What you're ignoring is that some significant percentage of that "bloat" is what leads to more rides and more money. All those tweaks and a/b tests and features that solve problems for specific segments that most users won't ever see, getting shipped week after week, increasing the new user conversion rate by 0.5% here, reducing the rate of canceled trips by 0.3% there, it all adds up over time. Many of the features obviously fail too and don't improve anything they just add bloat, but you can't ever know for sure which features those will be in advance.

In aggregate, the goal is obviously that it leads to the company making more money than was lost by paying all those engineers to move mountains to get around all the issues they hit up against. In the case of Uber, now a $96 billion public company and worth nearly double their 2016 valuation, it's a little ridiculous to call it a failure.

You read this story and see an unmitigated disaster, but it's mostly just a picture of things working the way the company wants them to. The goal is to grow the company, not to have a nice, conceptually clean, tech-debt free codebase just for the sake of it.

While I think your tone is a bit more critical than it needs to be, as many very intelligent people have made the same mistake, I think the sentiment is correct. But 'standing up to management' is literally not possible if they don't want it to be. They get to make the decisions if they want to, more or less by definition of 'management'. He did say 'we need to bail' to his boss at one point.

But, essentially, your final paragraph's point is the bottom line. This was not fundamentally a tech problem, it was a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen problem. That's a business decision.

It's also interesting to look back at the internal politics of Uber at this time. [1]

There's also a bunch of big articles on VPs quitting during this time. It was peak Uber controversy with the sexual harassment scandals, Waymo stolen IP, TK resigning, Fowler, spying, backdoors, etc. Reading the headlines in the algolia search is like a telenovela.

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber (Susan Fowler) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022

I am an Uber survivor - https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...

Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600873

How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564

Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14200486

Uber's Design Meltdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11109272

Uber employees used the platform to stalk celebrities and their exes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13163895

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1512691200&dateRange=custom&...

It’s interesting to me that you came away from this thinking that I didn’t realize the eng size growth was the problem. I specifically said in the third tweet that hypergrowth was the problem. I even went on to say why it was a problem. The entire point of including the details about the org growth was specifically to draw you to that conclusion.

OK, I understand. I didn't mean to imply that you didn't see the problem of hypergrowth and I apologize if it came across this way. However, in the sequence of tweets it does sound like the conclusion / lesson is to throw ever more heroic engineering at the problem or to get better at eng. planning, as opposed to solving the organizational issues and messed up incentive structures at the root of it all.

I realize this isn't a small ask. I've worked in BigTech myself where the reward / risk ratio of trying to actually solve problems at the root is basically 0 if you're not SVP or higher. Anyway, I enjoyed the tweets nevertheless. Good luck.

It’s interesting that you saw this was a tale of heroics. I view it as a tale of bad choices and organization failure.