> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe.

> Somebody Should Have Been Fired For This

This person is not a good resource. Uber was a very fast growing company, both in terms of their product and staff. Turnover in architecture happens. Calling this a catastrophe and click baiting about firing engineers over a rounding error in Uber’s overall finances is gross.

I understand this person is trying to grow their Substack with these inflammatory claims but I hope HN readers aren’t falling for it. This person’s takes are bad and they’re doing it to try to get you to become a subscriber. This is hindsight engineering from someone who wasn’t there.

I don’t know if the author here is intentionally clickbaiting or somehow ignorant about the scale Uber is operating at.

This was particularly egregious:

> If you’re building a system that makes the economics of your company impossible, you’re better off not building it.

If I’m understanding the timeline here, Uber replaced this system in 2019, and saved 8 million doing so. In 2019 their revenue was something like 13 billion dollars. In no world was this system making the economics of Uber impossible.

It’s a terrible article. They are angry on spending $687 a day for DDb writes when they company was doing billions in revenue. It’s silly and they have a grounded truth on how much systems cost at scale.

Uber does extensive leetcode interviews to weed out the best of the best developers just like FAANG. How could such a bad developer have been hired with this process in place and proceed to make such an expensive bad decision?

It’s almost as if gatekeeping the correct developers isn’t working. So yeah somebody should get fired. They screened to prevent this. It wasn’t prevented.

Otherwise admit the screen doesn’t work and fire the gatekeepers who are relying on it and the inverted selection of correct engineers.