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by carbonatedmilk 2242 days ago
Yeah, except they did rewrite the entire Mattermost mobile clients in React Native (And contributed it back, too - https://eng.uber.com/uchat/) Look, I'm all for Uber firing some of their 27,000 employees (27,000 seems like the wrong number), but their engineering team make a tonne of cool stuff and are really good open source citizens. H3 Geospatial indexing, Kepler.gl, and yes the Mattermost react native client - I use them all every day. Maybe let's trim in the HR and marketing departments, instead?
4 comments

How many of these contributions have became part of Uber's core business? I agree that their open source contributions are laudable, but it seems unfair to expect them to bankroll projects that don't contribute to the bottom line, especially if they are bleeding cash. It would be different if they were rolling in cash like the faang companies.
This is an interesting conundrum: Uber needs to splurge to be the kind of company that attracts fang talent but their revenue is still not at Faang level just yet.
I'm sure they benefit a lot from FOSS projects they don't contribute back to. I don't think it's so unreasonable to expect them to contribute back to other projects at least.
> and are really good open source citizens

I don't know much of the contributions Uber has made but all I remember is they slammed Postgres as been a bad database because they were trying to open multiple multi hour transactions to do things which is just insane. And then tell us that 'microservices' don't work and they are gonna use this new fandangled 'macroservices' when it sounds like they just didn't make microservices to begin with.

The issue I have with this is people go and read these things and say "oh we shouldn't use postgres cos uber", "we shouldn't do microservices cos uber". There's never any preface to these statements on what they did wrong, they blame the tool or technology instead.

It’s surreal how they can need 27k employees to run their business. 27,000. It’s a small town worth of people. Seriously...