uberemployee

What you describe was definitely not a common occurrence. Engineering wasn’t toxic for many years until the last 9-12 months or so I would say. Pre-Susan Fowler memo, it was the best company I had ever worked at. From 2017-2019 we sort of stalled because of the internal drama and it didn’t get really bad until the last 9 months, where attrition of our best engineers and vile political maneuvering from the dregs made it too much for me to stick around.

The engineer you describe sounds like they have mental health issues. There may be some teams with terrible managers but all companies have this, and I’ve seen similar or worse situations at Amazon.

Most engineers I worked with were great but there were many engineers that “played the game” in order to get a promotion and more money. It was sickening but if that’s the way the CTO sets the incentive scheme, who can blame an engineer for following it? It’s more on the CTO for setting the terrible culture than the engineers.

When I worked at Uber, this project was openly mocked. One of the CTO’s biggest failures was implementing a promotion scheme where you needed to create a new service in order to be considered “innovative”. This promotion scheme marked what I consider the end of Uber’s engineering excellence and the start of what made Uber turn into a bureaucratic mess.

One of the VP’s of engineering called it “toil vs talent”. People who “toiled” at work, meaning doing good maintenance work, would be rewarded with good bonuses but those with “talent” would be rewarded with promotions. Of course this drove people to come up with fake new services so that they could demonstrate “talent”. This also lead to an explosion of new services that overlapped or did nothing useful. Instead of working together, groups would make new services instead of working with existing service-owners because they needed to justify writing a new service. It was sickeningly transparent.

This project was one of those projects. It has no real use case because why the fuck would we want to use GPUs except to look cool on your resume. The sad thing is that the projects is overstating how well it’s being used internally. Internally people use Pinot instead of this.

For all you future CTOs, consider your incentive schemes carefully and don’t be so far removed from the action that you can’t see when your org is rotting. This is what the CTO did, and like I said, it was one of his biggest failures because it gutted the engineering org. Instead of working together, every team was looking at get promotions at the expense of the company and it showed.

The articles I’ve read state that $10B is Uber’s revenue not gross bookings.

I’m sorry you had a terrible interview experience. In 2017 we hired Gayle Laakmann McDowell (CTCI author) to train engineers on how to interview better and how to design better interview questions that weren’t biased. She held many sessions so hopefully our interviewing experience improves but it’s a skill that needs constant training.

FF is great. She is leading online courses for all Uber employees about business strategy and culture from real Harvard professors. It’s very educational for everyone.

It’s a very unique opportunity for us because she is an expert on what makes companies great. Not just culturally but business strategy too. Having her as a key member of the team is an advantage that t companies don’t have because whereas other people are figuring things out on their own, she actually studied it and taught it.

I hope she stays a long time to help mold this company into one of the greatest companies.

What do you mean by cultural excesses?

Anyone who is miserable has already left in 2017. Many long time employees are waiting for SoftBank deal to close before leaving which makes sense. They deserve to be enriched for their hard work. But they are only a couple of hundred employees at most. We have 15,000+ employees and 3,000 engineers.

I’m extremely proud of the work I’ve done at Uber. I have no worries about finding my next job. I have a laundry list of companies who have contacted me since Jan 1, 2018, including FANG.

If the company doesn’t want to hire me because of where I work, I’m happy to not work for anyone who makes snap judgements based on resume line items. That’s basically like excluding people because of the city they grew up in, the school they went to, or the football teams that they support. I’m happy never working for or alongside people like that.

Dara couldn’t be more perfect for who we need as a CEO right now and going forward. Culture is definitely shifting toward a more normal work life balance. Things were crazy for many years with how much people worked but for the most part it was out of excitement. Many, many people were overworked however and burnt out. That culture of squeezing out every ounce from everyone is gone, for the better. It’s not sustainable.

Frances Frei is a former Harvard Business School professor and arranged for several HBX classes from Harvard professors on business strategy that were very interesting and helpful. Having her as a guide as to how a great company should be behaving is a huge asset.

TK was great and built the entire industry but he overstepped his abilities and became his and Uber’s worst enemy.

I’m assuming after the SoftBank deal closes many long time employees will be gone. And why shouldn’t they, they are worth millions at this point, but only number in the hundreds. And this happens to all companies in the same situation, like google, Facebook, Dropbox, etc.

Overall the pace has slowed dramatically and has a big company feel. But the majority of people, myself included, are fiercely proud of the work that we do and the product that we have built.

The food could be better, though. Maybe after we become profitable? (This is an internal joke to all Uber employees)

Some of the assertions from the author about how things were in the past are pretty off. Office 2000 wasn't happy with 75 MHz and 32 MB ram at all. I would say the average computer at that time was at least 200MHz with 128MB of RAM.

In addition in 1995, developer "platforms" were rarely Windows-based. Borland was still hugely popular at that time, and DOS-based compilers were still big. The assertions he makes about the developer platforms are a complete joke: "Support for graphing of data, theming, 3D graphics" were completely not a thing, nor was "Sophisticated support for multi-language software components".

I'm pretty sure the author didn't develop back in 1995.

Uber was on Hipchat, briefly experimented with Slack, went back to Hipchat, and then moved to our own Inhouse chat based on open source project, starting around the beginning the year.

It was bad the first few months, but except for a recently publicized utterly embarrassing security vulnerability, in the last 2 months it's been working great. The mobile app is now much, much better than the HipChat ever was.

He wasn't opposed to taking Uber public, he wanted to delay IPO as long as possible because going public places restrictions on how the company is run. Dara said the same comment. But 18-36 months doesn't go against anything TK said.

Guys this is somewhat fake news. The question was what his thoughts were on IPO. He basically said it's up to the board, but 18 to 36 months seemed reasonable. It wasn't like he's actually planning on IPOing in 18 months, it was an off-the-cuff response and gave a ballpark figure. That's all, don't read too much into it he hasn't even officially started yet.

I worked with him. Seems like a nice guy, smart. But he's product manager, and that's it. I don't know the story as to why this was picked up but it isn't a very important story. Unless first level product managers are newsworthy now.

He isn't head of anything. He's a first level product manager that gave himself the title "Head of Developer Product". Recode wrote this last night and TechCrunch just cut and paste it. This is how fake news gets propagated.

As an Uber employee, I can say this: although the feelings on TK are mixed (some loving TK, others glad that he's gone), the feelings about Benchmark are pretty uniform. They are only out for themselves, and nothing they have done have "helped" us. They have only hurt us. This current ploy they are doing is only further hurting us. Everyone thinks this "letter" is a joke. Nothing to see here, at least from an employee perspective.