
How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained - smb06
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/how-ubers-hard-charging-corporate-culture-left-employees?utm_term=.vqV45Y6J6#.lcXVl9xpx
======
fatbird
_Uber uses an algorithm to estimate the lowest possible compensation employees
will take in order to keep labor costs down_

Of course they do.

I'd like to blame Uber. I'd like to blame Kalanick. But I keep coming back to
blaming us, the engineers, for being the willing hands that let Silicon Valley
dismantle every good thing we'd built up. We built algorithms to find out how
little we could pay ourselves. We built apps to turn employees into
contractors earning MacDonald's level wages. We routed around the government's
limitations on surveillance and record-keeping by selling ourselves open
microphones to Amazon's data centers.

It seems almost quaint, looking back on the 90s, how what we feared were
bureaucrats in government offices.

~~~
Anderkent
Why does it make a difference if it's an algorithm estimating what you're
willing to work for rather than some person in the corporation structure?

Yes, corporations will always try to figure out what's the least they could
pay you. But it's still up to you to set that number.

~~~
fatbird
You don't negotiate in a vacuum. If you participate in writing that algorithm
that exerts downward pressure on salaries generally (because it's more
efficient/effective, and it's applied at the level of a tech behemoth with a
lot of influence), you're incrementally lowering the baseline from which you
and everyone else negotiate. You're basically arming the other side of the
negotiating table--and that other side is already a multi-billion dollar
unicorn.

At some point, you'd think a basic sense of self-interest would remain. I
swear, if someone held a contest to design a better rope for hanging
engineers, we'd fall all over ourselves trying to win. If someone kickstarted
that idea, they'd need new stretch goals in an hour.

~~~
Anderkent
It might be more efficient/effective, or it might just be more predictable and
cheaper to run than person-to-person negotiations. I think I'd prefer a clear
algorithm for salaries to "what you get depends on who your lead is and how
much of an asshole you're willing to be".

------
cbanek
While Uber seems to be the current whipping boy of Silicon Valley, I wish I
could say that this article would sound different if I replaced Uber with any
other big tech company.

Getting yelled at constantly, usually with profane language? On call for weeks
at a time with no help? Put in a double bind by management? Put on an
impossible task, or a task made impossible? Stack ranked that you don't drink
enough? Staying around late trying to look productive?

I wish I could say any of those weren't ubiquitous in SV.

~~~
Apocryphon
AirBnB is probably the anti-Uber in that regard.

~~~
santaclaus
Really? I found their interview process to be downright creepy...

~~~
cbanek
Both of these comments sound interesting, and make me want to go interview
there and report back! :)

~~~
Apocryphon
They go out of their way to be the opposite of Uber, not completely
intentionally. I'm not saying it's necessarily the best thing to be.

~~~
MegaButts
Do you have any examples? I'd never heard this before.

~~~
Apocryphon
They go out of their way to interview for good culture fit, trying to preserve
a very cooperative, nice, opposite of Uber type of environment. So much so
that as others have pointed out, it seems cult-like, but in a way that is
favorable to employees, or at least engineer employees. Many other unicorns
just have the typical SV elitist cutthroat competitive environment that
existed even before Uber.

------
splitrocket
_As one former employee said, explaining why he joined the company, it seemed
like a “libertarian playground where the best would rise to the top.” But, he
said, “I quickly realized that environment also means work becomes a blood
sport.”_

A libertarian is someone who is hell bent on discovering exactly why and how
societies choose to govern themselves, the hard way.

~~~
valuearb
If you believe people are essentially predatory, government can't save you
from them, it just makes it easier to do predation on a mass scale.

~~~
piva00
The devil you know vs. the devil you don't.

------
blizkreeg
I've heard that the hard-charging culture at many investment banks and law
firms is similar. People work ultra long hours, because if you don't, there's
always someone who is willing to and ready to replace you. Associates at law
firms routinely have billables of 2000+ hours a year. Bankers are often in at
7am and leave at midnight. Long hours seem to be par for the course. So then,
why are we any different from law firms and banks like GS?

I strongly believe that this kind of toxic culture has no place in any
organization. So I'm in no way condoning the culture at Uber or similar SV
companies. I for one, never want to work at a place like that. I am curious
though, what makes us different?

------
thisrod
> In May 2015, an on-call engineer failed ... At the time, Uber had recently
> reached a valuation of $50 billion.

I find that astonishing. Outside Silicon Valley, I think that it would be
quite unusual to leave $50 billion of plant running overnight, but pinch
pennies by not paying anyone to stay up and check the oil levels during the
dog watches.

~~~
kevan
I can understand not doing butts in chairs 24/7, but I'm really surprised they
managed to make it to that scale without adding paging escalation. If someone
doesn't respond after X minutes then page their manager. Repeat until you get
to the CEO.

~~~
jfoutz
That was my initial thought as well. But, low disk space on the master DB? And
you need a human to go futz around with it? There is either a whole lot of
missing monitoring and automation, or those are completely worthless pages.

I understand the freakout, i assume it could take down the site. But, like,
not responding to a page is like the very last on the list of things to fix.
Calling in _random engineer_ is pretty much last ditch, hail mary, the world
is on fire, oh fuck we're going to go out of business disaster. At a certain
point, you kind of have to assume one possibility is your oncall person is
dead. Whatcha gonna do then?

I seriously doubt all of their careful high availability planning failed. I
would bet their paging is (hopefully was) just stupid.

~~~
oh_sigh
From the article, it's not that the engineer never responded. The engineer
acknowledged the pages but never did anything to correct the problem beyond
that. I agree with you though that a random engineer might not have the tools
and knowledge ready to fix something like that, but that is why you can let
the pages escalate until you wake someone up who does.

------
psidium
Holy crap. I've seen people getting hard looks for even suggesting the
project's team should stay after the 8 hours shift. Only once a manager asked
me to stay, very dreaded and saying he was really sorry he had to ask me that
all the time. And they paid me twice the time I've been there and my
performance review skyrocketed because I came in when I didn't need to.

But I make about 15k USD (if converting currencies) so there's that haha.

------
continuations
> But at a company with more than 15,000 people

Uber has over 15,000 employees? That seems a lot. That's almost the same
headcount as Facebook. Why does Uber have so many people?

~~~
CardenB
I would wager facebook has more employees than that, and uber likely has many
more employees that aren't software engineers than facebook to handle
operations around the world.

~~~
continuations
According to this[1] Facebook has 17,048 at Dec 2016. So it's more than what
Uber has but not by that much. Good point about the local ops people Uber
needs.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-
faceboo...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-
employees/)

------
Dowwie
Goldman Sachs was an early adopter of stack ranking. Employees gamed the
performance review process, politicking and gaming as annual reviews were to
begin -- if you give me a high rating, I'll give you one (.. or will I),
turning the office into a game of Diplomacy. Stack ranking and other human
resource strategies created an electric atmosphere of productivity but
unfortunately was accompanied by many negatives. Some elements of this story
about Uber's culture, excluding hostility towards women, seemed familiar. It
wasn't until long past the Financial Crisis that Goldman decided to reform its
ways, retiring stack ranking in 2015/2016, adopting a continuous performance
review process, and changing other managerial practice.

Emulating one leading organization's practices and expecting similar results
is a fool's errand. These tech companies are learning that the hard way, I
hope.

------
lloydde
> In college I took several business classes, and one was about Southeast
> Asian business. The professor said ... there's this spectrum of stress
> level. You want workers to be as stressed as possible, but not over the
> line...

Anyone have links/references that name and describe this business style?

------
linkregister
This seems fairly accurate based off of the accounts of friends and colleagues
who have worked at Uber.

------
peterwwillis
It's disingenuous (or misinformed) to talk about on-call engineers being
annoyed that they're always being woken up by alerts. That's the job.

A lot of companies mis-manage their ops department and flood the on-call staff
with after hours alerts because someone is not fixing the underlying issues.
This situation is not unique to Uber. (One alternative is to have a 24/7 NOC
staff to deal with recurring alerts (and resolving them using a NOC playbook)
and escalate to engineers as necessary, which they may have already been
doing)

Reporting on these specific issues in this way makes me wonder what other
examples in this article might be commonplace in many industries. There's no
easy way to know if Uber is a truly horrible place to work, or if they just
dug up every inflammatory remark they could find, and confirmation bias is
feeding what we want to be true. Although the executives (like the CTO)
definitely aren't afraid to sound like dicks.

~~~
bkor
On call doesn't mean you're working. It means you might get a call.

The people I know whom were on call weren't paid at 100% but more in the
10-30% range (on top of their normal salary). They might get a call and were
paid accordingly. If they'd get too many calls that had an obvious effect on
their performance.

I completely disagree with your statement that being "on call" means that it
is their job to "always being woken up by alerts". If you get so many alerts
the company should have someone _working_ (roster, etc), not have people on
call!

~~~
peterwwillis
We are not in disagreement... you essentially re-stated my comment. But your
experience of on-call may be different from mine. (I'm assuming you have also
been on-call for a multi-million-dollar 24/7 production service?)

------
sigsergv
I think Fincher should make a movie about Uber.

~~~
frik
The Social Network (2010) movie was superb. Yes Fincher as director and Sorkin
as screenplay writer would be phenomenal. It would take a good book about Uber
internals though. Unfortunately the former head of Sony Pictures in L.A.
screwed the dream team over the Steve Jobs movie.

------
jaclaz
I am uncertain on this.

Once said that most probably Uber and its culture are the roots of all Evil,
there is something I smell as being fishy.

If it was a case of exploitation of "humble", "normal" labour it would be a
thing.

But the exploitation of an "elite" of professionals in a "niche" field (such
as programming/software engineering), people that are - at least reportedly -
paid at a very high level and that every company is looking for (i.e. - stil
reportedly - a field where supply is not enough to fulfill demand)?

I mean, if you force a secretary or a clerk or a labourer to do more hours,
and go back to the workplace at night and on weekends they have very likely no
other choice than to comply.

I can undersatnd how people with a H-1B would have no other choice.

But a 100,000-120,000 US$/year programmer/engineer?

Does he/she have not another choice?

Cannot he/she resign and look for another job if the environment at Uber is
felt as "toxic"?

(and find such new job at the same pay level and relatively easily?)

~~~
ryan2611
Did you read the article? It says on numerous occasions that they're 'trapped'
by the lure of equity, they see this as their retirement fund.

~~~
jaclaz
Sure I did read it, but the whole point is that what they are "trapped" by is
(in your words) "lure of equity" (I would personally call that a - _slight_ \-
form of "greed", which while rhyming with "need" is not the same thing). It is
a choice, from the article:

>“It’s a money cult. People are putting up with massive amounts of abuse,
mental abuse, constant threats to fire you so you’re losing your equity,”

BTW:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even
read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions
that."

