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Can someone tell me why Uber needs so many engineers? I mean the app has been developed, infrastructure software as well, probably was rewritten several times a

Can someone tell me why Uber needs so many engineers? I mean the app has been developed, infrastructure software as well, probably was rewritten several times as well...why do you still need thousands of engineers for a taxi app? Do people really want more features? Can't they keep it going the "same" way for the next 20 years? Something like the craiglist approach.

idontwantthis 5y ago
Because they took many $billions in funding and if they don’t increase in value, investors can sue.
StillBored 5y ago
There was an article on this board not long ago, which was very eye opening. It was about the process of rewriting their ios app in swift. It described how they have multiple versions of the app, written by completely different teams, in different languages. Interesting to read, because it would seem any engineer with more than a few years of experience would understand the risks of rewritting an application of any complexity, but worse they would also understand the difficulty of picking immature technologies. Layer on a whole bunch of other WTFs (related to how & why the app itself is so large) and a picture emerged for me. Never mind the fact that no one in mgmt appears to have questioned why it wasn't possible to pick a cross platform language/toolkit (or even write a custom shim) and reduce their app development overhead. While they might be getting the glory for what the org has achieved the whole thing sounds crazy dysfunctional. Mostly because it sounds like no one with any actual long term experience developing and maintaining software has any power in their organization. Its totally the software version of "the emperor doesn't have any cloths". So, it doesn't take much imagination to see how they could be wasting immense sums of VC money on engineering, and likely are stuck on a treadmill or dozen that continue to cause them to fail upwards.

idontwantthis 5y ago

Because they took many $billions in funding and if they don’t increase in value, investors can sue.

StillBored 5y ago

There was an article on this board not long ago, which was very eye opening. It was about the process of rewriting their ios app in swift. It described how they have multiple versions of the app, written by completely different teams, in different languages. Interesting to read, because it would seem any engineer with more than a few years of experience would understand the risks of rewritting an application of any complexity, but worse they would also understand the difficulty of picking immature technologies. Layer on a whole bunch of other WTFs (related to how & why the app itself is so large) and a picture emerged for me. Never mind the fact that no one in mgmt appears to have questioned why it wasn't possible to pick a cross platform language/toolkit (or even write a custom shim) and reduce their app development overhead. While they might be getting the glory for what the org has achieved the whole thing sounds crazy dysfunctional. Mostly because it sounds like no one with any actual long term experience developing and maintaining software has any power in their organization. Its totally the software version of "the emperor doesn't have any cloths". So, it doesn't take much imagination to see how they could be wasting immense sums of VC money on engineering, and likely are stuck on a treadmill or dozen that continue to cause them to fail upwards.