Hacker News Reader

Comment by laydn | Hacker News Reader

I find it strange that a company which provides taxi hailing/routing technology felt the need to write a code cleanup tool.

View on HN

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A company with billions in revenue, live updates routing around traffic, has complex machine learning modes predicting ride times and costs, and operates in something like 65 countries.

Uber isn’t trivial

I didn’t know they did their own navigation, I assumed they would use one of the map services

Those services charge corporate users. If uber develops nothing homegrown then it is subject to the whims of the major map services, mostly google.

Most drivers use a 3rd party app in practice but uber probably needs to run mapping to avoid a source of weakness/cost.

(Could be totally wrong about incentive structure)

I thought between Google, VLS, Tom Tom, and I can't imagine that I just coughed up a complete list, there'd be enough competition to just procure this function competitively. I assumed it was more the Not Invented Here syndrome of a VC funded company who (until recently) had little of a cap on their Engineering spend.

You can make most of the Big N sound silly like this. Amazon? Basically a warehouse. Netflix, YouTube? They just stream video. Facebook, Twitter? CRUD websites.

It all sounds like anyone can put something like that together, but try scaling up to billions of users.

For sure if you remove the scalability challenges and profits optimizations techniques, these websites aren't that exciting for engineers.

Exactly. And each one of these companies had built the business around a key idea. I interview a lot of candidates for data scientists, and one of my favorite questions is what makes one of these companies what they are.

Uber's article [1] linked on the page mentions it at the start:

> These nonfunctional feature flags represent technical debt, making it difficult for developers to work on the codebase, and can bloat our apps, requiring unnecessary operations that impact performance for the end user and potentially impact overall app reliability.

> Removing this debt can be time-intensive for our engineers, preventing them from working on newer features.

[1] https://eng.uber.com/piranha/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com