Comment by Animats
2 days ago
What is Uber developing? They're an app and a car allocator back end. Both work OK. Why are they spending so much?
They gave up on self-driving, so that's not it.
2 days ago
What is Uber developing? They're an app and a car allocator back end. Both work OK. Why are they spending so much?
They gave up on self-driving, so that's not it.
This is a really underrated comment. It’s a great question and speaks volumes as to what the hell so many modern tech cos are actually doing with all their resource. Didn’t Elon strip most of the team at Twitter away, after some awful false starts, it pretty much ran fine on about 80% less human resource?
There’s a difference between:
1) the minimum number of employees it takes to maintain the core product
Vs 2) All the employees that it makes sense to hire for revenue and market expansion.
Internet comments usually assume that (1) is the goal. But think of say the sales department. If every salesperson you hire brings in new company revenue that’s greater than their salary + overhead, then why not hire 1000 of them?
> Both work OK
If only. The optimizations they do on their matching algorithm has made the UX so terrible, I regularly use Lyft instead now.
this is the most tired hn comment ever
"X is just Y - why is it so complicated?"
its lazy and boring to read these on every thread about a disliked big company