[losteric]

Sure but that doesn't require thousands of backend engineers unless they are reinventing everything... and I'd be left wondering what they are rebuilding since, over the past year, every one of my trips with Uber has been a bar-lowering experience...

[rtpg]

To be fair, operations becomes a much bigger deal as you get bigger. It’s not just the app, it’s having your infrastructure not fall over (because 0.1% failure rate means losing a lot of money)

Think of all the random bugs you’ve seen in your job and told yourself “eh, this would take someone 2 weeks to fix and is almost never hit by customers”

[warp_factor]

I think one of the bigger challenge is that when you become bigger you launch more projects to handle the scale and each of those projects introduce new bugs for which you need new team of engineers.

Basically, once you hit scaling I think you end up with a super small team that managed to keep simple (instagram for example) or you end up with a huge team that explodes in complexity and needs to grow exponentially to handle all the extra complexity. Uber is very obviously in the later bucket.

[notyourday]

I periodically see the same content on my FB feed because well, it is NBD if I see the same update from my friend several times.

Let me assure you, it is a BFD if I get billed twice for the same trip. So I am pretty sure Uber needs quite a few engineers to make sure that their stuff works correctly every time in every market for every customer.