Uber is officially a cab firm, says European court - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42423627 <comment><USER2> I take a bunch of ubers, by which I mean I take maybe 4 or 5 ubers a week. Before I took ubers, I didn't take cabs, I took the train. I walked five minutes to get on a tram to the train station, I switched to a train, and then I walked ten minutes home.

I never, really, took cabs. I can explain the multitude of reasons: Cab drivers with shitty attitudes, refusing to unlock the doors and just cracking open the window to ask how far it was you were planning to go: Too short? Don't want to take you, fare is too small. Too long? Don't want to take you, won't get a fare back. I mean, y'know, cab drivers are legally obliged to take you on any distance journey but the lack of accountability meant that they wouldn't. Sometimes there were no choices: Cab home or you won't get there. In those cases, I'd take cabs. The cab driver would be rubbing his eyes, swerving all over the road, tired after working a 16 hour shift, while talking on the phone to, I guess, whoever would listen. Doing anything they could not to pay attention to driving, apparently.

And now I take ubers instead. It's not because I like uber. It's not because I think that the laws around the cab drivers should be ignored and uber should be allowed to flaunt that however they like. It's because I think that, at least right now, uber works better than laws. At least right now.

Is the contractor thing a little bit on the suspicious side? Definitely. Should they pay their "driver partners" more? Definitely. Do I think that this problem is uber's fault? Most definitely not.

I don't have lyft available to me. If I did, I'd probably use lyft. I'm happy with being slightly conscientious and paying a bit more, knowing that I'm not ripping off some guy who can't do any better. Anecdotally, most of my friends think the same thing.

But what I won't do is support the existing cab industry.

<comment><USER3> My local (Denmark) taxi company has an app that is pretty much like Uber: I enter start and end address and can prepay. But, they do obey the law unlike Uber.

I suppose Uber's ease of use has inspired other companies, so it's great there was some competition. But now if Uber wants to return to Denmark, they must also obey the law.

I think in Europe we prefer to not have too much "disruption" and "lobbyism".

The big ongoing corruption case in Denmark right now is an IT company that paid for a $50,000 Dubai "research" trip with IT-bosses from the the local government (in hope of making it back for selling too-expensive IT equipment to the state)

There's a lot of people involved -- so far, a government employee has received a 4 month non-suspended prison sentence for receiving about $7,000 worth of iPhones etc.

<comment><USER4> We had app ride hailing in Nottingham, UK before Uber was even founded. It was an inevitability everywhere.

Rather funnily, we had a Twilio in Nottingham too many years before Twilio was founded.

The difference between EU and American startups is that there are VCs investing huge sums in US companies so they can do mass advertising.

<comment><USER5> It's unfortunately not that surprising though. The tech giants have operated in Europe largely without paying taxes. Avoiding corporate income taxes with help of Ireland, The Netherlands and US tax law. As well as avoiding VAT with special deals with Luxembourg. They have essentially operated with a large discount compared to local competitors. It's of course a lot harder to get investments in the shadow of such competition.

I don't think funding as such is the main problem in Europe though. We do have a few really rich tech people, as well as a lot of old wealth. What we don't have is the thousands of semi-rich people in the wake of the tech giants that can "repeat the cycle". Something especially needed since we haven't been spared the increase in housing costs.

<comment><USER6> Excellent point, especially with the tons of semi rich people. Its often overlooked how young SV really is. The first gold rush was in semiconductors, and the people that made money there invested in software and the cycle continued. What essentially happened is that these "semi-rich" people, as you say, were perfect investors in new startups:

1\. They had the money to get the startup going 2\. They had the technical expertise to (mostly) select good investments and cut through the bullshit. 3\. They had experience with startups themselves; they were excellent mentors and had industry connections besides.

Now the system is in place, it seems rather magical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And how ridiculous is it that it would take half a decade to state the obvious while this company funded by tech billionaires competed on unfair terms with tens of thousands of tiny taxi companies that followed rules and acquired licenses, expensive mandatory equipment etc.

I would love for the taxi industry to be liberalised but just not for the benefit of a few Silicon Valley billionaires with complete disregard of legislation.

<comment><USER8> > competed on unfair terms

Albeit the taxi companies created the unfair terms. Obviously it is not necessary to have a medallion to drive someone around. HN is generally anti- lobbying to protect corporate interest, but now that Uber is big there is some regret...

> I would love for the taxi industry to be liberalised but just not for the > benefit of a few Silicon Valley billionaires

And the consumer...

<comment><USER9> >Albeit the taxi companies created the unfair terms. Obviously it is not necessary to have a medallion to drive someone around. HN is generally anti- lobbying to protect corporate interest, but now that Uber is big there is some regret...

This myth of the taxi companies lobbying to avoid competition doesn't seem based in reality. Taxis didn't seek out regulation to protect themselves. Cities began regulating fares, service areas, and the business model. Cities put rules on them for the public good. The medallion is there is to balance out the price regulations placed on taxi companies and to ensure that the rules didn't make the taxi business unprofitable.

I've never seen any indication they sought out these regulations.

Really it smells like a smear campaign to make a bunch of immigrants driving cars 12 hours a day the bad guys and to make the 60 billion dollar corporate titan the underdog.

<comment><USER10> > Cities began regulating fares, service areas, and the business model. Cities > put rules on them for the public good.

The popularity of Uber, Lyft and similar show those two statements are in contradiction. I'm sure they weren't aware at the time, but that's what happens when you regulate business models. The status quo is locked in, and things are worse than they could be with perfect invisibility.

<comment><USER11> Taxi regulations date to a time when governments thought it was a good idea for the government to regulate rates. The government decided how much you could charge and your pricing policies, and in return, it limited competition.

<comment><USER12> My impression is that the rate regulation is to protect consumers from being ripped off or exploited. Does anyone know the actual history?

<comment><USER11> Some history of the Haas Act here: [https://www.politico.com/states/new- york/albany/story/2013/0...](https://www.politico.com/states/new- york/albany/story/2013/01/the-curse-of-the-new-york-city-taxi- medallion-000000). One thing to note is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. This was happening at a time when the government regulated things in ways it wouldn't dream of doing today. If you wanted to build a new telephone line, operate a new freight trucking or airline route, or build a new railway, you'd have to ask a government agency for permission, and also get approval for the prices you wanted to charge. The agency would decide "oh, there is no need for a route from here to there" and could deny permission on that basis, or decide "oh, this price is too high, you can't charge that much."

The government back then generally viewed competition as a pernicious thing. So they imposed entry requirements to limit competition. That necessitated also bringing prices under government control, to curb monopoly abuses. The Haas Act followed the same basic logic. Limit pernicious competition by limiting licenses, but curb potential abuses by controlling rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is good to hear. A few weeks ago we saw the recording breaking loss, showing Uber is really undercutting everyone and operating way under costs (while slashing drivers pays and yada yada).

Uber is big, really big. But I don't think it's too big to fail. And I think a failure will be colossal.

Has anyone noticed Lyft prices have gone way up? Like, almost standard cab fair prices in some cities? I wonder if Lyft is banking on the fact a lot of people use them so they don't use Uber, and noticing their prices are just slightly less than a regular cab. They could put them in a place where they're profitable, and charge a more traditional rate.

In the early days I knew Uber drivers who use to be cab drivers who claimed they made a ton more money than with their cab company. I doubt that's as true anymore, but once Uber fails, I bet we'll see a huge re-emergence of Cabs -- possibly alternative ride sharing apps that will put more money in the hands of drivers (where it should be).

It's really weird being in American cities today, because the number of cabs is significantly lower and noticeable. I saw a woman with her hand up, actually hailing a cab, and thought that was so weird. You rarely see that now. I mean it's probably better that cabs are more efficient with apps, going directly from pickup to pickup instead of burning fuel driving around, but there is still something lost with not being able to raise you hand or go to a taxi stand and get a cab in a city.

<comment><USER14> > I don't think it's too big to fail.

My gut reaction: There's no company the size of Uber that could die more quietly. The world's reaction would be a muffled "meh".

Uber doesn't even own their most important asset, which is their drivers, and if they collapse catastrophically their drivers will simply turn off the Uber app and download one of a half dozen competitors' apps (if they don't already have it). For Uber customers, the transition will be even easier.

Maybe I'm missing something: This isn't like a car company that owns and manages factories, or like a tech company that has labs or does significant R&D, or even a bank that has lots of employees and owns other assets.

So genuine question: what do we loose if Uber vanishes tomorrow?

(Don't get me wrong, I'd be sympathetic to their employees who need to find new jobs, but my guess is that their skills are in relatively high demand.)

<comment><USER15> it could have a massive effect on tech valuations in general. so from a real economy perspective you may be right, but the stock market and VC market might start to see this as an event to re-evaluate everything.

<comment><USER16> An event they would entirely deserve, if that's the case.

<comment><USER17> And it would be a gain for the society, too - because currently it seems the more absurd a valuation is, the more there is something wrong with a company - either it's doing useless crap, antisocial crap, or behaving immorally while doing something potentially useful.

I would love to see the valuations go down, to reduce the incentives for smart people to grow harmful businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I dont overly care what regulatory framework we place Uber into, I care that they dont misclassify their workers as independent contractors. The whole gig "economy" is a scam, people smarter than I have broken down the numbers about the cost of maintaining your vehicle (in uber's sake) and the tax bill due in april exceeding the pay. Not to mention theres little to no job security or benefits. Pay Your Workers.

<comment><USER19> You should care. Uber has lobbied in my state to not be classified as a taxi (or common carrier), and their drivers are classified as independent contractors. They were able to successfully lobby for this classification by guaranteeing a $1,000,000 liability insurance policy for injury caused by their drivers.

If your injuries due to driver negligence exceed this amount (which is very possible if you are severely injured and become disabled for the rest of your life, unable to work), you have no recourse. You cannot currently go after Uber because they are not classified as a common carrier. You are screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _[The] ECJ said that a service whose purpose was "to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys" must be classified as "a service in the field of transport" in EU law.

It added: "As EU law currently stands, it is for the member states to regulate the conditions under which such services are to be provided in conformity with the general rules of the treaty on the functioning of the EU."_

It didn't say it was a cab firm, but it did say it's a transport service, not a "digital service". To me as a layman, that makes perfect sense. With all kinds of services being improved using digital technology, the term "digital service" can be applied to almost anything.

</comment><comment><USER21> In countries like Morocco, Egypt, China etc EVERYONE is a taxi driver. Stick your finger up and they'll drive you a few km/miles for a few bucks.

Uber incorporated / centralised that. It's not some vague digital enabler marketplace. They know the route, micromanage both the driver and passenger, collect money based on route, unilaterally set prices. How someone can think they're not a taxi company is beyond me.

<comment><USER22> This. If this wasn't the case I would not have been able to get off from one of the mountains after dark a few years ago.

<comment><USER23> You can probably hitchhike from a mountain in Europe, as most mountains are in remote or fairly remote areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Court press release

[https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...](https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-12/cp170136en.pdf)

The full ruling is atm only available in spanish and french

[http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-434/15](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-434/15)

<comment><USER25> At this moment, I count the full ruling in 18 languages, including English, though that version is marked "Provisional text". Possibly working direct link: [http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=198047&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow. Uber single handedly made folks on ycombinator pro cab industry. The hatred I saw for the cab industry when Uber was announced or becoming successful was so strong that I am amazed at how grandly Uber fucked it up.

Practically though, Uber is still doing great and probably will be just fine even after this ruling. The traditional taxis are still bad and have never reinvented themselves.

<comment><USER27> that doesn't make sense.

HN is pro Lyft but also pro cab?

I just think HN doesn't like Uber

<comment><USER28> Please don't do this. HN is a diverse community, and you choose to be a part of it. Casting all of HN in one bucket does a disservice to everyone.

<comment><USER29> It seems that the fallacy of characterizing a large community (e.g. reddit, HN) as a single entity capable of things like hypocrisy is becoming more and more commonplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And again: "Taxi company considered by a court to be a taxi company". And this is news.

And no, dear US, "taxi" does not mean "ride service that has a monopoly on picking up people on the street, enforced by the use of medallions or similar". Taxi means "A car that takes you somewhere without a preplanned route, for money". This is why this is so bloody obvious.

In any place without a mediallion system or other enforced monopoly, there is NO innovation in what Uber is doing! An app or surge pricing is what everyone does. Ubers sole innovation is pretending that they aren't a taxi company so they don't need to hire and pay their employees properly. And honestly we can do without that innovation.

<comment><USER31> I may need you to provide the definition of innovation. Uber enables me to call a cab even before I leave the building, it suggests a price for me, it shows me cab's location, it sends my request to more than one cab.

<comment><USER17> That's how a taxi works, yes.

The only potentially new thing here (though not necessary invented by Uber) was "shows me cab's location", but the remaining three? All of them were supported since people invented telephones and portable radio transmitters.

Uber's primary innovation is, and always has been, their operations playbook, which allowed - and still allows - them to grow a billion-dollar business while routinely breaking the laws in front of everybody and not even trying to hide it much.

<comment><USER32> But I have no interest in talking to anyone or have essays worth of conversations where to meet and at what time and for what price. Or, like for instance a London competition app and many cab services outside London demand; to book n (even 24 for some) hours in advance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's a second-hand account of why Uber is terrible and should be regulated heard from a finnish taxi driver a week ago:

1) Probably all of the Uber drivers are uninsured in the case of accident. Good luck getting your hospital bill covered if that happens and insurance company finds out you were taking an Uber.

2) There is no background check whatsoever for Uber drivers he told. They recently added a clause that requires Uber drivers to have taxi permit (or something similar) which is required by law but they do not actually check it but now the legal responsibility is out of their hands. He said something in the lines of that "bad apples" can start driving and remain much longer in Uber's system than while driving regular taxi.

3) There has been cases in which Uber drivers haven't paid any taxes and actually have been taking unemployment checks while driving. Sure not directly Uber's fault but again if their drivers were regulated I'm sure it would make checking their taxes much easier and Uber would pay pension etc. from the pay.

I think those were his main points if I recall correctly. In Finland regular taxi is well-respected and regulated so Uber has had little luck in succeeding to gain market share. Mostly foreign people use and drive Uber here.

<comment><USER34> #1 is false. Uber has an insurance: [https://www.uber.com/newsroom/insurance- ridesharing-uber](https://www.uber.com/newsroom/insurance-ridesharing-uber) #2 is also false. There are background checks: [https://help.uber.com/h/6970e704-95ac-4ed3-9355-e779a86db366](https://help.uber.com/h/6970e704-95ac-4ed3-9355-e779a86db366)

<comment><USER33> @rockinghigh #1 In paper yes it seems so. But quick googling shows me this page [http://jukka- pekkakukkonen.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/223502-u...](http://jukka- pekkakukkonen.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/223502-uber-ja-vakuutukset) In which the guy goes through finnish Uber TOS which states that Uber is not liable of any damage to you or losses caused by the driver. Also because Uber drivers have the basic insurance for personal use but not for professional the insurance companies might decline compensation because it's against the terms of agreement.

#2 Also I think the point the taxi driver and (consequently I) was trying to make that Uber does not check can you actually be a professional driver. They might check your crime record but do you think that's all what it takes to be a taxi driver? Granted it might differ in your country but in Finland taxi drivers are well-respected because they behave like a customer servant should. And from what he said it seemed that Uber's process seemed a bit flaky "fill a form and you're an Uber driver" or something like that.

Have you no trust in me? :) If you show me a non-Uber source that debunks my claims please go ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Considering how Uber was apparently wanting to evade to be considered a transportation service this is IMHO a correct decision.

Just because you're a startup/funded/unicorn does not mean that laws do not apply.

This is pretty much the biggest thing that will change the "new economy". The market has reached a point where rightfully so people start to wonder why IT startups should be evading laws. They should not.

Running a business comes with duties for everyone. That is in the end in the interest of all consumers.

<comment><USER36> I agree 100%. All this "disruption" thing is mostly about being in a grey zone where you can cut corners, avoid paying taxes and not respect regulations. The legal system will slowly catch up and the initial advantage will disappear. In the end this is how economy works.

AirBnB is next I guess.

<comment><USER30> > AirBnB is next I guess.

I think it already started. If you sublet your apartment you are either a landlord or a hotel service, and have to follow all the safety/fire/health/ regulations for one of those. It's pretty obvious you aren't supposed to be allowed to just "share" your apartment for a fee, where some startup unicorn takes a nice cut because they cornered the market with a web site.

So yes. Uber and AirBnB are innovators in the sense that they aggresively invade legal gray areas. I think they will fundamentally change markets (e.g. will cause taxi monopolies to be removed, or reduce the red tape hotel businesses) - but they won't exist in a decade doing what they do now.

<comment><USER35> There is one issue here: what Uber and AirBnB are doing is not a grey area.

Both transportation and renting are regulated markets for a reason: because we already have experience that infrastructure related markets without regulation will be abused.

While there are some issues in both taxi and hotel businesses, I strongly oppose to Uber and AirBnB being a solution. Both companies apply IT methods but none of them have contributed any fundamental improvements to transportation or renting so far.

A real disruption should involve producing a beneficial iteration that moves forward a topic.

\- Uber did basically invest their disruption into the return of 19th century labour methods. \- AirBnb is basically inflating rents.

All those unicorn sparkles aside, it is probably time to look at unicorns with a clearer view. Sustainable value is not created by lawless disruption.

<comment><USER37> > Both transportation and renting are regulated markets for a reason: because > we already have experience that infrastructure related markets without > regulation will be abused.

While that's true, that experience comes from a different time period. I don't agree with the idea of exploiting unenforced laws, but this is also an issue where the community, government, or regulatory bodies aren't reacting quickly enough.

There's this weird dissonance where people like the new ideas and convenience, but don't wish to revisit the rules around these industries for any reason.

If every person prefers to hail cabs from an app to get in an unmarked car, then the city or state or whichever body should be forced to contemplate medallions. And if people want to AirBNB, the community should find reasonable compromises in rules that keep everyone happy.

It seems like the law makers and citizens are taking a slide, forcing judges to evaluate crummy old laws against what look like scammy businesses that the people love.

<comment><USER35> > There's this weird dissonance where people like the new ideas and > convenience, but don't wish to revisit the rules around these industries for > any reason.

I do not think the issue is in most of these rules. Transportation has e.g. insurance enforced. Uber evades that rules and thus endangers customers. Willingly. And fights for continuing to do so.

The thing about Uber and AirBnB is a two-sided coin:

\- laws should never be evaded. If a company like Uber wants to see laws change, there is a political process. But: that process can never start with breaking the law. \- law makers need to wake up. Society is moving faster because of the internet, thus something like a revisiting cycle for laws should be mandatory in every industry.

But: that needs to come from us as citizens. We have to demand that every company needs to follow laws, and use lawful processes if they want change to be implemented.

Meanwhile, I still think companies willingly breaking laws to disrupt markets should be punished. That includes Uber and AirBnb and many others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> About time the greedy corporation start paying their drivers a living wage. Good to see Europe fighting back as US is regressing further into plutocracy.

<comment><USER39> Uber drivers in Banglore makes around 50K rupees profit each month. This is higher than many government jobs and similar to the salary of many software developers in India.

<comment><USER40> I've only ever ridden Uber over a period of two weeks - the last two. In India, in Pune.

The drivers more or less all complained about Uber cutting the incentives and margins, stating that they are making a low amount of money. Ola seems to be a contender that many local drivers flock to?

Yes, these drivers might've lied to me. I'm just putting this anecdote against your statement of 50k INR of profit/income: That's certainly not the impression I got when I had discussions about just that on my rides.

<comment><USER41> They don't want more competition.

<comment><USER40> So I'm a white German IT guy in a suit in a car in India.

There's no reason to believe that I'm going to be competing with them anytime soon, nor is it likely that I have any locals that I'd praise Uber to if you pick me up from a hotel.

Can't believe that they'd lie for that reason?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This ruling is pretty disastrous for Uber in some countries where there is ingrained corruption through regulation.

Take România for example: licenses are needed to operate, there is a limited number of them, winning licenses is a black box, there is a maximum limit to the price per kilometer, a phone operator service is required, physical systems that monitor the ride, no credit card taxi support legislation, no legal tipping, cars must be licensed for taxi, drivers need special taxes and tests (some are part time weekend drivers).

In short there is a lot of improvements that Uber brings but the legislation doesn't cover (like GPS use) and there is no way to change those without hurting the real taxi drivers.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm not surprised that the American model of classifying your workers as "self-employed sub-contractors" isn't going to work out in Europe.

On topic: Yes, taxi laws needs to be revised. But that's a political issue.

<comment><USER44> Yes, taxi laws need to be revised, but there are sound reasons for licensing taxis operating in a city:

\- Limiting the amount of traffic on the roads

\- Ensuring that vehicles are nice enough (that there isn't a "race to the bottom")

\- Ensuring that drivers are nice enough (qualified, not scary violent criminals)

\- Ensuring that drivers are compelled to pick you up and drop you off no matter who/what you are, and where you are going.

\- Ensuring that there is a central point of contact for hailing a taxi.

\- No ambiguity about who and what is a taxi with regard to parking etc.

To be sure, a lot of licensed taxi services are pretty terrible. But thats not to say that the idea of licensed taxis is bad- its actually pretty reasonable.

Its worth noting that San Fransisco and the Bay Area was the "perfect storm" for creating Uber about 5 years ago- you had a fairly car-dependant transport network, an absolutely abominably terrible licensed taxi service, a lot of local skill in making web services, access to venture capital, (relatively) lax regulation, a healthy disregard for the working classes, and a naively/cynically optimistic view on self driving cars. But try to transfer those conditions to, say, a European city, and Uberization suddenly becomes a lot more difficult.

<comment><USER43> The only argument I've heard for licensing is coverage of rural service area.

Most of the others can be fixed by regulation of ride-sharing services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The important question is - what implication does it have beyond the classification? Does Europe have different standards for cab firms to meet? Like employment, fare rules?

<comment><USER46> Specific passenger insurance the first thing. You don't have that in Uber. Another special regulation is that taxis pay to the city council to operate. Uber drivers don't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Does that mean Uber now has to listen to all taxi rules and regulation in all of Europe?

<comment><USER43> Taxis are regulated locally, country by country, sometimes at municipality level.

I think most countries have already been of the opinion that Uber was a taxi service. And hence, prosecuted any violations they've made.

I know Uber have been shutdown in multiple places. Because regulators simplify declared that they considered it illegal.

So no, I don't think this will change much. This was probably a futile move by Uber trying to argue regulation didn't apply.

<comment><USER48> In Bucharest the city council just ruled that every taxi ride must go thru a central dispatch. This made all the apps/agregators illegal, Uber included.

Some legal taxi companies say will complain, because they can't imagine that we go back to '80s phone dispatch system, and the customers shall be able to use their apps to book the nearest taxi based on location, what a dispatch will not be able to do.

<comment><USER17> That's interesting, and sounds really disappointing. What are the reasons behind that decision?

<comment><USER49> Corrupt leadership inspired by the 80s "golden era". If they centralize the system, then they could pretend bribes for issuing taxi licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Yes, some taxis are a pain in the ass. But that doesn't mean that Uber should not be playing under the same rules as everybody does, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER50> I have never used an Uber, Lyft or any ride share.

If any rule or requirement is needed for any and all ride sharing companies, including taxi services and even bus drivers is they take a road test to at least confirm they understand basic rules of the community or area they service.

I bike or walk everywhere. I don't have a car. The problem I see and have is almost every few minutes while biking in the bike lane in Austin, a Lyft, taxi, or other ride share stops right in front of me in the bike lane to either drop off or pick up people. I've even had honk at me from behind while I'm in the bike lane because they want to use it or make a right turn.

I've talked with a couple people about this and even seen police pull these people over. So, I am pretty sure it's not legal. I wish 2 things: 1) These drivers are required to confirm they know the basic/general rules of the road and 2) Police start enforcing these rules. I won't even bother mentioning that every single driver I see pass me is texting or talking on their phones (not hands free style).

</comment><comment><USER51> "However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours. As our new CEO has said, it is appropriate to regulate services such as Uber and so we will continue the dialogue with cities across Europe. This is the approach we'll take to ensure everyone can get a reliable ride at the tap of a button."

This company is so full of shit!

</comment><comment><USER52> Surprised as the current EU administration is usually quite keen to support the race to the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sure it was sugar-coated but I thought this was obvious from the beginning?

</comment><comment><USER54> bbc.com does not have SSL? :O

</comment><comment><USER55> These are good news. Taxi sector is beyond screwed, we need better and cheaper services. I'm happy to see a successful and respectful company like Uber being the one leading the movement.

<comment><USER13> They provide that service by undercutting Taxis at a loss. I hope you're being sarcastic. Uber is anything by respectful .. and successful I guess in size, but not looking at their bottom line.

<comment><USER56> Undercutting taxis and at a loss are two separate issues. Taxis are overpriced in the US with or without Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Looks like the "Regulate Uber everywhere" trend is confirmed. Edit: I did not mean this as a bad thing, but as something that's normal and welcomed.

<comment><USER58> I don't see how classifying Uber as a minicab firm amounts to banning it?

<comment><USER59> "Banning" -> "Regulating"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I still wonder why Uber is a thing. It makes no sense, it does not feel like something capable of reliable service and it got almost no use cases.

Is it just a passing fad of some sort, like fidget spinners?

<comment><USER61> > it got almost no use cases

You don't think calling cabs to your location, paying with your stored card, knowing the fixed cost beforehand is a valid usecase?

<comment><USER62> Uber didn't invent these things. My local taxi places have been doing them for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> for god sake, ppl are stupid. Uber just left, let those ppl use the old fancy taxi service, they will like it!

</comment><comment><USER64> As long as Uber driver count isn't artificially constrained with $500,000 "medallions".

How do sick days and benefits calculate when "employees" are free to work as few or as many hours as they want? What happens if an "employee" chooses to drive more than 40 hours in a week or 8 hours in a day?

It still seems like there needs to be a new classification for "gig economy" workers. They're neither normal employees nor are they independent contractors. It's definitely something new.

<comment><USER65> $500,000 medallions seems to be a US 'innovation'.

Sick days and benefits will be calculated pro rata just like they are for people who work part time. It's not a hard system to create considering most companies have to do it already. There will be a contract that specifies that if you work a 40 hour week you get his much and if you work less you get that fraction of it. I would guess the contract would specify that overages don't accumulate more benefits but that's up to Uber to write into their contract.

The gig economy are exactly that, normal workers. Just because your work doesn't have regular hours doesn't mean we need an entirely new classification system.

<comment><USER64> What if I work a 60 or 80 hour work week? Do I accumulate sick days faster? What about states that mandate 1.5x pay for every hour over 40 in a week or every hour over 8 in a day? Can I force minimum wage waiting around at 5am in areas with insufficient passengers?

There are no companies that "have to do it already" where employees also have complete and total control over the number of hours they work and in what location they work.

<comment><USER25> > Can I force minimum wage waiting around at 5am in areas with insufficient > passengers?

In the EU, legally, yes, as long as Uber's stance is that if you are logged into the app, you are available for work and must accept fares. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003): "The SIMAP judgment defined all time when the worker was required to be present on site as actual working hours, for the purposes of work and rest calculations. The Jaeger judgment confirmed that this was the case even if workers could sleep when their services were not required."

Will Uber actually pay you minimum wage if you try this? No, they will fire you. Or they will implement a special mode in their app saying "thank you for trying to log in, but your services are currently not needed, so we won't let you".

Just because you aren't aware of the many many very detailed rules in this area, that doesn't mean that there are no rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> By this logic, all stock traders should be considered employees of the stock exchange they use. Uber is just like a stock exchange - a match making service.

* Traders/riders on a transaction/ride pay the exchange/Uber for this service.

* Traders/riders are free to trade/ride as much they want to, at any hour of the day, provided there's enough liquidity in the market (surge pricing etc.)

* If a trader doesn't cut a profit on a trade, it's the trader's problem not the exchange's

* If an Uber driver doesn't drive enough to earn a living wage, it's the driver's problem not Uber's.

<comment><USER67> The problem in your logic is that different industries have different regulation, like food industry has different rules then electronics, this regulation were created probably after bad things happen. As a user of Uber or classic taxi you should have same protections. Try imagine Uber for food, you put in an app what food you want to eat and some random person will bring you the food he cocked, the person is not qualified, the startup did not made enough background checks, maybe he cokes in a place with rats, if you get sick you can 1 star the person. My point is that analogies do not work that well when you change industry, P.S. I did not downvoted you

<comment><USER68> I would totally buy the food from the random person if it was cheap, convenient and had good user ratings.

People who can afford to only buy things with background checks and quality control and insurance should be free to buy those things, but it's a little mean to decide for everyone else. Some people can only afford the shitty version.

<comment><USER69> A random person cannot sell food to random person.

uber eats and deliveroo are only working with restaurants, they couldn't do otherwise.

<comment><USER68> Yes they can. It happens all the time, just not through a company. Probably not in Europe, though.

I am making a normative argument. I am aware that regulations prevent that sort of thing for good reasons. I say that there are also good reasons for not regulating. In everything there is a tradeoff.

<comment><USER67> Yeah, but the society calculated and decided that it is worth some extra cost to have clean food places and personnel then have to pay with lives or medical care. As a society we decided that this rules are better globally, even if some individuals would risk eating expired food because is cheaper.

<comment><USER70> Society rarely gets its calculator out. Rule making tends to be a political process. Oftentimes, the rules are suboptimal. The "calculation" is just a convenient rationalization.

<comment><USER67> I assume even if I get an exact measuring function for cost vs benefits you will find a minority that will ask to use a different measurement function.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dodging S3 Downtime with Nginx and HAProxy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sentry.io/2017/03/01/dodging-s3-downtime-with-nginx-and-haproxy.html <comment><USER2> Heads up a simple yet production ready NGINX location block to proxy to a public s3 bucket looks like:

        # matches /s3/*
        location ~* /s3/(.+)$ {
            set $s3_host 's3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com';
            set $s3_bucket 'somebucketname'

            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_ssl_verify on;
            proxy_ssl_session_reuse on;
            proxy_set_header Connection '';
            proxy_set_header Host $s3_host;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header Authorization '';
            proxy_hide_header x-amz-id-2;
            proxy_hide_header x-amz-request-id;
            proxy_buffering on;
            proxy_intercept_errors on;
            resolver 188.8.131.52 22.214.171.124;
            resolver_timeout 10s;
            proxy_pass https://$s3_host/$s3_bucket/$1;
        }

Adding NGINX caching on-top of this is pretty trivial.

Also, heads up, in the directive proxy_cache_path, they should consider enabling "use_temp_path". This directive instructs NGINX to write them to the same directories where they will be cached. We recommend that you set this parameter to off to avoid unnecessary copying of data between file systems. use_temp_path was introduced in NGINX version 1.7.10 and NGINX Plus R6.

        use_temp_path=off

Also, they should enable "proxy_cache_revalidate". This saves on bandwidth, because the server sends the full item only if it has been modified since the time recorded in the Last-Modified header.

        proxy_cache_revalidate on;

<comment><USER3> In our case, we don't need to ever revalidate. We store things forever since our file blobs are immutable.

<comment><USER4> Immutable blobs are really the right choice with s3, as it's eventually- consistent (when using it as a blob store anyway. If you're hosting a static site or similar it's a bit tricky to immutableize and not necessarily worth the effort).

<comment><USER3> We even go a step further, and our blobs are 100% content addressable. :) So caching is super easy for us.

<comment><USER4> Yep, file shas are a great choice. UUIDs are typically fine too.

One sort of weird case is if I have an image key (sha-based) and want to store thumbnail sizes: 'bae6ff187e4c491e5de9cfa3b039ce7da8255798' makes sense as a base key, but really I want bae6ff187e4c491e5de9cfa3b039ce7da8255798/400x400 for thumbnails rather than storing individual thumbnail shas, hah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternate title: "Replacing S3 downtime for vastly greater amounts of your own downtime"

What is the name for this phenomenon where folks think they can out-available a thing that has multiple engineers singularly dedicated to nothing more than its availability /and/ operation? It it just hubris? Surely there must be a more clinical name.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, one of our goals was to not add a new/weaker point of failure.

We gracefully fall back to S3 directly if our cache server is down without a hiccup. So there is no operational overhead of this additional cog. If the server has a failure, we'd go back to slightly degraded performance by talking across the country until we brought it back online.

<comment><USER5> The idea that it being a local proxy meaning there is no operational overhead is a dangerous fallacy.

If that's an earnestly literal statement from you, then it means you simply haven't encountered the failure modes that these kinds of set up are inclined towards.

I've worked at several BigCo's, seen them all implement this pattern, and seen every single one of them have fleet-wide outages due to these innocent "local proxies".

Remember FB's 2-3 hour outage 2 years ago?

[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more- det...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more-details-on- todays-outage/431441338919/)

It was /exactly/ this kind of "local proxy for higher availability/caching over the downstream thing" that caused the outage.

<comment><USER3> Sure, there's definitely risk. I'm not asserting that it's literally 0 chance. But this risk of this is also tied up with other things that leverage this proxy. So it's not adding a new dependency or a new point of failure. If this has a problem, we'll also have problems talking to other services in our network.

And for what it's worth, I've definitely fucked this up in the past and caused downtime as a result of a setup like this. The pros still outweigh the cons in practice.

<comment><USER5> You can't add a new thing without adding a new point of failure. Every point is a point of failure.

Who deploys the thing?

A human? God knows they can screw it up.

Automated deployment?

Well, that's how you get a simultaneous failure and total outage.

Automated incremental deployment?

Ok, slower road to total outage.

Automated incremental that will halt itself or rollback based on reliability metrics?

Ok, getting there.

Wait, was the local proxy load tested?

Was it load tested when one of your data centers is down and everything is doing 30% more work?

And on and on and on. It's all operational overhead, it's all ways to fail.

Can you tell I used to work in monitoring? Maybe I just have PTSD now. :P

<comment><USER3> > You can't add a new thing without adding a new point of failure. Every point > is a point of failure.

Correct, but it's an existing process. So you're right, we could ship a blatantly bad config.

> Who deploys the thing?

We do, humans, yes. We can definitely screw up a config.

> Automated deployment?

We tend to do blue/green deploys on critical pieces of infrastructure just to sanity check it. We might even pull a node out of production, test on a staging server, etc.

> Wait, was the local proxy load tested?

Yes. The load we need for this case is not even close to significant.

> Was it load tested when one of your data centers is down and everything is > doing 30% more work?

Yes, it's literally just a proxy to S3 doing no additional work. For our traffic, the load is not a concern. Especially since it's running on every machine, it's distributed pretty well. A single box cannot overload our haproxy process compared to the CPU needed to run the Python application itself.

> Can you tell I used to work in monitoring? Maybe I just have PTSD now. :P

DataDog, it's pretty dope. It gives us lots of super good insight into all of these things and is what alerted us because haproxy reported S3 down in the first place. It'd also tell is the moment a process like this crashes, etc.

<comment><USER5> DataDog was my customer...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots of criticism in this thread by folks who are missing the point.

@mattrobenoit -- neat idea and the 70% savings in bandwidth is awesome. The side effect of helping mitigate the S3 issue for you was a sweet little bonus!

<comment><USER3> Also, should note, it's about a 98% savings in bandwidth, but cost savings explicitly was 70% since we have to factor in the cost of running this new server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This proxy service had been running for a week while we watched our > bandwidth and S3 bill drop, but we had an unexpected exchange yesterday > morning: [pic showing S3 offline]

Talk about great timing!

</comment><comment><USER8> There have been a lot of articles and suggestions for mitigating S3's single- region architecture (design flaw?) since the outage.

One solution that I haven't seen much of is to just use a service that gives you multi-region without any extra work, such as [https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage- classes#multi-...](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage- classes#multi-regional)

<comment><USER3> This doesn't solve our performance issues that I originally set out to address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For object sync between on-premise and S3, AWS offers Storage Gateway. It supports IAM, encryption, bandwidth optimization, and local cache for hot objects with availability built in.

[https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/details/](https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/details/)

<comment><USER3> I'm afraid to know how much that costs.

<comment><USER9> Pricing is here: [https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/pricing)

As with most services, you pay as you go and only for what you use. The prices are aligned with typical AWS storage, request volume, and data transfer costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're making range requests against S3 objects, look no further than Varnish as a reverse S3 proxy. More details on accomplishing this here:

[https://moz.com/devblog/how-to-cache-http-range- requests/](https://moz.com/devblog/how-to-cache-http-range-requests/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is actually a great idea. I like datadoge on the pic. What sort of bot is that? Does anybody know?

<comment><USER3> That's DataDog. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a neat way to deal with it, and has numerous other benefits, but I thought I'd add another thing to try: deploying your data in multiple regions. You can set up a secondary bucket in a secondary region, and configure your primary bucket to replicate data to the secondary bucket automatically. And then set up your infrastructure to switch to the secondary bucket for read operations should there be a problem with the primary. With large amounts of data the costs could add up, but it has the advantage that you can still serve all read requests during a regional outage, not just the reads that are in the cache.

Obviously this method has cost associated with it, so you should probably only do this if you need complete data availability.

<comment><USER13> > _configure your primary bucket to replicate data to the secondary bucket > automatically_

Well, when the primary goes down, your write operations would get busted.

If the upstream source allows it, just write to both buckets at once. E.g. with Logstash this is trivial.

<comment><USER12> I put this elsewhere in the thread, but you can also set up bi-directional S3 replication. I haven't used it in production, but in theory it would mean you can continue write operations during failure. And those writes that are committed to the primary but not replicated when the region goes down wouldn't be lost, they'd come back up once recovery is complete (S3's SLA for data integrity is a lot stricter than it's uptime). Whether or not that is acceptable depends a lot on your use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have you considered using S3 bucket replication and having your application's logic fail over to the replication target in the event of a regional failure? The former is a checkbox, the latter is 30 minutes of coding (in my experience.)

<comment><USER3> S3 bucket replication is a bit flawed, and doesn't buy us anything on top of what we implemented. And would cost double for storage. Plus more complex application logic which I wanted to avoid. Tools like haproxy are pretty good at this.

With S3 replication, you still have a primary/replica setup in which only one of them can accept writes, but you can accept reads from both. So we'd gain HA between multiple regions, but we wouldn't solve our original goals: speed. The round trip to S3 was too slow for us.

<comment><USER14> Very cool. I did read the article but I missed that speed was important, so the custom solution was an excellent choice.

Another idea might be to use Varnish for the caching layer, but I haven't compared Varnish to NginX in many years so the gap has probably been closed now?

Good work. I've stuffed this one in the back pocket for future use.

<comment><USER3> I have tons of experience with Varnish and a long history there. Varnish is really bad for this since it's memory only. I wanted to use 750GB of disk space, not the 32GB of RAM we had. 750GB of RAM is significantly more expensive.

And in our case, performance between reading some bytes from disk vs memory isn't significant. A disk seek is still many many orders of magnitude faster than a round trip to Amazon.

With that said, Varnish does offer the ability to use mmaped files, but the performance is really appalling out of the box, and just not worth it. Varnish is way better if you want strictly in memory cache.

Another benefit of nginx is the cache won't be dumped if the process restarts, unlike Varnish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing that complicates easy replication is the rules around CNAMEing your S3 bucket to a subdomain you control. You have to name the bucket subdomain.your-domain.com.s3.amazonaws.com, then CNAME subdomain to s3.amazonaws.com. Your replicated bucket needs a unique name, so when you want to fail over it's unfortunately not just a matter of changing a DNS entry to point to the alternate bucket.

Of course, if you have complete control of the client you can just change the hostname. But if you have references scattered throughout html files, you'll likely want a reverse proxy in front of S3.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've built similar proxy/cache setups with just nginx.

Is HAProxy there to get more insight into things, like the slack notification? Or does it serve another purpose?

<comment><USER3> It directs traffic conditionally based on if our cache server is up or not, falling back to S3 directly. In theory, we could use nginx for this, but nginx isn't as good as a generic load balancer since it doesn't have as rich of insight into the status of upstreams. Also yes, the nice benefit of being able to do alerting based on uptimes and whatnot. We already have haproxy running here, so it was just adding another frontend to support this.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the info.

Is the next step locally cache uploads so that works while S3 is down?

<comment><USER3> That's another problem that'd require much more work than just a few hours of hacking around. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another good option is to store your files in a second cloud storage service, and use CDN or DNS failover.

<comment><USER3> This would unfortunately be slower, since it's not within our datacenter and on our network, and significantly more expensive. Probably at least 100x more expensive for the bandwidth than S3 by itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cloud services like S3 are making programmers too complacent these days.

Back in the day, every production web site had something like this "HAProxy" in place.

Now, S3 goes down, and everybody has their thumbs up their asses because that wasn't covered in the Rails bootcamp they went to.

</comment><comment><USER19> If the client sends incorrect Authorization you will still serve from the cache. This is insecure.

<comment><USER3> This is a trusted, internal, private network. The only one who could do this is the application itself, or something rogue on our network. If something were running rogue on our network, there'd be worse things it could get access to.

<comment><USER19> I see, if this is private network then this is a nice simple solution for caching. We plan to implement S3-caching in minio [[https://minio.io](https://minio.io)] (i.e it will authenticate the requests and also do caching) in case you'd be interested for public facing caching proxies.

<comment><USER3> Yep, it's definitely possible to go this route as well. We just didn't have to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does authorization and access control interact with the proxy? Does it first check authorization with S3 and cache the result, use a parallel ACL, or just allow access to anything by anyone?

<comment><USER3> Good question. Authorization is passed along upstream to S3, but we don't re- check authorization when serving a cache hit. In our case, this is a fine tradeoff since our network is private and trusted.

<comment><USER3> To be more clear, there are other things we could do here if we didn't inherently trust our network and the things running there.

<comment><USER20> Thanks, I understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Neat. You should be saving bandwidth costs also.

<comment><USER3> As mentioned, we are saving a lot in S3 transfer cost. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can you disclose which provider do you use to host the servers? Do you have a fixed bandwidth or pay per GiB of transfer?

<comment><USER3> SoftLayer. All internal bandwidth is free. Public network is a fixed allocation of bytes per server, then overages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Essentially a fluke and not a general case people should follow.

<comment><USER3> Disagree. Considering the original goal had nothing to do with expecting S3 to go down, it just happened to be super useful during this incident. We get more more benefits even without S3 breaking.

<comment><USER24> OP is a little abrupt, but it isn't downplaying the system's usefulness to you guys; just warning other readers that this isn't a general solution for, as the post is titled, "dodging S3 downtime". It's a "fluke" precisely because it "just happened" to help with something it wasn't designed for.

It's not uncommon for applications to have MRU access patterns and be able to keep partially functioning during partial data availability. For these applications, a cache will lower costs and mitigate S3 outages. It would have been nice for the article to give the criteria up front.

<comment><USER3> Is paragraph 2 of the post not upfront enough? I clearly stated our goals of the project, and the fact that this also saves us through the incident was a great side effect. But I never set out to mitigate S3 failures like this.

<comment><USER24> > Is paragraph 2 of the post not upfront enough? I clearly stated our goals of > the project

That paragraph says your connection to S3 is slow. Your solution doesn't fix general S3 slowness. However, it does make S3 slowness less of a problem for your application.

That's why it would have been useful to describe how your application accesses S3, so others can quickly determine if their applications would also benefit from a similar solution.

For example: "90% of our S3 reads are of blobs that were read in the last 30 days."

Many applications might upload data to S3, then quickly download it for processing. For those applications, this solution won't work.

> But I never set out to mitigate S3 failures like this.

We know. It's just that some people might read the title and think this is a more general solution than it is. OP was just warning people against that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I can't do development any more, what should I transition to? - <AUTHOR> I've had 7 development jobs and I haven't enjoyed any of them. I'm not that great at it and I can't handle the stress any more.
I need an exit plan but I have no idea where to go. I want a job that's about half as technically demanding as fullstack-wear-every-hat jobs at $70k-80k.
Could I get some ideas? <comment> non-entity I've wanted to leave the industry for a while for various different reasons and it seems the golden handcuffs are very real. The only realistic options seem to be moving towards adjacent business roles (various management, business, or customer facing roles mostly) as you'll see these are pretty much the majority of suggestions you'll see on these threads. Occasionally you'll see the person who left for a trade or something completely unrelated to tech, but ofc with those you risk starting from the bottom again and not making anywhere near your target salary. IT roles can make around what you want, but i imagine you'd be unable to start in roles paying that without experience.

Another option, which may be unpopular is to find a less demanding job. No one wants to hear it, but theres a plenty of development jobs, especially in non- tech companies where you don't have to be that good, you won't do much outside the standard 9-5 hours, pay what you want,and you can coast at for a very long time as long as you aren't a total incompetent. These ofc come with their own issues, but it might be the most realistic option you have, although you haven't gone into much details as to why you want out.

<comment><USER3> > Another option, which may be unpopular is to find a less demanding job. No > one wants to hear it, but theres a plenty of development jobs, especially in > non-tech companies where you don't have to be that good, you won't do much > outside the standard 9-5 hours, pay what you want,and you can coast at for a > very long time as long as you aren't a total incompetent. These ofc come > with their own issues, but it might be the most realistic option you have, > although you haven't gone into much details as to why you want out.

What / Where are these companies and where could one look for such?

<comment><USER4> Government, banks, big non-tech corporations in general. In particular, my observation is that anything "data" related (big data, data warehousing, any kinds of report building) can be technically easy (certainly easier than a CRUD app - also easier to maintain, since it's typically not running 24/7), well paying and populated by not that strong people. These data applications often have a lot of value to the business and hence they're willing to pay for smart people who will swallow their pride, handle the boredom and just get the job done.

Bear in mind that by being a borderline slacker you exclude yourself from any promotions and from doing more "interesting" work, but in many places you'll still get paid. Also, tech moves fast and, if you don't learn, you'll have problems 10-20 years down the road.

<comment><USER5> Do you think the 10-20 years down the road thing is just because from the late 90s until now there's been a huge change of paradigms, etc...

But now things are bit more established. If you're a good Java 8+ engineer who's worked on complicated large systems... do you really think that will go away?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Field Application Engineer or Solutions Architect are excellent transitional roles to other things. You get to work with customers, a variety of customers. Then you arent stuck being with the one customer (whatever product company you are working for). Variety is good.

If you work with a range of external customers, opens more avenues for escape, also. Pure development is pretty tedious, you are treated like a cog.

Not enough people talk about how much software engineering actually can suck. I couldn't stand having a "SCRUM MASTER" breathing down my neck, demanding timelines for every bug, dragging and dropping tasks on me.

<comment><USER3> Please do not take this the wrong way, I am genuinely curious, apart from constant learning / re-learning, what are the other things which people don't talk about when talking about Software Engineering (developer role).

I have worked as a consultant, sysadmin and developer but I was a fresher (when developer) at a $BIG_FIRM and everything had a process (Requirement gathering, analysis, etc. etc.) so it was not that Agile. curious to see how it is right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My advice would be to think about what you _do_ want out of work. You can straightforwardly make that money as a math teacher, a welder, a healthcare administrator, a banker. All of those are "less technically demanding." Hell, you can make more than that as a truck driver, if you can handle hazardous materials. Some of those options may be attractive to you, others not. Ask yourself why you feel the way you do about each, and work from there.

Another thing, though. Depending on how old you are, 7 dev jobs is a lot of dev jobs. You should consider whether you think the technical demands are really what's making you unhappy. Because that many changes, depending on career length, suggests maybe you've given up too easily on a few. A successful career change requires both optimism and commitment. So keep your chin up, zero in on what you do want, and consider whether leaning into your current career and doubling down on your commitments could get it for you. Otherwise, best of luck. Go pick up a welding torch/green visor/trucker hat.

</comment><comment><USER8> Specialized consulting, narrow your focus. Take an aspect you enjoy and are decent at, narrow in on that and then work for yourself. It's difficult to get started, highly rewarding as you get rolling, and can eventually pay very well. Part of the point would be to stop wearing every hat, pick the hat/s you want to wear and do those. You don't have to be great/elite at the hat you choose, you just have to be good enough.

</comment><comment><USER9> It was React/GraphQL/Apollo that broke me. I liked it better when just knowing ruby and sql were good enough. Those jobs are still out there but they're getting harder to find.

<comment><USER10> That pushed me away from web dev but not dev in general. Got into native mobile dev, now playing around with Rust. Wondering if I'll end up full circling back to the web with WASM.

Anyway, point is, there's plenty of variety out there!

<comment><USER3> > Anyway, point is, there's plenty of variety out there!

Where can we find those? Almost every job posting ever needs 6-7 different technologies with multi-year experience in almost every.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are you someone that gets energy from working with people or working solo on tasks? I used to have a similar challenge, I stopped enjoying my technically demanding job until I realized that there was just as much value to be had from my time share my experience and skills with other geeks in my field. It made what I do enjoyable again and also got me to accept my value as a story- teller and education when I had convinced myself that I probably would only ever have my technical abilities to lend to my job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working solo. If I could maintain some servers or gear in a remote location or something, that would be perfect.

<comment><USER12> What about moving into sys admin / devops?

<comment><AUTHOR> Azure would compliment my previous work with MS technologies. I think AWS is more popular though so might be more amenable to a lateral move. But I'm sure Azure has their own path as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Technical project manager, product manager, product owner. Engineering manager. Scrum Master. As long as you enjoy leadership any of these options should do quite well. Being technically-savvy is usually an asset in these positions, and you should be able to make good money.

<comment><USER14> What if you can't tolerate the BS that comes with those positions?

<comment><USER15> That is an interesting point of view. What if you choose to be no BS project manager or no BS product manager etc. Unless you mean the BS that comes from dealing day to day with humanity?

<comment><USER14> I mean in those positions you deal with BS from both directions - <USER2> management and/or the business as well as the personnel under your command.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I work as an application engineer for a SaaS company and I do a lot of troubleshooting up and down the stack, but I do not write code except for some console apps or scripts. I do a lot of DB work, some DevOps stuff like cert renewals, custom reports, write bug tickets, etc. The job is not that stressful and I earn close to what you are looking for in terms of salary. I actually expect the amount to be in that range in the near to mid term after some restructuring of our department and reevaluation of the position. They are actually going to be hiring in Q4 for two similar positions, possibly remote. Please let me know if you have any interest!

<comment><USER17> I have a similar job as a technical support engineer, which requires a lot of DB querying as well. I've optimized a lot of my job by investigating the data through jupyter notebook, which is typically a data analyst / data scientist tool, but works really well for troubleshooting impact and behaviors through data. I highly recommend trying it out, it's made my work more seamless. Learned the job twice as fast as anyone of my other my peers; commended by my boss, in how surprised she found learned the material; seems to be a reoccurring event for my last three jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How about a technical support role? You still get to solve technical problems and you're helping/interacting with customers directly without being responsible for shipping new features or fixing production downtime incidents.

<comment><USER19> I am in tech support and I am expected to fix production downtime incidents.

<comment><USER20> That's SRE work with garbage pay. Seek employment elsewhere when able!

<comment><USER19> What makes you think it's garbage pay?

<comment><USER20> In my experience, there is a large delta in pay between tech support and SRE roles (~$45k-$60k/year). Tech support pay is fine if you're just doing tech support.

<comment><USER19> I am referring to an enterprise SaaS company based outta Houston. Technical Support Analyst > 4 years exp makes around $80k-$90k/ year.

Another question if you don't mind -

>> _Seek employment elsewhere when able!_

Were you talking about some specific roles? Like software developer or something?

<comment><USER20> If you're capable of resolving production issues, performing technical support, and have at least some proficiency with software development, I would recommend exploring SRE or software engineering roles to capture more compensation (based on the skill level you've communicated in thread).

<comment><USER19> Will do, but may I ask for some examples of jobs I should be looking for. I get it you are saying SRE and software engineering but some links giving a fair idea about position and salary ballpark would be gratefully reciprocated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if a government job slinging PHP would do the trick? Pension too.

</comment><comment><USER22> Take a look at this video: [https://youtu.be/G2SqqjRn_c0](https://youtu.be/G2SqqjRn_c0)

</comment><comment><USER23> Project manager. Lots of companies need a PM that has some of the technical knowledge you do to help make decisions on processes.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm in the same position. Management wants a full stack / multiple stack midlevel dev for like $85k per year. I think the expectations are ridiculous, especially since they wont train.

I loved the first 3 years of my career, but then the company showed its politics and started to screw me over... and over...

I'm upvoting and hoping to see some good responses.

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe try PM role? You have been working for long, you might have an idea how things work in shop.

Here, the most of cognitive load of will be talking to people, thinking how to design product and getting work done.

Okay, this might seem a lot at the moment but this is something to think in your position.

</comment><comment><USER25> What about it stresses you out? Is there anything about the job that you like?

</comment><comment><USER26> Look into Salesforce. You might do well as a Salesforce administrator. You can set up your own small "org" and do their training, Trailhead, try some administrative training and see if it's up your alley.

<comment><USER27> I had to integrate an companies booking software with Salesforce via API. It's dreadful software from that perspective

<comment><USER26> From the outside, developing, it can be. But running and configuring the platform from the inside pays well and has several "low-code" way of doing reasonably scoped tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If the problem is you really dislike it, then I'd start with what you do like and go from there.

If the problem is stress, consider discovering the source of that stress and if there's a solution besides leaving the industry.

<comment><USER29> (Not the OP, but this question does resonate...)

It's a good set of questions to keep in mind, but I'm not sure it always leads to a feasible course of action.

What _I_ like is working independently on a gnarly problem for some extended period of time. That explicitly includes spending the odd day "spinning my wheels" without being immediately being pushed to ask others for help -- because bumping my head against stuff while working alone is the way I like to learn stuff.

This way of working seems to be under fairly vigorous attack in favour of "everything needs a team", and I'm not quite sure how to work around that. Just pointing out that I'm getting things done does not seem to be sufficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about the typical career moves - design, product, sales, or management?

</comment><comment><USER31> How about relocating or going fully remote with company from overseas? I feel like US market is 10x more demanding than European.

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by more demanding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Consider specializing on some technology (e.g. Javascript) and focus on that.

</comment><comment><USER33> Management.</comment>


Microsoft Justifies Killing the Start Button in Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.legitreviews.com/news/13533/ <comment><USER2> I think this is going to go over like a lead balloon for the significant population of Windows users who are UI-blind.

They do not know how to pin apps to the taskbar, they do not know any keyboard combos, they do not press the Start key on the keyboard, they do not realize they can search for apps, and they have certainly never pressed the mouse pointer against the screen's edge to make UI appear.

The one inviolate, signature, fundamental interaction with Windows since 1995 has been clicking on the Start button, and now it's being replaced with a giant, whirling explosion of colored panels and secret UI.

Their explanations don't pass the smell test, and I think this is a product- breaking change. I'd like to know the real reason why.

<comment><USER3> > I'd like to know the real reason why.

My guess is their plan is to try to leverage their desktop dominance into mobile. By forcing existing desktop users into their mobile experience. And hope that'll be familiar enough to buy old windows users into their mobile ecosystem, but not different enough to scare them away to a different desktop. The start menu is just one of the many pieces that doesn't work well on mobile. So they'll also get rid of it on the desktop, hoping that'll get desktop users familiar with WP.

Yea, a bad plan, but I guess that's their vision.

<comment><USER2> "We took away this thing you know and replaced it with five things you don't on the theory that you'll be so delighted with the changes that you'll be more willing to purchase a less essential product from us in the future."

That is a _gamble_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's strange, I never used it til Vista/Win7 when they made it actually useful. Now I don't need to clutter my desktop with links to all my programs, I just hit the windows key and start typing away.

</comment><comment><USER5> Remember seeing the Start Menu in Windows Vista for the first time?

It should be obvious to anyone that Microsoft has been trying to kill the program list for a long time. Instead of being presented with the basics of what the system can do, everyone is now getting a curated experience.

Things are supposed to be easy to use. But do you really want to keep your users stupid forever? There has to be avenues of exploration to lead to further complexity. Otherwise why bother with anything more than a web browser OS?

</comment><comment><USER6> This bothers me a lot. I use the Start Menu all the time for searching and common programs, and then use the taskbar as a way to manage open applications. Granted, I don't miss it on my Macbook, but that is already very limited by not having a mouse, smaller screen, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Fits my usage perfectly. I have the 4 programs that I use 95% of the time pinned to the taskbar, everything else I use search to run.

</comment><comment><USER8> I always felt that the start button was the only thing keeping some windows users from switching to other operating systems. Now that there's not going to be a start button, I hope that more people will be open to Linux/Mac since the "clutch" of the Start button will no longer be an issue.

</comment><comment><USER9> OS X manages just fine without a formal "Start" button. Who needs Start buttons when you can pin, search from the desktop, or use Launchpad? So goodbye, old Start Button, we've had a good run. You will be remembered.

<comment><USER10> OSX has the Apple menu (for System Preferences, Shut Down, etc.) and the Applications dock menu.

So OS X _does_ have a Start button for all intents and purposes, it's just divided into two halves (which basically correspond to the original columns of the XP start menu). I personally feel it would be really annoying to go without either of them.

<comment><USER2> Anything to the right of the divide on the dock is considered a stack, which is just a pinned folder.

Once the user accidentally drags it off the dock, it poofs away and they are lost.</comment></comment></comment>


Mimic – [ab]using Unicode to create tragedy (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/reinderien/mimic <comment><USER2> Someone needs to write a Chrome extension that replaces all the content of <tt> and <code> elements with mimic'd versions, to discourage copy and pasting code.

<comment><USER3> And another extension to undo that. Such contrivances are ultimately pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437619)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is just mean.</comment>


Ask YC: Has anyone seen any polls lately? - <AUTHOR>

I was just scanning the front page, and I realized that there is not one poll on it, and if I'm remembering correctly, I haven't seen one in several days (maybe a week?). I just thought it would be worth commenting on after so many of us (not me ;-) were worried about news.yc being overrun with polls. <comment><USER2> I tried the poll feature a few days ago, it wouldn't submit no matter what I tried.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think an influx of users (like me) have offset those poll posters.</comment>


A note on losing 89,000 customers in 33 hours - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/a-note-on-losing-89-000-readers-in-33-hours-423861897748 <comment><USER2> Calling blog readers "customers" is clickbait.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair. What would you call facebook users? Medium users?

<comment><USER3> They're just users. People reading content are just readers. Customers are people who _pay_ for goods. For sites like Facebook and Google Search, the customers are the advertisers. The users are the product that's improved for advertisers. Or others that are scarier who get access to same user profiles/data. Why do you think they're always being more invasive of privacy and showing more ads even if people don't want that? They make more profit off their actual customers by selling them a chance to analyze and manipulate users. That simple.

Bruce Schneier was first I read on this although I can't find original writeup. Here's one:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_as_1.html)

Here's one meant to be slightly entertaining that's specific to Google's end of things:

[http://www.datamation.com/columns/executive_tech/article.php...](http://www.datamation.com/columns/executive_tech/article.php/3801006/Googles- Business-Model-YOU-Are-the-Product.htm)

Note: They did consolidate their privacy policies for various services to start linking things like author predicts. I found that news piece before this one.

Note 2: The "If it's free, then you're the product" meme obviously doesn't always apply to free goods. You must assume it does in U.S., though, since you have no legal protections in practice on that sort of thing. They might sell you out behind your back.</comment></comment></comment>


Chasing Ghostnet, a espionage network w/ 1295 infected PCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investigating-a-Cyber-Espionage-Network

<comment><USER2> The actual PDF: <http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/10731/15987355.pdf>

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> WAY over-rated story. The network is built using a script kiddy tool called Gh0st RAT, which relies solely on social engineering to propagate. There are no new exploits here, or nothing as sophisticated as confiker especially since Gh0st RAT is a simple client/server model that is very easy to block (infact, most firewalls should already be blocking it).

The security company that wrote that report probably charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for information that any competent network admin could have found online or would already know if they kept up to date with the 'latest' (ie. 10 year old) threats.

It just happens that one of these networks hits a high-valued target, and then propagates. Note that most of the victims are incredibly unsophisticated and from poorer countries or organizations without a clue.

The lesson here should be about training computer users and having competent administration and support of IT infrastructure, rather than a scare campaign about Chinese government hacking. ('oh the host server is a Chinese IP, it must be the government! (300M net users in China.. durgh)).

</comment><comment><USER5> 60 minutes just ran a story on Ghostnet. It is a terrible development-- these networks undermine online trust and e-commerce everywhere.</comment>


Google on spectrum bid: We bluffed! - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/04/04/google-we-bluffed/

<comment><USER2> Are the winners legally bound to developing a wireless network on that bandwidth? What's stopping Verizon from dragging their feet setting up such a network, or leaving it unused altogether?

<comment><USER3> Responsibility to shareholders to get return on a 10-figure investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technically that's semi-bluffing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well played, Google. Well played.

</comment><comment><USER6> w00t. I for one am thankful that Google is on the side of making spectrum open instead of colluding with the networks.

</comment><comment><USER7> at least they're not evil</comment>


Show HN: Pace, a slow messaging application - <AUTHOR> http://pacemail.io

<comment><USER2> A remark on the imagery: Is it necessary to link the "slow web" with a man at his later (or last) stage in life? Isn't this naturalising the hectic/fast web as something ok to do for the first two thirds of ones life?

<comment><AUTHOR> I picked the image because it feels to me like it's capturing a peaceful moment. I guess it could be interpreted differently though. For the record I consider both fast and slow messaging as things that are ok to do what all stages of your life, but they're both meant for different use cases. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, awesome. We need things like this in the web.

That's the idea of "the slow web" movement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the enthusiasm! :D Yeah, it's definitely heavily influenced by the slow web movement. I'm hoping it can be a gateway to sending paper letters again for some users.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Common interview questions for senior software engineer position? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys, I have a 3 hour interview coming up on Monday, this will be my first senior level position. Prior to this, at various other places I have worked as intermediate.
What questions should I prepare myself for? 3 hours seems awful long just for asking technical questions?
All in all, I hope to transition into senior level position smoothly. Most of my experience comes from building my own products (SaaS, desktop etc). and working as an intermediate level software engineer for a few years and finally working as a freelancer.
The position is for a backend developer, and they have popular mobile games that they need to support. <comment><USER2> Each company is different, I could be way off the mark, and 3 hours strikes me as a little short for the standard format.

A common interview format will have you doing multiple, separate interviews, usually 60 minutes long, with different people. The purpose of this is to gather a few independent opinions. You might be asked to write code, you might be asked to sketch architecture, you might be asked to tell war stories.

Try to stay relaxed, be candid, and take a break/drink/use the restroom between interviewers. Try to start with a blank state, mentally, for each round. Also, bear in mind that if you're breezing through the interview, people will often start asking tougher questions to try and figure out where your limits are. If, by the halfway mark, you're being asked things you don't know the answer to, that does not mean you're failing. (Avoid bullshitting if you reach this point, it'll be obvious and count against you, it's worse than just saying you don't know)

</comment><comment><USER3> Usually, you interview with a few people in sequence, that's why it can take so long.

In my experience, many technical interviewers are not very good at this interviewing thing; it isn't their core skill and on top of that they are _human_.

One of the early technical questions should answer the question: "Are you here by accident?" Google "fizzbuzz" for an example of this sort of question.

A poor but all too common flavor of interview question goes like this: "How would you write something that you would never write in real life but should have learned about in school?"

The interviewer looked it up before the interview so it's blindingly obvious _to him_. When you stumble trying to remember the Taylor series for the sine function they will think you are a bit slow. I always brush up on linked list and tree operations to prepare for this type of question. Try not to hold it against them - remember, the person asking them probably doesn't know what they are doing and all they may have been exposed to are other bad interviewers asking them this sort of question i.e. they know not what they do.

The _good_ interviewer will try get you into the relaxed state you would be if you were actually working with them, and then ask you a technical question that's actually relevant to what they do day to day.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi mate,

We choose our interview questions based on the position and how the candidate presents themselves - e.g., if you state you have strong SQL skills, we'll be expecting you to demonstrate those skills.

In the first filter interview, we're generally looking for war stories that show you have what we're looking for, so if the word 'scalable' pops up in a job description, for example, then a relevant anecdote on a time you had scaling issues and overcame is worth making notes on.

We also prefer to have you work on actual problems on a computer while pairing with one of our team members instead of doing stuff on a whiteboard. We're interviewing for skills and team fit, and if you're intelligent, then skills can be taught, but attitude rarely can.

In summary - depends on the specifics of the job description.

</comment><comment><USER5> At a senior level in the places that I've seen, I'd expect a mix of very abstract as well as more practical questions.

The other responses show some of the more algorithmically based practical questions. Things like fizzbuzz, quickly followed by how you'd do an in-place string reversal, followed by whether you'd use quicksort vs mergesort for something. Personally, I don't see a huge point in too many maths-based questions because Google, so it's a litmus test and not a skills test IMO.

Then there are language and framework related questions - maybe you'll get shown some complexish code and be asked to spot the bugs. Or you'll get asked how, in practical terms, you'd go about achieving something (with which library would you be working). This would also go over the technologies and skills you might actually need to have to do your job at the company.

To see the cultural fit, they might ask about a project that interested you, and why it interested you. I come from a government town, so this question winds up being pretty awkward, but a lack of passion and enthusiasm is something that I've seen technically-relatively-competent people turned down for.

At a higher level, there's things like "say we wanted to create a link shortener, how would you go about implementing it?" and the follow ups on scaling and asynchronous processing ("what about analytics?" etc.) Stuff which gets you talking in terms of the components and how they'd interact in terms of queueing, designing for reliability etc etc. These types of problems really have no wrong answer, and you can learn a lot about how the developer thinks, their areas of interest, and whether they'd be a good fit for the team without ever getting them stuck on a problem.

At the end of the day, I haven't asked/been asked, questions that are that different from those that you'd ask a junior or intermediate interviewee, it's the detail and quality of the response that you expect to be different.

That said, with 3 hours, they'll probably have the interview and then get you to code something.

</comment><comment><USER6> They will probably ask you to actually code something. I don't know these guys... but they might ask you some silly ass trick question..

[http://www.programcreek.com/2012/11/top-10-algorithms-for- co...](http://www.programcreek.com/2012/11/top-10-algorithms-for-coding- interview/)

Check that out.

</comment><comment> bra-ket [http://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-frequently-asked- intervie...](http://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-frequently-asked-interview- questions-for-Java-Engineers)

</comment><comment><USER7> 'll give you a mock phone interview if you'd like. Just give me your info and we can set it up.

</comment><comment><USER6> and this [http://algorithmsandme.blogspot.in/p/blog- page_27.html#.U4o2...](http://algorithmsandme.blogspot.in/p/blog- page_27.html#.U4o2OCgkRWs)</comment>