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Comment by this_user | Hacker News Reader

For a company that is basically a taxi service, they seem to invest an awful lot in constant rebuilds of their extremely complex infrastructure, which raises the question of whether that is even remotely necessary or just an exercise in pretending that they are a tech company.

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“Basically a taxi service,” except that Uber spans hundreds of cities, coordinates millions of drivers - none of whom work on a fixed schedule - and its only interface with customers is an app that has to be fast, accurate, and reliable at all times.

Even a single taxi event is complex. Tell Uber you want to go to the ATL airport and it'll ask which terminal. If you're catching one from the ATL airport, it'll map and walk you to the rather distant pick up spot. And we haven't even touched on payment yet...

This is just such a bad take that it makes everything else you say after it null.

And google is just a search engine they only need like 20 engineers……………

They do food delivery, parcel courriers, regular ubers, plan ahead uber, grocery shopping, and a lot of other stuff. if anything this is simpler than most silo driven architectures you'd usually get with such a massively diversified business.

To be fair all of those listed were also handled by taxis previously, just the process was more manual and more distributed, the dispatcher allocated a cab to the requester and maybe passed an initial message, and then it was directly between you and the driver.

> "Basically a taxi service"

Not defending their tech stack, but I mean that is a lot of realtime data that needs to be accurate - this is not your typical SaaS crud app.

Just the taking payments and reconciliation in dozens of currencies and payment methods alone would be so kind numbing difficult and complex

I love these r/iamverysmart takes on HN.

Is this generally a sign of youthful wishful thinking or just plain hubris?

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