Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut Costs

Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by danpalmer on Saturday August 10, 2019 @08:15AM (#20661619)

An Uber competitor, Hailo, did this. Rather than adapting their services to support multiple languages, time zones, etc, they instead just ran a fully separate instance of the service for each region.

Their costs, downtime, and tech debt spiralled out of control, mostly due to this architecture decision, and then spent a year or more rebuilding to try to get it under control.

Uber probably have the better approach, at least I don’t hear bad things about Uber’s tech where I have heard multiple horror stories about Hailo’s.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by arusahni on Saturday August 10, 2019 @12:15PM (#20662878)

Do you have a source for this? Not questioning the assertion - just interested in the issues and the design process for the solution.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut... by danpalmer on Sunday August 11, 2019 @02:48PM (#20669715)

I'm afraid I don't have a single source – this is from discussions about tech teams, culture, engineering, etc, at meet-ups in London over the past ~7 years. They had a relatively large engineering team so there are plenty of ex-Hailo devs around here.

There were some good things to come out of it, from what I understand. I believe Hailo were avid Cassandra users and many of the team went to Monzo who have deployed Cassandra very effectively.

[ Parent | on HN ]