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Comment by miguelrochefort | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I would be surprised if Uber hired more than 20 developers (which I consider a lot already).

I would extremely impressed if Uber is maintained and developed by only 20 developers.

Care to explain why?

They have an Android app, an iOS app, driver management system, fleet management system, ride tracking system, ride scheduling, navigation system (not sure if this is 3rd party or in-house), payment processing, profile system for both riders and drivers, price calculation system, and probably a bunch of other stuff in the background.

All this must work correctly and reliably in the 400+ cities they're operating in. To me at least, 20 developers is not enough to develop and maintain that many interconnected systems. I would say 100s at the very least.

Don't forget cars that drive themselves

20 people is more than enough to build and support these things...

Are you serious? With many 9s of uptime, low latency requirements and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the line? Uber employs over 2k developers right now.

Take a look at Uber's career's page. Even broken down to USA Engineering on the Engineering team hires, there are dozens and dozens of open positions. It's safe to say Uber thinks it's a > 20 person job.

https://www.uber.com/careers/list/?city=all&country=united-s...

I agree with you and parent that it is (and should) be a > 20 person job for its scale, but the career page is probably not the best example.

Many of those positions are perpetually open or rotated periodically (see: "You're leaking trade secrets" by Michael Schrenk) while the actual position was given to someone internal or someone connected to someone else internal to the firm.

Most of these pages are used for resume harvesting so that [if the firm has resources] an HR or technical recruiter can periodically evaluate the rest of the field. The firms holding out for the "rock star" often are more aggressive in recruiting them (whether at Job fairs or through LinkedIn headhunting).

Just FYI I recently watched a tech talk from some conference where Uber guy claiming they have 2000 developers...

Does that include everybody working on autonomous driving and related 'side projects'?

heres a youtube link for those interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY

What the hell that's insane...

I'm not sure just because you mentioned 400+ cities they need as many developers as cities they operate in.

Did you read the article? In it, the author discusses the engineering issues that arise from trying to deal tackling problems in different languages. Now, granted, Uber in this particular thread of discussion does not have to deal with tokenization issues of Japanese/Chinese character search strings but I think it is naive to not think that the nuances of individual communities of 400+ cities intra-country, let alone dealing with separate nations, will add significant engineering overhead... (even if the relationship is not linear)

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