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Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. by Xorlev on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @09:21AM (#14603503)
You really don't know what you're talking about. There's more to Uber than just an app. There is a large set of backend services responsible for everything from authorization to billing, promotions, logging, road directions, ETA forecasts, driver portals and so much more. I've never worked there but ventures like this tend to be very complicated with lots of moving pieces.

More than a team of four can manage certainly.

Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. by FussyZeus on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @09:46AM (#14603717)
Maybe but this still seems like something that could be run out of one well maintained data center. Certainly fewer than 6,700 could manage it?
Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. by joshuamorton on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @11:26AM (#14604590)
Scale, payment processing, and customer service all take manpower.
Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. by FussyZeus on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @11:56AM (#14604871)
OK customer service I get, but why the first two? I mean yeah you'd need an IT staff obviously but certainly not that many.
Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. by pcnix on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @12:54PM (#14605546)
Just dealing with the different laws about taxi services in different countries/cities itself would require a staff that size or more. And there's a lot more than that behind the scenes, like security checks on drivers, managers for each city to decide incentive plans for drivers etc. It's a very massive endeavour, and the size of the company is justified.
Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. by joshuamorton on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @02:27PM (#14606564)
It takes a constant number of engineers to push a single feature, no matter the number of users.

It does not, however, take a constant number of engineers to maintain the infrastructure that lets a single engineer push a feature to millions of users. (P/I)AAS can help, but you still need people to monitor performance, find regressions and bugs, and track them down.