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Comment by cjslep | Hacker News Reader

> The engineers in charge of these systems have been "at odds," which has created friction, according to The Information.

> Uber’s chief technology officer, Thuan Pham, later wrote to his staff that the mistake “reflects an amateurism with our overall engineering organization, its culture, its processes, and its operation.”

This makes it sound as if the two engineers in charge of the Node.js and Python systems are bickering over which technology stack is better and refuse to compromise. I get there is worry about career progression if your backend option loses, the glory of being the engineer in charge of the entire backend of Uber, and the different specs of different technologies. But to hold the entire company hostage seems like it would be a career-ending move to me, regardless of sides. Then again, I am not in management.

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This sounds very much like two little pigs arguing about the merits of straw vs twigs when they should be building in brick to me.

By brick, which language would you want to use?

the best one for the job, I am assuming that is what Pham has been brought in to identify.

At that scale my choice would be Java. Proven, reliable, plenty of devs, vendor support, good type system, and plenty of open source code to leverage. Plus it's it's a mature ecosystem.

Java the language or any language that compiles to the JVM and can leverage existing Java libraries?

I'd go with Java itself. It's the most mature and stable. Uber is not a startup. It needs an enterprise solution.

Scala, Go, Python, Haskell, Erlang.

Instagram seems to be doing OK with python.

Personally, for infrastructure level stuff like that and if I was starting from scratch, I would chose Haskell.

At the scale of Uber and given that there would be a lot of legacy hanging around, I would probably chose to build on top of the kind of scala libraries that twitter has been putting out (which it sounds like from the other article about uber's micro services currently on HN they are doing).

The serious statement behind my slightly tongue in cheek remark earlier, was that I don't think either python or node are suitable for building infrastructure type applications that will form the backbone of a constelation of SOA type applications. Round the edges, it's slightly more defensible. However for central infrastructure, I'd rather have rather more foot-bullet barriers than those offer.

Good luck hiring Haskell programmers.

If you're really serious you go C or C++, not interpreted languages at all. But that said, plenty of big scale stuff is running on PHP, Python and Ruby. The language matters less than the people using it and the architecture design.

Actually, that Haskell developers are hard to hire is one of the biggest myths going. Supply of Haskell developers massively outstrips demand at the moment.

In my experience Haskell also neatly address the other two points of people and architecture: the average [0] level of skill of developers in the Haskell community is higher, as is their average level of grit and determination (because of the learning curve). Haskell almost encourages constructing your applications as operations over streams of events (a la event sourcing, unified log etc), which for my money is the best way to think about designing most platform type apps right now.

[0] Note: I'm not claiming that all Haskell developers are coding ubermensch, just that the average level of the pool of talent is higher.

Maybe it's the other way around. You have to be extremely serious when your goal is safe C/C++.

Perhaps part of the problem is that these interpreted languages have made programmers lazy.

Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of people still don't understand that developer time is one of the biggest costs in developing and maintaining software.

Given that you have a lot of NodeJS and Python developers I would look at Vert.x.

You could then let both sides continue to write the code in the language they are comfortable with but still work on a common platform. Plus being on the JVM it is fast and scalable.

It is not sensible to just stop what you are doing whilst you retrain and rehire your engineering team to learn a new language. Especially in a competitive hiring market like San Francisco.

Probably, the news article is not a technical article, focusing on what is the actual stack, because, (http://stackshare.io/uber/uber) shows that there are other layers in the stack of Uber.

> But to hold the entire company hostage seems like it would be a career-ending move to me, regardless of sides.

It would be, if you lose. If you win, you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It would also be a career ending move to admit that your system is less than the other system and everyone will remember you as that loser whose system was done better by the current VP of engineering.

Easy... choose Node and put the Python engineer in charge or choose Python and put the Node guy in charge.

Or redo the whole thing in Go.

There is definitely some degree of executive decision their management could make but it would shred one of the two leads careers. This kind of hard call is why you're boss, so it says something about someone when they don't make this call (although we don't know the full story here, this situation happens enough in general).

The post I was replying to was asking why an individual lead engineer in this scenario would do this. They have reasons to fight and no reason to concede. Their bosses have every reason to, at minimum, get both sides to "hug it out" so why haven't they?

Or move everything to a microservices architecture and use the best suited language for each subsystem. It would force both camps to engineer for composability and open service apis. My tupence.

I assure you that Uber is built using "micro services". That doesn't mean there isn't value in having some language uniformity in the org and it doesn't solve the language preference between people problem.

Looks like Uber has moved to a microservices architecture. Check their engineering blog: (https://eng.uber.com/soa/)

Wasn't aware of their move. A microservices architecture then makes the technical conversation about the service, it's latency, performance rather than implementation details.

Is it such a bad thing to have many different languages in play as long as the SLAs are met?

I have a friend in SF who works at Uber and writes Go there. He said they're using it for a lot of things internally.

If you are choosing a whole new language why not one of the JVM ones.

It is faster and more scalable than Go plus it has a usable debugger.

decent engineers aren't tied to one platform, so this is not really a valid argument imo.

career progression goes faster if you aren't limited by these sorts of choices. being able to learn something new fast and apply the same principles all over the shop is something that engineers do...

you work with what you are given.

On the level of senior engineer, having chosen the Wrong platform would give the other senior engineer the promotion, at best, and at worst, get you fired. Regardless of your capability to build on a different platform.

Just because it's wrong now doesn't mean it was the wrong decision when the decision was made.

Choosing X over Y could have meant they got out the door quicker than a competitor and got them to the point they're at now, even if Y makes more sense now at the scale they're at.

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