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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example of "code tunnel vision". I see it in a lot of developers. They see a problem in the real world and they think "this could be fixed with this snippet of code". Ignoring all the incredibly complex context of running large scale services in the real world: organizational issues, politics, infrastructure, operations, maintainability, etc etc.

"It's so fixable! Here are 150 lines of code that solve the problem! How come it exists?"

If only everything could be fixed by a pull request.

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Additionally having a narrow viewpoint of a situation (at a restaurant, eyeballing some receipts) and assuming you've seen enough to identify the root cause of a problem. There's a pretty large assumption that the cause was mishearing or misreading the order identifiers. They had apparently personally experienced a "swap" twice, but made no mention of whether in these cases this was the cause.

However I don't want to dump on the guy, he broke down what he thought was the problem, and attempted a solution and did so with a bit of humility ("I hope it's clear that I don't think I'm smarter than anyone at Uber, Uber Eats, or really anywhere").

True. Also their solution has a lot of minor problems as well

Upper case letters are harsh when on a big text, but for the case in point they're perfect

And no, nobody will shout "abstract century" in a McD, it doesn't make sense. Some delivery apps show the order no. in big letters on the phone, so it can be shown to an attendant, not sure Uber does that, but of course that doesn't work with your 'smart' solution

Maybe this is an exclusive Uber problem, maybe because they focus on drivers picking up more than one order

That is precisely the problem. You have hundreds of people solving problems with colliding visions and myriad unforeseen issues that need to be addressed. Compromises emerge.

There will always be someone who can't discern that their imagination leaves out great many details thinking that they have superior insight.

This is why user research is so important.

I started my career working in UK government applications (GDS), and I'll admit at first I was dismissive of user research as being some kind of hand-wavy nonsense, but I quickly came to believe it is absolutely vital.

It's a human nature problem, and here's a pretty trivial example in a different realm:

I am a commissioner on the Parks and Rec commission for my suburb (the citizen oversight commission appointed by the city council). I often hear from my fellow residents about some problem that they want solved, and half the people who tell me about problems follow up their problem description with some form of "And if they city would only do X..."

Every time one of these issues is brought before the commission, the staff explain the 37 different factors that they have take into consideration in finding a solution. "Just doing X" is rarely feasible because of a plethora of factors that they person who suggested that was unaware of.

> I see it in a lot of developers

Like "fixing" a problem they don't understand.

I have to wonder if those codes don't reset every day and if there isn't just another digit added as necessary. The author seems sure they aren't unique?

Even if they weren't unique what are the odds the same restaurant had the duplicate at the overlapping pickup time..

Supposedly Uber has Product Managers and other people considering the user experience. Or do developers choose what to work on directly? I am not familiar with the culture there.

Every problem is trivial when you don't understand it.

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