lovealmond

1. If they really want to spy on customers why would they do it only for 5 mins after the trip ends? Why not do always like some of the other apps? I remember waze had it like that for a while.

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).

You are right, they have fucked up in the past. There will be some more fuck ups going forward. What i have seen is employees fiercely question each & everything in weekly town halls & there are positive steps that have been taken to make things better. I am optimistic that Uber will become much better going forward due to genuine efforts taken, question is can they do it fast enough to overcome the cultural debt they have accumulated during the hyper growth period.

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.

I would expect the same low single digit percentage for black/hispanic engineers. They measure it, we saw some broad breakdown based on gender (15.1% females in engineering, compared to FB - 16%, Google - 19%). TK said they are going to release full numbers soon.

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

I joined Uber as an engineer last year. For me the deciding factor was they have really interesting problems to work on, wonderful team, impact that i can have from my work & they move fast(minimal bureaucracy). Pay was the last thing on my mind (they pay decently). My team mates are very accommodating, they taught me lots of good stuff. Professionally this has been amazing for me. Speaking for myself, I haven't had much stress than what i had in my previous companies. For me stress used to come from bureaucracy, which TK does a good job of keeping it to minimum.

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...

I joined Uber as an engineer last year. Professionally this is the best thing to happen to me. I work with great engineers, i learnt a lot from them. There are people from diverse backgrounds, people for top CS universities to people without any formal CS education but who are 2-3x better than most engineers i have seen. That said, it is not the place for everyone, things move really really fast. Lots of engineers are from Google & FB. Some tooling is inadequate but that is normal for any young company

I like TK, he is honest & anti-burecracy (which is very important for engineers). We have weekly town hall & he answers all sort of questions from employees with honesty that i haven't seen in my previous companies. I feel Uber is going through growing pains since they grew too fast. They have hired/hiring managers from bigger companies who will help them transitioning into a mature company.