8 ms·

Let me flip this around. Non-governmental subsidized transportation infrastructure is and always has been a race to the bottom. Taxis are mostly only profitabl

by dbt00 5y ago

Let me flip this around. Non-governmental subsidized transportation infrastructure is and always has been a race to the bottom. Taxis are mostly only profitable with extremely low overhead and only servicing high traffic areas like Manhattan or other major metropolitan areas. Uber's thousands of engineers and SF HQ disqualifies them from being low overhead anything. In the 1890s in Chicago when massive subway and interurban train networks were built out by private business, they either failed financially or succeeded only by real estate speculation around where they built their lines. Eventually all of those lines were acquired by local governments or shut down. Mass transit lines in LA, NYC and around the country followed similar trajectories. Look up the Interborough Rapid Transit Company in NY, or Charles Yerkes and Sam Insull in Chicago. These days modern suburban subdivision companies don't bother with creating mass transit, they just fund street construction and install public works lines like gas/sewer/water/electric, and let the city deal with the traffic and the inevitable deferred maintenance that clashes with their low tax philosophies.

neonate 5y ago
This seems to me the salient part of your comment: > Taxis are mostly only profitable with extremely low overhead and only servicing high traffic areas like Manhattan or other major metropolitan areas. Uber's thousands of engineers and SF HQ disqualifies them from being low overhead anything. If I'm understanding correctly, the argument is that taxis are basically a shit business—bad enough to break the "software is eating the world" rule because they have such low margins that you can't pay a software team (or at least, not operate a marquee SV software company) and compete. Better tech isn't enough. If that's true, that answers my question. I'm surprised if it's true, though. I didn't think the taxi business was that miserable, and I'm not sure how it squares with taxi medallions being the highest-performing investment of the 20th century (or some factoid like that which I read years ago).
- dbt00 5y ago
  They were in Manhattan. They weren't in SF, and they certainly weren't in, say, Urbana, IL.
  - neonate 5y ago
    You mean about medallions? That makes sense. Have I characterized your argument correctly, more or less? If not, I'd like to know what I missed.
  - eschulz 5y ago
    I think you got it. Pay a million dollars for a medallion, and then have the right to sit at Times Square or JFK and charge people $50 to drive them for 20 or so minute. The cabs are independent LLCs, so they're on their own for health insurance, 401k, etc. Mostly driven by immigrants, I think being a cabbie can be a tough job.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  When he puts it like that, it makes me think Uber has a much better business model than I thought. Taxi efficiency is very heavily dependent on information - if you know exactly where the customers are, where the drivers are, and then can run shortest-path algorithms in real-time to match them up, you can save huge amounts of driver time waiting and finding customers. Figure you save an hour a day * 200 workdays/year * 200K taxi drivers in the U.S. and that's 40 million hours saved in the U.S. a year. At a rate of $10/hour, that's $400M/year. Then add in economies of scale from knowing where all the drivers and customers are, and a better brand and better customer experience from reducing wait times and transaction costs to get a taxi. Is that worth $80B? I don't know, but I'd guess probably not. But it'd easily pay for a SF HQ and several thousand engineers.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    Yes informational efficiencies for transportation at scale could easily be $80 billion worth of value to the world. The real question is whether Uber can capture that amount of value. And whether competition will drive the margins to zero anyways.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    Or at least several hundred engineers. Does Uber really need several thousand engineers? It's kinda nuts to me, WhatsApp scaled to a billion with 50, you figure an order of magnitude more to deal with the fact that a large part of Uber is turning legal compliance into code.
    - refenestrator 5y ago
      When you read their stories about managing 10,000 microservices or whatever.. I don't want to trivialize their domain but it seems like a bit of empire building happened.
    - ChefboyOG 5y ago
      Not arguing that there isn't probably a level of bloat at Uber, but the complexity of Uber's product is a lot more than other commenters are implying here. Their ML platform alone seems like a monster: https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/ https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > I'm not sure how it squares with taxi medallions being the highest-performing investment of the 20th century Taxi medallions are an artifact of how NYC regulated its taxi fleet; other places may have had them but the investment factoid probably comes from NYC. Joe’s Cab in Peoria, IL probably doesn’t have a medallion worth $1 million to borrow against. And, of course, note: not all cabbies owned (or currently own) the medallions they drive under: many lease them or drive for a company that owns them, and has sat on them as a speculative asset for decades. Source: went to school in NYC with plenty of cabbies’ kids. It’s not a job many people eagerly take.
- adventured 5y ago
  Taxis are both a mediocre margin business, and typically cartel restricted. Many people here are likely familiar with the absurd stories of the NYC medallion prices from just before Uber took over (a million dollars for a taxi medallion, before Uber smashed the cartels, tanking the value of the medallions). NYC extracted $855m in medallion fees from just 2004-2014. So how did the eg NYC medallions become so valuable? The taxi cartel bought into the (mostly unspoken) notion that the medallions represented a government guaranteed blockade on competition. For a city like NYC with rather epic taxi demand, a license to print even just 8% margins perpetually can be an enticing prospect (especially in an age of forever low interest rates). Then, instead, the city governments mostly allowed Uber and Lyft to continue to operate (after their initial move to operate first and seek forgiveness second), rather than shielding the taxi cartel from competition.
- maxk42 5y ago
  I know of no city in the US (although there may be some small towns) where taxi rates are not dictated by either state, county, or local laws. You cannot get a taxi for any rate other than the officially-sanctioned one. Unfortunately, this rate seldom has anything to do with the cost of gas, maintenance, depreciation, pandemics suddenly causing people to use more / less services, etc. This means that for the taxi industry, there are four chief ways of making more money (1) lobbying, which is effective but slow; (2) reducing costs in the extreme, which is also effective, but only to the extent that you are able to reduce your costs further by delaying repairs, doing it yourself, not offering refreshments, not providing great customer service, not developing apps, etc.; (3) working more hours, often in contravention of labor and safety laws. Also effective, but only if you're independent. (4) Breaking the law. A significant number of cab meters are illegally altered to charge more money than allowed by law. Uber, for all its flaws, provided a service that was better than the taxi companies simply because they didn't require their contractors cut corners, cheat, or provide poor service to make money. People flocked to Uber because it was genuinely a better experience than the local taxi companies. I think in the long run, Uber will compete by becoming as expensive as (or more expensive than) local cab companies, and having a much smaller customer base.
  - otterley 5y ago
    > (4) Breaking the law. A significant number of cab meters are illegally altered to charge more money than allowed by law. Do you have evidence of this claim, at least insofar as U.S. taxis are concerned?
    - canada_dry 5y ago
      Certainly the same method used by some unscrupulous gas stations. They added a device to the pump that electronically altered the cost i.e. skipping/adding x cents after y amount pumped. More than one Canadian station owner was nailed a few years ago for adding these devices to their pumps. My google-foo skills haven't found the relevant story tho.
      - maxk42 5y ago
- gauravjain13 5y ago
  If we suspend the Uber/taxi comparison, and assume Uber is a new taxi-like service but better, therefore deserves a premium? I know I’d pay for that premium. Not everyone will, but I can’t be alone? So that means the addressable market shrinks. Think premium black-car-only service; Uber’s roots). Why can’t such a service find demand/price equilibrium? I think it can, but not in a manner that can justify Uber’s “unicorn” valuation. And I think that’s at the core of Uber’s conundrum/identity crisis: it provides value, but with tech-company cost structures. However, it doesn’t deserve tech-company valuations because it’s just not as scalable — it’s tied to operating in the physical world, with physical constraints. If the strategy is to burn cash, continue entrenchment, and eventually leapfrog to self-driving Ubers (mitigating the scaling/cost problem to an extent), then that’s a war of attrition. Fingers crossed.
  - ajnin 5y ago
    What's premium about Uber ? My personal experience is that taxis are usually much more comfortable cars, they're allowed to drive in dedicated bus lanes, and they don't try to scam you by taking a longer route to rack an overcharge. The advantage and innovation of Uber is the app, but now taxi companies have one too. So what is it ?
    - cozos 5y ago
      Taxis absolutely scam you and its harder to prove than an Uber with a digital record of the route taken.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      My personal experience is taxis are less comfortable and I've only not been scammed by a taxi once (in the us), taxis are fantastic abroad, no idea why. A large part of Uber is also the rating model. I don't know if taxis have that, but at least for LGBTQ passengers it makes a huge difference. You can't harass your passenger and keep a good rating.
    - mcculley 5y ago
      One advantage I get from Uber is a single interface no matter where I am. I travel a lot. I won’t install an app for every city. Uber has taken away the pain of dealing with taxi companies in strange cities. Unfortunately, it traded one kind of monopoly for another. Ideally, Uber would have been an app and a network that taxi companies plug into.
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  Those taxi medallion returns were a con from small groups of insiders.[0] [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medall...
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Drivers and vehicles are by far the biggest expense in operating a taxi service, not matching, ordering, and navigation. The only way Uber was ever going to make sense was if software could eat the drivers, but they effectively gave up on that and it's looking like it won't happen any time soon. We've already long had "better tech" for moving large numbers of passengers between popular destinations in a city: trains and buses. But they're still not profitable and require public investment. Uber as a public service could probably work, but then no one could get rich transferring wealth from late-stage investors to early-stage investors.
- deepsun 5y ago
  > taxis are basically a shit business In efficient market ANY business must be a shit business. If you have high profits -- competitors should squeeze into your profits. Same logic works for other low-margin businesses, e.g. restaurants, they just saturated their supply.
hosh 5y ago
What about Japan, in which over 87% of rail passenger transits in three metropolitan areas are provided by private operators? https://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-what-it-can-teach-us/ https://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-w...
- franciscop 5y ago
  > or succeeded only by real estate speculation around where they built their lines My understanding of how Japan transit is profitable (I live there and I'm interested on it quite a bit) is multi-sided, but the main difference is that train companies own (or are leased for free/cheap) the station areas. So they setup big malls and stores around the stations, that for the fact of being on a station are probably the most transited and profitable ones in the nation. Some smaller but meaningful differences might be that Japan urban density is very high (small country, lots of mountains/forests), that there's a lot of public transportation traffic, that the train rides for employees are normally subsidized by the companies, etc.
curmudgeon22 5y ago
Uber only has one HQ. Sure, it’s more expensive than a taxi service in city X, but Uber HQ and engineering service a very large area.
- dtagames 5y ago
  It doesn't require any special "engineering" to make a ride hailing app. I guarantee you could get an Uber clone out of a high school coding bootcamp weekend. It's really that simple. "Dispatching" a message to a phone based on its location. Why would that need special software engineering? That's all open source stuff that's readily available. Certainly everything else Uber does (collecting money, ratings, etc) is all off-the-shelf stuff.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    Just the whole abuse detection and handling part of it is vastly more complex than anything a coding bootcamp could handle. But as usual the software isn't the biggest challenge. Building a driver and rider network at the same time is.
    - verbify 5y ago
      Abuse detection is more important at scale. If you have a local app servicing a single city, they're less of a target than Uber.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      What abuse are you trying to detect? I can only see payment fraud, but that can be mitigated by requiring clear payment in advance (like a deposit) and/or payment methods where the fraud liability shifts to the bank (any payment card with 3D-Secure which is now the default in Europe).
      - Edman274 5y ago
        Sometimes, drivers rob / assault / murder passengers and sometimes passengers rob / assault / murder drivers. Sometimes, you want to do background checks on people driving, and you want to have a way for a passenger to report something like "hey, my driver that dropped me off at my house has now been driving past my house at 2AM", and you want to make it possible to let a driver report something like "hey, my passenger threw up in my car".
dredmorbius 5y ago
Part of the profit in taxis is through medallion appreciation and rentals. Taxi medallions are required to operate in a city. The supply is artificially constrained, creating a taxi cartel. But medallions are rarely owned by the drivers themselves, rather they're owned by the taxi company or an investor, and leased back. Limited supply + lease -> rents Plus the medallions can serve as collateral (as with any asset), or be bought and sold. If one entity controls enough of them, they can then influence taxi availability (and hence prices) within a region. This hits the bigtime only in a few major cities, but is probably enough of a factor in taxi finances to warrant a mention. (I'm not nearly as knowledgable about this as it may seem. Mostly some discussions in econ courses at uni and the stray article since. Uber did crash medallion prices though.) (Stock exchange seats are another somewhat similar asset, and also staple of econ course discussions.)
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Uber's thousands of engineers Why does Uber need a thousand engineers? The first time I used Uber was 4 years ago. It felt like a complete product. I understand the constant need for expansion around the world requires engineering to scale up servers in multiple regions, but does that really take a thousand engineers? Do they really need thousands of people to handle the feature creep? I'm just finding it hard to believe that there's enough work to do on a ride hailing app to keep thousands of engineers busy.

by dbt00 5y ago

neonate 5y ago

This seems to me the salient part of your comment: > Taxis are mostly only profitable with extremely low overhead and only servicing high traffic areas like Manhattan or other major metropolitan areas. Uber's thousands of engineers and SF HQ disqualifies them from being low overhead anything. If I'm understanding correctly, the argument is that taxis are basically a shit business—bad enough to break the "software is eating the world" rule because they have such low margins that you can't pay a software team (or at least, not operate a marquee SV software company) and compete. Better tech isn't enough. If that's true, that answers my question. I'm surprised if it's true, though. I didn't think the taxi business was that miserable, and I'm not sure how it squares with taxi medallions being the highest-performing investment of the 20th century (or some factoid like that which I read years ago).

dbt00 5y ago
They were in Manhattan. They weren't in SF, and they certainly weren't in, say, Urbana, IL.
- neonate 5y ago
  You mean about medallions? That makes sense. Have I characterized your argument correctly, more or less? If not, I'd like to know what I missed.
- eschulz 5y ago
  I think you got it. Pay a million dollars for a medallion, and then have the right to sit at Times Square or JFK and charge people $50 to drive them for 20 or so minute. The cabs are independent LLCs, so they're on their own for health insurance, 401k, etc. Mostly driven by immigrants, I think being a cabbie can be a tough job.
nostrademons 5y ago
When he puts it like that, it makes me think Uber has a much better business model than I thought. Taxi efficiency is very heavily dependent on information - if you know exactly where the customers are, where the drivers are, and then can run shortest-path algorithms in real-time to match them up, you can save huge amounts of driver time waiting and finding customers. Figure you save an hour a day * 200 workdays/year * 200K taxi drivers in the U.S. and that's 40 million hours saved in the U.S. a year. At a rate of $10/hour, that's $400M/year. Then add in economies of scale from knowing where all the drivers and customers are, and a better brand and better customer experience from reducing wait times and transaction costs to get a taxi. Is that worth $80B? I don't know, but I'd guess probably not. But it'd easily pay for a SF HQ and several thousand engineers.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Yes informational efficiencies for transportation at scale could easily be $80 billion worth of value to the world. The real question is whether Uber can capture that amount of value. And whether competition will drive the margins to zero anyways.
- dnautics 5y ago
  Or at least several hundred engineers. Does Uber really need several thousand engineers? It's kinda nuts to me, WhatsApp scaled to a billion with 50, you figure an order of magnitude more to deal with the fact that a large part of Uber is turning legal compliance into code.
  - refenestrator 5y ago
    When you read their stories about managing 10,000 microservices or whatever.. I don't want to trivialize their domain but it seems like a bit of empire building happened.
  - ChefboyOG 5y ago
    Not arguing that there isn't probably a level of bloat at Uber, but the complexity of Uber's product is a lot more than other commenters are implying here. Their ML platform alone seems like a monster: https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/ https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/
woodruffw 5y ago
> I'm not sure how it squares with taxi medallions being the highest-performing investment of the 20th century Taxi medallions are an artifact of how NYC regulated its taxi fleet; other places may have had them but the investment factoid probably comes from NYC. Joe’s Cab in Peoria, IL probably doesn’t have a medallion worth $1 million to borrow against. And, of course, note: not all cabbies owned (or currently own) the medallions they drive under: many lease them or drive for a company that owns them, and has sat on them as a speculative asset for decades. Source: went to school in NYC with plenty of cabbies’ kids. It’s not a job many people eagerly take.
adventured 5y ago
Taxis are both a mediocre margin business, and typically cartel restricted. Many people here are likely familiar with the absurd stories of the NYC medallion prices from just before Uber took over (a million dollars for a taxi medallion, before Uber smashed the cartels, tanking the value of the medallions). NYC extracted $855m in medallion fees from just 2004-2014. So how did the eg NYC medallions become so valuable? The taxi cartel bought into the (mostly unspoken) notion that the medallions represented a government guaranteed blockade on competition. For a city like NYC with rather epic taxi demand, a license to print even just 8% margins perpetually can be an enticing prospect (especially in an age of forever low interest rates). Then, instead, the city governments mostly allowed Uber and Lyft to continue to operate (after their initial move to operate first and seek forgiveness second), rather than shielding the taxi cartel from competition.
maxk42 5y ago
I know of no city in the US (although there may be some small towns) where taxi rates are not dictated by either state, county, or local laws. You cannot get a taxi for any rate other than the officially-sanctioned one. Unfortunately, this rate seldom has anything to do with the cost of gas, maintenance, depreciation, pandemics suddenly causing people to use more / less services, etc. This means that for the taxi industry, there are four chief ways of making more money (1) lobbying, which is effective but slow; (2) reducing costs in the extreme, which is also effective, but only to the extent that you are able to reduce your costs further by delaying repairs, doing it yourself, not offering refreshments, not providing great customer service, not developing apps, etc.; (3) working more hours, often in contravention of labor and safety laws. Also effective, but only if you're independent. (4) Breaking the law. A significant number of cab meters are illegally altered to charge more money than allowed by law. Uber, for all its flaws, provided a service that was better than the taxi companies simply because they didn't require their contractors cut corners, cheat, or provide poor service to make money. People flocked to Uber because it was genuinely a better experience than the local taxi companies. I think in the long run, Uber will compete by becoming as expensive as (or more expensive than) local cab companies, and having a much smaller customer base.
- otterley 5y ago
  > (4) Breaking the law. A significant number of cab meters are illegally altered to charge more money than allowed by law. Do you have evidence of this claim, at least insofar as U.S. taxis are concerned?
  - canada_dry 5y ago
    Certainly the same method used by some unscrupulous gas stations. They added a device to the pump that electronically altered the cost i.e. skipping/adding x cents after y amount pumped. More than one Canadian station owner was nailed a few years ago for adding these devices to their pumps. My google-foo skills haven't found the relevant story tho.
    - maxk42 5y ago
gauravjain13 5y ago
If we suspend the Uber/taxi comparison, and assume Uber is a new taxi-like service but better, therefore deserves a premium? I know I’d pay for that premium. Not everyone will, but I can’t be alone? So that means the addressable market shrinks. Think premium black-car-only service; Uber’s roots). Why can’t such a service find demand/price equilibrium? I think it can, but not in a manner that can justify Uber’s “unicorn” valuation. And I think that’s at the core of Uber’s conundrum/identity crisis: it provides value, but with tech-company cost structures. However, it doesn’t deserve tech-company valuations because it’s just not as scalable — it’s tied to operating in the physical world, with physical constraints. If the strategy is to burn cash, continue entrenchment, and eventually leapfrog to self-driving Ubers (mitigating the scaling/cost problem to an extent), then that’s a war of attrition. Fingers crossed.
- ajnin 5y ago
  What's premium about Uber ? My personal experience is that taxis are usually much more comfortable cars, they're allowed to drive in dedicated bus lanes, and they don't try to scam you by taking a longer route to rack an overcharge. The advantage and innovation of Uber is the app, but now taxi companies have one too. So what is it ?
  - cozos 5y ago
    Taxis absolutely scam you and its harder to prove than an Uber with a digital record of the route taken.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    My personal experience is taxis are less comfortable and I've only not been scammed by a taxi once (in the us), taxis are fantastic abroad, no idea why. A large part of Uber is also the rating model. I don't know if taxis have that, but at least for LGBTQ passengers it makes a huge difference. You can't harass your passenger and keep a good rating.
  - mcculley 5y ago
    One advantage I get from Uber is a single interface no matter where I am. I travel a lot. I won’t install an app for every city. Uber has taken away the pain of dealing with taxi companies in strange cities. Unfortunately, it traded one kind of monopoly for another. Ideally, Uber would have been an app and a network that taxi companies plug into.
anonAndOn 5y ago
Those taxi medallion returns were a con from small groups of insiders.[0] [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medall...
nonameiguess 5y ago
Drivers and vehicles are by far the biggest expense in operating a taxi service, not matching, ordering, and navigation. The only way Uber was ever going to make sense was if software could eat the drivers, but they effectively gave up on that and it's looking like it won't happen any time soon. We've already long had "better tech" for moving large numbers of passengers between popular destinations in a city: trains and buses. But they're still not profitable and require public investment. Uber as a public service could probably work, but then no one could get rich transferring wealth from late-stage investors to early-stage investors.
deepsun 5y ago
> taxis are basically a shit business In efficient market ANY business must be a shit business. If you have high profits -- competitors should squeeze into your profits. Same logic works for other low-margin businesses, e.g. restaurants, they just saturated their supply.

hosh 5y ago

What about Japan, in which over 87% of rail passenger transits in three metropolitan areas are provided by private operators? https://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-what-it-can-teach-us/ https://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-w...

franciscop 5y ago
> or succeeded only by real estate speculation around where they built their lines My understanding of how Japan transit is profitable (I live there and I'm interested on it quite a bit) is multi-sided, but the main difference is that train companies own (or are leased for free/cheap) the station areas. So they setup big malls and stores around the stations, that for the fact of being on a station are probably the most transited and profitable ones in the nation. Some smaller but meaningful differences might be that Japan urban density is very high (small country, lots of mountains/forests), that there's a lot of public transportation traffic, that the train rides for employees are normally subsidized by the companies, etc.

curmudgeon22 5y ago

Uber only has one HQ. Sure, it’s more expensive than a taxi service in city X, but Uber HQ and engineering service a very large area.

dtagames 5y ago
It doesn't require any special "engineering" to make a ride hailing app. I guarantee you could get an Uber clone out of a high school coding bootcamp weekend. It's really that simple. "Dispatching" a message to a phone based on its location. Why would that need special software engineering? That's all open source stuff that's readily available. Certainly everything else Uber does (collecting money, ratings, etc) is all off-the-shelf stuff.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Just the whole abuse detection and handling part of it is vastly more complex than anything a coding bootcamp could handle. But as usual the software isn't the biggest challenge. Building a driver and rider network at the same time is.
  - verbify 5y ago
    Abuse detection is more important at scale. If you have a local app servicing a single city, they're less of a target than Uber.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    What abuse are you trying to detect? I can only see payment fraud, but that can be mitigated by requiring clear payment in advance (like a deposit) and/or payment methods where the fraud liability shifts to the bank (any payment card with 3D-Secure which is now the default in Europe).
    - Edman274 5y ago
      Sometimes, drivers rob / assault / murder passengers and sometimes passengers rob / assault / murder drivers. Sometimes, you want to do background checks on people driving, and you want to have a way for a passenger to report something like "hey, my driver that dropped me off at my house has now been driving past my house at 2AM", and you want to make it possible to let a driver report something like "hey, my passenger threw up in my car".

dredmorbius 5y ago

Part of the profit in taxis is through medallion appreciation and rentals. Taxi medallions are required to operate in a city. The supply is artificially constrained, creating a taxi cartel. But medallions are rarely owned by the drivers themselves, rather they're owned by the taxi company or an investor, and leased back. Limited supply + lease -> rents Plus the medallions can serve as collateral (as with any asset), or be bought and sold. If one entity controls enough of them, they can then influence taxi availability (and hence prices) within a region. This hits the bigtime only in a few major cities, but is probably enough of a factor in taxi finances to warrant a mention. (I'm not nearly as knowledgable about this as it may seem. Mostly some discussions in econ courses at uni and the stray article since. Uber did crash medallion prices though.) (Stock exchange seats are another somewhat similar asset, and also staple of econ course discussions.)

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> Uber's thousands of engineers Why does Uber need a thousand engineers? The first time I used Uber was 4 years ago. It felt like a complete product. I understand the constant need for expansion around the world requires engineering to scale up servers in multiple regions, but does that really take a thousand engineers? Do they really need thousands of people to handle the feature creep? I'm just finding it hard to believe that there's enough work to do on a ride hailing app to keep thousands of engineers busy.