Uber Hires Former Google Search Chief Amit Singhal As SVP of Engineering (techcrunch.com)

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."

Comments

fucking over drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking over drivers is not an amazing computer science puzzle.

You like money, don't you, fake geek and scummy businessman.

wtf is SVP?

[Anonymous Coward]

SVP may refer to: S'il vous plaît, French for "Please" (literally, "if it pleases you"

What kinda bullshit is this. BFD would be a better title!

Re:wtf is SVP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your attempts to troll every threat fails every time.

Re:Deport all the H1-B Indo-chimp STREET SHITTERS

[Anonymous Coward]

You dumb cunt. America was never white. You stole it from the local Indians... Dumbass!

It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to me why this takes billions of dollars and a building full of PhDs???

Re: It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

Greed. The super rich are hoarding as much money as they possibly can before the whole fucking economy collapses.

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[stephanruby]

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.

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[50000BTU_barbecue]

...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

[Anonymous Coward]

Indo-chimps aren't "PhD". You are confusing their phony indian village "degrees" issued by a shitty voodoo yoga-priest with real western college degrees, ok.

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

Money is how the score is kept, loser.

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to me why this takes billions of dollars and a building full of PhDs???

Makes me think of this post from Dan Luu...

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

meh -- that said, it still doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would make a retired engineer salivate at solving hard problems. it's a car service that depends on razor thin margins and efficiency to make a profit.

Re: It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

unlike you dumbass who probably can't wipe his own ass without a user manual, he was VP of search at Google and was responsible for some really cool work while there. But then, why do I bother?

Re:It's a way to hail a cab

[Anonymous Coward]

because of the scale of things; ebay is "just" a local auction store. facebook is "just" a bulletin board and google is "just" a search engine. When you scale this to the levels these companies are at today, you realize the enormity of the problem. Uber has ~500K drivers, tracking and planning for these across 450 cities with different rules and competition. They manage about 4 million (not 100% sure about this statistic) rides per day and at the rate they are growing, will start to dramatically change aspects of our economy - how(or if) we buy cars, the efficiency of transport, the success of real car pooling and so on. Every one of these needs complex algorithms given the size of the problem. Uber is lucky that many of these have been solved by others or partially solved but there a a lot of solutions they need to come up with to grow at the rate they are growing. And all this takes a lot of smart work PhD or not.

Uber bus to the Trump camps

[Anonymous Coward]

Before this decade ends, the excess population will be herded into self driving Uber buses headed for Trump branded extermination camps. The buses will be filled with presumptuous fools who thought they were keeping their skills up. Only massive reduction in population will make America great again. Have a nice death.

Chinese are worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese only hire Chinese who only speak Chinese. No one can work with them because of the language barrier. Once you have a Chinese manager, your only option is to resign.

India, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Now why does this sound familliar...

Re:India, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

IT is Indian Technology. People not of color need not apply. And if you think you can get a job at a convenience store because all the Indian clerks went into IT, guess what those jobs are gone. Amazon is launching a convenience store chain, replacing clerks with automation, and putting every other store out of business.

Re:Deport all the H1-B Indo-chimp STREET SHITTERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Native Americans aren't native either. They stole land from the local buffalo.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess the Trump is on you.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep your skills up. You're next.