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Comment by Farbklex | Hacker News Reader

Highly focused development crunch time is "refreshing" from time to time. And since the involved engineers probably got pretty good salaries, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone.

But as I always say: Don't let a management problem become an engineering problem. The deadline was artificial and put stress on everyone. Uber is not an agency which has to deliver a product to some client. They have the freedom to release apps "when they're done" but choose not to do so.

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Indeed. Sounds like TK was a major issue here, but so were the whole tree of managers under him that agreed to ridiculous timelines that would destroy their teams instead of just pushing back on the deadline. Then again ... wouldn’t surprise me if TK very intentionally built such a management team.

Regardless, to be safe, I’ll definitely never work at Uber, or any other company TK has touched. This sounds like an absolute nightmare, and is so different from my experiences in ~a decade at other tech companies that it’s crazy.

The crazy thing is... his bold, risk-takey leadership worked. So who's to blame these executives for continuing to pull these kinds of stunts?

Sure a bunch of people burn out and leave but does that actually move the needle on any metrics besides turnover that these people look at? Assuming that departures get filled I don't know that turnover has that much of an impact on other metrics.

I think you are focusing on the business aspect and ignoring the humanity or lack of it in this situation.

I wonder what the health toll was on the all the hundred of people who worked on this? The reduction in life expectancy, health issues that arise due to 16 hour days...

It's not necessary.

I think their point was that TK&Co do ignore the humanity for the "success" (ie: their money)

Losing fully onboarded people certainly hurts velocity on projects after this one. And being known as a bad place to work is very damaging for recruiting efforts - I’d think a strong majority of devs would agree with either/both of “I’d never work for Uber” or “I’d never work for a Travis Kalanick owned company.” For a B2C tech company, where the product is absolutely crucial to the business’ success, having trouble hiring good people is a major downside.

Personally, about a year ago, a recruiter reached out to me about an interesting sounding role at “CloudKitchens”, that I was legitimately considering, but once I learned it was a Kalanick startup, I turned it down. The product/idea sounded interesting, but I’ve heard too many horror stories to work for the guy. I’m sure I’m far, FAR from the only one.

Did Uber struggle as a result of this?

I know they struggled as a result of Travis in general, but do they have trouble hiring? Has their development pace really slowed down (Kotlin aside)? Is their product suffering as a result?

I’d imagine they do have trouble hiring, and this hurts them via lower quality hires that they have to pay more for. But it’s a guess, I don’t have any hard numbers, likely few people outside of Uber HR do.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the theory that burning out your most talented engineers until they quit in an effort to put out an app update 6 months early (or whatever) is a healthy long-term strategy.

> [it] worked.

What worked ?

What important thing have been achieved ? An application that worked fine and did the business well have been rewritten entirely. Nothing wrong would have happened if it was released 1 week or 1 month later.

Even letting appart the human cost, I can’t even imagine all the shitty « dirty but it somehow works » code this kind of management create. The kind of technical debt maintenance teams will have to live with for years.

Until the next bullshit-deadline-rewrite driven by single-KPI managers

TK?

Travis Kalanick.

He says lots of people burned out and quit afterwards. Doesn't sound very refreshing. Sounds like the exact opposite: they spent everything they could and the adrenaline of the situation kept them going, and when that stopped they collapsed.

Well they resigned from the company, they didn't die. They took the money and went elsewhere or on a break

While it's not an agency, Uber has to allocate resources for a finite amount of time for a particular task. If there are other projects predicated on this app rewrite, it's absolutely essential that the rewrite is completed by a certain date.

The only things predicated on the app release are marketing, etc. that they've decided to predicate on it. They also chose to take the launch on in the first place.

Sometimes there are external deadlines (events whose schedule you don't control, things for partners, etc.), but this just clearly isn't one of them. They could've released the update after Christmas - that was 100% under their control.

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