Completely agree that not everything is sunshine and happiness at Uber. The quality is highly variable across the company, but my observation has been that this is a feature, not a bug. Some systems need to be built very well such as software defined networking and container infrastructure, so you need to take the time to build it right. Other areas are one off features where speed to market matters most. Faster, Cheaper, Better, choose two. I would say on average there is a good balance between those three across the company, with each team/project making the right trade offs for the short and long term business goals. Most systems that have proven valuable end up being rewritten. I've helped sunset two older systems thus far.
It's easy to drop in and criticize the architecture of some older systems, but it's also instructive if you were around when they were built and knew the trade offs and constraints that existed when they were first conceived. The growth we've experienced has been astronomical and it would have been non-trivial exercise to build systems 2-3 years ago that account for the scale and business needs today. Even today, it's hard to plan farther that 2-3 years out with the growth we are seeing. I work on a system doing millions of QPS and in 2-3 years, it will be handling an order of magnitude more QPS and more business needs. We might scale horizontally or decide a different solution is needed. I don't think there is a silver bullet and the microservice architecture means that rewrites and re-architectures are tractable problems.
It's easy to drop in and criticize the architecture of some older systems, but it's also instructive if you were around when they were built and knew the trade offs and constraints that existed when they were first conceived. The growth we've experienced has been astronomical and it would have been non-trivial exercise to build systems 2-3 years ago that account for the scale and business needs today. Even today, it's hard to plan farther that 2-3 years out with the growth we are seeing. I work on a system doing millions of QPS and in 2-3 years, it will be handling an order of magnitude more QPS and more business needs. We might scale horizontally or decide a different solution is needed. I don't think there is a silver bullet and the microservice architecture means that rewrites and re-architectures are tractable problems.