2. Smart coworkers (well before this came out)

3. Good compensation (I heard for top tier applicants, they give something like MSFT total comp as salary with a ridiculous amount of paper money)

4. Assumed less bureaucracy compared to Big Cos because of unicorn/start up status

5. Ability to develop the first X in the new ride sharing/autonomous car industry

Uber would be a good fit for someone who specifically wants to work at a big_unicorn with large scale technology problems.

Most engineers wouldn't be able to accurately evaluate the ability of the leadership of tech companies, so that negative is out the door.

For the ethics portion, that's subjective.

For the cut-throat nature of the company, I heard that it was worse than most tech companies but not terrible (60+ hr/wks) like some financial companies.

Given the other stories about how they operate, I wouldn't be especially shocked if their starting offers varied wildly over time, even on no particular basis.

Drop to 40. You'll get more done. Trust me.

It's no way to live though, in particular on an ongoing basis. The cost is just too high. I still wouldn't be averse to the odd bit of overwork when it comes to the crunch but these days that's very much as a favour to my employer - and one I know is appreciated.

If expectation is 60 hours, you would need to push 80 hours to stand out the way you did. 60 hours would not get you a pat on the back.

People in finance do it. The difference is that if you push 80 hours for 5 years and you are not culled, the pay becomes massive with senior developer level base salary with contractual guarantee of 150% salary as bonus. You can retire in your early 30's or continue working 80 hours. Except that now 80 hours becomes "management 80 hours" - i.e. just having your phone with you counts as working.

If you're working in a place where everybody is working 60 hours and competing to be the richest man in the graveyard then yeah it's not much.

But when you're working an extra 2 hours a day on your own then yeah - then that's something. It's all relative.

In my opinion you are often doing yourself and your fellow workers a disservice by working that much for free. If you own the company this is a different matter of course.

There are mitigating factors to this i.e. each additional member of your headcount incurs their own cost overhead; also that certain roles and responsibilities can't be serialised so easily.

It's no Space X, but giving people a cheaper, more reliable cab that can be used for carpooling seems more meaningful than spending one's time working for a company whose primary purpose is getting people to click on ads.

This nonsense needs to stop. That's not how "meaning" works.

Marketing and advertising are one of the primary drivers of the economy and very likely the reason the company you work for is successful in staying in business, finding customers and paying you. It's also the primary business model behind several of the largest companies on the planet and funds an immense amount of content across the web for everyone.

The advertising industry is not full of evil hackers running scams. It has some of the brightest people working on challenging problems and has driven several other sectors forward, including software development and database technologies that are often discussed here on HN and used for many other ventures.

There is no inherent ranking of morality, it takes all kinds of jobs and people to make this world go around. Claiming otherwise is shortsighted and simplistic at best, and never leads to good discussion.

One is moving humanity forward potentially into a spacefaring species in our lifetimes. The other is playing zero-sum games to help Pepsi avoid being outcompeted by Coke.

Also you're comparing a single company to an entire industry. Advertising is one of the reasons why SpaceX is successful in the first place, along with thousands of other cutting edge companies. SpaceX is exciting, but advertising has far greater impact collectively than you might think.

You're talking about meaningfulness at the individual level, and I completely agree, nobody should be judged for how they find meaning and edification in their work, as long as they're not a hitman or something involving a similar level of individual amorality.

But I also agree with gp and others that there is a difference between doing ad tech and rocket science. It's not that ad tech should be demonized, but I can't deny that there's something more meaningful about space exploration, and here I mean "potentially meaningful to much/all of humanity". And for some, this broader sense of meaningfulness overlaps significantly with their individual sense of meaningfulness, in which case they probably would have a hard time finding ad tech work meaningful.

Exactly, that's you - but others are completely different. There is no absolute ranking. Individual meaningfulness is all that exists. You might be in a group of people that all believe the same but that's about the extent of it.

I personally see space travel as just another step in the growth of technology. It's definitely exciting but not some grand journey towards meaning. It's just science and tech and progress.

And there are billions more who couldn't care less for space. Many say we should cure cancer first before spending money on space because it's more "meaningful", yet it's clear that both are important pursuits to the people involved in them and that there is no right or better thing for an individual or society to do. So why is advertising somehow beneath that? Is allowing efficient commerce and communications to build the economy and wealth somehow not up to the same standards?

This letter from 1970 by Dr. Stuhlinger of Nasa is an incredibly reply in defense of space vs feeding the hungry, switch out space travel with anything else and it still holds: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

This is not even consistent. Even if you admit only individual meaning, then certainly there are aggregates of those values across society. And advertising is not as high as feeding the hungry or contributing to world peace, as obvious examples.

Collecting stamps may be meaningful to you as an individual, but society also judges your contribution as more or less meaningful. Psychologically, your own experience of meaningfulness is influenced by the opinions of others.

So you can see already that even if you disregard any questions of morality in how you spend your life, the idea that meaning is purely individual already breaks down and becomes inconsistent. We are social animals.

That is a wonderful letter and an excellent example of how the cost of space exploration can be justified. Advertising, while wasting more human resources, does not need this kind of justification, because it is not usually funded by public institutions. However, if you were to try to write such a compelling letter to justify the vast human expenditure of energy and intelligence on advertising you would find it difficult.

The letter makes specific examples of the benefits to all of us on Earth of how space flight requires technological progress, which improves our well-being, and how space exploration inspires us to better appreciate and protect our planet. You cannot replace space travel with advertising and make the same arguments.

Whether space travel or curing cancer is more meaningful, it's certainly good that we are doing both. However, the same is not true for advertising. If you took 99% of the talented and capable people in advertising and put them to work on curing cancer, feeding the poor, providing health care or education, or any of a number of other areas, society would be better off.

Some people derive meaning from making a good living and supporting their families. If advertising is the way to do that, great. But if you derive meaning from the value that your work provides to society (and to some extent, everyone who works does) then advertising (in the majority of cases) is not for you.

If we could disarm all the world's armies overnight and prevent all wars, and spend those resources on something else, wouldn't be better off? We cannot, because the competitive structure of our world is such that unilateral or universal disarmament are both impossible to achieve. Military spending and war remain necessary because we have found no way to move beyond them.

If we could create a world overnight with no advertising, we would be better off by all the productive areas that energy and creativity could be redirected to, but we can't because of the competitive structure of our economies. Advertising is made necessary by our current system, but that does not mean it is equally socially valuable or provides the same meaning to those who work in it as every other field.

In making this comparison, I mean no disrespect to the military. You can agree that war is horrible but still serve from love of country. There is nobility in that. I don't think you can make the same claim for advertising.

This is what I said. There is no absolute ranking. It's groups of people thinking the same thing, and very few things have a majority, but even if they do it doesn't matter since it's a belief. There is no "right" or "better" yet you keep saying advertising is worse somehow. Even space travel is far from the top if you actually look at the entire planet and that's what I was trying to show with that letter.

> You cannot replace space travel with advertising and make the same arguments.

Yes you can. Every industry makes progress that is felt everywhere else. That is the point. Advertising has moved the entire internet into the commercial age and allowed the absolutely vast amount of content today, not to mention the success of every major business that you rely on and work for. I don't see how you can discount that at all.

Yes. Advertising is worse. It is a net loss to society, necessary for structural reasons of competition between companies but otherwise nearly valueless in comparison to the human energy and time devoted to it, and with significant negative externalities for all of society. There are many industries that are better than advertising.

This is why it isn't rated as one of most people's favorite feel-good industries, even though you claim to think that's irrelevant.

Take the money out of the equation and ask yourself how many people would still be working in advertising if we lived in some sort of Star Trek world where people decided what to do based on their abilities and what is best for society.

> Every industry makes progress that is felt everywhere else. That is the point. Advertising has moved the entire internet into the commercial age and allowed the absolutely vast amount of content today, not to mention the success of every major business that you rely on and work for.

You're arguing in defense of advertising, but I think you've painted yourself into a corner here. Yes, in some butterfly effect way, every industry affects everything else, but the scale is not always the same, and not every effect is positive.

What would have happened to the Internet without advertising? We would still have e-commerce because it is tremendously efficient, but we wouldn't have banner ads, or spam. We would still have content, because people like to create and share, but we wouldn't have fake news sites (the ones that were built by teenagers for the ad revenue) or Buzzfeed, Outbrain, and all of the rest of the shit content that exists only to game advertising. Would we have Google? Youtube? Facebook? Maybe with different business models.

If you look at the actual impact of advertising on society, it's not easy to argue that it is one of the better industries. So I can understand why you took the approach of trying to say that all industries are really the same, and anyway it's all just beliefs which you say don't matter. But that argument doesn't hold up.

I'm curious where you would draw the line beyond which people in an industry become responsible for what their industry does, or if you draw that line at all.

One example is that you can be a self-employed bookbinder in a remote town by advertising your services online. This allows you to find customers who want your services that you would not otherwise be able to find. Those customers are able to find more bookbinders than would be possible without online advertising which drives down price.*

So, online advertising is not always zero-sum, it allows some business that would not be able exist without it. The existence of more businesses reduces price for customers.

* I got this idea from an article I read previously and am not able to find.

Besides listen to it from Musks own mouth, "Meaning is about the delta between impact and scale. Whether you help millions of people share a photo more easily or send one person to mars."

If you work for a company selling ads, do you derive meaning from how the company invests its profits? Or from the direct effects your actions have on the world?

The rationalizations some people will accept to avoid taking responsibility for how they spend their own lives...

Edit: clarity

Do you go around telling construction workers that their life is meaningless and they should instead be building rockets to carry you to another planet?

The point is that SpaceX is a making a potential contribution to humanity's future, which makes it a more meaningful way to spend your working years than an advertising company.

The fact that an advertising company thought that SpaceX was a good investment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this argument. It completely misses the point.

But the "cheaper" part is largely because rides are being subsidized by VC money no? Is it that meaningful if its not sustainable?

Uber is a private company so their accounting isn't publicized but as far we can tell, the VC subsidies target a very specific situation: the low prices from competition such as Lyft/Didi

Leaving out the "price wars" aspect, the unsubsidized higher Uber fares would still be lower than:

1) taxis (especially out to the suburbs)

2) the TOC (Total Cost Ownership) of owning a car if consumers make a behavioral change from buying their own car and instead, switch to an on-demand "car as a service". E.g. using Uber 10 to 20 times a month is less than purchase price of car + loan interest + taxes + annual registration + insurance + parking garages.

Similar with number 2, if don't actually know what the subsidy is worth how can you state this?

Keep in mind that Uber isn't subsidizing every fare in every city in all circumstances because even with a $11 billion war chest from VCs, that's unaffordable. They are strategically subsidizing in specific markets (e.g. price wars with Lyft and previously Didi in China).

In the early days (2011?), Uber didn't have heavily subsidized fares and riders still chose them over taxis because they cost less.

My comments are based on observations from analysts, comments from investors Bill Gurley (Benchmark) and the CEO.[1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-t...

"In February, Uber earned an average of 19¢ per ride in the U.S., according to previously undisclosed financial documents."

You realize that comments from analysts have been hugely wrong before? See Henry Blodgett and Mary Meeker.

Yes they're often wrong but I wasn't talking about predictions. I was talking about how they described the past. Uber was already beating taxis in limited markets without any subsidies.

If I'm interpreting your position correctly, you believe that the only possible way for Uber to be cheaper than taxis is through subsidies. This isn't true.

Financial arbitrage of transportation by using crowd-sourced cars instead of taxis has been discovered by a dozen companies besides Uber. In fact, the opposite tactic of no subsidies and aggressive surge pricing can still be cheaper than taxis.[1] Put another way, Uber (crowd-sourced cars and not the luxury Black Service) without subsidies is by design, cheaper than taxis. What the subsidies attempt do is make Uber cheaper than Lyft/Didi.

The subsidies were part of a competitive strategy to try and bleed Lyft and Didi to death. (It didn't work with Didi and Uber called a truce with them. How Lyft plays out remains to be seen.) However, the subsidies are not necessary for Uber fares to be cheaper than taxis.

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-ride-share-cabs-...

How were they "beating" taxis? On price? Are you actually beating something if you are cheaper but losing money?

The links you are posting are really fluff pieces. This one is some reporter's anecdotal summary of spot prices for two particular destinations in a single city. This is no way a serious piece of business journalism.

You keep making statements about the specifics and extent of the subsidies but you don't actually know this do you? And none of the links you have posted support these assertions you are making about these subsidies or lack of them.

Advertising makes up about 20% of the US economy. Is it really so hard to believe that there are rewarding, ethical jobs available in that other 80%?

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...

So yeah, let's be more realistic and say that advertising makes up 2% of GDP. There's got to be an ethical job in one of the industries making up the other 98%. I've never worked for an ad-supported business and I don't find employment difficult to come by...

So does that mean any journalist working on hardcore investigative journalism is working on advertising? If yes, your world view is a bit warped. If no, please explain why you think a Google search ranking engineer is essentially working on advertising?

Incentives matter. A lot. Companies who derive the vast majority of their revenue from advertising will have their culture and technological choices shaped by the underlying business needs.

Heavily marketing dozens of largely unsuccessful moon shots to keep people excited does very little to change this underlying analysis.

Newspaper business models continue to be mainly advertising driven, so I don't disagree with your analogy, just your conclusion. Advertising shaped journalism enormously even before that business model was crippled by Google and Facebook. I would have the same difficulty working for Buzzfeed as Google.

I worked at Google, on Search. My work (and my team and org's work) was never affected by Ads and how Ads worked. We just focused on making Search better. So I object to your imagination of how Google culture and choices are shaped.

You seem to be interpreting "incentives and culture" as "explicit directives or pressure from Ads". There are many ways for culture to grow. Chinese walls can prevent many overt pathways from growing, but they aren't an antidote to the overall role incentives play inside companies.

In fact it's such an important problem, that there were already a lot of people addressing it.

Before Uber I had to use my phone and call a number and talk to a computer that would dispatch a cab to me. Now I use my phone and use an app to talk to a computer that would dispatch a cab to me. Yes, the app is better, but I'm not being "given mobility", I'm being given the freedom to save a couple seconds of effort. Which is, you know, nice. But no, it doesn't have a drastically positive impact on anyone or anything.

(And since Uber launched in my area, some of the local taxi companies have launched very credible apps, so even that advantage turned out to be fleeting.)

The premise is similar - you use it to hail cabs and you have a maps screen that shows where cars are, how long they'll take to get you, taxi drivers number etc.

But the business model is crucially different: Instead of trying to eat the whole cake Hailo just acts as a go-between customers and extant independent taxi drivers.

It really is a non-zero sum for everybody involved. Customers get to "Uberify" their existing taxi service; Existing qualified experienced cabbies have a new conduit through which to access customers. Hailo themselves take a commision on each fare the driver books.

To me this is a far better proposition: A technology that improves the lot of everybody involved. Not just - and I use the term hesitantly - "scabbing" existing drivers.

It seems to me that much of Uber's growth and success is not just based on the technology but also on the gaming of employment regulations, bypassing regulations, and a smidgin of exploitation.

Many make the case that regulation is a barrier to improving services and only serves to protect vested interests and this may well be the case in places where Uber has flourished and Uber may in fact provide better employment terms in some cases. I don't know, but in many cases the taxi regulations exist to protect the customer .. to which Hailo is simply a welcome augmentation - rather than a replacement.

As a result, Black Cabs are expensive. The drivers also have a famous tendency for racist rants and their captive audience.

Hailo doesn't do anything to make travel more affordable.

That is a fair point.

With regards to drivers having to have "the knowledge" I consider that more a feature than a bug. I've gotten a few taxis in the last while with drivers relying solely on GPS - including a couple of Hailo drivers - who ended up taking hopelessly circuitous routes, or even got lost altogether.

Agree that the artificial limit of taxis and cost of licence is an issue. You should try getting a taxi in Dublin where there was wholesale deregulation about 15 years ago. You can get a taxi in minutes! Sucked for the drivers at the time though.

I believe in London you also have the option of the "minicab" (here they're called "hackey" cabs) - which is what the Uber business model really augments. All it takes is for those guys to catch up with technology and Uber becomes irrelevant once more. I'd be fairly sure they're up-to-date on the dubious labour practices though /s

In a market like Dublin, Hailo is an ultra-efficient dispatch service. I call for a cab to a destination, and the drivers decide if they want that business. Of the ~7 weeks I was there, I only had one trip where it took me an extra 10 minutes to get a cab, and that was because it was pouring down rain.

At busy times it will cost you more, though not too different at the end of the day from Uber's "surge pricing" though.

Most places in the US don't have a taxi system, they have scammers driving around in cars willing to gouge you for a ride.

In London in use Uber because it is cheaper + fare splitting but this habit has actually cost me money. When I went to a smaller UK city recently I ordered an Uber instead of just hailing a cab on the street like I used to. It cost me 4x what I usually pay and the driver had no idea where he was going.

So I guess my point is that both have their uses and in some cases cab companies can be better than Uber.

Depending on how they pivot to be profitable, Uber could actually cause disruption by creating mobility and then taking it away once the cash runs out.

"Yeah, I'll get the Uber. Ugh, 3x surge? Let me check Lyft. Sweet, $5 cheaper. It's coming in 5 minutes."

Drivers are already running both apps. When the subsidies run out we will all be fine, drivers included.

If Lyft is still subsidised they'll replace Uber, sure. What happens when the VC subsidy moves away from the category entirely though?

Once the cash runs out then the supply will return to previous market levels.

There is a real opportunity here to push cabs out of the market. The efficiency of driving a cab around and picking up at random is certainly less than an UberPool-style service that is basically constantly giving rides. I'd believe a 20-50% in efficiency.

If you don't believe their reports of profitability, that's fine. I don't know how to convince you otherwise.

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-t...

This isn't how taxi cabs typically operate, except maybe in very dense neighborhoods. It's common in low to medium density areas to see cabbies waiting (often in the same parking lot) for a call from their dispatcher rather than driving around at random waiting for a hail. And in dense neighborhoods with enough riders, such as Manhattan, taxi cab occupancy comfortably exceeds 50%, at least at peak hours.

From the 2014 NYC Taxicab Fact book (which actually seems to cover the whole city, not just Manhattan) [1]:

Aside from these spikes, other areas of high occupancy occur mostly at peak travel times. For weekday AM rush hours (between 8AM and 9AM), the average occupancy is around 56%. For the PM rush hours following the shift change (between 6PM and 7PM), the average occupancy is around 62%. On Friday and Saturday nights, peaks occur around midnight and again at 4AM, when bars close in NYC. At midnight on weekends, 56% of available taxis are occupied, on average, and at 4AM, about 49% of available taxis are occupied.

[1]: http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/2014_taxicab_fact_...

I found a video on my old phone that I'd filmed to show how the system works:

http://www.taxiwars.org/p/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.html

Usually I'd make it to the address in about 7 minutes. Sometimes I was parked at the pickup address already (convenience store). I think there are two diaries titled 'instant taxi' on my site...

Uber is only profitable if you only look at SF, and ignore taxes paid, interest expenses, and equity issued. So no, by that definition I don't consider Uber to be profitable for a company that lost $1.2B in the same timeframe.

SF is also arguably one of the best public transportation markets, so I'm not sure how much Uber contributed to mobility there either.

The whole surge pricing thing was pretty innovative. A regular cab driver shoots to meet their daily quota. If it's raining, they hit that much sooner, and call it a day. There really are fewer cabs when the weather sucks. Or, more accurately, there are many more riders than drivers available.

The innovation is in having a flexible workforce. Surge pricing is mostly price gouging. Having plenty of passengers wanting to go places is incentive enough to get extra drivers on the road.

I've met a few 'ride share' drivers who only go out during the times they can expect to get a surge fare. One of them had graduated from an engineering program, and lived in Pittsburgh...

That sounds like it's working as intended, no? More people driving when there's more demand, less when there's less.

EBITA is a reasonable way to calculate profitability, which ignores taxes and interest. Equity-based compensation is a possible concern. Do you think that they're giving away so much of they're company to employees that they can't sustain that after they start paying pure-cashing (or cash + public equity) comp? (I'd honestly be surprised, but curious to know what you think.)

While I haven't extensively researched, what I did find was this:

""" Not thinking of depreciation as an expense is crazy. I can think of a few businesses where one could ignore depreciation charges, but not many. Even with our gas pipelines, depreciation is real — you have to maintain them and eventually they become worthless (though this may be 100 years).

It [depreciation] is reverse float — you lay out money before you get cash. Any management that doesn’t regards depreciation as an expense is living in a dream world, but they’re encouraged to do so by bankers. Many times, this comes close to a flim flam game.

People want to send me books with EBITDA and I say fine, as long as you pay cap ex. There are very few businesses that can spend a lot less than depreciation and maintain the health of the business.

This is nonsense. It couldn’t be worse. But a whole generation of investors have been taught this. It’s not a non-cash expense — it’s a cash expense but you spend it first. It’s a delayed recording of a cash expense.

We at Berkshire are going to spend more this year on cap ex than we depreciate. """

So tell me - what giant depreciation expense does uber have that is going to jive with this assessment?

Disclaimer: not really an uber fan.

It's a cab company that decided to ditch the cabs and to "contract" with "independent owner-operators" in an effort to circumvent the laws around cabs, and to avoid the hassles of actually having employees and capital expenditures. It's just the Web 2.0 business of plan of "let the users provide the content, and then sell it back to them", applied to physical objects.

You could already call taxis by phone (including your mobile), as you say. So you are creating something of a false dichotomy. At least where I live, there are also public devices (only in particular places, of course) you can use to hail a cab, in case you somehow don't own a mobile.

And apparently mytaxi was founded the same year as Uber, so Uber's idea wasn't quite that unique. I suppose it was just the right time for such services to spring into existence.

Uber appears to be the most successful, probably in no small part due to their ruthlessness.

I've never ordered a taxi in a small town, so I can't comment on what that process is like.

I'd guess I've called in for around 10 cab rides, and have had two experiences where a cab was requested, I was told it would come, and had it not come after waiting for much longer than was reasonable.

Uber doesn't actually show you where the drivers are before you request the ride. Those little animated icons just represent the density of available drivers, not actual car positions.

(It just sounds really dishonest for the app to do this)

It was neither difficult nor traumatic as the descriptions of the "problem" that Uber is solving that I see in these Uber threads. I've never driven a car in my 40 years of life, and therefore taken 1000 cabs in a dozen cities, but I've clearly only taken the best ones.

Maybe things have changed since the introduction of these ride sharing apps, but reliability of the Baltimore taxi system used to be atrocious outside of the 5 block radius of the Inner Harbor.

If you had said "black car service," I would have believed your story could be representative, but that is simply incongruent with every experience I've had in Baltimore. I tried the 3 major cab companies in Baltimore and had similar experiences with each.

I'm not alleging any moral shortcoming, it's just that there was no incentive to improve service to an acceptable level until Uber and Lyft arrived.

If a person's _primary_ concern is making mobility more accessible and affordable for _everyone_ especially the most needy then doing that by improving public transportation systems(buses and rail) and systems that are regulated by the governments(New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission). Those systems are obligated to serve the entire public.

FYI, you can call an Uber from the web or SMS.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/06/15/no-smartpho...

I still think my point that it requires upfront wealth and technical proficiency is still valid when related to public transportation systems.

Even though there may 2.32 billion people with smartphones there are large percentages of people who don't even in developed countries. For U.S.in 2015 folks who make less than $30k a year 50%. Folks older than 65 27%. Folks between 50-64 54%. Even if they own a smartphone that doesn't mean that Uber would be accessible to them.

Pew Research Poll from 2015 http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/chapter-one-a-portrait...

https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html

I personally wanted to work at Uber ATC because it is one of the fee places I could work on radar signal processing outside of government work (and SV). If the crappy interview homework hadn't turned me off the company already, all this shit would.

You speak of ethics & morality, let me ask you about a cause which is very close to my heart. How do you feel about tech in general where diversity is big issue. Black & Hispanic engineers are in low single digit percentage (ex: FB/Google 1-3% [1][2])? Can i call someone not ethical for working in such tech companies, which does not provide equal opportunity in the name of meritocracy? I think issues should not be treated in complete black & white. HR messed up in doing the right thing, that does not mean everyone working there does not condone this and support such abhorrent behavior. [1] https://www.google.com/diversity/ [2] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/06/driving-diversity-at-fac...

* Threatening to dig up on dirt on journalists who aren't nice to them.

* Having a "god mode" available to all of their staff to see who drives where, which was only restricted after it became public.

* Creating a blog post about how they can figure out who is having one night stands (or, as they called it, "rides of glory").

* Blatant and repeated sexism. Anyone who lives in the bay area knows people who have worked at Uber and have heard the stories.

* Encouraging drivers to sign up for subprime auto loans.

* Tracking users locations even after they get finish their ride (even more ominous when combined with their "rides of glory" privacy invasions)

* Hiring a firm comprised of ex CIA agents to pry into the lives of people who screwed with them.

All of that can be confirmed with multiple news sources by a quick google search. It's not just their lack of diversity that makes them a cringeworthy company, it's the fact that they repeatedly and regularly go out of their way to disrespect privacy and generally act super sketchy. They're practically comic book villain level at this point.

* Threatening to dig up dirt: You try working hard on a product and listening to reporters bash you every day of the week, sometimes blatantly making things up. I don't condone the exec's actions, but Sarah Lacy doesn't exactly have the greatest reputation.

* God mode - it's arguably what made Uber. There was initially a lack of restraint on its use, but I've heard of people getting fired for its misuse well before it was public.

* The blog post was very stupid.

* The sexism is quite rampant across all of SV.

* The subprime loans were pure incompetence: it got fixed. Nowadays it's easier to walk away from the loan than at any other dealership.

* The user tracking I heard was to prevent fraud - there's close to $1 million being taken by fraudsters per week. Fraudsters have also physically assaulted employees.

* They investigated a lawsuit being filed because it was targeted specifically at Kalanick, and their security team deemed it a possible threat. The guy happened to be ex-CIA in his previous career.

Out of all, below happened after i joined for which i have some info. * Tracking users locations even after they get finish their ride (even more ominous when combined with their "rides of glory" privacy invasions) This is done for 5 minutes after the ride ends. This is required to fight fraud & ensure safety of riders. This can't be opt out because fraudsters will opt out & we still have fraud.

First of all: We only have Uber's word about that. A company not known as the most forthcoming when it comes to telling the truth.

"This is required to fight fraud & ensure safety of riders. This can't be opt out because fraudsters will opt out & we still have fraud."

This is about the most ludicrous reasoning I have heard in a long time. Fraud prevention doesn't really require that you spy on your customers. You're not dealing with Random Q Shmoe spontanously jumping into an Uber. All of those users need to create an account and provide a valid credit card in the process. User accounts can be locked immediately if fraud is suspected and even if fraud occurs the amount could be a couple 100 bucks, max.

Look, I understand that Uber needs to come up with some excuse to justify spying on their customers. But please tell your communications department they shall try to come up with something more plausible and to stop insulting the intelligence of the general public.

2. Fraud at Uber's scale is not few 100 bucks.

I have decent critical reasoning skills not to agree blindly if the message came from communication department (it did not).

How is a company going to manage toward improving a metric if they're not even measuring it?

What makes you think they want to improve it? If they're after the best it's probably counter productive.

So if one wants to actually hire the best, they should measure these things, otherwise you can't correct for things like 'our Cal alum hiring manager keeps passing up a bunch of good Stanford grads' or more serious versions of that.

It's not like it's the NBA, where you have to be a tall strong man to make the team. Anyone can program, market, manage, etc.

Would you further like to consider that historical evidence indicates that when an industry claims it has meritocratic processes which naturally produced lopsided hiring with respect to gender and race, that claim has been debunked, often spectacularly, by simple tactics such as blind interviews in which the interviewer cannot discover the gender/race of the candidate?

Perhaps after considering this, you should find some other use for that reflex arc which produces "hire the best" statements whenever you're exposed to the word "diversity".

Any situation where you have two candidates and hire one because of irrelevant characteristics you won't be hiring the best.

You want sexist and racist hiring policies, but only when it suits the genders and race's you want. Do you here outrage from white people about being under represented compared to Asians?

Did I say I did?

I want meritocratic hiring processes. I just happen to suggest -- and I believe evidence is strongly on my side -- that a process which produces lopsided gender/race ratios is extremely unlikely to be meritocratic. I also do not believe many of the other sound bytes people inevitably throw out in this argument (example: "that group just isn't interested in our field" / "they just prefer other things", another classic which will, I'm sure, rear its head in this thread sooner or later).

What is the strong evidence for this statement that you claim exists?

It is very unintuitive to me, as I have always thought the problem existed earlier in the pipeline than the actual interview/hiring process. I am always open to my view being changed, so I would like to see this evidence that is strongly on your side.

Here's an example: look up the historical gender breakdown of computer programmers. Hint: once upon a time there wasn't a "pipeline problem" to use as an excuse, and for-profit free-market competitors were doing just fine with a very different gender ratio than they have now.

It is unlikely that, in the (short -- less than a generation to transform the industry) period in question, women magically became unqualified to work as programmers. Especially since many of them already had worked as programmers and nobody had found reason to complain about their work.

Or, more bluntly: the sudden disappearance from a field of an entire category of people, whose only distinguishing characteristic is being of a gender historically denied economic opportunities, is unlikely to be explained by a similarly sudden catastrophic decline in their qualifications. The continuing absence of people of that category is equally unlikely to be explained by their lack of qualifications.

Here's another example: take a look at what happens to other fields when they introduce effective blind interviewing (in which interviewers cannot discover the gender/race of the candidate prior to making a hire/no-hire decision). It once again does not suggest that previous processes were anything approaching meritocratic.

Specifically, it's the Julie Landsman story, where a fantastic French Horn performance of great power and force turned out to be produced by a small woman, and the people hiring lost their shit when they found out.

A funny side note is that, to be a CEO, typically you have to be a TALL white man. Now, in tech, I could see there being a bias for large HEADED people of whatever gender or color, on the (unjustified) assumption that raw brain material volume would help. But surely, the distance from the ground said head is, can't have much to do with it! And yet, it's another 'meritocracy' fail.

AI will be a lot better at this sort of thing (while perhaps inventing its own meritocracy fails). But we're not there yet.

As for your example, it is not "strong evidence". Historical breakdown doesn't mean much since very few people were computer programmers at all back then. You can't extrapolate from that to the distribution of people who would become programmers decades later once it would be a super mainstream profession that a huge fraction of the population would enter.

Programming was a different affair too. You have to be much more detail-oriented to deal with punch cards and spaghetti goto code; this means fewer people get to be big-picture focused.

Going back a couple decades further, computers were huge halls where women did small calculations by hand; someone (Oppenheimer, Feynman or some such) did the big picture work and divvyed it up much like physicists now give Matlab or Fortran work to do.

Also, your second paragraph amusingly makes a different form of my argument for me (if you can't assume that the ratio at one point in time is indicative of general facts about qualification as a function of gender, you also can't assume that it is at a different point in time -- it may be that a decade or two from now there will be an order of magnitude more programmers!).

Sure, for example, boys being encouraged to become computer programmers. There's an article on NPR that discusses this[0]. Also, when you say "the process", I'm not sure you're adequately describing the evolution of programming and its related skillset demands. A strong increase in competition would naturally lower the ratio of women to men:

- time invested in programming correlates strongly with skill

- historically men have been able to put more time into careers than women(who often need a better work-life balance to manage a household).

- the historic SMAM[1](mean age at marriage) gives men an extra ~2-2.5 years over women even if you assume equal parenting responsibility, before men must also make parenting concessions.

[0] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

[1] - http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldmarriage/...

The only possible third alternative is "the women who were programmers at that time constituted most or all of all living women who were interested in programming", which reduces to "women aren't as interested in programming as men" which in turn reduces to being able to prove all sorts of known-false things by asserting that a forced lack of options (through social and legal discrimination) was in reality an innate "preference" of women in general for or against certain things.

You can have effects working both ways at once.

A lot of world-class woman scientists seem to wind up working in either brand-new or highly interdisciplinary areas; certainly statistically more than you would expect. I hypothesize that, based off my own (anecdotal) experience, this is (in part) because many of the major departments are eye-wateringly bigoted, sexist environments.

Male-dominated environments playing power games are, largely, pretty awful places and one of the power games which gets played a lot is sex discrimination up to sexual harassment. You see the kind of egregious shit you see in Silicon Valley just as frequently in academe. It's pretty awful.

I suspect – again, based off what I've seen and what I've heard from people who were there – something similar may have been going on in the early days of programming. When it was a wide-open new field, there was less in the way of straight-up power games because there wasn't wider societal prestige to be won. So it was more hospitable to out-groups than the other professions fishing in the same hiring pool, e.g. wider engineering and science. But then, over timer, perceived prestige came in, and with it came the status games you find everywhere perceived prestige is, and... vicious cycle.

Incidentally, for anyone who hasn't observed this kind of phenomenon before, this is pretty much how patriarchy works. Interlocking systems of power create perverse incentives which, in turn, reinforce those same systems.

As far as I'm concerned, speaking bluntly, these days there are people who get intersectional feminism and there are people who are just not paying attention to how things work. There's not much middle-ground.

I don't expect that to be a hugely popular viewpoint on HN, but, y'know, I'll live.

These things have their place and if you get lucky (unlucky?) you get a Steve Jobs or perhaps a Travis Kalanik or Jeff Bezos, and you get a predator culture where the company is galvanized to beat the other guys up. Or you get a collective culture where this behavior is all you want and the main thing to reward…

However, looking at it on the larger scale, the more open systems (say, the birth of the personal computer industry that produced a Jobs and Wozniak) could be seen as less competitive, more 'feminine' boom times where cooperation and networking weren't eclipsed by raw power. In those 'less male' times more overall progress was made and the foundations were laid for the big dick-swingin' companies that would come to dominate. Perhaps without times like that, you don't even get the Jobs and Bezos and Kalanik.

Pretty strong argument in favor of open development: though even that will inevitably find ways to turn competitive and be directed by the most dominant. But if the principle is one of extending a common body of understanding, that remains more broadly available.

And we can find drastically changes in gender distribution (and gender segregation) in multiple professions. Is those three choices, A, B, or C, the only possible reason for those? Data from Sweden say over 85% of women and 85% of men work in professions which has serious problem of gender segregation, a problem which only got worse in the last 100 years. Which of those tree choices explains why 1917 had less gender segregation in the work place than 2017?

And what happened since 1917 to 80% of the profession in the job market to cause half the population to suddenly get less status from being employed there?

(same account as roghee0I)

Then you have the wrong process in mind. AFAIK the breakdown of employees is very similar to the breakdown of graduates (and hence applicants). So there's no bias in hiring, all the bias is coming before (socio-economic status? personal choices?).

Principle of charity.

There is no charitable interpretation of this reflex.

The only possible way to interpret it is as a naked statement that groups currently disproportionately underrepresented in the industry, or at specific companies, are made up of inherently inferior people. Otherwise, a process which "hires the best" would hire more of them, and hiring more of them would not "lower the bar".

The intuition being expressed is as follows: Say you work at a factory, filling boxes of widgets. Widgets of varying quality stream past you, coming out of the widget stamper, such that you only have time to grab, on average, one widget out of every ten. Your job is to grab the best widgets you can spot, and put them into your bin. that's how the factory sorts widgets into different grades of quality. Further down the line, other failed startup founders toil away at other bins, snagging the ones you miss, from best to worst.

Most of the widgets are sort of a greyish mucky colour, but about one out of twelve will display a splash of original colour from the plastic that was recycled into widgets. You think nothing of it, but one day your pointy-haired manager comes and tells you that the "colourful" widgets are extra-popular and people are trading them. The company can sell boxes with at least 1/3 coloured widgets for ten times the price of regular widget boxes. Your job is now to ensure that at least one out of every three widgets that you grab is "colourful."

As a consequence, the average quality of widget in the boxes that you pack declines.

There are a lot of wrong and simplistic assumptions behind this understanding of "changing hiring processes." The knee-jerk assumption that doing that means implementing a naive quota system is not the least of these, but there are many others.

Furthermore, it is much more likely to be put forth by not-very-tactful people who have nothing to gain (and perhaps something to lose) extraneously, from greater workplace diversity; these are the people who are the most likely to both be sympathetic to, and express, views that seem at best borderline-racist.

This does not, however, mean that there is no charitable interpretation to the 'reflex' you are describing. It is not a cunning excuse to perpetuate *-ism in the workplace. It is what they believe to be a serious and valid objection to "changing hiring processes," as they understand it.

I do not think you are going to convince me that way.

  - 9,2% -- awesome, non-colourful
  - 0,8% -- awesome, colourful
  - 82% -- meh, non-colourful
  - 8% -- meh, colourful

  - 6,7% -- awesome, non-colourful
  - 0,8% -- awesome, colourful
  - 2,5% -- meh, colourful

I think that it's important to note, however, that the analogy functions without relying on any notion that the "colourful" widgets are inherently inferior. It was this point of your own that I was responding to.

Notion of diversity being a better metric than actual performance is makes sense only if you see companies as a vehicle for hiring, not a tool of delivering value.

[edit: sorry, i missed adding details about the low single digit percentage claim, updated that. Thanks zachrose for pointing it out]

"Have to" be represented sounds like it's a chore. There are many ways that people can be diverse, I wouldn't see the need to "stop". But if I had to think of a list I guess it would include:

Age

Race, gender and sexuality*

Nationality and/or experience being the Other

Favorite programming language

Economic background

Religious background

Languages spoken

Regional identity

Personality

Fashion, in a broad non-prescriptive sense

Promises vs. callbacks

I spend way, way, way more time working with my colleagues than I do directly determining the makeup of my firm. But I hold the thesis that diversity and success (particularly creative success) are correlated, and apply that thesis in deciding where to live and work.

* Particularly in the way that everybody forms their own person out of their genetics/biology and the surrounding society.

What evidence do you base this thesis on? Do you have examples of say, successful and racially diverse companies?

I'm guessing that you mean that many don't support the company's behaviour?

There were repeated points at which complaints could have been addressed.

A lack of diversity can be due to poor hiring practices or due to industry shortages. Either of these isn't the same as ignoring direct complaints of harassment. Your post reads like minimising the disgusting actions of Uber.

  > How do you feel about tech in general where diversity
  > is big issue. 

Why does some field need to mirror racial/whatever composition of the society? Are you concerned that NBA demobraphics does not represent general demographics?

A field that basically runs society should ideally mirror that society's composition. Diversity is healthy, particularly in an industry that attempts to combine creative and analytical thought inside multiple models of economic and political philosophy.

The fact women and non-white people are under-represented in our industry is a major problem for its long-term health.

"Software is eating the World". Put another way, "Ideas created by white men are eating the World, in a way that is fully automated and potentially oppressive." History suggests we should have a rethink before we go much further.

Fact 1: In the House of Representatives, women hold just 83 (19.1%) of the 435 seats. Fact 2: In the Senate, women hold just 21 (21%) of the 100 seats

Politics as a field disagrees. And it has been running like this for a long time, I guess?

One thing I don't get is that, when people talk about NBA, with very little Asian representation, they will gladly accept the fact that Asian men are, physically not as capable as African Americans, but freak out when it comes to the tech sector.

Isn't this hypocritical? Diversity is a good thing to have, but I don't think it is more essential than, software engineering skills, itself, when hiring a software engineer. Companies are not charity, they hire engineers because they need engineers. If the demographics of engineers reflect the overall demographics, diversity will come to companies naturally.

Maybe one should ask the right question how to educate more african/hispanic engineers, and Asian basketball players than trying to find them only when blame comes.

The problem here is that it is not necessarily talent / genes / physical characteristics that is the barrier here. I agree it is better to ask questions on what the gaps potentially are (and if they are fixable) rather than assign blame or feign outrage. I would caution in any genetic assumption, though, unless it is backed by really good data. One only has to point to the old discredited eugenics philosophy to show the dangers here.

From looking at the international community's CS graduation rate, there is a high degree of variability. 40% of Mexican CS graduates are women, and 10% of Switzerland CS graduates are women (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...). Googling, women as a percentage of graduates is even roughly at parity or even with women as a majority in certain countries (Malaysia and some Arab countries). Based on this, I would consider culture to be more of a dominant factor in explaining the current CS gap rather than anything genetic based.

Some of the issues that create a lack of diversity reflect current norms that, if adjusted, would in my opinion improve everyone's lives. For example, from what I've read, at least some of the gap regarding women achievement in the work force (in general) can be ascribed to a combination of work-family balance concerns, tradition (women "traditionally" run the household), and America's high pressure, "more hours" oriented work culture. This honestly doesn't sound like a bad thing to fix for men in the IT workforce, either.

No doubt. However, the same bar should be applied. What I read from the media seems suggest, companies should follow their command to increase diversity whatever it costs, otherwise it is racist/sexist and prepare to be attacked.

I don't agree with this. Because it makes software engineering as a job look easy. Those non-technical journalists seem to believe, company either intentionally choose not to hire minorities, or engineers can be mass produced in short time.

Neither is true, because if they are, we won't even discuss this problem. Look around, who is talking about Uber drivers' demographics? No one. The media adapts the false philosophy to trying to correct things from top-down, not bottom-up, because the former is an easy target. They have an AGENDA, and it is not really about fairness, it is about attacking others to gain power.

I honestly don't think that non-white and/or non-males are proportionally less able to think analytically than white males. I think that on average they have less education, and a culture that does not promote intellectual pursuit. Those are the things that need to change, and if you change that it should then flow through into programming.

What makes you so sure it's ok?

It's really for people who are involved with long-distance running and/or the NBA to figure that issue out, since they have the relevant background knowledge.

Programmers often have misconceptions about the level of concern for diversity in other fields. For example, a common trope is that no-one is worried about the fact that most nurses are women. But in fact people in the nursing profession are worried about this, and there are efforts to recruit more men.

I have a feeling that somewhere over on the NBA forum, someone is saying "but then why are 90% of programmers men, and why is that ok?"

If it doesn't, then it's pretty suggestive that there's a wider problem. Why do people from different backgrounds not enter that profession? Are they being discouraged somehow, and how can that be avoided?

Diversity is an self-evident good, in that multiple backgrounds and experiences result in a more well-rounded team. Trying to make sure you have that benefit is good sense.

My opinions aside on whether Travis is a healthy CEO for Uber, there are real costs to employee turnover. And that is true at the CEO level just as anywhere else.

And there are actually some benefits to a post-crisis employee. Sure, a new person they hire probably won't have Travis's specific flaws. But the same can be said of a post-crisis Kalanick. He's actually pretty likely to not make a similar mistake again.

Unless, of course, it becomes a pattern. Certainly Kalanick has demonstrated a pattern of ethical lapses, so if that's the thing you're trying to optimize against he should go. Is there a more specific pattern of ignoring sexual misconduct? Well, probably also yes in Kalanick's case.

But my point is he needs to go because he's demonstrating a pattern of poor performance, not because there needs to be a head on a spike for people to trust Uber again.

They were bigger and in these companies "aggressiveness" is just fucking backstabbing everywhere. At least they went to Las Vegas.

That is why... many others are the same but not successful to be in the news.

I have seen someone let go for misbehavior in spite of an assertion (at the time) that they were a very high performer. This was not uniformly the policy, and it's not clear to me it was ever actual policy. Susan reports that she was told by other parties that this was the reason - but it is possible she was informed incorrectly.

> the CTO who should have been fired a long time ago for being complicit in other scandals

Could you clarify? I have no idea what you're referring to, and "Thuan Pham scandal" doesn't turn up anything that looks relevant for me in Google.

I have tremendous respect for Thuan. With regards to this particular issue, it's clear he could have done better. At least, he missed a chance to fix this. We'll see what a more thorough examination reveals.

> but somehow you do believe Susan Fowler

I believe Susan Fowler honestly reported her experiences. I believe Susan Fowler because disbelieving her misses a chance to fix things. And I believe Susan Fowler because I don't see her having anything to gain - and plenty to lose - in offering us that chance. I appreciate her bravery.

> how exactly are you intent on holding management accountable?

I am intent on paying attention to the process, looking for honesty and integrity and meaningful change in response, and being vocal where it is lacking. Employees are asking - and Travis is answering - tough questions at the weekly staff meeting. If you have constructive suggestions, I welcome them.

> Should everyone involved be let go, including the CTO and CEO? Do you really believe stuff like this bypasses them?

Some kinds of involvement clearly deserve termination, but at this point we're still learning about what went on. There are possible answers that would have them out or me quitting in protest - and there are possible answers that wouldn't.

I don't know of any team where that's true. My team is usually out of the office by 6, often earlier. I sometimes have trouble leaving work at the office, but a big part of that is that I'm excited about my project - others do better on that count.

> I also was told that the pay is subpar and they expect you to get paid mostly in stocks.

I might be able to do better elsewhere if I were better at selling myself, but moving to Uber was a step up for me in cash before considering equity.

And this was presented as a typical day, not a rare "everything is on fire, all hands on deck" thing?

I don't want to rat out the two people who told me since they are easily trackable but i heard it from two different teams. I also heard it from the intelligent spend team.

This wasn't just from Uber people either. I honestly really wanted to work at Uber and told my friend at Square and he told me he heard the work environment was "toxic". I also told my mentor at my internship that i thought Uber was cool and he said his friend worked there and had insane hours. Finally, my roommates cousin started working at Uber a year ago and has echoed the previous statements.

Once again, this is all anecdotal but it's hard to ignore the signs when I've had them from so many sources. I sincerely do believe in Uber's mission and have wanted to work there for years so i'm not trying to be biased at all.

edit: And these toxic environment comments were this summer.

I have not one iota of doubt he would do anything for a position at Uber with even a modest (<$75k) yearly salary regardless of location or any other benefits. And it is my belief this represents a vast majority of software developers around the world.

Are you in your early twenties? Poor or in debt? Feeling unimportant? Come work for Uber.

Did you start a family before you were financially prepared? Want to take care of them? Come work for Uber.

Girlfriend break up with you for being an unemployed loser? Come work for Uber.

If this is reminiscent of Wolf of Wall Street, you might be starting to get it. The world is full of poor and disenfranchised people who are willing to do many things that those in a quiet office with a white laptop embalmed with some special Apple, myself included, could likely not even imagine. To say working for Uber, who likely has as many fax pas as any conglomerate, is so horrid is absolutely laughable.

Edit:

The only difference now is that the finance wolves of yesteryear are now slinging code to mine and collect personal information, trigger mobile game purchases, etc.

- College costs have risen much faster than inflation.

- At the same time, state subsidies funding universities have declined fairly dramatically since the recession, further increasing out of pocket costs.

- For many students, prestige and amenities are much more important than cost. When you see someone paying six figures for a university education, they're not picking the high-quality, cheap option. They're picking the (hopefully) high-quality, prestigious option.

- In the USA, anyone can go to a university. Anyone. Academic ability is almost irrelevant. Unfortunately, the least academically qualified students are often persuaded into attending very expensive for-profit universities.

- Student loans are very readily available.

- Academically excellent students in many, maybe even most, states almost always get a free ride to an in-state public university.

- Two year community colleges are very cheap, and generally offer an Associate's degree and easy transfer to the closest four-year university.

It is still very possible to go to school and graduate with no debt. I did it in 2011.

That's ~50% more than the average American household income. To do work that's not related to a degree, and without work history to show performance?

That's an example of a shocking choice if given the opportunity for a math major bartending in a college town?

You should get out of the SV sometimes. Most of them are doing fine.

All the things you mentioned subsequently are completely valid reasons for people to join Uber, but on top of that they just sprinkle some mental gymnastics to try to explain away wrongdoing the company has done.

And don't underestimate the allure of money. Think of all the smart and extremely driven people that go into investment banking. As stressful as working in a tech company is, I don't think it compares to Wall Street (contrary to David Fincher's depictions). Work 80 hour weeks, but retire at 35 with your fuck you money.

Personally, I had a chance to work for an oil company out of college. $80K starting, six figures within five years, and stocks that were actually worth money. However, the cognitive dissonance I'd have to wrestle with was too much for my former hippie self. Someone else still took the position, though.

Uber is changing the world. For better or worse.

99% of other startups are irrelevant, and will go out of business soon.

Also - working at Uber, many will get rich.

They are a big company, with tons of money, they are spending huge on highly specialized things that most other startups couldn't ever touch, and there is 'financing' for cool, niche things. Self driving cars, big data, transportation things. Food delivery. And just the scale of it is interesting.

Finally they have a kind of job security that goes beyond what most startups would offer.

I have no love or hate for Uber, I mean I don't like them for some reasons, but there are plenty of reasons for people to want to work there.

It takes a lot to build an organization and from how Travis ran Uber there is no sustainable effort in that direction.

I'm deliberately not commenting on the sexual harassment stuff because quite frankly it's none of my business until the claims have been substantiated.

Isn't the interestingness of the engineering work independent of the interestingness of what the company does? E.g., if your area of interest is large databases, would it matter if the company is using its large database to store car ride data, or to store physical inventory, or to store weather data?

Perhaps the Uber Eats logistics chain? The build tools? The god-knows-what side projects done with all that capital?

They bought like half of CMU's RI to build a self-driving car.

If I wanted to work on build tools, I could literally do that anywhere else.

As far as working on a side project, why work on a side project when you can work where that is a core competency? (And yes, I'd say Uber Eats is a side-project. Everything that isn't directly related to getting a midrange Mazda to pick you up is a side project at Uber.)

"Uber’s aggressive workplace culture spilled out at a global all-hands meeting in late 2015 in Las Vegas, where the company hired Beyoncé to perform at the rooftop bar of the Palms Hotel. Between bouts of drinking and gambling, Uber employees used cocaine in the bathrooms at private parties, said three attendees, and a manager groped several female employees. (The manager was terminated within 12 hours.) One employee hijacked a private shuttle bus, filled it with friends and took it for a joy ride, the attendees said."

We are also told that the NYT has non-public information on this from their 30 interviews, reviews of internal emails, chat logs and tape-recorded meetings, of which, precisely one person is willing to attach their name to this, due to fears of reprisal.

Given that the NYT just claimed to have evidence of a felony, shouldn't the police be involved here? I mean, it's very clear in my opinion that the NYT is trying to tell us that all that confidential information they can't show us somehow proves that Uber was complicit in that incident, so I'm really wondering when something will hit the courts?

Or is there a case already going on that I don't know about?

If you saw any of your current coworkers do cocaine, would you go straight to the cops and what would you tell them? What do you think they would actually end up doing about it?

I think the cops would not have enough evidence to actually do anything about it besides he said/she said, and you would totally alienate yourself among your coworkers essentially screwing over your career.

My point is that it is not nearly as black and white as you make it out to be and it is usually better to be safe (don't do anything) than sorry (speak out and ruin your career/friends/network over it).

It seems a lot more constructive than complaining about it anonymously in the news over a year later. I mean, a bad culture persists because people allow it to, so I don't understand why they waited to fight it, given their claims.

He must not have been a "high performer".

Do-gooders are being instructed that the only way to "improve company culture" is to snitch on their colleagues for victimless crimes.

8 months ago, Travis raised $4.6B for the company. That's certainly a real contribution.

If you're looking for victories that are primarily from the CEO more often than once a year from a company that size, you may need to look a bit harder.

Depends. Uber is more grounded and useful than most SF startups. They choose a good problem to solve. Bashing it whatever you want, as a service, it is pretty valuable.

You make good points.

There's one that I'd like to add:

For me the biggest red flag is that this company's business model is based on blatantly ignoring laws that inconvenience them. And I should sign a contract with them? Yeah. no.

Believe it or not, what makes a company attractive to work for can vary from one person to another! Culture may be important, or it may not be. Interesting and impactful work may be important, or it may not be. Money may be important, or it may not be.

In fact, I'd love an example of a company that is struggling to find employees due to a toxic environment or a perception of toxicity. For every engineer who says "Yeeech, I'd NEVER work for Company Abc" there are ten who would LOVE the opportunity.

The first Uber is the ride-sharing Uber, which is on a trajectory that either will or won't turn first-mover advantage into an Amazon-like dominance.

The other Uber is self-driving vehicle R&D. Not the same people, and probably not the same culture.

The non-shitty companies are dwarfed in numbers by the teeming masses of shitty companies. Uber is not special here.