"Too many engineers" is the impression I tend to come away with whenever I attend a tech talk by someone from the more fiscally beleaguered of the tech darlings.

The talk is invariably about some really impressive bit of software that appears to have required equally heaping measures of smarts and money to build, and also appears to be a $10 solution to a 10¢ problem.

Never underestimate the ability of someone with an IQ of 135 to make every problem difficult.

Yet technology has never been a problem or a limiting factor of Uber. Uber deserves plenty of criticism, yet it seems rich to blame technology when they grew from nothing to enormous with few if any hiccups. It worked.

But yeah, extraordinarily few internal projects can be turned into an external project without enormous rework. It's only the myth of middle managers who perceive software as a growing asset who think otherwise.

That explains most of the engineering culture in the Valley, really. Even the "leadership" is on board with it, because they have their own resume driven development to pursue.