Uber is experimenting with letting riders wait longer for a cheaper fare

Re:Uber is experimenting with letting riders wait longer for... by jakecopp on Monday June 18, 2018 @11:12PM (#17343533)

"...operational infrastructure and excellence it takes to scale a marketplace like Uber's to 4 billion rides..."

Nope! In the grand scheme of things, building an app, and some backend software while maintaining bunch of servers doesn't compare to building:

[1]

- 46 BART stations: 17 surface, 14 elevated and 15 subway stations.

- 669 revenue vehicles

- 112 miles of railway track

- a police force with 206 legally sworn-in law enforcement officers and 90 other staff members

- a wireless network that supplies cell phone service to riders underground

BART isn't even that good - I live in Sydney and we are always complaining about our double-decker dead-silent very clean commuter and city rail. Buzzfeed [2] even thinks our train system is from the future!

I love software - I want to make a career out of it, but we can't forget "real" engineering fields and the effort that goes into them.

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/04/us/san-francisco-bay-area...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/8rulvn/mfw_american...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Uber is experimenting with letting riders wait longer for... by vincentmarle on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @12:41AM (#17343894)

Structural engineering is the art of solving the known knowns, which basically reduces the complexity to budgeting/resource planning. Startups need to solve the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, which is inherently more challenging and difficult.

[ Parent | on HN ]