> you could get yourself 25 top-notch engineers without AI PhD

Not in the US though. According to levels.fyi, an SDE2 makes ~275k/year at Uber. Hire 25 of those and you're already at $6.875MM. In reality you're going to have a mix of SDE1, SDE2, SDE3, and staff so total salaries will be higher.

Then you gotta add taxes, office space, dental, medical, etc. You may as well double that number.

And that's just the cost of labor, you haven't spun up a single machine and or sent a single byte across a wire.

"and have another mil left over for metal" was the part accounting for hardware, infrastructure, etc.

And you can fudge the employee salary a mil or two either way, but the point is that spending that much on a team to build something isn't infeasible or even unreasonable.

Work from home doesn't mean that home has to be in the US.

> Then you gotta add taxes, office space, dental, medical, etc. You may as well double that number.

Economies of scale help a bit with this for larger companies, so it's probably not quite double for Uber, but yeah, not too far off as a general rule of thumb. Probably a 75% increase on the employee facing total comp to get fairly close to the company's actual cost for the employee.

It doesn't sound like they needed to implement a new DB system for this.

This is using existing features of Docstore which is Uber's own DynamoDB (sharded MySQL) which they seem to be using for almost everything.

Is accounting really a core part of Uber's business? They're a transportation company not a bank. I kind of question the premise really

Uber is a technology company that tracks 'rides' between drivers that are contractors and customers, and accounts for taking money from one and giving it to another. I wouldn't just call it a core part, I'd go so far as it say it is the intrinsic essence of their business. They're not a bank, but they're not running a branch with tellers taking cash and running ATMs, either.

They are in the transportation market serving transportation needs for a transportation-seeking customer base. How they accomplish that is obviously interesting, but their attempts to move laterally haven’t been amazing from what I can tell (though I don’t follow them closely).

They are structured and run like a tech company but imo they don’t produce a tech product.

> They are structured and run like a tech company but imo they don’t produce a tech product.

This kind of comment could kill their stock :P

Uber said they were going to produce self-driving cars, so technically they are a failed tech company, which is now just a company. I am surprised they didn't get crushed by a competitor that didn't waste their capital on worthless stuff. So much for capitalism working. Uber should have gone bankrupt.

There is just no way that their database is actually technologically novel. Uber just doesn't have the expertise.