
Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit - mark-ruwt
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/ubers-self-driving-trucks-division-is-dead-long-live-uber-self-driving-cars/
======
arijun
I've always felt that self driving trucks make the most economical sense to
automate. A self driving truck would get to its destination faster (saving
money) and without the need for a driver (saving money). And the majority of
their time is spent on relatively predictable interstate roads, not the
chaotic roads of a busy downtown, so they'd be simpler to automate.

Otto (the self-driving truck company that Uber bought and is now shuttering)
was the first I'd heard of that. It's a bit sad that they're shutting down.

~~~
amarka
What do you mean by "most economical sense to automate"? It seems like
everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck =
5-6 cars), the insurance and maintenance on the truck and hardware, the
potential for catastrophic failure (1 runaway car doing 70 = bad, 1 runaway
truck doing 70 = REALLY bad), the extra complexity of pulling a trailer and
monitoring the trailer as well as the truck, monitoring the size and type of
load of the truck and modifying the driving characteristics to match the load,
the extra regulations that trucks are subject to (what roads they can be on,
what loads they could cary on certain roads, what time of day they can drive
on said roads, when they can or can't use engine braking).

Edit: even on 'simple' point A to point B route that involve 99% highway, what
happens when a small part of the highway shuts down for whatever reason
(flooding, multi-lan accident, fire, etc) and all traffic is routed on smaller
adjacent streets, or forced to share a lane with oncoming traffic. Automating
a truck is as hard or harder than automating a car, since you're dealing with
the same external variables but have more internal/attached moving parts.

~~~
jonreem
Trucks often drive mostly or only on major thoroughfares and often on
extremely long and tedious routes. A self driving truck that could drive 50
hour stretches without getting tired or making mistakes would be a huge
improvement in efficiency.

~~~
bunderbunder
I could see there being a nice "hybrid" avenue, too: Have a human driver in
the truck for managing all street level driving, overseeing loading/unloading,
refueling, etc. And then let them take a break, or work on their side hustle
or master's degree or whatever, while the truck is on the highway. And either
pull off the highway or have the human take over if conditions aren't
favorable.

Self-driving taxis, OTOH, feel like they've got a much longer way to go before
they can generate any real profit.

~~~
noodle
AFAIK this is the accepted path forward (minus the side hustle aspect).
Automate that which is easier to automate: the long distance highway driving.
For the first/last mile, let a human do the work.

~~~
colechristensen
I think what is going to happen is people are going to realize robot cars are
death traps. Not because their rate of accidents will be any higher, but that
when they do have accidents they will seem bizarre and inhuman mistakes that
even the most incompetent human driver would never make.

Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend
intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and
terrain. Before that happens (which is basically skynet, and a very very long
time away) all you have is a bag of tricks cobbled together. Those tricks will
miss things and get confused and make mistakes. Maybe not very often but
definitely in strange ways that are frightening.

The unknown is scary. Drunk drivers, tired drivers, old drivers, et al. are
plenty dangerous, but they still behave in ways that can be understood. AI
mistakes will be / are / have been strange unsettling things that can't be
reasoned about if you're a person in the area of the misbehaving vehicle.

~~~
philwelch
> Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend
> intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and
> terrain.

People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better
than people.

In my college town, some pedestrians got ran over by a driver who later pled
insanity due to "caffeine-induced psychosis". I think you're seriously
overrating the predictability of human failure modes.

~~~
rayiner
> People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do
> better than people

Even if that’s true (and I doubt it is), there is ample precedent (AI winter)
for the industry dramatically overestimating what computers can do.

I bet if you time traveled and showed Siri/Cortana to an AI researcher from
1960 they’d be incredibly disappointed.

~~~
ghaff
Not sure why people are disagreeing. That seems a blindingly obvious comment.
There's so much today that would seem almost like magic to pretty much
everyone living in 1960. But coice assistants? (And even just voice
recognition.) almost certainly seemed like relatively "easy" problems. Perhaps
less so to AI researchers than the general public but still.

~~~
rayiner
I don't know about "magic." A modern smart phone might be "magic" to someone
in 1860--it operates based on technologies that didn't exist back then. But by
1960, the building blocks of modern computing were already in place: digital
von Neumann computers built out of transistors, radio communications, signal
processing, etc. AT&T used frequency-division multiplexing of multiple voice
channels in phone transmissions in _1918._ The mathematical framework for
modern technologies like LTE was in place by the 1950s and 1960s. Would it
really have surprised anyone that transistors would continue to get smaller
and faster, allowing higher complexity, higher-throughput signal processing,
which would allow Facebook?

~~~
Retric
I remember reading a dreamed up device that would hopefully show up some day
written about in 1960.

Weight ~1 ton, cost ~1 million dollars inflation adjusted, non toxic, delivery
date ~1990. What did they want? A 1 GB random access HDD.

A 32 gigabyte micro SD card for 10$ would have blown their mind let alone a
smartphone.

~~~
rayiner
They were off on size/weight, but they guessed the capacity just about right
(IBM 0681). I don't think extrapolating out pre-existing trends, for
sophisticated people, be "mind blowing." Would your mind be "blown" if you
learned that by 2048 you'd have a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-
resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully
developed physics)? Seems like hyperbole (and setting a low bar for peoples'
imagination).

Reading stuff written in the 1960s about what today would be like, what
strikes me is that technology is so incredibly _not_ mind blowing compared to
what we had back then. _Even_ in the area of computers. Hell, we haven't even
come up with an input device that beats keyboards, which were invented in the
_19th century_ (electro-mechanical keyboards, not typewriters).

~~~
Retric
They where vastly off in terms of size, weight, transfer speed, latency, and
cost. In 1990 you could get a cheap RAID array so pick do you want 100x that
capacity for far less than that price and weight.

~~~
tigershark
No way that you could get a _cheap_ raid array with 1GB capacity in 1990. My
pc had probably a 40MB HDD at the time.

~~~
Retric
Cheap in terms of multi million dollar hardware budgets.

1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a
refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.

That’s ~1/10the the cost and 1/4 the weight they where looking for. You really
could do vastly better in 1990. For ~2,300$ you could get a 700 MB HDD buy 3
and your talking 1.4 GB with redundancy for ~1% of his budget.

PS: If I extrapolate current trends and say we might get a self driving 400 HP
Honda Civic in 2050. Then someone says sort of a Tito costs 3,000$ has 50,000
HP but nobody drives that under powered piece of crap. It would be a shift in
how you think about things.

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valuearb
The new CEO continues to impress. When he took over, Kalanick had Uber in
something like a hundred side-businesses, a massive waste of focus, effort,
brand and capital. This isn't the first or will be the last black hole side
venture Dara is getting Uber out of. And he's already established his 100x
better at PR and building/protecting the brand than Travis was.

Uber never needed to be in the automated trucks business, there are zero
synergies with their core business, and it's not even clear that will ever be
a good business to be in. Is Uber Eats next on the chopping block? That would
probably be my choice.

~~~
swozey
> Is Uber Eats next on the chopping block? That would probably be my choice.

Are you saying this because you don't use Uber Eats and don't see a value for
it? I and people I know in my city heavily use Uber Eats and it provides Uber
drivers who are already on the road (here in over abundance to the point that
they're barely making any money) additional income.

~~~
sincerely
I don't think Uber Eats has any specific pros over the million other food
delivery startups

~~~
wskinner
It does on the supply side. It keeps drivers on the Uber network, which is
good for both the rides business and the Eats business due to more consistent
supply, and good for drivers due to higher total volume of work.

The eventual result is that Uber can operate more efficiently than competitors
that only do rides or food, allowing them to compete better in both markets.

(I used to work at Uber)

~~~
clairity
exactly.

ubereats is a flanking product, meant to protect the core business.
strategically, uber really only has market power on the supply side, and
ubereats is primarily about protecting that advantage and less about being a
standalone business (although i'm sure they'd be thrilled if it succeeded as a
standalone business).

i'd be surprised if ubereats went away any time soon. at least, not without
something else replacing it.

~~~
slivym
In European markets there is literally no overlap between Uber Eats and Uber.
Uber drivers are driving Toyotas, Uber eats drivers are riding mopeds and
bicycles. You can't just switch from one to the other.

~~~
flak48
Same in Asia

------
ergothus
I'm generally pro-self-driving vehicles, and while I don't want to
underestimate the difficulties, given how far related tech has gone in recent
years I think it'd be a mistake to assume any of this is "never" going to
happen.

Despite this, I've been very nervously watching how truck driving and self-
driving interact. I feel like city-to-city long haul driving will have a very
rapid turnover once a certain tech threshold is hit. That threshold might be 5
years out or 20 years out or even further, but once it is reached a lot of
jobs cease to be as profitable very quickly.

Trucking is a major source of strong employment for those without a college
degree. It is a significant source of employment all across the US, and there
are related effects - entire small towns and certainly many small businesses
rely on the income from truckers. (Everything here is about the US because I
know too little about non-US to have even these vague reactions)

Miners have become a synonym for workers displaced by technology - yet mining
was always 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than modern trucking and took
multiple generations to decline. Trucking could lose a big chunk of the
industry in the course of a decade or less, to the tune of a million drivers
or more. Having a million or more drivers that are suddenly unemployed or
under employed would have a huge impact on the economy and public faith in the
economy. Having this occur is predictable even if we can't predict when. Yet
how many have given serious discussion on how to handle the reaction once this
starts coming to pass?

Could be confirmation bias on my part, but I see cases like this - where the
effort proved to be more complicated than expected - to falsely create the
narrative that this is not a real problem to consider, which just makes the
eventual impact worse.

EDIT: Please stop thinking I want to "protect" trucking or "stop" self-driving
technology. I want neither - I just want us (society) to take advantage of the
time when we know a change is coming but isn't here yet rather than deny it as
"not yet real" and then wring our hands in despair over the consequences once
it IS real.

~~~
Kalium
You're absolutely right! Trucking is a _major_ sector of employment.

It's also a major source of life-shortening occupational health problems. The
life expectancy of a trucker is _16 years_ shorter than the norm. Why are you
so eager to protect jobs that are measurably killing the people who work them?
Do you value these jobs so much that you're willing to pay for them in human
lives?

For my own part, I'd rather have a million former truckers who need retraining
and new skillsets than a million dead truckers. But that's me, and I'm known
to be weird.

~~~
SolarNet
Great redirect, but you failed to answer the actual question. But first a
rebuttable.

First of all the life expectancy between college education and highschool
education is 12 years. So that's only a 4 year shorter gap. (Perhaps universal
medical care would fix this problem)

Second, do you seriously think the US has the capacity to handle 2 million
unemployed truck drivers in the course of a couple years? That's a 10%
increase overnight, and I have news for you, schools are already overburdened.
(Perhaps free college education would provide the money to improve capacity,
and fix two problems with one stone)

Third, the real problem is the jobs. What job are they going to do once they
get their degree. Millennials are already one of the most highly trained yes
underpaid generations yet, and they have the advantage of youth. The jobs
aren't coming back from these sorts of events. (Perhaps a universal basic
income would fix this problem)

And finally the real question was: What are we going to do about it. It was a
request to have a conversation about the solution. Not to stop it from
happening. I've provided my solutions, in the spirit of _conversation_ I would
be curious to see what you identify as problems, and your proposed solutions.

~~~
CydeWeys
Comparing college vs high school graduate life expectancies isn't valid
because truckers aren't a subset of one or the other; they have a good
proportion from both groups. Taking off 12 years is the maximum effect
assuming there isn't a single trucker that has a college degree, which of
course isn't true.

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fmpwizard
I think the sad result of this story is that they are going to keep going with
the self-driving car technology. During the investigation into the fatal crash
accident they had, they showed how reckless they are. It would be great if
they learned anything from the death of that person and rethink QA and
decisions, but I doubt it. Time will tell.

~~~
TillE
I really thought they'd pull out of self-driving tech after that. It's insane
that they're right back on the roads a few months later. There's no way that's
enough time to be sure your broken software isn't going to kill again.

~~~
ghostly_s
It certainly isn't responsible. But it's their only moonshot route to
profitability, so innocent lives be damned.

~~~
charmides
Did you know that 1.3 MILLION people die in car accidents on a yearly basis?
There are extremely good reasons to believe that a mature, self-driving car
industry will lower that figure by orders of magnitude.

It is a shame that there have been a few accidents now that the technology is
in its infancy, but it is very short-sighted to wish that Uber halts its
experiments and delays the technology from taking off.

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iampims
It’s kind of surprising, I always imagined self driving trucks to be a more
profitable business and “easier” challenge.

~~~
rtkwe
If you limit the trucks to only highway driving and design depots for them
they might be easier but I think once you start trying to drive them on
smaller roads there's a lot of issues that crop up. First and foremost is that
there's a lot more vehicle to keep modeled and the dynamics of how to drive
the cab to safely maneuver the trailer might require a way better model of the
environment and the position of the trailer.

~~~
josh2600
Why wouldn't Uber just do long haul to a distribution point near a city and
hire drivers for the last mile?

~~~
Untit1ed
Thing is this puts it in a narrow band of competitiveness between human-driven
trucks (less capital-intensive, more expensive over time) and trains or sea
ports (more capital-intensive but still cheaper than automated trucks). A lot
of bigger cities where it makes economic sense to have this kind of hub-and-
spoke model will already have trains and ports too, so it's a bit dicey.

~~~
konschubert
What you can do, is to have the driver sleep in the cabin during the long leg
of the journey and then drive just between highway and hub.

This means that instead of two drivers, you're not just paying two.

~~~
rtkwe
Doing that would require 100% autonomous and the legal allowances across the
whole nation. There's also some very specific rule around what counts as rest
for drivers and I'm not sure that would qualify as rest under the current
rules.

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tsycho
Meanwhile, Waymo is expanding into self-driving trucks, saw them on 101.

------
newnewpdro
Having experienced a winter car accident on a highway involving a semi truck
where the truck wasn't damaged but my car was totaled, I am extremely grateful
the truck stopped and its driver allowed me to wait in the heated cab while
waiting for police to arrive.

The idea of all these massive trucks autonomously operating on our highways
strikes me as a very dystopian future. I appreciate the humans in the machines
accompanying me on cross-country road trips. Without the truckers, much of
these vast spaces will become far more desolate and dangerous to travel
through.

I'm fine with technology assisting truckers, but am hopeful there will
continue to be a requirement of people being present with ultimate authority
over the vehicle.

~~~
cdolan
Great point. Out of curiosity, what happened in the accident that the driver
was comfortable inviting you into his car? In many environments/scenarios that
would seem risky, particularly after a traumatic event like a car accident.

~~~
newnewpdro
He had almost crashed into me by suddenly changing into my lane on a snow-
covered highway.

I braked to avoid the collision, he swerved back into his lane having seen me
brake, but my car rotated from the too-agressive braking. I was able to
prevent a spin, instead limiting it to some highway-speed unpleasant
fishtailing, but the whole ordeal had brought my car awfully near his trailer
which was now next to my car again due to his decelerating.

There was a lot of snow/slush accumulated between the lanes, and this kept
pulling the right side of my car closer to his trailer, regardless of what I
did, before the tires of his trailer struck the rear corner my car, violently
forcing my car under the trailer, shattering the driver and passenger windows
from the compression. At that point it was pure chaos from above and the
steering wheel was ripped from my hands by a frontal impact with the landing
gear.

Somehow after what seemed like an eternity my car broke free from captivity
under the trailer and shot out the side and off the highway, through the air,
before landing on an embankment and sledding down to a frozen water retention
pond where it circled a few times before coming to a stop in complete silence.

I can't speak to what was going through the trucker's mind when I knocked on
his passenger window and told him I was the luckiest person on the planet, and
asked if I could wait in his cabin until the police arrived. My car was not
even visible from the highway. He claimed to have no idea what happened, just
that he saw my headlights disappear after he swerved. He had no idea my car
had been under his trailer. Typing this story has been surprisingly emotional.

~~~
a3n
I'm a truck driver, and I was a little sickened reading it. Still am.

Back in driving school one of the other students was out on the road with an
instructor and two other students in the back. A driver was texting, and ran
into the back bumper of the trailer (the iron work below the back door),
embedding the car by the engine under the bumper. The car was dragged from
that point until the truck stopped.

The story the student and instructor told literally involved the phrase "...
did you feel something?"

------
oblib
I think to do this right (safely) we need to start looking at how to integrate
roads with self driving cars and trucks and at vehicle to vehicle
communication.

At some point there needs to be standards set for these kinds of things and,
really, the sooner the better.

I think we, as consumers, would be better served with a vehicle that could
safely drive down the highway for long distances right now than a car that can
drive us to work and back on city streets 10 years from now.

And if we integrate roadway to vehicle communication from the highways outward
the transition will be more efficient, especially for trucks.

~~~
kahnjw
I agree road and vehicle to vehicle comm is important, but the work being done
now by these companies is comparatively much more important. If there is an
implementation bug on either side of one of these integrations or if the
communication medium is bogged down, then what?

These systems must be able to handle diverse and unpredictable situations
without being able to communicate directly with other agents in the
environment, and must be able to act safely relying solely on their own
percepts.

------
WisNorCan
The only thing that made less sense than Uber focusing on trucks (Uber
Freight, AV Trucks) is Uber Elevate (flying cars). The days of Uber testing
crazy, new ideas is over.

The downside is that some of them actually worked. I can't see Dara ever green
lighting Eats, which is now a great business. Note that Dara & Expedia
completely missed the AirBnB phenomenon and had to play catch up many years
later.

~~~
jy1
Eats is the biggest success for uber besides ridesharing. It's got huge
potential.

~~~
dragonwriter
The market Eats is in has huge potential, but Uber had lots of competition in
that market and no moat.

------
dontreact
Could it be that losing the self driving car market to Waymo is more of an
existential threat than not being first in the trucking business?

~~~
amarka
That's a really good point. I also wonder if the cyclist accident changed the
mood and/or culture at Uber when it comes to autonomous vehicles. I have to be
honest that it would absolutely gut me inside to know that my software caused
a death.

~~~
cdolan
I understand your point but the software didn’t exclusively cause the death.

The software was known to be unreliable. In that way it did contribute to the
person’s death. But so did the driver tasked with correcting the vehicle (who
was watching Hulu), the technicians who disabled emergency brakes, and the
company culture/management that thought this was safe in the first place.

On a side note, my iPhone X knows when I’m looking at the camera to use
FaceID. If I look away, am asleep, or otherwise occupied, it won’t open the
phone. I’m not sure why Uber doesn’t use similar technology, in conjunction
with steering wheel sensors to identify hands on the wheel, to force operators
to stay alert. This seems particularly important if the software is
unreliable.

~~~
bjl
If the software was known to be unreliable, then it shouldn't have been on the
road. Everyone at Uber who worked on that project shares the blame.

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bitL
Hmm, so the only self-driving part of Uber that was working gets shut down and
put under dysfunctional part. I love corporate politics...

------
mlacks
I suddenly have the urge to research "Why was an interstate system built vice
an interconnected railway system?" I'm guessing that the auto industry lobby
team was stronger than the rail lobbyists, even though at this point it seems
like the rail was the better choice economically.

~~~
bsilvereagle
One of Eisenhower's goals for the Interstate system was building emergency
takeoff/landing strips for aircraft.

------
macrael
Is this in any way related to the Levandowski lawsuit? The thesis of that suit
was that Uber only bought Otto to get a hold of Levandowski and his Google
knowledge...

------
edshiro
Since autonomous driving technology is not there yet, I believe truck OEMs
should focus on ADAS to enable lane keeping and lane change on highways only,
as this is the easiest part of the job. Drivers would be require to intervene
as soon as the truck exits the highway.

I presume this is what Tesla will do with their trucks although I am very
concerned by their very dubious marketing when it comes to autonomous driving
technology.

------
pcarolan
It seems like a smart transition technology would be truck driving roads.
Basically install sensors on major freeways for longhaul routes which allows
the road to take the wheel. You could have on/off ramps for this so people
could take over the last mile.

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mlang23
I wonder how long it will take until public press will admit that the
autonomous driving hype was just that, a hype to generate investor money. We
aren't there yet, it was obvious already a few years ago when google and tesla
began to push the media.

~~~
foota
From what I've heard in the news, waymo seems to be fairly far along.

------
TaylorAlexander
Waymo is developing a self driving truck. With Uber out of the game, there’s
more upside for Waymo.

------
sjroot
This is surprising to me as well. I have seen first-hand how tedious it can be
to find reliable truck drivers, particularly in the Midwest. I am eager to see
how this industry shifts in the next couple decades.

------
1k
Article didn’t actually say why they’re shutting it down. Is the tech not
feasible?

With the Otto lawsuit settled and Levandowski gone it should have cleared the
way. Focusing instead on self driving cars doesn’t make sense.

~~~
a3n
> Article didn’t actually say why they’re shutting it down.

It did. They want to consolidate limited development resources, and flesh out
the tech in the easier car segment before then applying it to the superset
truck segment.

------
mymythisisthis
Instead of fully automatic it would be good if they could be remotely operated
for a short period of time, this would give the driver a chance to check
their; phone, paper work, pee in a bottle.

------
yani
I think they should focus on just one segment at a time and this is a good
decision by them. They have the market to put self driving car in use but they
cannot do the same for trucks.

------
aardvark291
Does this mean Otto is being shut down?

------
amarant
so all of that Levandowski kerfuffle was for nothing? dear me, what a waste!

------
h4b4n3r0
How about we start with self-driving _trains_ that don't fly off the rails
when some train engineer ignores the speed limit, and don't run into each
other due to mis-routing. That'd be a good start for this whole "self driving"
thing.

------
ebikelaw
Soon to be followed by: Uber shuts down, full stop. Sure, Softbank shoveled
another shipload of money into the gaping maw of this capital furnace, but
they're still burning it. Now, in addition to a tragically bad main business,
they also don't have the fairy tale about how autonomous vehicles will
eventually make them win.

~~~
valuearb
Nope, this is actually a sign of Uber finally having adult leadership. Dara
Khosrowshahi has only been there 9 months but he's doing an outstanding job,
getting Uber's priorities straight and refocusing the company.

And their core business is a fantastic business. Bookings is still growing
faster than 50% annually. It cut it's burn rate to $300M last quarter, despite
the bleeding at dozens and dozens side projects like Trucks, Eats, etc, and
still has $6B in the bank. Dana is getting them laser focused on their core
business again, and they'll be profitable before you know it.

~~~
UberThrowaway13
Are you at Uber? Speaking as someone who is at Uber, I wouldn't say this is
the case at all. Dara's successes have largely been on the PR front (huge
successes), some good partnerships and an exit in SENA which was probably the
right move given circumstances but shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Things he hasn't done: 1) Kept Uber moving faster than competitors 2) Hired
necessary leadership (CFO, CMO, CPO [he tried but the guy he hired originally
was a total fraud. Huge swing and miss], etc.) 3) Driven focus on anything
other than loyalty which is itself shaping up poorly 4) Gained back market
share 5) Kept the best leaders. Losing Aaron Schildkrout alone was a massive
loss, but there's been PLENTY of other leaders taking their sabbaticals and
then quitting

Turning to Eats, if we got rid of that (no way we would) we would lose the
most dynamic and fast moving part of our business. It's the only place that
still has the talent and structure of Uber 1.0 but without the awful cultural
problems.

~~~
valuearb
I might be wrong on Eats, but I'm not wrong on the rest of the side
businesses.

And Dara has gotten the most important things right in the few months he's
been there. You don't have choices in keeping foreign subsidiaries if your
predecessor put the business on the route to bankruptcy, you shed what you
have to shed before your cash on hand gets so low you lose all leverage in
keeping the business financed.

And if Aaron Schildkrout was so great, why was he working for Travis Kalanick,
Stockholm syndrome? Why would you work for someone who constantly tarnished
the company brand you needed in order to succeed in your job? It really sounds
like Uber needs a complete house cleaning of it's entire upper ranks. You can
play the "I was just following orders" card, but it also disqualifies you from
being a true leader.

