Uber Hires Former Google Search Chief Amit Singhal As SVP of Engineering (techcrunch.com) 26
The former Senior Vice President of Search and employee number 176 at Google has joined the ride-hailing company Uber as SVP of Engineering. TechCrunch is reporting that "Singhal will be heading up the Maps and Marketplace departments at Uber, while also advising CEO Travis Kalanick and Uber VP of Engineering and Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski on their efforts to build out the company's self-driving technology." From the report: The last time we in tech news circles heard from Singhal, he was saying goodbye after a 15-year career at Google, in a farewell letter that felt a lot like a retirement announcement. Singhal wrote that he was leaving to "see what kind of impact [he could] make philanthropically" and to"spend more time with [his] family," in an effort to "define [his] next fifteen years." Now, a little under a year later, Singhal is back in an executive role -- this time at a much younger company, but still at one of the most influential technology firms in the world. So how did Singhal get from there to here? Well, for starters, Singhal did throw himself into philanthropic pursuits, focusing on the Singhal Foundation established by him and his wife Shipa, which aims to deliver access to high quality education for kids who normally wouldn't be able to attend top schools, and which began with a focus on the city of Jodhpur, in India. Singhal met Travis Kalanick through a mutual friend, which sparked a series of conversations between the search expert and the famous founder about Uber, its goals and its technical challenges. The combination of the scope of both Uber's potential impact, and the extent of the engineering hurdles it faces in achieving its aims were what drew Singhal in; he is, after all, a true engineer at heart, and mountainous technical challenges attract skilled engineers like nothing else. "This company is not only doing things that are amazing, this company also has some of the toughest computer science challenges that I have seen in my career of 25 years," Singhal told me. "Those computer science challenges for a computer science geek are just intriguing -- you give a geek a puzzle, they can't drop it; they need to solve the puzzle. That's how it felt to me."
It's a way to hail a cab (Score:1)
Can someone explain to me why this takes billions of dollars and a building full of PhDs???
Re: (Score:2)
...but what use or value would money have in such a situation? Money is a symbol of trust; it can only work if people can trust strangers.
Re:It's a way to hail a cab (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone explain to me why this takes billions of dollars and a building full of PhDs???
If you're using UberPool, the app needs to match riders going the same way. For that, it needs to take into account distance and traffic conditions. The same thing goes when an Uber driver is trying to get home and sets the destination filter, so the Uber driver doesn't ride back in the general direction of his home without passengers.
There is also supply and demand to consider. Uber needs to predict which areas are going to have higher demand and then it needs to provide enough incentives for Uber drivers to alter their daily routines to go to those areas with higher demand. And of course, that demand will fluctuate from year to year based on different events, different weather conditions, Uber marketing, public transportation outages, and other unknown factors...
In a small town in the middle of nowhere, all this work may show no result. But in cities like San Francisco or New York, where you absolutely can not hail a taxi downtown during rush hours (even if you happen to be white and well dressed), this makes a huge difference and usually means the difference between taking your car to work and paying $60 in parking for the day, or taking a combination of public transportation and Uber to work and paying a total of $20 a day.