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From the jobs page of the first link for a software engineer position: "The position is salaried up to $72,000 a year depending on geography. Fixed-term contrac

From the jobs page of the first link for a software engineer position: "The position is salaried up to $72,000 a year depending on geography. Fixed-term contracts are available." Sorry, but you're not buying competitive talent with 72k/year salary. Uber can squeeze out tons of marginal efficiencies via better routing/matching, price discrimination, and surge algorithms. Implementing those algorithms means hiring good talent, especially in ML. Having a fancy frontend is only 10% of the picture if you want drivers to have good utilization.

endisneigh 4y ago
> edit: and the second link advertises using Postgres, which will never scale past the size of a single US state to be fair depending on the exact implementation details you probably could do everything you need, including management using Spanner and BigTable.
hackernewds 4y ago
this assumes Uber can only hire silicon valley engineers. $72k is plenty money in a cheap gas/food/rent no state tax city like Dallas
- briandear 4y ago
  $72k for Texas lol. I don’t know a single Silicon Valley quality engineer working for that anywhere in the US.
ForHackernews 4y ago
> which will never scale past the size of a single US state People live in a city and take cabs in that city. Build a city-scale app. For extra credit, add federation APIs to interoperate with other city-scale worker-owned co-op apps. Only a tiny 0.1% of people (including Uber's dumb investors) think that being able to use the same app in every city on earth is a killer feature.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  You don't even need multiple apps. Even if a Postgres DB only scaled to a single city, which is wrong to begin with, you could shard it per city/state/country pretty easily.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- noirbot 4y ago
  It kinda is a big feature though. I'd imagine people who need a rideshare service are over-represented in people who travel a lot for either business or pleasure, and likely do so to multiple random cities. I remember traveling to a city in Canada 4-5 years ago when they didn't have Uber or Lyft, and there was a local app that was vexing to try to use if you didn't already live there, and assumed you had a local address. There were a lot of places I just didn't end up going to because I couldn't work out the app, and couldn't find a normal taxi on the street that didn't require cash that I didn't have. For a lot of people, the times you're calling a cab are a stressful experience already - you're in a new place, maybe with a new language, often under time pressure to get somewhere. There's definite advantage to using a familiar app in that use case.
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    I guess you're right that having Uber is a big help for all the people who fit the center of the Venn diagram for: - Unwilling to use public transport - Unfamiliar with the city - Don't carry any cash - Don't speak the local language - Unable to install/set up a new app - Travelling alone, without a local who can help them Are there enough of those people to justify Uber as a $100B business? I am very sceptical.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      What you've described is most business travelers, which is essentially what keeps most of the airline and hotel industry alive, as I understand it.
mathgladiator 4y ago
I think most of those efficiencies can be done better by a human dispatcher. The key thing which made Uber take off was a combination of convenience and better cars. Solve the convenience and that can take you a far way for many people.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  I don't really think humans are better equipped to route 10-15 cars in a region factoring in drivers' preferences for direction, pickup and dropoff zone attractiveness to drivers, and traffic. See this research on human solutions to the vehicle routing problem: "When comparing the human performance with the optimal solution and classical heuristics (nearest neighbor, savings, and sweep), we see that participants typically perform better than the worst heuristic and worse than the best heuristic" [1]. All of these algorithms are pretty naive baselines and you can do a lot better with actual routing software. And this being a low margin winner take all business, Uber being slightly better with algorithms makes it substantially better as an option compared to the coop. Also I think you're underestimating the difficulty of consistent hiring. You can definitely find a good dispatcher in NYC, but can you scale that level of skill to the entire US? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305054820300794 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03050...
mathgladiator 4y ago
All postgres needs to handle is a large metro area and then is trivial to shard and scale out.

endisneigh 4y ago

> edit: and the second link advertises using Postgres, which will never scale past the size of a single US state to be fair depending on the exact implementation details you probably could do everything you need, including management using Spanner and BigTable.

hackernewds 4y ago

this assumes Uber can only hire silicon valley engineers. $72k is plenty money in a cheap gas/food/rent no state tax city like Dallas

briandear 4y ago
$72k for Texas lol. I don’t know a single Silicon Valley quality engineer working for that anywhere in the US.

ForHackernews 4y ago

> which will never scale past the size of a single US state People live in a city and take cabs in that city. Build a city-scale app. For extra credit, add federation APIs to interoperate with other city-scale worker-owned co-op apps. Only a tiny 0.1% of people (including Uber's dumb investors) think that being able to use the same app in every city on earth is a killer feature.

endisneigh 4y ago
You don't even need multiple apps. Even if a Postgres DB only scaled to a single city, which is wrong to begin with, you could shard it per city/state/country pretty easily.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
noirbot 4y ago
It kinda is a big feature though. I'd imagine people who need a rideshare service are over-represented in people who travel a lot for either business or pleasure, and likely do so to multiple random cities. I remember traveling to a city in Canada 4-5 years ago when they didn't have Uber or Lyft, and there was a local app that was vexing to try to use if you didn't already live there, and assumed you had a local address. There were a lot of places I just didn't end up going to because I couldn't work out the app, and couldn't find a normal taxi on the street that didn't require cash that I didn't have. For a lot of people, the times you're calling a cab are a stressful experience already - you're in a new place, maybe with a new language, often under time pressure to get somewhere. There's definite advantage to using a familiar app in that use case.
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  I guess you're right that having Uber is a big help for all the people who fit the center of the Venn diagram for: - Unwilling to use public transport - Unfamiliar with the city - Don't carry any cash - Don't speak the local language - Unable to install/set up a new app - Travelling alone, without a local who can help them Are there enough of those people to justify Uber as a $100B business? I am very sceptical.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    What you've described is most business travelers, which is essentially what keeps most of the airline and hotel industry alive, as I understand it.

mathgladiator 4y ago

I think most of those efficiencies can be done better by a human dispatcher. The key thing which made Uber take off was a combination of convenience and better cars. Solve the convenience and that can take you a far way for many people.

ceeplusplus 4y ago
I don't really think humans are better equipped to route 10-15 cars in a region factoring in drivers' preferences for direction, pickup and dropoff zone attractiveness to drivers, and traffic. See this research on human solutions to the vehicle routing problem: "When comparing the human performance with the optimal solution and classical heuristics (nearest neighbor, savings, and sweep), we see that participants typically perform better than the worst heuristic and worse than the best heuristic" [1]. All of these algorithms are pretty naive baselines and you can do a lot better with actual routing software. And this being a low margin winner take all business, Uber being slightly better with algorithms makes it substantially better as an option compared to the coop. Also I think you're underestimating the difficulty of consistent hiring. You can definitely find a good dispatcher in NYC, but can you scale that level of skill to the entire US? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305054820300794 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03050...

mathgladiator 4y ago

All postgres needs to handle is a large metro area and then is trivial to shard and scale out.