Most of the codebase is custom integrations for local markets. You can systematize some of it but most of the complexity comes from there.

> When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years

I suppose it becomes easier once the browsers, Android and iOS have been frozen for a little longer than 16 years. Nevermind the changing regulatory field and new products (when was Uber Eats launched?).

In that 16-year period, Covid-19 emerged, as did viable self-driving and partnership with Waymo. A networked, people-facing app can't ever be "done", unless you have perfect prescience. Internal tech-stacks are a living thing: keeping a service that on the outside appears to be unchanging is a lot of work! Scaling is a lot of work! Scaling services and maintenance feed off each other.

I think you’re missing how complex international operations and optimization are.

Each country has their own laws around what uber is and isn’t allowed to do. This needs to be formalized in code. For example you actually call a taxi, though the uber app, and the amount you pay is per mile, not a fixed fare decided ahead of time. To add to this complexity, some cities will have their own laws. What happens if you take an uber from town a to b, where each one has different laws ? A lawyer probably has an answer but the app needs to adhere to that. On top of that laws change all the time.

Optimization, well you can always optimize something. speed, costs, paths etc. In a way this never ends.

I think the part we interact with as consumers is a tiny sliver of the complexity those services have to build and operate.

Weren’t they trying to do their own self-driving thing?

I think this is partly a problem with companies that have had heavy investment. Uber’s value isn’t based on what they are doing, it is based on the idea that they are going to render ideas like owning your own car or taking public transit obsolete (I mean that’s an exaggeration but less of one than it ought to be).

There are always newer technologies and techniques to be implemented. Better algorithms. Larger deployments. Better reliability. There are also almost always bugs to fix. So, so many bugs.

Well there is a lot of ongoing maintenance cost. There is probably still some marginal gains possible on the matching side. There are new products to launch. So while one specific software can mostly be finished, the total software of a company is always changing.

shiny new tools but people only want to use them on the same old problems. how can we innovate the development of crud apps even more?! that was what plagued the web dev landscape for some time. Constantly seeking newer lazier means of producing the same old product. I admit it has an allure but if companies are no longer constrained by dev effort / labour then they can only ponder their own reflection as the source of their failures.

Uber is at a large enough scale that this analysis doesn't work. You and I do not care even a tiny bit about "Eats for the Way", one of their planned features this year (https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/go-get-2026/) that lets Uber Black passengers specify that their car should arrive with their Starbucks coffee order. But if 0.01% of users order 1 additional ride a month because of this, that's about 200k rides a year, which may well be sufficient to justify the development costs.

There is always a rewriting around the corner

[dead]