throwaway_uber

Yes and no. There are multiple offices in the Bay Area including three in engineering offices in San Francisco. Most offices/floors have a lot more space and good working conditions. However where that photo was taken, conditions are probably the tightest of all because it's the headquarters location on one of the two main floors. These two floors are where engineers need the greatest contact with other non-technical teams. It goes through periods of being cramped due to business growth and as the company acquires more office space, conditions get better again. This is not uncommon at any company in San Francisco when you've grown headcount and are waiting for more office space to decompress. I've seen similar conditions when visiting friends at other companies experiencing high growth.

I work on one of these two floors, and have worked at all three SF engineering offices on three different teams since joining 3 years ago. I would say those are not typical conditions for most engineering teams, but are more common if you work on a team that needs to be close to the non-technical areas in the company.

That all said, you can work wherever you want. Sometimes I work at my desk with headphones and sometimes I find a quiet place on that floor or one of the other floors. There are no lack of quiet spaces. It's also easy to work from home one to two days a week if you want. My team has our own no meetings day and some team members work from home that day (but typically do so to save themselves the commute).

I won't go into any details on what I work to maintain my anonymity but I have no problem getting serious work done and I work on one of the largest scale and most critical pieces of infrastructure.