> it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend?

You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering... and being a bit snarky, attending Uber engineers talks here and there at a few conferences, looks like. they love to (re)invent internal tooling/platforms. That's pretty expensive on its own.

EDIT: I'm not saying that Uber's engineers didn't add value to the company, they absolutely did and handling the scale up they had to handle is not an easy feat. But I do challenge the notion of "what features did they create with that (LLM) spending?" of GP.

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SlinkyOnStairs 10 days ago | parent | next [-]

> You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering

People DO.

It's well known that most tech companies are ran incompetently. As you say, it's not the engineers' fault.

But most projects and hiring in these companies exists to juice promotion criteria. And that, depending on perspective, these companies are either massively overstaffed or massively underproductive.

The comparison to AI spending being wasteful holds up pretty well, these are companies that readily piss away billions in pointless spending.

	▲	hibikir 10 days ago \| parent [-]
		The massive misalignment in large companies is no secret. But neither is the fact that when someone comes to cut, they also have no idea of who is doing load bearing work that matters, and who doesn't. I look at recent cuts around my large corp, and it's clear they are made at levels that have no visibility of the ground, and are uninterested in said visibility. Obvious mistakes that are worse than what claude would have told you (yes, I asked Claude to pretend to make the budget cuts in our org y looking at the same data an exec could probably get. They were better than what happened) I think it's a general problem, but in my rare conversations with execs nowadays, they seem rather uninterested in improving their decision making there. The actual performance of the organization does not appear to be all that relevant to them.

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FergusArgyll 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a very good answer but there's a flip side too.

The idea of "if you add intelligence you make more money" is contradicted by the fact companies don't just always hire more people. Wy doesn't google just hire everyone?

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quantified 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, but has their rate of value added increased as a result? It's a good question to ask. They added value before LLM coding, and now are more expensive than before thanks to token costs.

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CharlieDigital 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is what all "platform engineers" have to do once things are working nicely: you have to keep inventing work.

I don't know; I'm a Ron Popeil "set it and forget it" kind of guy. Make the dumbest, simplest thing that's going to work with some clear path for scaling. Then go do valuable things instead.

	▲	darkwater 10 days ago \| parent [-]
		But most Platform Engineering teams in smaller companies (and especially non-US) add a layer on top of existing technologies. A layer that usually maps to the specific culture and idiosyncrasies of that company; a bit like the deployment flow which is usually very specifically shaped on how a company is. But in Uber's case, they tend to reinvent lower level pieces of platform/infra.

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throwaw12 10 days ago | parent | prev [-]

you don't get promotion for supporting existing things, but for "inventing" you can get promoted. also for large migrations