7 ms·

Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredib

by vladf 4y ago

Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.

hackernewds 4y ago
It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is I would know.
- nanidin 4y ago
  Maybe the world needs a ride share matching game, in the same vein as Elevator Saga[0]? [0] https://play.elevatorsaga.com/ https://play.elevatorsaga.com/
  - smegsicle 4y ago
    or an openttd mod
- charrondev 4y ago
  Sometimes I wish it were simpler. I’ve had multiple situations where I couldn’t get a ride into my local city recently. The app says there are rides within 10 minutes, shows me a cheap rate and I hit yes. In 10 minutes no matches have been found. In 10 more minutes it finds someone 20 minutes away. 15 minutes later the driver cancels and I’m back to square one. Now the thing is the cost of the ride is a pittance and I would gladly pay double the cost just to get to my destination in a reasonable timeframe. Instead I just call a cab now, request a pickup at a certain hour and they send a driver. FWIW I’m 20 minutes drive from downtown Montreal, so this is not like I’m out in the sticks or anything, and couple years ago it was much easier to find a ride. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s even another ride sharing company taking the drivers, it’s just a lot of drivers pivoted to doing Uber eats instead.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I had a mostly similar experience in the France. The "gladly pay double" would translate in using a different app (the ones provided by traditional taxi companies) depending on the circumstance and the margin of error. Uber's app was still hands down the best to use, and I had so many issues with the others, like credit card registration being flakky, or the app straight crashing on specific screens. It looked a lot like they paid a dev company a lump sum to make the app and would proceed to pay for some more fixes every six months instead of keeping an ongoing maintenance contract. I kinda wish that now that the legal frameworks and service viability has been explored, Uber dies completely, and the gap is filled with local startups working closely with the local market to maintain ride services from there.
  - wdb 4y ago
    Always worth comparing apps as Uber is especially at night not always cheaper than the good old cab app
- Teever 4y ago
  I think people don't care about it because at the end of the day all this mind bogglingly complex stuff just exists skim money off a transaction that should ideally be done between two individuals -- a buyer and a seller. Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain. Why can my ISP string up fiber optic all over my city and put routers and switches or whatever in boxes that can survive all kinds of inclement weather and end up charging me $100 a month for gigabit internet? Isn't that a much harder business than Uber?
  - menzoic 4y ago
    >Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right. It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value.... Think about what you're saying. You don't "care how complex it is". Well that complexity determines whether or not it is rent seeking. You say ideally a transaction between two individuals. The major problem being solved here is finding the two best matched individuals based on their current location and destination over time. You need some system to aid this discovery no matter what. Here's the definition of rent-seeking: Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline
    - Teever 4y ago
      > reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0] >reduced wealth creation Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1] > lost government revenue How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2] I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole purpose of Uber is to make people entirely dependent on it by driving out alternatives like local cab companies and public transit through low prices subsidizes by Saudi money. I think it's great that Uber has forced cab companies to modernize and make their services more convenient but we both know what will happen if Uber gets a stranglehold on this market. You'll see jacked up prices for the captive market and declining service. This is how it always goes. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152512/uber-lyft-climate-change-emissions-pollution-ucs-study https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152512/uber-lyft-climat... [1] https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/uber-and-lyft-are-pushing-drivers-into-poverty-opinion.html https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/uber-and-lyft-are-pushing... [2] https://troymedia.com/technology/how-uber-dodges-paying-taxes-in-canada/ https://troymedia.com/technology/how-uber-dodges-paying-taxe...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- voz_ 4y ago
  I worked there for 5 years, it's not that complicated, Uber just made it way too overcomplicated.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I think that HN has crossed a threshold where the stereotypical HN reply is not someone condescendingly declaring that some problem they don't understand is easy, but instead someone who admits that they don't know how hard a problem is, condescendingly assuming that the person they're talking to is as ignorant as they are about it, and admonishing them to respect their betters and to make the assumption that the decisions that have been made and the methods that have been used by bigco X are rational. This is a weird forum. An argument that a company is big and successful so must have some process for making decisions that works well, so criticisms of those decisions by internet randos are necessarily badly informed and egotistically presumptuous because they can't have the understanding of the people directly involved yadda yadda yadda i.e. a standard status quo argument, generalizable to dismiss any criticism independently of the specific facts of any situation or the institution being defended - when you're making that argument, you could be making it to someone very highly placed or otherwise knowledgeable about the institution that you're defending.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Okay granted it's a hard problem. It's a two-dimensional elevator scheduling problem with stochastic servers as well as stochastic customers. But does that really justify 30 thousand employees?
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these big companies is making a difficult problem (or, rather, set of problems), especially at scale, look trivially easy. An example I think proves this: In Austin, TX, Uber and Lyft stopped operations in the city for about a year in 2016-2017 when voters passed a law requiring fingerprint checks (the state legislature eventually overrode this law, which is a common feature of Austin city-Texas state relations). During that time, Austin was flooded with a host of startup rideshare apps, some funded by some technology high-fliers. Even though I liked to use the RideAustin app because it was a non-profit, paid drivers more and funded a charity I support, there is no denying the apps were a far, far cry from Uber and Lyft's apps. Even after a full year there was really no comparison in the quality of the apps. Just the ride-sharing part of Uber does about 15 million rides a day, in thousands of cities, each with different regulations and legal frameworks. Uber on-boards about 50,000 new drivers a month. Anyone who thinks this can all be managed with "15 engineers" has not thought through the problem.
- voz_ 4y ago
  I didnt say it can be built with 15, but at 2017, features peaked, and maintenance is much easier than creation.
  - menzoic 4y ago
    The most important factor that is completely lost in this argument is "scale". Simple looking things are very complex at large scale. Even if no new features were built, the current api and apps won't scale to meet the demand as the user base continues to grow. And at any point in time there are thousands of bugs that need to be fixed within months before they cause big issues. 15 engineers will take years to fix them. Another big factor is cyber security. This alone will require more than 15 people. Monitoring and defending against active threats, updating libs with patches and migrating from deprecated dependencies spanning 100s of services.
ehnto 4y ago
What I actually would believe could take 15+ engineers is Uber's platform globalization requirements.
ehnto 4y ago
What I actually would believe could take 15+ engineers is Uber's platform globalization and reporting requirements.
hattmall 4y ago
I think the point is that it doesn't need to be. We are seeing that the marginal benefits of extreme price optimization is minimal. Taxis have been simply charging flat rates for time and mileage for decades. Certainly there was room for improvement and Uber already did that and continued deep optimization is probably not worth it. 15 is hyperbole of course as any billion dollar company will need more than that but probably not multi-thousands.
haltingproblem 4y ago
> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well. Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.
haltingproblem 4y ago
> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well. Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model

by vladf 4y ago

hackernewds 4y ago

It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is I would know.

nanidin 4y ago
Maybe the world needs a ride share matching game, in the same vein as Elevator Saga[0]? [0] https://play.elevatorsaga.com/ https://play.elevatorsaga.com/
- smegsicle 4y ago
  or an openttd mod
charrondev 4y ago
Sometimes I wish it were simpler. I’ve had multiple situations where I couldn’t get a ride into my local city recently. The app says there are rides within 10 minutes, shows me a cheap rate and I hit yes. In 10 minutes no matches have been found. In 10 more minutes it finds someone 20 minutes away. 15 minutes later the driver cancels and I’m back to square one. Now the thing is the cost of the ride is a pittance and I would gladly pay double the cost just to get to my destination in a reasonable timeframe. Instead I just call a cab now, request a pickup at a certain hour and they send a driver. FWIW I’m 20 minutes drive from downtown Montreal, so this is not like I’m out in the sticks or anything, and couple years ago it was much easier to find a ride. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s even another ride sharing company taking the drivers, it’s just a lot of drivers pivoted to doing Uber eats instead.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I had a mostly similar experience in the France. The "gladly pay double" would translate in using a different app (the ones provided by traditional taxi companies) depending on the circumstance and the margin of error. Uber's app was still hands down the best to use, and I had so many issues with the others, like credit card registration being flakky, or the app straight crashing on specific screens. It looked a lot like they paid a dev company a lump sum to make the app and would proceed to pay for some more fixes every six months instead of keeping an ongoing maintenance contract. I kinda wish that now that the legal frameworks and service viability has been explored, Uber dies completely, and the gap is filled with local startups working closely with the local market to maintain ride services from there.
- wdb 4y ago
  Always worth comparing apps as Uber is especially at night not always cheaper than the good old cab app
Teever 4y ago
I think people don't care about it because at the end of the day all this mind bogglingly complex stuff just exists skim money off a transaction that should ideally be done between two individuals -- a buyer and a seller. Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain. Why can my ISP string up fiber optic all over my city and put routers and switches or whatever in boxes that can survive all kinds of inclement weather and end up charging me $100 a month for gigabit internet? Isn't that a much harder business than Uber?
- menzoic 4y ago
  >Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right. It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value.... Think about what you're saying. You don't "care how complex it is". Well that complexity determines whether or not it is rent seeking. You say ideally a transaction between two individuals. The major problem being solved here is finding the two best matched individuals based on their current location and destination over time. You need some system to aid this discovery no matter what. Here's the definition of rent-seeking: Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline
  - Teever 4y ago
    > reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0] >reduced wealth creation Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1] > lost government revenue How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2] I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole purpose of Uber is to make people entirely dependent on it by driving out alternatives like local cab companies and public transit through low prices subsidizes by Saudi money. I think it's great that Uber has forced cab companies to modernize and make their services more convenient but we both know what will happen if Uber gets a stranglehold on this market. You'll see jacked up prices for the captive market and declining service. This is how it always goes. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152512/uber-lyft-climate-change-emissions-pollution-ucs-study https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152512/uber-lyft-climat... [1] https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/uber-and-lyft-are-pushing-drivers-into-poverty-opinion.html https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/uber-and-lyft-are-pushing... [2] https://troymedia.com/technology/how-uber-dodges-paying-taxes-in-canada/ https://troymedia.com/technology/how-uber-dodges-paying-taxe...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
voz_ 4y ago
I worked there for 5 years, it's not that complicated, Uber just made it way too overcomplicated.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I think that HN has crossed a threshold where the stereotypical HN reply is not someone condescendingly declaring that some problem they don't understand is easy, but instead someone who admits that they don't know how hard a problem is, condescendingly assuming that the person they're talking to is as ignorant as they are about it, and admonishing them to respect their betters and to make the assumption that the decisions that have been made and the methods that have been used by bigco X are rational. This is a weird forum. An argument that a company is big and successful so must have some process for making decisions that works well, so criticisms of those decisions by internet randos are necessarily badly informed and egotistically presumptuous because they can't have the understanding of the people directly involved yadda yadda yadda i.e. a standard status quo argument, generalizable to dismiss any criticism independently of the specific facts of any situation or the institution being defended - when you're making that argument, you could be making it to someone very highly placed or otherwise knowledgeable about the institution that you're defending.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Okay granted it's a hard problem. It's a two-dimensional elevator scheduling problem with stochastic servers as well as stochastic customers. But does that really justify 30 thousand employees?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these big companies is making a difficult problem (or, rather, set of problems), especially at scale, look trivially easy. An example I think proves this: In Austin, TX, Uber and Lyft stopped operations in the city for about a year in 2016-2017 when voters passed a law requiring fingerprint checks (the state legislature eventually overrode this law, which is a common feature of Austin city-Texas state relations). During that time, Austin was flooded with a host of startup rideshare apps, some funded by some technology high-fliers. Even though I liked to use the RideAustin app because it was a non-profit, paid drivers more and funded a charity I support, there is no denying the apps were a far, far cry from Uber and Lyft's apps. Even after a full year there was really no comparison in the quality of the apps. Just the ride-sharing part of Uber does about 15 million rides a day, in thousands of cities, each with different regulations and legal frameworks. Uber on-boards about 50,000 new drivers a month. Anyone who thinks this can all be managed with "15 engineers" has not thought through the problem.

voz_ 4y ago
I didnt say it can be built with 15, but at 2017, features peaked, and maintenance is much easier than creation.
- menzoic 4y ago
  The most important factor that is completely lost in this argument is "scale". Simple looking things are very complex at large scale. Even if no new features were built, the current api and apps won't scale to meet the demand as the user base continues to grow. And at any point in time there are thousands of bugs that need to be fixed within months before they cause big issues. 15 engineers will take years to fix them. Another big factor is cyber security. This alone will require more than 15 people. Monitoring and defending against active threats, updating libs with patches and migrating from deprecated dependencies spanning 100s of services.

ehnto 4y ago

What I actually would believe could take 15+ engineers is Uber's platform globalization requirements.

ehnto 4y ago

What I actually would believe could take 15+ engineers is Uber's platform globalization and reporting requirements.

hattmall 4y ago

I think the point is that it doesn't need to be. We are seeing that the marginal benefits of extreme price optimization is minimal. Taxis have been simply charging flat rates for time and mileage for decades. Certainly there was room for improvement and Uber already did that and continued deep optimization is probably not worth it. 15 is hyperbole of course as any billion dollar company will need more than that but probably not multi-thousands.

haltingproblem 4y ago

> rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well. Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.

haltingproblem 4y ago