[keehun]

Perhaps the next question is, what do 4000 engineers do? Not aimed as a troll-y question: an informed idea of what the breakdown of that many engineers do would be enlightening. For example, there were about 200 iOS engineers the last I heard. Assuming similar levels for Android, that leaves 3,500-3,600 engineers.

[simonrobb]

+1 Appreciate you avoiding the usual "it's just a little smartphone app"

I'm not going to try and give an exhaustive list, but as a rough explanation: things get really, really hard when you're operating at Uber scale (hundreds of thousands of riders on trip at any one time, each demanding low latency and reliability):

- Product: native clients for each side of the marketplace in each vertical (rides, eats, freight, atg, et al), maps, localization for every country with a presence (not just language, but tax, legal, hundreds of region-specific modes e.g.: tuk tuks)

- Infrastructure: hardware teams to build on-prem DCs (cloud can get very expensive at scale), software networking to deal with said low-latency traffic, storage to optimize for reliability/latency/cost, observability (metrics, logging, alerting, tracing), security, et al

- Data: insights, operational support, routing, et al

- ATG

Hope that gives a better idea.

[dubliner2077]

Datacenters are not cheap either, at escale go for the Cloud as it makes some operations more efficient which is what they want.

VMware for example, assuming they don't use ProxMox lol, is super expensive, hardware maintenance, network, power, building, etc.

[kaikai]

Uber doesn't just make apps for phones. They also have an entire self-driving car division (computer vision, etc), car routing, maps folks, payments, the separate driver apps, etc. A company that size and complexity has plenty of work for engineers.