recalculated math from now on - for me, you're just another armchair quarterback who speaks before he thinks.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Yes, OP was wrong to specifically call out "two devs" and HN, as it always is, was technically correct and called him out on it. Congratulations HN! Bad OP! I agree with the overall sentiment though: "What are all these people doing?" is a valid question against lots of Silicon Valley companies who are currently growing for the sake of growing. Yes, you need a few lawyers. Do you need 100 lawyers, each with executive assistants, and lawyer managers of other lawyers? Why? What specifically are they all doing? Why can't you do it with 90 lawyers? or 80? I've worked for companies ranging from 12 people up to 100,000+. I've seen companies that were legitimately understaffed, but also companies where I don't think anyone (including the employees themselves) could articulate why all these people were needed. Outwardly, it's always explained with some nebulous reason like "Oh, what we do is oh-so-complex! We need people to, um, manage the complexity, and uh, create synergies." Yea, and they need exec assistants and interns, and their own staff of sub-complexity-wranglers, who also need assistants, and soon it's complexity-wranglers all the way down, and nobody knows what any of them are actually doing, but they're all sending E-mails to each other! The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure your importance by how many people are under you, so everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get budget for, and build their empire. But it's an empire of paper, of TPS reports! These people aren't really doing anything, but they make this SVP's org bigger than the other SVP's org, and the CEO can tell everyone how huge (i.e. important) the company is getting, and that's what's important.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    > The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure your importance by how many people are under you, so everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get budget for, and build their empire. If we're throwing around conventional aphorisms, one could just as easily argue that most companies simply optimize for maximizing profits by minimizing labor costs, and therefore have an incentive to eliminate redundant labor. Heaven knows that Uber's primary goal for the next few years is profitability. Why, then, wouldn't Uber just get rid of all of these paper TPS report empires? Should be simple enough, right? The reality is that it's a lot more complicated. I think GP's comment about armchair quarterbacking is an important one, and I think this comment as a good example of that. A fun joke I've heard is that the mark of a senior engineer is how often they say "Well, It Depends™". It mostly alludes to the general tendency to avoid simple explanations of complex systems the more senior one gets.I think the same applies in the context of organization building. There was a good comment a while ago from a former Uber engineer that broke down just why the Uber app is so big: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 If you take that, and try to imagine that it's not just engineers, it's also Product Managers, Designers that feed into the raw R&D; and the fact that Uber actually operates in multiple business lines (Eats, Rides, Freight, Bikeshare, Transit) and then the operationalization of all of those features, including customer support, biz ops, product marketing, etc. And then wrap all that up into the core organizational infrastructure necessary to support all that: FP&A, HR, etc. It all adds up! And that's just the current businesses we see, you also have portions of all of that feeding into the numerous exploratory efforts they probably have underway into new business lines.