When taxis were first introduced, there were no regulations on them. There was no training for taxi drivers, there was no guarantee your driver wouldn't scam you, or that they were even experienced drivers. There was no need for them to have insurance, so if your dubious-trustworthiness driver got in a crash in their unmaintained car, with you in it, who cares if you got hurt?

After people had enough of the unregulated/bootleg taxi industry, government introduced regulations - insurance, training requirements, maintenance, which all drove up the cost of taxi service, of course. In a reputation-free unregulated market, corner-cutting is a great profit-optimization solution, but people generally don't want to bear the cost of systems that cheat them, or expose them to sky's-the-limit risk, so that plenty of drivers gambled with their customers' lives by not wasting time on silly things like repairs, insurance, a license. Unregulated taxi service harmed a lot of people. So there is a lot to consider about Uber being an unregulated equivalent, particularly as related to its profitability.

Uber doesn't profit because the preexisting taxi system was bloated with waste or laziness. Uber's business model works by providing consumers with amateur service, and driving down workers' compensation with particularly precarious contracts. They offload the cost of fleet maintenance and even fuel to their contractors. On top of it all, their funding goes not towards enhancing their quality standard of service, but towards sabotaging self-sustaining, "skin-in-the-game" established taxi services to lower their quality by having to cutting their prices, compared to Uber's predatory pricing. It's not about having a trillion dollar, Millenium Prize-worthy, NP-hard route optimization algorithm that cabbies could never comprehend. It's not about how a ~sharing economy~ shatters the paradigm by revealing new low-hanging fruit improvements to maximizing the flow of queued operations.

At a basic level, people give the same parameters to Uber they would for a cab: start location, end location, pickup time, and payment. Nowadays Uber drivers and taxi drivers alike both use the same GPS apps to plan routes on the fly. The automated aspect of Uber's taxi service is mostly the means through which the customer is interacted with -- app textbox UI elements versus phone message, billing to credit card via the internet vs a point-of-sale terminal, drivers turning down potential customers at their discretion via app or in-person.. -- and not so much "how the sausage is made" behind the scenes.

The secret to Uber's money? It's about spending as little as possible as it takes to make contractors pay out of pocket for the costliest parts of the business -- sustaining contractors and the resources required for driving others around -- while at the same time getting the contractors to provide the business's lifeblood and value themselves at a fraction of what it's worth. Presented as a "side-hustle", Uber pitches you the idea that you should accept low wages (and no benefits) for an exclusive chance to buy into a gamified battle royale, for scraps, in Uber's proprietary arena. Drivers are at the mercy of a stringently unforgiving rating system, where one single four star review takes twenty five star reviews to repair the damage done to their reputation. And if they do slip under four stars, they get suspended. Oh, and did I mention that all the while they bear the cost of upkeep, fuel, etc.?

Uber doesn't prioritize allocation of profits, ad infinitum, into more programmers; it would never make money that way! The programmers at Uber are no more responsible for the profit-creating decisions in the unregulated grey area it relies upon than the engineers who built the first factories were responsible for the decisions made by factory owners. "Child labor costs less" and "if you won't work 12 hour shifts someone else will" were both common justifications for ways corporations benefited from abject conditions to the detriment of society. Today still it is common for capitalists to publicly laud democracy as their most cherished ideal of managing the nation, while simultaneously enforcing policies that deny contributing workers from contributing to decisions about their contributions at all.

Offloading unavoidable costs as externalities paid for by someone else (specifically, Uber contractors) is the number one capitalist strategy for increasing profit, and really has nothing to do with Uber's technology or programmers at all - it's not like the programmers can create new technology that reduces further how much they pay their drivers without going below the operational costs for retaining their an employee-supplied fleet, or technology that can take more money from customers' hands than they pay for. At best, the centralized system they have interferes little with individual transactions, encourages carpooling, and updates driver availability in realtime (while collecting a lot of valuable consumer patterns, of course). At worst, it penalizes drivers for simple gestures such as giving a customer a couple of minutes to use the restroom, instructing the driver to move on to the next customer. Uber also used to do fake ride DoS attacks against Lyft, by requesting rides from remote locations before canceling them half-way there.

Uber is efficient in a way that BF Skinner and Eddie Bernays might approve of, but would to many others just look like not remembering the lessons of history. Uber is but an old scam with a new face. I can't see their existence continuing for more than, say, two years without serious revamping - afaik they aren't even profitable yet in the first place, they just live off borrowed money atm.

And ditto re: worker abuse for Wal-Mart and Amazon, and ditto re: anti-competitive salted earth policy tendencies towards smaller players. The engineering programmers don't even participate in the decisions to move around cost burdens in business strategies - the closest they get to calling the shots on spending, is when they're coding the revised implementation of whatever sleek new approach upper management wants ready to present at next year's shareholder's meeting. Better make 'em look good!

[ninja-edit: eeeek! apologies for the W-o-T]