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There's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their ow

by bko 5y ago

There's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their own chat solution? [0] > With operations in over 620 cities, it was paramount for us to identify a chat solution that would enable Uber employees to reliably communicate on desktop and mobile regardless of where they were in the world. Did Uber really need their own chat solution? Are they not better served by a SaaS product, one of 5 that 90%+ of companies are using? Are they still using uChat today? (honest question, I don't know) This is especially dangerous when talking about security sensitive features. It is highly inadvisable to roll your own crypto Lot of companies shut down or fail for lots of reasons. I think a business should focus on what they do best and what's critical to their mission. [0] https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

andyp-kw 5y ago
I see your point. But at Uber's scale I can see the business need for a custom chat app. Most third party chat apps are bloated, both the cheap and expensive ones. Plus there's the need for custom integrations.
- bko 5y ago
  I used to work at a large bank and they operated perfectly fine with Window's messenger. As does every other bank in the US, despite having tens if not hundred of thousands of employees. Some things require more specialized features like trade tickets (which Bloomberg does), but for chatting, you're not gonna be able to build a better solution than already exists. And if you can, then you should spin that off into its own business like Goldman did with Symphony [0] The nice thing about being a client is that they support all this stuff and it gets better over time. Also something like Slack is absurdly cheap compared to the usefulness and productivity it provides. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Communication
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    > but for chatting, you're not gonna be able to build a better solution than already exists. And if you can, then you should spin that off into its own business like Goldman did with Symphony The implication that Symphony is a better solution for chatting than already exists / existed. As a (non-trading) user of the platform, I strongly disagree. I don't know what the traders think, but I'd hope there's a USP in there for them besides "it's cheaper than a Bloomberg seat."
lhorie 5y ago
Uber grew extremely fast in its initial years and that resulted in large number of teams starting NIH projects to "make themselves useful". Uber switched to Slack a while back, in addition to laying off a sizable chunk of the engineering workforce, and it didn't really collapse on itself. Nowadays, there's a lot more support internally at Uber for buying off-the-shelf solutions instead of trying to reinvent wheels.
msbarnett 5y ago
> There's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their own chat solution? [0] Sure, there's obviously a big difference between controlling the things that are critical to your business and wasting time outside your core competencies. And part of that difference is the risk profile: if your entire backend disappears, and takes the API your frontend is built around and all of the data with it, you're basically up shit creek. If your chat app of choice disappears, you can sign the company up for a different one tomorrow – it doesn't take 8 months of crunch to "port" your employees, and likely all of your critical business docs weren't in the form of chat history. > Lot of companies shut down or fail for lots of reasons. I think a business should focus on what they do best and what's critical to their mission. Agreed. But very few internet companies can claim that the data in their datastore and the entire mechanism by which their product accesses said data is not critical to their business, which is the distinguishing factor here.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Crypto is almost always implemented as a library, and probably ultimately as a kernel module in most cases. There is no reason at all you should need to call out to a remote service to encrypt and decrypt data. That wouldn't even make sense, as it would need to be encrypted before traversing the network to be of any use. And there are plenty of commodity chat applications like Mattermost and RocketChat that you can self-host, again not necessarily needing to use someone else's cloud service but also not need to roll your own application.

by bko 5y ago

andyp-kw 5y ago

I see your point. But at Uber's scale I can see the business need for a custom chat app. Most third party chat apps are bloated, both the cheap and expensive ones. Plus there's the need for custom integrations.

bko 5y ago
I used to work at a large bank and they operated perfectly fine with Window's messenger. As does every other bank in the US, despite having tens if not hundred of thousands of employees. Some things require more specialized features like trade tickets (which Bloomberg does), but for chatting, you're not gonna be able to build a better solution than already exists. And if you can, then you should spin that off into its own business like Goldman did with Symphony [0] The nice thing about being a client is that they support all this stuff and it gets better over time. Also something like Slack is absurdly cheap compared to the usefulness and productivity it provides. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Communication
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  > but for chatting, you're not gonna be able to build a better solution than already exists. And if you can, then you should spin that off into its own business like Goldman did with Symphony The implication that Symphony is a better solution for chatting than already exists / existed. As a (non-trading) user of the platform, I strongly disagree. I don't know what the traders think, but I'd hope there's a USP in there for them besides "it's cheaper than a Bloomberg seat."

lhorie 5y ago

Uber grew extremely fast in its initial years and that resulted in large number of teams starting NIH projects to "make themselves useful". Uber switched to Slack a while back, in addition to laying off a sizable chunk of the engineering workforce, and it didn't really collapse on itself. Nowadays, there's a lot more support internally at Uber for buying off-the-shelf solutions instead of trying to reinvent wheels.

msbarnett 5y ago

> There's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their own chat solution? [0] Sure, there's obviously a big difference between controlling the things that are critical to your business and wasting time outside your core competencies. And part of that difference is the risk profile: if your entire backend disappears, and takes the API your frontend is built around and all of the data with it, you're basically up shit creek. If your chat app of choice disappears, you can sign the company up for a different one tomorrow – it doesn't take 8 months of crunch to "port" your employees, and likely all of your critical business docs weren't in the form of chat history. > Lot of companies shut down or fail for lots of reasons. I think a business should focus on what they do best and what's critical to their mission. Agreed. But very few internet companies can claim that the data in their datastore and the entire mechanism by which their product accesses said data is not critical to their business, which is the distinguishing factor here.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Crypto is almost always implemented as a library, and probably ultimately as a kernel module in most cases. There is no reason at all you should need to call out to a remote service to encrypt and decrypt data. That wouldn't even make sense, as it would need to be encrypted before traversing the network to be of any use. And there are plenty of commodity chat applications like Mattermost and RocketChat that you can self-host, again not necessarily needing to use someone else's cloud service but also not need to roll your own application.