You should scratch below the surface because this isn't really explaining much - it does not sound like something that requires more than 100 people. Their legal team sounds like it should be twice that alone.
My point is that there is 100s of screens/features in the Uber app that you don't even know exist. And you have those same 100s of screens across their other apps. Multiplied across all of the different platforms. Plus any internal tools they use.
I'm curious, have you worked at a software company of Uber's scale? Not trying to be a dick here, genuinely curious because I hear these types of comments often here on HN and I wonder how many of those commenting have seen the scale from within.
My whole point here is I don't understand why "Uber scale" is so large. I have worked in large organizations - smaller than Uber, but we did more stuff (as in more complexity and diversity in products - shipping software and the hardware to run it, for example).
"100s of screens" is as meaningless to me as "thousands of lines of code" and wholly uninteresting because it seems like the front end is the least significant reason why Uber requires so many people to operate. That's why I'm interested in seeing how many people are assigned to projects and what they actually spend their time doing, because at scale you begin to experience inefficiencies due to scale for bad reasons if your incentives aren't aligned. From the original twitter thread that sounds like it was rampant at Uber.
Not sure how long you've been around, but "Uber scale" used to be a joke a few years ago because no one could understand why they would reinvent so many wheels because "they don't work at Uber scale." The joke being that Uber didn't need to be Uber scale to begin with, they just had investor money to burn.
I'm just a layman, but I often ponder this same "Why are some companies so big when a small team could do about the same thing?" and my mental theory currently is:
1. The amount of engineers scales very badly with respect to application complexity. I.e. you may need 100 or 1000 engineers to do something that "looks" about 2x as complex as something 10 engineers can do, and
2. The more complex solution tends to win in the market because on the one hand people value the application handling edge cases better, having shiny graphics, having slightly better UX, etc. and on the other hand you redeem the cost of paying those 1000 engineers thanks to software being free to copy and network effects / monopoly.
Google really is just an advertising company. Everything else "Alphabet" does is a rounding error next to ad revenue.
Microsoft and Amazon have multiple profitable lines of business.
Is Uber more like Google or more like Amazon? Is "Uber Eats" (underpaid contractors drive around takeaway dinners) distinct from "Uber" (underpaid contractors drive around people), or "Uber Black" (underpaid contractors with unwise car leases drive people around)?
> Google really is just an advertising company. Everything else
> "Alphabet" does is a rounding error next to ad revenue.
It's not like people would go and visit a page with just a list of ads; no matter how little revenue the other products around ads bring in, they bring eyeballs to the ads, and serve as a moat around ads.
> Google really is just an advertising company. Everything else
> "Alphabet" does is a rounding error next to ad revenue.
It's not like people would go and visit a page with just a bunch of ads; no matter how little revenue the other Alphabet products bring in, they bring eyeballs to the ads, and serve as a moat around ads.
Or am I crazy?