主持人: Uber had about 5,000 microservices. None of us wanted to go through that extreme. But lots of time when you are under a lot of pressure and no time to react other than to survive that scale that keep on coming at you. Travis told you you have 2 months to launch in China. That was one of the craziest thing we've ever done, but it's also one of the most amazing thing we've ever done and now explain why.

主持人: So let's talk about how and why Uber built so much internal tools. I can't claim that every single one of those thing were absolutely necessary but all the important one were absolutely necessary. So I remember a very painful example of that we had to face early on was when Tuan Pam joined Uber as the company's first CO in 2013. The company had 40 engineers did 30,000 rides per day and the system crashed multiple times per week. He had 5 months before Uber's dispatch system would hit a brick wall with no way out. 7 years later, he left the CTO of one of the most complex engineering organizations ever built.

In today's conversation, we discuss Tuan's interview with Travis Kellik for the CTO role, which lasted 30 hours, spread over 2 weeks, scaling through chaos, rewriting dispatch before it collapsed, launching China in 5 months, and the full appreite known internally as Project Helix. Why Uber ended up with thousands of microservices and hundreds of internal tools because existing solutions could not handle Uber scale at the time, and many more. If you've ever wondered what it's like inside the room when a company is growing faster than it systems can handle and what are ways to get things under control, this episode is for you. As a side note, I've been lucky enough to work at Uber while Tuan was a CTO. And Tuan is the real deal.

This episode is presented by Statsig, the unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. Check out the show notes to learn more about them and our other season sponsors, Sonar and Work OS. Tuan, it is so good to have you here in person.

Thuan Pham: It's my pleasure. It's so good to connect with you again after all these years. And it's so good to reconnect. We we worked together for almost four years at at Uber. Probably my first month I already met you in like some really like fun slashstressful circumstances during Helix the Uber app rewrite which was a crazy project.

主持人: Well, before we get into any of that, how did you get started not just in tech but but in life? You had a pretty rough start.

Thuan Pham: Yeah, I I I grew up in I was born in Vietnam and I was a child I would say of the Vietnam War. So in 1975 when the south of I was from the south of Vietnam, my father was tied to the military of the south of the south and when the when the country was unified, right? The the south has lost and north is one and there were a fair amount of repercussion, right? People who are associated with the southern regime would not have much of an opportunity growing up. the education opportunity, all these other that was again the the the way it was at the time. That's not necessarily true right now. But that was and my mother then made a very bold decision that she wouldn't want her two son growing up with no opportunity. And so we had to flee the country. And at the time there was a massive wave of exodus called the boat people where people just get onto rinky boat fishing boat or whatever thing they can get their their their place in and escape the country in the middle of the night. People did not know at the time and nobody thought about it that but the chance of survival was about less than 50%. that about two million people left, about million people survived the crossing because this these boats are not sea worthy and we crossed the ocean and yeah, but we were the lucky we were lucky half really. But no one thought about if people think too much about it, they probably wouldn't do it. But everyone just like well we need to escape we need to you know give ourselves a shot of a better life and so we did. So we we left Vietnam. It took many try and took it depleted the entire you know saving of my parent because it was a scam. People were say you know pay up half now half later and then the boat never shows up and finally on the fourth try we actually made it and then we were lucky that we have a really good captain who actually navigate through storms and and all that and we survived even pirate from from Thai. I was around I think 11 12 somewhere and so we crossed that and we survived three three day four nights of the crossing of the South China Sea to Malaysia then we went into Malaysia we thought we were done a week later we got tow back out and dump it in Indonesia a few days later and that's where the government there accepted us in and put it on a deserted island at the time and we formed a refugee camp there. So, and then we were waiting to be processed. We got interviewed by all the different countries and the the US gave us a refugee settlement because we were tied to the old regime that were supported by the Americans. So, we were very very thankful to to get here the land of opportunity and we didn't know any English. We didn't have any penny to our name. We were sponsored by a church. the first set of clothing we got was from the donation closet at the church. And so and so but we had to build from the ground up and so that that was how I grew up and that's how I got here.

主持人: And then from this like absolutely not just unconventional but just extremely hard start. How did you eventually get your interest into computers into tech?

Thuan Pham: Just like most in life is by happen or luck. I I was pretty good in math and science as most kids in in Asia. We were growing up. We learned that. And when we got here I had a friend in high school who had received a gift from his dad an IBM PC. That was when one of the very first one the one with like two floppy disc.

主持人: Was this in ' 80s or '7s?

Thuan Pham: This was in the 80. This was in 1982. Yeah. So freshman year. So after school I would hang out at his place and he's got a new toy and so we were you know writing little basic program and playing game and all that stuff and we learned how to use word processors and lotus and word stars and all that and I started coding in basics and then I just realized that oh it come very natural to me I can think very algorithmically and then there's another weird thing I I sometimes tell people I am generally a procrastinator I don't like to do the same thing twice so computer programming is perfect for me, right? You solve the problem once that's a creative part. After that, I get bored. I got to do the next problem. And so, writing program was like the perfect fit for me.

主持人: You do not duplicate your code.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. I don't like duplicate the code. I don't like to do the same thing twice. And so, yeah, when you write it and then it execute way faster than you can do it by hand. So, that was really wonderful. I just taught myself that. And then I volunteer at a government agency to write code for them after school. And so I did that and I went in there and I basically stitched together Lotus DBA3 with all the scripting languages and automate the entire financial accounting and reduce the the the workload. At the time the two accountant had to spend about 3 weeks or so every quarter reconciling everything. I did all that stuff with a purchase button and took about three hour for the whole batch to run. And so they were so happy when I graduated high school. I think they they wrote me a really good recommendation letter. And with other things that were going on and the good grades and everything else, I I got accepted MIT and then I got there and I really learned computer science like the fundamental of computer science. Back then I was just like a kid who just, you know, write programs. So,

主持人: And then during or after MIT, what was your first professional job where where you got paid and you worked full-time on on techn with technology?

Thuan Pham: One thing lead to another. I was when I was at MIT, there was a multi-year co-op program with some of the best company tech company in the world at the time. AT&T, Bell Labs, Xerox Park, HP Labs, and all these company Bor all over the country actually. And so we applied for it and and then the best the the kids with the best grade got prioritized. Then the company had to go through a selection process. They rank all the kids and then the kids all ranked the company that they got ranked and then there was a matching process and I end up coming to Hill Packard Laboratories and AP was one of an awesome company at the time.

主持人: Back then they were massive and like very

Thuan Pham: Very innovative laser printers you know workstation computer systems all of that stuff. I was in the HP lab which is the research lab where a lot of the really innovative stuff happened and so it was a dream job. as a student I get to work on cutting edge research with all the other PhDs around I get to write the joint thesis for my bachelors and my masters with the work there that was part of the arrangement and when I graduated HP just hired me straight into that research lab so I became one of the researcher although I didn't have a PhD and after that that were a few years of that then I went into the industry and write code that people would actually use I really enjoy my time at HP lab because you get to do cutting edge stuff. We were working on medical informatics at the time where right now you go to every doctors all your recctors following you. Back then we actually have a network distributed system architecture where every physician workstation that you go to right had your your X-ray and everything follow and then you have like knowledge base that actually look at for drug interaction. Oh, we actually did that research back in the mid late 80s actually. And so like these are cutting edge stuff. But then the the thing that I find unsatisfied unsatisfactory at the time for me was we published great paper and then didn't go anywhere. It was not productionized and I'm just like I want this is so cool. Why can't we bring it to the user? But that wasn't the setup. The setup was research lab worry about research and then we would have like a tech fair every year and the general manager of every product division swing by and then decide what they want to pick up and productize. And so I didn't feel empowering beyond the research phase. So I just had to go find a place where I can write code and people actually use my code.

主持人: So I went to Silicon Graphics. At the time we were also trying to invent the future and we actually did a prototype of that. There was interactive TV where back then now we could take for granted a streaming video video on demand online game right cooperative game. Back then we didn't have cell phone internet yet and we can cobble 4,000 um homes together in an 18 trial that has cable and then we invent like network protocols and all these things and we actually formed a set top which is like tube TV not even a flat screen TV with a set top box on top which is a silicon graphics box and we can implement online shopping video on video on demand and you're building all of that without having any of this stuff right here like we and and celebrity like Michael Jackson came by and saw demos and we saw Spielberg, we saw everybody. We thought really believe that was the future and it was the future. The problem was it's way we way way ahead of the time. Right. Then I learned a big hard lesson. It's not about just a technology. It's about whether the world is ready for it, whether it's economically feasible.

主持人: And and back then what was the point where you realized like this is not going to work even though we're doing this awesome stuff

Thuan Pham: After a year, right? because it took like $100 million back in 1994 just to provision the head end. Silicon Graphics love it because they sell all these massive server to pump out video and then the settop itself is a silicon graphics workstation that cost $45,000 right people would not buy that right

主持人: especially like like in today's money that would be like 10 $20,000

Thuan Pham: People would not buy that the early adopter enthusiastic maybe right but not for the mass market and so when we and we we did that trial incredibly successful we definitely all saw the future and then we did the same trial a similar trial with a different set of software that we wrote for NT nippon telephone in Japan. We went to Japan deploy that very cool had a really great time but then it fizzled out because it would not be commercially viable and so that was a really first life lesson that I learned it's not just a technology right you got to be at the right place at the right time and the right price point and then after that I went to a startup founded by a former office mate at SGI so we were doing internet advertising the internet was about to take off then mosaic browser search came out Netscape was being form and yeah in the early days of Netscape and so we saw very clearly that the the advertising model worked for TV so it has to work for the internet right because all these content people would use it if it's free but then who has to pay for it the advertising so we we I joined a company initially we call ourselves netvertiser which is like you know very and then ch it changed it name quickly to net gravity and then it's so enterprise software to put ad banners dynamic ad banners ers on CNN on Netscape site and all that. I was one of the very early engineer there. I was the fourth engineer I believe. Yeah. And so people don't know this but a buddy of mine we were the first pup engineer to put the first dynamically targeted ad on the on the Yahoo page on the internet.

主持人: And dynamically targeted meaning that it showed different ads based on different or or like whatever.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. The version before I came in was a script that crawl through and just put a stick static banner ad and rotate it through every hour. But then we it's like we got to target it and then we started using cookie we started you at first it was a content of the the page and and the person and then we actually use that to actually target different ad and then we have ad sequence and all that stuff and that was the very first one of course we had some success there that company went public but another thing that I learned was sometime you got to seize the market right there's a company that formed right much later than us but did an ad service bureau And that took off because it take a lot less investment for people to you just stick a banner a tag on your HTML page and then revenue just come your way, right? Because the the the service bureau kind of stick the app there dynamically or that kind of stuff. We had wanted to do that in our company but then one of our board members said no you should focus on get to profit first before you expand. Oh, and we went down the profitability path and we then becomes like you know a bigger robust enterprise solution where the other one is and try to get profitable and the other one is just expand through the internet like raising Wi-Fi then after that years later got bought by Google. So that was the journey there. There's a lot of lesson there about how to build things.

主持人: So, so this was do I understand that you you you saw that what happens when there's a big market and you you focus on profitability which which should make sense but a player focuses on growth even at being nonprofitable. It might be able to swallow you in the end.

Thuan Pham: That's right. Look at what happened to at Uber, right? We did not the right move.

主持人: I'm starting to see how these things are coming together. So now you're at the startup which almost took off but not quite. And then what was your next stop? That company went public and then got absorbed and after about seven years there I had made it to the VP level. I joined as an IC. Along the way I knew that from my inspiration at the Silicon Graphics day that if you want to do something really big you need to leverage other people. You can't do it with your bare two hands. So then I switched over to the management track and I honed the skill and I got up to directors and senior directors and then ultimately got the VP and then

Thuan Pham: After about eight years, seven year, eight year there, the com bust happened right of that time and then I said well maybe it's time to prove to myself whether or not I'm just a one hit wonder or I actually have skill that are transferable.

主持人: Just just one thing on the dotcom bus because you kind of swept over it because you you've now seen a lot of like ups and downs but can you take us a little bit back what actually happened with comb bus because the people I talked to especially were new grads it sounded very very scary what what did you feel like and what did people professionals engineers all around you feel like

Thuan Pham: The com bus was was kind of scary when the correction happened right but before that there was this exuberance that everything is.com right pest.com fubar.com everything is a.com webban. Yeah, all of that stuff. I still have the webb van bin in my garage actually. And so, yeah, but then there there was a shake out eventually. There has to be sound business model that makes sustained profit, right? Growth and profit. Growth alone eventually burn, you know, money and that's not good. You can grow fast, but eventually you have to turn that into profit to be a durable company. And so in that dot wave there were massive company that emerged, right? There was Yahoo, there's Google, there's Amazon, all of those company. There's also a bunch of other company, web van and others, whatever that would go under because they didn't have like a strong value proposition that last the the test of of time, right? So, yeah, it's all about the what value you deliver and whether or not it's beneficial and valuable to the customer that they're willing to pay, right? And I think that's one thing that we learned. Which one is like a real fundamental strong business even though it might not be a profit initially, but which one are just a me too, right? Just put a.com on something and and it's hot there. There may be a lot of AI things that's going on right now, right? Eventually some of these things will consolidate, some will go under, some will become really awesome solutions and all that stuff. And so, but the the market will sort it out. In the end, the the customer will vote on what they want to spend the money on. Speaking of building things that last versus things that don't, one thing that always separates the two is cold quality. And that's what our season sponsor Sonar is all about. Sonar, the makers of Sonar Cube, is deeply rooted in the core belief that code quality and code security are inherently linked. Highquality code is naturally more resilient, and as agents start to write code at a massive scale, that verification layer becomes your most important security parimeter. This is where solutions like Sonar Cube advanced security are valuable. With this new malicious package detection, advanced security provides a real-time circuit breaker, automatically stopping agents from pulling in unverified or risky thirdparty libraries before they ever hit your pipeline. The impact is measurable, too. Developers who verify their code with Sonar are 44% less likely to report experimenting outages due to AI. As per Sonar states of code developer survey 2026 report, it's really about closing the gap between the speed of AI and the reality of production security. What else is Sonar doing to help reduce outages, improve security, and lower risks associated with AI and agenda coding? Head to sonarsource.com/pragmatic to find out.

主持人: With this, let's get back on what Swan did after the com boom and bust. And there was a lot of layoffs, companies going bankrupt. Did that worry people around you? Did that worry you that, you know, your your job could be in danger or you might have a harder time switching jobs or did you not did was was it a very short-lived?

Thuan Pham: It lasted a couple years. I remember and during that time it was definitely hard to to get a job. especially for new college grad that's always the the the first layer that get hit right when everything retrenchs people want more experienced people people want to stress existing folks rather than keep on you know hiring entry- level so that you have to you know continue to invest in right so it's just the economy of time it it comes and go in wave um yeah so that's always a certainly a very scary time u but of course you know in the longer range of history things generally tend to recover But it it caused a rearrangement and yeah so during that time it was it was certainly tough. However I the way I look at this thing is like yeah talents are always talent right so people really strong talents and who's really hungry is always um try to punch above their weight will always be marketable right yeah

主持人: even in a downturn

Thuan Pham: Even in a downturn so I think the key thing is how people should even in peace time invest in that skill never be complacent constantly try to be better and then in wartime or in rough time those will save you right if people just be very complacent atrophy with the time and then when rough time hit it's very very hard to recover from that

主持人: and then you went to VMware at this time.

Thuan Pham: Mhm. Yeah. So um let's see after I went from double click to that and then I jumped into a fourperson company again leaky roof and everything classic startup that business did not succeed. Uh it took about 3 years or so, got to about 40 50 people in size and then kind of ran out of money and then got acquired by another entity that was built with a security appliance product with try to solve the problem of you know intermediation of web services traffic going through and it was a very interesting security niche but it's not a mass market thing and so it's hard for a company to kind of break through like that right and um but eventually it it uh it went away but even then you Those three years taught me a lot. Um, okay. That you can survive even when you do it from the ground up. Uh, then you still have skill that you can pick up despite the fact that that journey might not end in like a commercial success. Uh, but your skills still get better.

主持人: So you are getting better as a professional even though

Thuan Pham: And that's something we have to trust. We invest in oursel but of course we invest in the company or vehicle that we are part of and ideal case both side succeed but if the other succeed at least if you work really hard you will gain some skill and then based on that uh then you can then leverage all the thing that you learned so far and all the mistake that you've made all it got you smarter and better and wiser to look for the next opportunity. So right after that I look at a bunch of other thing when that company was acquired and then I I went into VMware um again when VMware was a pretty small not very well known yet um so it was um 40 person organization and so that build software to stitch together

主持人: so so VMware was still early

Thuan Pham: VMware was it's still early yeah there was two there was three division um one division that did the the workstation desktop app and then there was the division that does the hypervisor which is the OS underneath the OS. And then there was my division that was building enterprise software that stitched together all of the hypervisor into like a a cloud platform and management platform. Right? So I was one for that. It was our 40 people and we kind of built the very first product suite for VMware called virtual center that tied to ESX. So that was um that was a really really fun right people

主持人: and and then and then VMware really took off. virtualization as a whole took off. In the early 2000s, VMware was was core part of it. It was one of the main things. So it was just uh was it a kind of hockey stickish experience?

Thuan Pham: It was um not to the extreme of Uber. Um but it certainly was because it was a industry changing technology. It was a game changer. Right? Before that there wasn't anything like that. At first people thought, "Oh, this is kind of interesting tool on the desktop for you to run a couple of, you know, Mac and PC OS on top in on a PC, but the true power was the ESX, right? The Yeah. And then that's what you power data center. And then of course that's the the hypervisor but the the I think the key feature that made VMware so useful was the whole votion thing when you take a virtual machine and you can migrate it from hardware to hardware without any perceivable downtime of the application run on top with that capability. unlock the whole cloud thing, right? Because you have a thousand machine, it can look like one. It can look like a C machine and so application inside of your machine will just scale and it will just move itself and it can do whatever you need to do, right? You can do DR, you can do, you know, uh yeah all kinds of things with it, right? So that's actually make it very much like a cloud operating system.

主持人: And then at VM where we also grew with the company, right? So, so again I it seems you have this history of you were VP of engineering at the startup, you stepped down to a small startup, you then joined VMware and eventually you became VP of engineering at VMware as well, right?

Thuan Pham: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. I have this weird thing where when I get when the thing get large um and I start to feel too comfortable, I get nervous

主持人: really.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. And so that's where when at double click when I got to VP and I managed hundreds of people, I like is this a fluke or is it real? So I had to go back to a fourperson company and try to see if it's real or not. That didn't succeed really well, but the engine was healthy. It was good. And then when a VMware again is a smaller company and go big and when it get really big again when you get to a point where you're just running things rather than breaking ground and doing this thing or how hard learning then you got to do something different, right? So I keep on going back small and when I get big I might go back small again and

主持人: yeah so I'm seeing the pattern. So you you got big at VMware and VMware was doing amazing. What made you um look around and how did you find this very small company at the time called Uber or it might have been Uber Cab I'm not even sure how it was called.

Thuan Pham: It was Uber at the time already was way before that. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. It was when after 8 years at VMware um and sometime people change sometime company change uh sometime both side change and so um yeah for me what changed personally for me was I reached to the point where I didn't feel I could do much more there. Right. I'm running 800% engineing team. We're building this that this software and and it's been like the third generation of that software already. We're tweaking, we're adding more feature to it. I love my team and all that. But you know, it's just more of like keep it steady, keep it growing and add more feature. And then the company has also changed along the way. you know, the the original founder left, new crew came in, and there's a fair amount of changes and personalities and all that. And after a while, it just felt like it's time.

主持人: So, so now with your background, like you now have a super impressive background. You probably could have gone anywhere large or small. What was your search process look like? And and then how did you come across again? Cuz Uber was still pretty obscure.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Uh here's a really interesting thing. People do ask me about what the search process look like. How did you sit together a career like that? My honest answer is I didn't do any of that. And um and it wasn't luck that you that you bumble around and you find one thing after another. It's actually something different. It's that if you try to do a really good job at every company you've been working well with all the people that you work with, including your own team, your peer, whatever it is. Over time, very slowly, you accumulate a decent reputation in people's mind. And people always come and go throughout the industry. But if you're good with them, to them, whatever, they tend to remember that. And then when you become available, then people come to you.

主持人: Yeah.

Thuan Pham: Like this, how about this? How about this? How about this? And then you actually look at all those thing. And then you can dig in and you can decide. And so that played out multiple time for me in the in the valley. And especially I think the biggest breakthrough was Uber. Again, when I left VMware, I didn't plan to do anything, right? I'm said well let's sit back and take a look see what's going on and then Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital who invests in early investor in Uber and guess what his tie was he knew me from that net gravity startup a decade before and so he we kind of knew each other and then but of course when we know someone you follow their reputation and it was Bill who come to me after he knew that I'm leaving VMware hey can you take a look at this one I'm investing it could be really interesting so I went up to his his um office in um San Hill and he shared with me the board deck and how the company is growing and then I understood the the business model right to all of you back then when I trying to recruit some people it was like why Don why you joining a taxi company right

主持人: yep I remember everyone's asking that question

Thuan Pham: exactly and so but I I knew that and of course then we have to go through like a pretty rigorous interview process with Travis and uh yeah, but ultimately it's about the connection that lead to the the right thing, but that connection and the opportunity is basically tied to your reputation.

主持人: And then back then as I I I looked it up and you also helped me with this, Uber just raised it series B which was $30 million is value at $300 million which was sizable but still not nearly the the gigantic company that it later became. And one fun fact that I I read about is you had this very rigorous interview traveler process which was tens of hours or or something like that. Can you can you talk about how that went?

Thuan Pham: It was impressive on that he did that. It was he committed over 30 hours interviewing me oneon-one.

主持人: Wow.

Thuan Pham: Yeah.

主持人: That's like several days of like long

Thuan Pham: Two weeks worth of interviewing every single day. A couple hours each day minimum.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. with passion, with intrigue and we end up after a while I kind of forgot that I was being interviewed. It was like through people kind of sharing ideas like exchanging idea and sometime disagree something and then kind of work it out

主持人: and then you you showed me you took a photo of like some topics that you talked about like can you like summarize what what those were?

Thuan Pham: Yeah. uh my very first meeting I drove up to San Francisco and saw Travis in uh in the office and we immediately went to the whiteboard and he wrote down all the topic on his head that you know he want to talk about with me that was a really long list there's a big long list of general topics about you know hiring and firing and communications and all of that stuff or design everything else and then there's a shorter list of very engineering specific stuff what about code quality what about QA what about design um all that and then there is also a list of shorter list of the five things that he want to see in an engineering team and and the culture of the engineing team and yeah and so that was the list and so after we wrote the list um we start talking picking up some item off the list and talk of course you know in two hours I was supposed to meet him for an hour it last two which is actually good because we got totally into it time ran out and then as soon as I drove drove out of the office. I barely get to the exit. I got a call from the the recruiter say, "Go Travis, we want to see you again and talk talk some more." And so we did that. And of course, he's very busy. He's traveling around the all the regional offices um to run the business. And so we set up a Skype session every single day for two hours each day and we will pick one of the topic. That's why I took a picture a photo of that whiteboard and he did the same thing as a as a list of topic to talk about and I still have it on my phone today.

主持人: It's it's so impressive to me that cuz we'll we'll share that list in this episode as well that screenshot but that the fact that the that the CEO would go into things like code review like it's the hiring topics I understand but but that he was so engineering minded or did you get a sense that he had the vision that technology and engineering would be just key to Uber?

Thuan Pham: Oh absolutely. I mean he he knew that and it was very clear from the very beginning that he viewed the business has two major engine that powers it. One is the operation you know bits and atom right you got to have wheels physical thing moving around the world and then there's technology and technology is a key part of that right no one side is super appeal to the other but it require both of those yeah and so that was very key and I think he also knew what he wants also and what he want in whoever it is and so I think this list and this this this series conversation was for him to to vest that yeah Later on, I I I think either he said something or I figured out that it was actually a simulation of what it's like to work with another person

主持人: in that capacity. In the end, when we inside, we all working with each other all the time and can we disagree on something? Can we work things out? Do we have generally similar philosophy and principle? And he did it himself. Yeah. And so that Yeah. and and the the level of passion and commitment he showed was just really impressive from from this side I can tell you for example there's some session when we totally you know in the middle of that and two hours gone by and he had to like stop and catch a flight to go somewhere else he literally stopped and told me just wait and he'd pick up his phone call his EA and say can you move my flight and continue the conversation who had that level of commitment right and passion and stuff like that and when you see that it actually draws you in.

主持人: Yeah. So I guess it was not a question that you joined but can you recall what was it like from the inside especially from an engineering point of view from a systems point of view from like what was going on?

Thuan Pham: So it was still pretty small. It was um about 30,000 rides a day when I pulled the data the the the weekend which is always the busiest time when people move around. Yeah. That weekend the the day the the Saturday or Sunday before I join I joiner Monday. um was about 30,000 rides a day. Uh and Uber was I don't know 20 something cities around the world at that point uh 2030 and so it was very modest. The there's certain things that were going for it already. The the engineing team was very young but uh pretty scrappy and uh pretty committed and talented where whatever need to get done by hook by group they co together right and so and as a result though the the the service was beautiful. anybody who ride we only had black car service at the time but the XP was beautiful when for all the people who ride it that's why word of mouth is you know raging around and uh yeah and so that was the really good part now the thing that maybe Travis had foreseen or whatever it is was the next phase which as the company grow faster and faster what happened right and by the way the the the 40 engineer were very very young I think in the 20s all of them and um the system was built not to scale, right? It was built for functionality. It's actually

主持人: together and it worked.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. And it worked and it worked beautifully, right? But it wouldn't scale and it would crash and burn all the time, multiple times a week. And that was our lives in the trenches. The hockey stick actually happened. Um yeah, everything breaks. Uh and um and we have to basically race against time to actually figure out what would be the next most critical thing that would break and how to get ahead of it. And one of the thing that drivers always tell me even from the interview days is you got to see around corner. So I try my very best to see around corner this that's and one of the first thing I I did when the first couple weeks were beyond getting the getting to know the engineer and build relationship and build trust was to start examine what we currently have and what we need and dispatch was the first thing

主持人: without dispatch there is nothing right that's where you match the writers and and drive

Thuan Pham: yeah it's it's our matching service right when when it has the drivers the writers and does the match

主持人: that's right and without that there's no business right there's

Thuan Pham: And so yeah and I I start that was the first system I looked at and I asked some I I reviewed the architectures I reviewed the implementation plan and um it was very obvious that wasn't going to get scale uh it was a JavaScript it's NodeJS and it was a single threaded thing and the engineer at the time where when the city get larger and larger uh they need more out of that piece of code to power that city they would move that piece of code into a larger machine with a faster processor.

主持人: Vertical skilling only gets you exactly so far.

Thuan Pham: So my role also is to do thing but also to teach people along the way and so I would just asking leading question to the team and the team only have three people three or four people at a time and uh so I asked the engineer um okay what would happen if the city get larger and you have to support that because every city is getting larger the ride volume is getting larger and larger. Uh then entry base said, "Oh, yeah, we just we just move it to um a more powerful processor and say what happened if you get to the fastest process you can." Oh, there are multiprocessors and then you can get a four-way box and then you can put multiple of these processes on them and then you say, "Well, you got three or four of these things servicing same. Do they talk to each other? Do they share the same state?" Not really, right? So it become very partition. So pretty soon by asking those leading question, the engineer now discovered a flaw that this thing would not scale, right? And then and then I had to establish the limit of where is the brick wall and I basically said what's the biggest city uh do we currently have in terms of right volume and uh they say New York City and I said okay when is New York City is going to we can run our capacity even handle New York City even on the biggest box that we can get our hands on it's about October and this was around May okay and so it's like well we have to rewrite it don't we and we have to write it in a really scalable way And and I only have two requirement that I all I need. One is a city has to be powered by multiple boxes.

主持人: Yes.

Thuan Pham: And a box has to power multiple cities. That's it. So you can have N byM.

主持人: You gave them these two constraints.

Thuan Pham: No new feature necessary. Just make sure that we can do that. And then that allow the business the company to just pour a whole bunch of hardware behind that and it will scale. Technically it will scale infinitely right. And so the engineer did that and because the requirement is very simple we have to do it really really quickly before we run out of time uh run out of runway to survive and uh so they did that and we actually deployed that right around August September right before it actually

主持人: and then on to the next problem database going to be the next choke point right and then the API monolith is going to be the next choke point and we keep on identifying all these things uh so there's all these threat coming at us and we have to establish like how much runway we have until we like really getting serious Star War there's no way out and then get ahead of it

主持人: and so this was then the reason that we had so many rewrites I I joined later but rewrites were still continuously happening and I think when you come in you ask like why could have they not written it properly the first time or like but but I I guess do I understand correctly that it was because a sometimes you just build a system to solve your problem and and and b you don't always know how big this will say a good example is the the New York problem And then you take those constraints and then you build a system and then if those things change later you might need to build a different system.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Um it also depends on how fast you're growing that dictate how you make and because the faster you grow the shorter runway you have to survive right given whatever architecture and system that you currently have. And yeah the the the question about how big it can possibly grow nobody knows really. But it's actually not fruitful to pontificate on that. Yeah. It was all about um how much time we have to live.

主持人: Yeah.

Thuan Pham: Right.

Thuan Pham: We don't we hit the brick wall and it's no way out. Right. So yeah, and and if that time is really short, then don't overthink it. Just survive that and give yourself enough runway to then live to fight another day is what I like to say.

主持人: Growing fast like Uber did is a good problem to have for startups until it's not. And the pain points that come with fast growth is a good time to mention our season sponsor, Work OS. If you're building any SAS, especially an AI product, surprisingly, you reach the need to build enterprise features like SAML edge cases, directory sync, audit logs, and all the things enterprise customers expect quickly. Building that infrastructure yourself takes months. Work OS gives you APIs to ship it in days. Authentication, SSO, SCIM, Arback, audit logs, and more. All designed to integrate directly into your product. That's why companies like Entrophic, OpenAI, and Cursor already run on work OS. Skip the rebuild. keep shipping. Visit workhaw.com. With this, let's get back to Tuan's team rewriting the dispatch system and the short breeding space that this first rewrite gave them. So that's what with dispatch, we knew we had to do it very quickly, maybe by ourself another 12 months. And after we get through that point, then we have another 12 months to think about the next phase of survival for that team. That's why the system need to be rewritten several time. Let's say if my requirement for the engineer was build a system that will scale infinitely to the test of time, it might take a year. We never get there. We'll die before then.

主持人: Yeah. Speaking of of dying before, you were given in 2014 a seemingly impossible task. Travis told you you have two months to launch in China. And apparently launching in China was not as simple as just like opening your API and allowing the firewall. What was that project like? I heard it was an absolutely manic and crazy project. Can you take us back what it was like?

Thuan Pham: Yeah, that that was one of the craziest thing we've ever done, but it's also one of the most amazing thing we've ever done. Um, and now explain why so that that is so so I remember very very clearly right around Christmas time 2020 14. Uh we were all hanging out in the the the the the big room in uh 1455 and Travis made a declaration that okay come the new year I'm going to light it up and we're going to go into China. Okay. And then he turned over to me. It's like I want the uh and one of the requirement at the time was that we have to run our services on China soil, right? And data center physically there

主持人: physical data center needs to be there

Thuan Pham: Until then we kind of dabble in dirt water by powering it from from the US. Okay. And we have a limit of time um to do that but he's going to light it up. We're going to do that. And I said he's like two months. And I said well that's really tough. And he's like why is that? because I can go rack all the machine and copy the software over and shouldn't take more than two months and then I have to like explain that it it's not that easy because when you do that then it work on day one and then the two drift and how you going to maintain that right we don't have twice the engineering team to actually manage two different system that deviate

主持人: so the right way to do that is you build rearchitects whatever you need to do to kind of build one system that that can be partitioned right so I think there's a huge security concern right because there are anything that runs over there cannot presume to have any level of privacies or anything like that. Uh but over here we have to protect everything right. So we have to build that same system that has completely partition of data and controls and everything else so that yeah nothing bleed across but it has to be every time you deploy code you have to close everywhere right so you have to re rebuild a lot of things and

Thuan Pham: uh so I went to the TPM team and asked uh the team to actually scope it out and I think

主持人: TPM technical program manager

Thuan Pham: Technical program manager and um I think the best path for us was about six months and that was the fastest we can even imagine I benchmarked with a few of my friends in the industry and they kind of laugh at me and it's like 18 months minimum thing. Uh but you know that was Uber so we just like we didn't think too much about it. was like well that that um let's do that and then driver didn't like the the six months so we kind of settle around four months right so and so

主持人: because he didn't like

Thuan Pham: We just split the difference we didn't know anything but we just want to heads down and start getting to it and so we look at oh what need to change given like this is the end u uh goal and the requirement and then with everybody start getting really busy uh working a lot of hours to stop making these changes and four months come and we are still a month or so short so we slip the winter trappers and he's not too happy about that but it's fine right and then uh five months comes around and we're very close but we're not there we're about to slip again and so uh it was not h definitely not happy then but we actually talk it out and I said the team feel very confident that within a month we can launch but he had to give us something that mean give us a ability to incrementally launch instead of lighting all the city in China oper once let let us do it in phase right every single week we'll launch a number of cities and then we're going to do it in a process of like a few weeks and then we're done with that and he said okay that's reasonable but he want the the biggest city first and that's Chungdu

主持人: so he he agrees to the incremental launch but you need to start with the biggest

Thuan Pham: Start with the biggest first yeah exactly but it it is brilliant though you think about it uh I I I thought a lot about that you know over time and that was the most brilliant thing because by doing the hardest thing first once you launch that everything else is downhill from there the team has this swag the team know would go into the next set of city with confident had we done the traditional way let's start with the safest one the smallest one first and next one we step it up on the surface it seemed like oh it's a very good risk control measure but every single week we'll be holding our breath until it's done it's not done right but this time we we did everything we and to do the hardest thing first and after that it just the routine process throughout the rest and that it worked out exactly like that and so yeah we got it done and a bunch of people were really burnt and then they took like a month off go to the beach and did nothing except stare at the water I know some other did that uh but after that though we're not fearful of anything we did like kind of the impossible and

主持人: I I I I talked with a friend at who worked at the IT team at the time and his job was just to get the servers physically set up and he said that the timeline was so impossible. I think they had two weeks from start to finish. They had a little bit of time to plan but they were on the site. They were just and and when I gather the stories from the software engineers who worked on it, everyone had their own impossible task and project and they all thought it couldn't not be done and then somehow it all came together.

Thuan Pham: That's right. None of us thought the whole thing that could be done, but we just got our head down and we just, you know, break it apart and just do it one step at a time.

主持人: And then I think needless to say, but the China launch was a massive success. Uber started to compete head-on head with the leading Chinese provider DD. And they were is pretty much head-on head uh very intense competition all the while competing with the rest of the world as well.

Thuan Pham: That's right. Yeah.

主持人: So that that was something incredible. That was something incredible and I think just the experience having gone through that and doing thing that initially you didn't think was possible just increases everyone's confidence and range and and that's what stretching all about and I think that there's a saying that Travis like to say that sometime you have to be willing to redline yourself a little bit right and that's how you you you prove that you can actually do a lot more than you can that was the fearlessness of the and the risk-taking culture that he won in the company in the first place

主持人: one thing that Uber has been very very well known about from the outside is microservices and from the inside one thing that has been very talked about is a program and platform split. Can you tell us which one came first and and how do we get to as many microservices as we did?

Thuan Pham: The program and platform came first. Yeah. And microservices came later. Um and the platform and and uh program platform as an organizing structure came first out of necessity. When I came in April of uh 2013 uh we had 40 engineer and three product manager.

主持人: Yeah.

Thuan Pham: By the end of that year um we had about a 100 engineer and a dozen or so product manager. Even at that really small size we ground ourselves to a halt with a functional or structure. Uh imagine a low tone engineer there about up to eight or 10 mobile developers uh a number of infrastructure engineer and a bunch of backend engineer etc etc and um five eight people or so at dispatch now but every feature that we want to put out has to be queued up on mobile development bandwidth dispatch bandwidth and it become impossible to navigate tradeoff because every feature you want to do you have to go negotiate with so many team right and so then the team want to move fast and start to feel that friction and complain right away. And that's a good thing, right? You know, we raised a concern. And so I remember Travis and Jeff Holden and I saw that and we got together for a couple days actually and I remember we had sticky note all the different colors each color represent a different function engineering product designer um and uh we put one person name to each of the sticky note and then Travis gave a talk about what are the most important area of the business that he think right and at the time they were like 17 area that he can think of the the world of Uber can cover 17 area turned out to be a lot more than that but at the time it was 17 we didn't have enough to fund 17 we had enough to fund seven plus a few more right so we fund seven uh with partially the next four and that's it and the rest can remain empty until we hire more people and we fund it and so that was the the the the thing but then as part of that process we then put sticky note onto each of these area has to be a cross functional team because we can no longer afford to run in no uh yeah cross function rather than a functional team.

主持人: Yeah, which means that there's like a back end, a mobile and whatever else they need like a design if they need to etc.

Thuan Pham: That the the concept is that team has to have all the skill set necessary to just get it done. Whatever they have to do, they just go off and they do that. Right? So that was the the principle behind that decision and then we call some of those program and some of them platform. So programs are the team that build thing that the end user actually use and the platform are the thing that build tools and layer that other program team use and that was it sort of horizontal versus vertical kind of thing. So and that's that and and then after we define that then we start putting the right sticky note onto that box and then that's how the first version of programming and platform came about.

主持人: And then how did microservices start and how did they blossom as much as they did?

Thuan Pham: Yeah, again um you know none of us wanted to go through that extreme but lots of time when you are under a lot of pressure and no time to react other than just to survive that scale that keep on coming at you, you have to make decision that increase speed and velocity because speed and velocity allow us to build quick enough to survive and so um we knew right away that the the backend API which is a monolith, right, is the thing that will prevent prevent speed from happening, right? So, we made a declaration anything that is new need to be built outside of that. Yeah.

主持人: As a microser. Okay. And then there's a team that's dedicated to decompose that that monolith that API monolith into a bunch of services.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. We used to call it API, right? I think

主持人: that's called API, right? And I think that project name is called Darwin.

Thuan Pham: Yes, Darwin. Oh, I remember.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. And interestingly, had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right? These hockey sticks are laying on top of each other now as we launch new city and happening fast.

主持人: New city and new product Uber X.

Thuan Pham: That's right. Feature has to be added on, right? And so the philosophy we all operate at the time was no one should be blocking anybody else. No one can block anybody else. And so when a team that need to build a feature and that thing hasn't been pulled out of monolith, they add to the monolith, right? And then the team that pulls it out do the best that it can and then we kind of keep chasing our own tail until eventually you know something get completely pulled out and as it happened it bulges up like this the monolith right because you pull out one thing the remaining stuff grew even faster than the stuff that you pull out. So the code base get larger and larger eventually reach to a certain point when it start to come down and that's why it took two two years and meanwhile everything that is new must be auto because we don't keep on adding stuff right to to the monolith and so that's how it came up to to like you know thousands of microservices but that was out of necessity so that we can just fan out and solve every problem all at once and then over time after things stabilize and so the business more mature and growth is not as violent like that anymore uh then the team uh we actually have a project called ARC. We can look at this stuff and how do we clean it all up. So we put like domain interfaces on top a whole bunch of microservices that are within the same domain.

主持人: It's it's funny because I remember that around like 2016 or so there was a published Uber blog post that Uber had about 5,000 microservices and I just saw about a few months ago Uber published another one and they have about 4,500. So in that 10 years the number has gone slowly gone down right to go down but

Thuan Pham: To go down but even then right now Uber has so much more complexity right yeah it's the process what took a little while but when yeah the team had to look at everything and how do we simplify that right and and then to make sense out of that the new tool has to be invented by us gagger the tracing tool all of that stuff and so that be really great tool that we open source to

主持人: and let's talk about h how and why Uber built so much internal tools and also open source a bunch of them. Jaker was one of them but internally we had schemaless a trip data store T channel RPC protocol ring pop g spatial placing clay service framework you monitor observability and there's like hundreds of others some of them open some of them not

主持人: how were you thinking about that like does it not seem like a lot of waste for us to build this or was it again necessity

Thuan Pham: It was mostly necessity I can't claim that every single one of those thing were absolutely necessary but all the important one were absolutely necessary the thing is when when I started Uber used pretty much all the open source stuff. We use Reddis, we use everything, right? Because those the engineer there just focus on putting together a service that actually move cars. But then as we scale uh we keep on using uh pushing the boundaries of the capability of those um um open source stuff and to the breaking point and at certain point if we don't invent something to power our own need. By the way, this is 2013, 14, 15, 16. It's not as mature as

主持人: we did not have the kind of the big tech investment in open source back then. There was very little and and mo most of the big teams like Google and Facebook, they were keeping their inside.

Thuan Pham: I remember like for example a very painful example of that we had to face early on was we use Postgress. All right. and we get to certain scale that postquest would randomly fail and that take our services down randomly without we don't understand it's inside the kernel I remember the time where I had to go on LinkedIn begging people who anybody on LinkedIn that has any knowledge of postgrad to be our consultant to help us diagnose this problem and we spent several weeks and during that it was terrifying because I don't mind if we think we can do something of our own problem it's terrifying when we have a major problem and we depend on somebody else and we we don't know because it's open source there's no single person no some single company I'll be willing to pay anything if someone can give me an answer but there was no one right and so that was one of the motivator to kind of build our own you know data layers and all of that stuff as well so that we would use this generic database and we end up using MySQL just as table data store all the logic on top we have to build for our own use right because then we control our own state and we only build the feature that we really need, right? And so that was one of many example and eventually we run into other brick wall of scaling. I remember in 2015 right around the holiday I was taking a holiday trip. I had to go to the airport and I I took an Uber ride as usual. The receipt didn't come for 2 days after that, right? Why is that? Things were queuing up. We weren't processing things enough, right? And so yeah, but that's not a dealbreaker for many people because they just ride and then receipt come later. is fine as long as the building and all the stuff even when you build people late they don't really mind that either right but as long as the right happened the rest of stuff can be processed later but it's still not great okay when I dug into it like our data processing capability is at capacity right so we have to rewrite a bunch of stuff and then our cap ability to monitor things is reaching a breaking point with the open source tool that we use so the M3 has to be invented right and all of that stuff so we we allow lot of we had to do thing because we at the scale where we broke all the open source stuff that we use

主持人: At Uber we did unusual things one of the most unusual projects which is where you and I met when I joined Uber was called internally called Helix it was completely writing Uber's app and as I understand what happened is Uber's user experience was starting to degrade because it was really cluttered got a bit fed up with it the designer team came up with a solution which was a very nice and clean UI which kind of the engineering team looked at it and it would have been a full rewrite And then we just did a full rewrite. Back then I remember we had a million or two million lines of code. We had two or 300 mobile engineers working on this. This was a massive business and there was an extremely tight deadline set. Can you take us back on why did we even do this

主持人: because from it didn't feel it felt existential threat from the inside but it was not like uh like a plus versus uh versus Facebook existential thing. And how did we decide on that short deadline?

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Um it seemed like a recurrent theme that keep on coming up was a tight deadline, right? Everything we do had a tight deadline. It's just it's yeah it just that's just how the culture role. Um anything we want to do want to do as fast as we can. Um but going back to uh why Helix um actually Travis has a vision right and it's actually not just the designer Travis and Yuki who was the lead designer at the time they pair up and they all the storyboard and everything else. So he has a vision where the current app back then was too limiting. Yeah, it's really good. Push a button, get a ride, all that stuff. But if you want more services to hook in other things, right, messaging and all these other things as people were riding, uh the new architecture allow it was much more open, right, to all those things. Uh and so that was the the vision behind that. And then when we're doing that, the aesthetic is really important. The icon change and all of these things change. Oh, yeah. And so but that but that is yeah it's beautiful right that's actually Travis and Yuki right they were and then of course when when that fleshed out to a certain amount um then the engineering team the mobile team get involved and it's not just the mobile engineer the back end had to be written to everything

主持人: we we we changed from uh the heartbeat where every 5 seconds we would pull and it was pretty painful to an actual push uh push channel

Thuan Pham: Yeah this part with that by by that time it's called real time system now right yeah it has to change back end has to change everything has to change to port the new flows and then all that stuff and so yeah it it took I don't know 6 700 engineer all told 7 8 months to actually do it then we put it off and it still live today it's still on that same architecture it was so far well thought out it's almost like future proof in that design so it's still used today it's still beautiful today and if you compare that with the previous version it actually was definitely the right

主持人: yeah and it was scalable user experience

Thuan Pham: I take no credit in that it's like the genius of Travis and Yuki

主持人: you every now and then sent emails to all of engineering on different things and I remember this really really emotional email coming from you uh about naming.

Thuan Pham: I see all this and I understand that young engineer want to have fun.

主持人: We were having fun.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. And name things in a goofy way. I think the trigger for that was a service named Mustafa. I have no idea what it is. Right. I look at that stuff and and by that time we were already very complicated, right? And we had to onboard new engineer all the time. we want builders to ramp up quickly etc etc and I can imagine an engineer come in here and if all these weird name have no context to it uh at the time our tooling wasn't that great either right you blame didn't come into existence yet right and so there's no mapping for people to discover what this really mean and then those we renaming scheme so I got to the point where I'm kind of fed up so I send that email out of course you know those mass emails sometimes you regret after you send it out because it has some effect but it didn't really solve

主持人: and I I think it very quoted because you specifically wrote this is not a Mickey Mouse shop.

Thuan Pham: Exactly. We're not Mickey Mouse. We and and yeah, it was uh again it was it was a growing up phase for everyone in the company. But it was it was my frustration at the time was look at at this scale inside we got to take ourselves seriously. We got to do thing better faster and this is not helping.

主持人: Tuan's been talking about improving things as the orc scales such as moving to a more mature naming policy. Introducing new and better approaches as the company matures leads us nicely to our presenting sponsor stats. Statseig built a unified platform that enables both experimentation and continuous shipping. Built-in experimentation means every roll out automatically becomes a learning opportunity with proper statistical analysis showing you exactly how features impact your metrics. Feature flags lets you ship continuously with confidence, roll out to 10% of users, catch issues early, roll back instantly if needed. And because it's allin-one platform with the same product data, teams across your organization can collaborate and make datadriven decisions. They have a generous free tier to get started and pro pricricing for teams starts at $150 per month. To learn more and get a 30-day enterprise trial, go to stats.com/pragmatic. With this, let's get back to Tuan. We we started to do better names. One other thing that was very very unique to Uber across the industry and it caused a lot of confusion from the outside is Uber senior level. For a while Uber had a senior engineering level called L5 which is common and then at some point you were the leadership team cut it into two. There was L5A and L5B senior one senior 2. Can you talk us about why you did that and where did you get the idea from?

Thuan Pham: I did that. I'm I'm not apologize for it. I think it was a good move at a time. Um and the the the principle was we want people to grow right but we have a very clear definition and expectation of what it is at the staff engineer level because we benchmark ourselves to all the great company out there Google, Facebook and all that

Thuan Pham: and then I realized that for many engineer crossing from senior engineer I mean um engineer two pass through the senior engineer to get staff it could be a fiveyear journey. Okay, it's a long time and so I just want to break it in two so that people get that sense of progress and then also not everybody can make it to staff, right? But some people it's good enough to make it to senior

主持人: senior too. Yeah.

Thuan Pham: And I think that's a benefit. It's not right but versus like not doing it and everybody kind of just get lost in that five year you know journey. Um yeah and so that was the the motivation behind that. So you saw a problem and then this was a solution and it it it worked we can say right

Thuan Pham: It worked for a while right and then people were acclimatized to that and then they start complaining it's like oh why there's two level we need to get the staff faster and then while I was there I held on to that because I was a principal and staff is staff compared to the best of the industry

主持人: u and later on after I left I think it got

Thuan Pham: re they got pushed down L5B is now staff everything got pushed down

主持人: inflation and I I didn't want to do a cytoin inflation thing.

主持人: I I I appreciate that. Another email that I I remember from you is in 2016 you sent an email saying you've heard the feedback that NGS are unhappy because their managers not support them and then what you wrote is like we are creating an easy internal transfer process. You can move teams how how was that received and again how did you decide that we need to do this?

Thuan Pham: I look at um the talent base and I think it is best for us to create opportunity for people to keep on growing with fresh new challenges within the company because if we don't do that they would leave the company and seek uh and then I thought about the next logical step which is hey if people come to us and just resign they didn't tell us when they interview.

主持人: Yeah. And so why the heck do we have like these rigorous process when you have to ask your manager for permission to go to another team. Yeah. Why do we make it harder for ourself right when our own engineer go from team A to team B have to ask for all these uh you know permission where they don't have to ask if they interview outside. Yeah.

主持人: That just doesn't make any sense.

Thuan Pham: Basically it's easier to interview outside or it was easier to interview outside. So that didn't make any sense to me and so I said well let's not have that. Right. And that also has maybe a good side effect where manager now need to be incentivized to take care of people great develop them grow them you know put position the best people into the best time for them to grow and then they not like to leave their own team right if they continue to grow. So there's all of that you know that back pressure might cause engineer managers to be a little bit more responsible too. So that was that and I remember that get quite a bit of push back because it would be pretty radical at the time you but we just did it anyway and so that that turned out to be the the right thing to move right and I would rather people trust each other and when an engineer want to go they should have a really great relationship with their manager where they just talk to man hey look I'm I'm I want to do this and the manager should be generally supportive instead of like no you belong to me that kind of thing which is the the wrong thing I have a saying that I share with you guys all the time It's not a jail. We can lock anybody down, right? Everybody have free will. If they want to work, you know, somewhere, they should have the ability to do that. And we should create more opportunity and then we also to support that. We publish internal job board, right? Anything on the outside see we see on the inside. So any should be able to shop within all the opportunity have inside the company and stay with the company. And why make it so hard and end up leaving the company? That's just a silly thing.

主持人: I remember at Uber in in some of the the meetings either all hands or team meetings you you gave talks that were memorable and one of the most memorable I I asked around former Uber folks and Charles specifically he was on the podcast he told me that his most vivid memory of you is this talk or or this topic about behaving work in the perspective of death.

Thuan Pham: Yeah, I don't remember that exact speech but I I do have that line of thought in my head all the time right and sometimes I would share with different audience with different context but it is um it's all about finding one's you know purpose and not take oneself too seriously right if you look at uh people the most accomplished people don't take themselves that seriously right the more you know the more you know you don't know kind of thing and people who are arrogant tend to like not know enough yet or they have to all that right so um yeah so I always take opportunity to remind people to sort of be humble and the example I use always is use myself right I say look you know when you're in an important position people treat you really well but don't let that get to your head it's not you it's the position you hold and I remember saying this like the moment I stop being salt right And that's always happened, right? The the world forget about us, right? So the only thing we can really do is in any job that we do, do the best that we can to help each other to leave a lasting positive impression in each other. And one day everything ends a job end and then I'll get to the mor stuff like life even end itself. And so then I measure my myself like what is my achievement that I will be most proud of? And I said, well, when I'm gone, the thing I'm most proud of is how many people remember how I was good to them or helpful to them and for some number of years, right? And that is that because I can't take anything with me. And so live in the moment, be as best as you can to everyone and be very as constructive as you can and and and leave a good legacy behind you. So that that that was a whole gist of that.

主持人: It it feels to me sometimes there's talk about how you can network better and grow your network, but sounds like this is almost like it's it's not a hack. It's just do the work, right?

Thuan Pham: Do the work and then the right thing happen, right? But you can't do the work in service of that goal because that's very artificial, right? Just be genuine, just be yourself, be helpful, be constructive, uplift everybody, help people along the way, coach you being doing it altruistically. And let me tell you another angle too which I personally experienced over and over again. It's not only that other people around the industry pull you into good stuff. When you pull in and you don't have people to support you succeed, you would not you would not succeed also. And here is an example at at Uber right when I came in uh again the engine we talk about very very young in experience did not know how to build system at scale reliable all that stuff and the network that I have who really knew how to do that was from VMware. You're building system software. We're building operating system. Right. Rigorous principal level engineer all

主持人: experience. No like in their sleep they can do it. Right.

Thuan Pham: Right. So when I came in and when I have to like um work with the team on dispatch I pull in the first engineer from Uber to to lean land on that team. Right. His name is George. And so he there and he work for everybody else or uplift everybody there. Right. That and then

主持人: from VMware.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then when I build payment system, let's pull in another a few more one. And then when we get to build schemalas, it was a Denmark team, right? I pulled the top four engineer from my VMware team in that I moved them down from one floor to the next in Denmark.

主持人: This is why we had a Denmark office which was correct which was one of the best infrastructure offices at Uber

Thuan Pham: and they built schemalist.

主持人: They built schemalist. They they built a lot of other

Thuan Pham: right. And so now if I weren't a good person doing a good job for them with them or what why would they come?

主持人: Yeah. They would they wouldn't answer the phone.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. They wouldn't answer the phone, right? But every single one that I call because I really needed help, they all came. Initially they all asked the same question. Why taxi company? But when they understand that they came, right? But they came because they still enjoy working with you. Right? There are people who work with me for five different company over 28 years.

主持人: And that always surprised me and I think this is something that people might overlook a little bit as they're building out offices or I'm talking with founders is one thing is where you can hire the other thing is where people where the good people stay for a long time and there's a lot of value in that and Denmark kept being very core critical infrastructure.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. core infrastructure software team and that's one of the thing we had to build at Uber because back then when I came in we didn't build infrastructure software right we just use existing open source stuff right and we built that and another thing that I you know uh discover along the way is great talents are everywhere but you know you have to bring opportunity to them

主持人: they don't necessarily relocate from Denmark to San Francisco right and so that's why we end up having nine engine offices around the world y because we have a lot of work need to be We didn't go to other places because of cost savings like that. We go there because we have need and we have world class talent and we just cherry pick the worldass talent doesn't matter what size it is and Denmark team was small compared to team in India etc. But you know there would really great talent infrastructure and we'd invest on that. Lithuana we had amazing DevOp uh team and so we just go to where the talent uh is and then we bring the great work to the great talent and then then we establish a structure uh to manage and give people first class ownership of the problem and then you know everybody is kind of equal.

主持人: At Uber you you talked about several times of your three tours of duty. Which ones were these?

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Again, it it come back down to purpose. Uh so when I do something, I try to be intentional about why am I doing something? What's my purpose of doing that? And so of course my purpose to come into Uber was, hey, let's build this business. I just build a tech that support the business. And so the first couple year, 18 months, 24 months were fixing a lot of the broken stuff. Things weren't reliable, become more reliable, etc., etc. Uh rebuild things. um basically just get thing to work and work well and then along the way you know these things don't end and beginning on a particular day it just phase in and out right so the phase two uh that what I call my second tour of duty was scale worldwide scale that was China that was massive scales everywhere in every dimension uh and so yeah so at each of those phase when you're done with that phase you ask yourself am I still useful do I want to re-up right my commitment and energies and everything else. And so the first two phase were no question, right? We're there to do that. And then as phase two were about to wrap up, right, uh about 2017, we actually kind of stabilized. We're really big now. I was actually asking myself that question, do am I need it here anymore? And I was actually about to wrap it up that summer because, you know, at that point, we had also another STP that was higher. And I think he's really really great technically and I can like feel very very at peace kind of you know there's there's someone who really take it on even better cuz the person has done even bigger thing at Google right yeah and then but that didn't work out and then Uber has a really rough year so then I have to like sign myself up to the third tour of duty which is and what is the purpose of that you know help the company get through the turbulent years and I had no idea at the time when that phase would end I just kind of know the condition for that to end which is whenever the next CEO arrive right and then after that whether that person like me I like that person or whatever it is that's to be decided but that third phase I have to stick it through because you know we owe it to oursel and we owe it to everyone along the way who have built Uber to that point right to to get through that turbulent phase. So we did that and then uh when the new sale come in and you know I stayed on until 2020

主持人: and then in in so in 2017 I remember it was really turbulent. Travis had to step down for a while. A group of of I think 14 people who were Travis's direct reports. They took over steering the company. You you were one of them. So this is the point where you decided that if everything would have gone smooth, you might have actually just left. But you decided to stay on to help the company, help the team to help us get through. Uber was built by tens of thousands of people, right? Past and present. The fact that people built somewhere and then left before I that's so fine. They that work was still in there in some way, right? That led to that Uber that we have there. And it was a really important thing that we all built that that many of our lives were.

主持人: And and then just to suck it up, we went public, which which which went good. And then it it it went okay. And then of course CO happened which really hit Uber and a few months later in into CO uh you did step down. Why did you leave Uber and and why why was the timing what it was and what motivated you to say okay this is the time to to go?

Thuan Pham: Yeah, it it didn't have anything to do with co really. it you know I was I'm lucky enough to arrive at a point in life where money doesn't matter right and so then I asked myself why am I doing anything if I wake up every day and spending x number of hours on doing something why would I do that versus something else and so it come down to three things one is do I really love the mission and what I'm doing and the second one is do I feel like my being anywhere there right is making a really big impact. And the third one is am I enjoying the company of people I'm working with? Right? And if several of those dimensions are lacking then at some point is not enjoyable in totality anymore. Right? Then uh then it come down to okay when you wake up and you spend 50 hours a week doing something where money doesn't matter anymore. Uh I live very modestly so it doesn't doesn't change anything. So uh then why would I do that versus doing some other thing? And so I think that was that was the the realization at that point where I'm more like okay I'm there doing a a big job but more or less running things rather than you know being very uh much more effective and building the company like in the early days and so and at that point I think it's actually much better for other people who take a crack at that job again it you know like everything ends right and so you have to decide yourself at

主持人: and it did give opportunity to other people right so like and and they did pick it up now After Uber, I I remember you did an interview uh with a with a publication. I think you said that you're thinking of retiring or you'll see. But then you you were not done. Oh, no. You you did other stuff. Kong new bank fair. Can can we talk about what what what happened? What was your thinking? And you never even left for for a moment, honestly.

Thuan Pham: Well, I blame that on CO. So, seriously, that one co had everything to do with it. Uh so when I left um we had um a plan to travel the entire summer because my our daughter was between eighth grade and ninth grade when she's about to enter high school. We had African safari plan. We have all the other travel plan.

主持人: Everything got shut down.

Thuan Pham: Everything got shut down. All the flight get cancelceled all the country clothes and so we stuck at home. Yeah.

主持人: Right. And I don't remember at the time where I'm the only one who go to supermarket to and then then like very very sparse to kind of race through it, pick up what you need and you get out with all the mass and

Thuan Pham: yeah and so uh we kind of bored though and so I I'm bored so I sit at home and we all got on video uh zoom call and uh lots of people want to kind of chat with me uh to um not surprising and so I took a bunch of call and one of them was the the founder of coupon and we had really great chat and you know it's like hard charging person want to get a lot of thing done and I I really like that and I I think well I'm not doing anything here anyway so might as well you know make myself useful right again it's about how you spend your time and so yeah as I did that and I um yeah I I joined there and I helped some but I learned also a ton because that's also a very interesting area right of Amazon style logistic and the way coupon does it is you talk about 5 hours 6 hours delivery

主持人: Wow.

Thuan Pham: Yeah. You order before midnight and the thing show up in your doorstep 5:00 in the morning. 5 and I when I was there I joined the delivery truck putting packages in front of people's home like 2 3:00 in the morning and it's it's brilliant right and all those thing that you learn and you you you learn a whole bunch of these thing and so yeah it's a really great use of time right given the circumstances.

主持人: Yeah. And then you became was it is it an adviser or a board member at Newang?

Thuan Pham: Uh board member. Yeah. And New Bank is for for those that don't know and outside of the US or Europe, it is the most successful and highest valued non US companies, the largest growing bank uh in Latin America. It's it's it's extreme. It's as it's engineering culture. I hear amazing things about you're the first person I'm actually talking about. So, what what did you learn there? And and you're still involved, right?

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Yeah, I'm still involved, but as a in a as a board member capacity. Uh and for a while I I also took on a more active responsibility to mentor the Cto right a couple of them.

Thuan Pham: And so yeah and so I I again it's all about being useful. Um we all learn a lot in our journey and working with really smart people, really motivated people younger and impart that knowledge and sharing you know what you see and advice help people move forward better faster and and I find that very fulfilling and so so that uh was that and the the culture there is very vibrant. I mean it remind me of our early days Uber when everybody is gung-ho hard charging the founders hard charging everybody is when I visit there uh usually during board meetings uh once a year we kind of go down to Brazil uh and we will have all hands with the with the entire company and sometime I also did all hands with the engineing team and do AMA style the way we did Uber and so it's just very energetic right and and there there many factor to their phenomenal the success one is like like very much like Uber they actually solve the right problem at the right time

主持人: there's a whole bunch of unbanked population before new bank came along and they deliver like leapfrog of traditional banking just online and the app and the experience is beautiful the NPS score is through the roof and it it ultimately it add a lot of value to people right live and that's why the adoption rate is crazy high right and and and so yeah well executed um amazing product vision and phenomenal cultures and energy and all those factors are very common in like great companies and we experienced one of those thing at Uber too in early days. So it's really re-energizing being a part of that

主持人: and and and they're doing great and now you're the CTO at fair. What made you join fair?

Thuan Pham: I took a couple years off when my daughter was finishing high school because I figured that time would not ever come back when she's gone and she's gone now.

主持人: What was it the right choice?

Thuan Pham: Oh, absolutely. I would not take that time back. So that

主持人: um yeah, I'm so glad.

Thuan Pham: Yeah, 10th, 11th grade, and 12th grade, I get to stay home, drop her off, pick her up, cook, you know, hang out together, help with college application, all of that stuff. And so the the bond we had was really cool. And as I was thinking about her going to college, I was thinking, "Wow, I'm going to have a lot of time on my hand, so what should I do?"

主持人: Here we go again.

Thuan Pham: Exactly right. And so should I join another board, which I was about to. And then at the last minute some partner Seoya asked me to meet Max uh the CEO of there and really liked him very smart again all the same characteristic very smart uh very hard charging want to all the right thing the businesses empower you know local you know businesses

主持人: can we talk a little bit about that because from the outside you know when you Google fair and you and I look at it it doesn't tell you exactly too much feels a

Thuan Pham: It is um it is a B2B marketplace right between uh big brand wholesalers and retailers up. So people buy that and then uh stock their storefront and and so yeah and so all the traditional two-sided marketplace dynamic apply and the mission is very similar to our mission rub even though we are B toc right this is B2B but it's all about what can we do to empower local businesses to flourish right so to buy the right thing to sell through make a profit grow that business

主持人: so basically this can help small and also large businesses to actually just like grow their business may may that be like

Thuan Pham: more successful demand, more demand, more supply, all of that stuff, right? So, yeah, it's like a really

主持人: market place is really fun and very complex and so I really like that

Thuan Pham: and I really when I dig in uh through the interview process and everything else and again this company moved really fast within a week everything was finished including my homework assignment, right? I have to go and present and everything else and so I really the company moved really fast. is energizing and the culture is super nice and super kind, you know, like no politics. Everybody's just focused on doing the right thing and working with each other, taking care of one another. So, it's a trifecta. Doesn't matter if the company is really big or really small, right? But it's got all the ingredients. So, I was like, well, maybe that's a good place to jump in and help out help out.

主持人: And can you give us a little context on fair in terms of the size of the company, the size of the engineering team, where the hubs are, what the what the work is like? Is it in person? is is is it hybrid and so on?

Thuan Pham: Yeah, the company is about a thousand person. The engineing team including the data science team combined is about 300 people. The work we are in the office three days a week um yeah three days on the week that the other two on um are working remotely online for yeah and some people show up more if they live close to the office. Um yeah uh the engineering team uh there's a a portion here in SF um just down the street from here and uh a large part is in uh Canada uh then we have a big office in water and we have a big office in uh Toronto. So I I make the trip there quite often. Every five six week or so I'm over there.

主持人: And what are some interesting engineuring challenges that you're excited about right now that you're solving?

Thuan Pham: Oh uh right now clearly the most exciting thing is AI and how is AI changing everything so quickly. Tell me h how what what are you seeing what's working what's not at you know like in on your teams

Thuan Pham: In my team as well as in the company you know we're using AI to boost everyone yeah effectiveness and productivities and output right and so so that's one within the engine specifically we use AI to make you know search and recommendation better right because the whole job is to help people discover thing that would sell really well for the business and etc and imagine AI as a shopping consultant right and all this stuff and then coding wise you know AI is doing a lot more of of the coding now um but we also used uh different technique to actually boost uh engineering productivity um you have you heard like swarm coding

主持人: so so swarm coding as an agents

Thuan Pham: yeah a whole bunch of a swarm of agent right

主持人: it's it's pretty new so you're already using it

Thuan Pham: So we already using it and we we building orchestrator to orchestrate the action of all this agent and uh we measure the the first the early adopters um the and then the the the bulk of the engineer follow through after we build the the more robust tooling and we see dramatic lift in engineering output among the early adopter the the one are really efficient at thinking this way right because it's very different from a linear kind of thinking when I write this piece of code right now it's almost like multi-threaded programming was single threaded right you have to think about all these other thing you have to prompt all the action and then you have all this code come back at you and you have to review it you sit together. Yeah. And it it required a different way of thinking and the cognitive load might be a little higher but the output is dramatic and we have seen our best engineer double their output.

主持人: I I know we're talking about that but just to make it clear we're talking about not the code out but the actual business out but the impact of their work right

Thuan Pham: Yeah the impact uh now depend on the the evolution of AI right so right now the state uh of the art right now is it's very easy to make large scale changes right clean up and everything else right so massive productivity increase now we're trying to crack the next frontier which is how we get that level of productivity increase and output building new features on top of a code base that are older, right? It's not like, oh, you and I can just go build something brand new, not entangled with anything. It's really fast. The whole thing will generate for you, right? Yeah. But we got millions of lines of code and how do you like deal with that and build feature on top with all those, you know, dependencies and all that stuff, right? Can AI good enough now to help us untangle some of those thing along the way building new thing and so we actually, you know, continues to work on that and figure out how we can actually continue to boost uh more and more productivity out even building new feature with AI.

主持人: How do you think AI will change software engineering and what a software engineer does and what skills we value?

Thuan Pham: Yeah. Uh it's already changing. I mean very rapidly fast. These changes are fascinating anything I've ever seen including the internet. Right. Back then I remember when we first learned how to um do programming. We have to know a lot about the machine architecture. We have to know about virtual memory. We have to know and then we have to learn how to like syntax and coding. All of that stuff been abstracted away now. Right. Especially AI. It's like I want X Y and Z blah and it should be this way and whole thing get constructed right so it elevated level the playing field where people who don't even know how to program can now create good you know good decent code and app or whatever it is that look on the surface are really good. So it is gamechanging right it it um it elevates the playing field. Now then in that level of of abstraction, how do you tell the great engineer from the good engineer?

主持人: Great question. How do you

Thuan Pham: Well, from what we see so far, the great engineer are still finding way to leverage this and accelerate the output even more. Then we see the difference between the great engineer and an an average engineer is still two 3x in terms of their capability. They're more inquisitive. they're at the bleeding edge more, they're more innovative, right? And then there are people who like, okay, well, here's the tool that you give me, I'm going to be two times more productive, right? Because I'm using this tool. It's great. But the great angel continue to break new boundaries. And so I think that is still available. You can still you can look at people and you can see who are the high performer versus who are average.

主持人: So do I hear correctly that the with the traits that you're seeing in G engineers is we didn't mention but it's kind of a given the foundations plus curiosity plus innovation

Thuan Pham: Fearlessness willing to innovate willing to stretch willing to try new things and break new ground all of those traits that's still exist

主持人: interesting if I think back to like just the Uber days or your startup days that those traits were kind of the traits of the

Thuan Pham: standout that's right those are things that make someone outstanding versus someone the average

主持人: so I guess maybe an advice is like well I mean try not like if if you were a great engineer before just don't be complacent and keep using keep right approaching the same way. Right.

Thuan Pham: Correct. Yeah. Complacency is death. I mean like every the world will move faster and faster and the moment we stand still we are falling behind.

主持人: It sounds like if you if if you worked at a a fast fast-paced startup before which is this is how it works. AI should be familiar. Welcome to how it was before.

Thuan Pham: To me it is a incredibly powerful tool but in the end it's still a tool and you can wield the tool properly. you can do extraordinary thing versus you just merely use a tool in a mundane way. You're not going to be a great stuff.

主持人: So we talked about stand out engineers in this age. I'd like to talk about something that I cannot talk with too many things. Standout CTOs. You have now been CTO at multiple companies. I I lost VP of engineering. You've been at some of those high highest engineering leadership and at Uber at fair. You've you've done an outstanding job as a CTO. What is the most important job of CTO?

Thuan Pham: Yeah, there there are a couple of angle to this. One is build a high performance team. All right, talent, culture, all of that. you know, whatever it is that you got to do, put the orc structure, put the, you know, uh, develop the talent, prune, you know, uh, bad folks out or whatever, everything that you need to do to make sure that you have really high talent density because when you have team A, team A will just want to hire more A level players and yeah, they just intolerant of anybody who's not performing, right? So, when you get to but you got to get to that concentration and then it's kind of just self-protecting, if you will, right? And then of course you have to create an environment where people really trust each other and align and work really well together, right? Because you put an all-star team together doesn't mean they work really well. If you don't have like a the cultural alignment, right? So that organizational side of things I've always deeply believe in that if you do that one well then good outcome will just happen, right? It doesn't matter what you want to do, right? They will just uh be able to come out with great result because we have great talent and with great motivation. The other side is you have to look in the future and see around that corner, right? For example, I always think about two years out. What does great need to look like? Okay, do we have the key, you know, uh ingredient if you will, talents and otherwise to actually get there, whether it's architects, the leadership, whatever, right? And what problem are we trying to solve? what would a business look like? So, you know, uh the famous Wayne Gretzky quote is skate to where the puck would be. So, you have then to envision that future and I would I would share this with everyone at every management level that when you're in a any level, your job is to see a little bit further out than your folks, right? Because your folks are busy working on the near-term things, right? And then you have to see because if you don't do that, then no one it's your job to actually do that,

主持人: right? Well, let's put this to the test because right right now is the most so many people including me see it's an unprecedented time with growth.

主持人: How do you look around the corner? What do you see around your corner right now? Like what will be coming maybe not even in two years but even in six months?

Thuan Pham: Well in 6 months you know we know what we need to do. In fact it's too short right it's like these are the things

主持人: talk about two years. I I I recently asked Open AI on what they see in two years and they're like oh that's too long let's talk six months.

Thuan Pham: But in context is everything right? for them they're trying to reinvent that future and sometimes things are changing too fast there from that context but from fair the business we know what business result we want to drive we know what project we need to execute right to me that that's pretty much lock and load it just require good execution right good adjustment along the way to me 18 to 24 months out is my job to look at while my team is worrying about the six-month uh problem right and so for example there are many area that we need to clean up right there's the e data ecosystem that's been old and you know same problem we saw at Uber too you know something change upstream break thing downstream and how do you really clean it up with all this you know older you know code base then you know what is the next generation of search and discovery that are AIdriven right you know to look like productivity right how can we leverage AI to like double output on you know future development right so all of these thing what does that future need to look like and do we have the horsepower and and to get there right in terms of expertise uh management and the planning all that stuff and so and and then if the answer is no then it like the next question how do we actually position oursel there who do we recruit and so that that's the job of the co on on the sort of the the non-management side

主持人: and then finally um what advice would you give to a young engineer someone let's say 25 years old or a new grad who is entering the industry right Now, lots of change

Thuan Pham: For folks who are entering the the workforce right now. I have to acknowledge it's a very scary time because it's very bumpy. Even at our company right now, we still bring in uh new grad, but it come through our uh intern co-op channel, right? Uh we're not in the world where we just hire massive number of new college grad like the old days anymore, right? But if great people are still finding opportunity, right? That we have a a healthy cohort of co-op every single um four months that come through, right? And the best of the best still get offer from us because if we don't hire those folks today, what senior engineer will we have for yeah years from now, right? You have to feed the talent pipeline and great people are great people. They will learn and grow and

Thuan Pham: Yeah. And so so that will always the opportunity will always be there for great talent. So invest in yourself when a student you know volunteer doing solve hard problem early on. The earlier and harder you work early on the better you will have in in the in the in the future. If you take it too easy right now then the road in the future might be a little harder. So I think that's the key. And then when you enter the industry it depend on uh I think career phases. I would say the first five 10 years or so find opportunity where you learn the most that push you the most because those are the time that you you have the most energy to develop your skill and ramp up really fast and when you get to like senior engineer staff engineer range then you know enough to be very dangerous in terms of making a big impact then seek opportunity where you can make a big impact. Maybe a smaller company will allow you like a you know a bigger stage to actually make a huge impact, right? Take some of that risk and do that. And that phase should be about using what you know and make this big impact as you can. And you will learn along the way too. And then when you get to the next phase where hopefully if you're really good, you're already at this, you know, principal engineer, senior staff or on the management side, senior director, VP, whatever it is. And then that point you learn to give back, right? You learn to coach and develop people along the way. you'll be leading and responsible for you know very big things uh you know apply that knowledge to do a really great job but also teach and bring other people along so different phases you should change the priority a little bit

主持人: to thank you so much this was a great conversation so I hope that everyone be um will find this useful

主持人: What a conversation so many of these stories have not been told before and I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did the microser story is such a good one nobody at Uber planned to have thousands of microservices. It happened because every time they tried to decompose the monolith, the business was growing so fast that other teams were adding to it faster than the decomposition team could pull things out. It took 2 years to do something that in isolation would have taken 3 to 6 months. Uber had unusually violent business growth that resulted in unusually fast code growth and microservices helped Uber tame its growth. But unless you're growing at the speed of Uber, you probably will not need thousands of microservices. Oh, and fun fact, in 2026, Uber has fewer microservices than they had in 2016.

I also found it fascinating how Tuan's entire career was shaped by relationships he built by simply doing great work. Bill Gurley reached out about Uber because he remembered Tuan from Netgravity, a company from a decade earlier that didn't even win his market. The engineers Tuan pulled from VMware into Uber came because they genuinely enjoyed working with him. There was no networking strategy. just years of being good to people compounding quietly in the background.

Finally, Tuan's point about AI was an interesting one. Complacency is death. The traits that made someone a great engineer before these AI tools: curiosity, fearlessness, willingness to try new things are exactly the same traits that make someone great with AI tools. The tools changed. What makes people exceptional has not. Do check out the show notes below for more deep dives on Uber and Uber's engineering culture as covered in the pragmatic engineering newsletter and podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. A special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show.