6 ms·

On a related note about candidates not understanding offers, has Uber stopped the practice of calling candidates in the morning, making them an offer, and deman

On a related note about candidates not understanding offers, has Uber stopped the practice of calling candidates in the morning, making them an offer, and demanding that they accept or decline by the end of the day? I doubt it was helping candidates understand their compensation package. I worked at a competing company a few years ago and we had to deal with this with many candidates we were recruiting.

ndirish1842 10y ago
FWIW, I've had a few friends receive entry level offers (as software engineers) recently and they all had no deadline to accept
- aisofteng 10y ago
  Entry level engineers are generally easily replaceable.
- Merad 10y ago
  Entry level offers made to students are really an entirely different ballgame. They're usually made months in advance of the expected start date, often as far out as 8-10 months.
  - ndirish1842 10y ago
    hence the FWIW ;)
- ndirish1842 10y ago
  *EDIT: To be clear offers from Uber
pdxandi 10y ago
This happened to me a few months ago at a different company and I was shocked by how unprofessional I thought that approach was. I ended up declining the offer because I thought that kind of pressure to commit was an indicator of how poorly the company may be run. It was for a senior level position and I had been at the same firm for nearly five years and it just seemed unnecessarily aggressive.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  It's not really an indicator of how well or poorly it's run, but it definitely is an indicator of the culture there (had a 48 hour exploding offer before, and the C brass culture was quite toxic).
  - davedx 10y ago
    You don't think toxic culture leads to a poorly run company? I guess Amazon is a good example of that...
    - danpalmer 10y ago
      I think it depends on how the culture is toxic. Amazon's culture seems to be "toxic" in a very specific way: that it selects for a very particular kind of person, with particular kinds of motivations - those who don't align with that are unhappy and leave quickly, those that are stay and perform very well. I think there are ways Amazon could improve its culture, but apart from widening the potential pool of effective hires, I'm not sure it would benefit the company a huge amount. However I think Amazon is the exception to the rule, and in general I think toxic cultures are a significant hindrance to most companies.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  I don't like this practice at all, just to be clear, but let me play devil's advocate for a second: Let's say that a company is trying to hire for "a senior level position", as you put it. Let's also take it as an assumption that senior level positions are relatively unique, carry responsibility within the company, and are not a homogeneous fungible engineering role. In other words, you can't hire two people for one senior level position and squeeze them both in somewhere. The company doesn't just interview one candidate at a time, much as a candidate doesn't interview only one company. If there are two candidates in the pipeline and the company likes both of them, it would be unethical to give both candidates an offer at the same time (since the company can only hire one person, it would need to rescind the offer from one of those two people if they both accepted). So, the company might tell the candidate they like most: "We really like you for this position. We'll give you 24 hours to decide, and hold the position until then. After that, since we can't hold up our recruiting pipeline indefinitely while you decide, the offer may expire." If you are a candidate, getting an offer a day or two later than you're expecting could seem like a big delay, after all. I assume that this is not what you were told, or how it was messaged, but how would you feel about a situation like that? How would you want it to be messaged? If multiple people are competing for one position, you can only have one outstanding offer at a time, which means it needs to have a reasonable time expiration so that the next-best candidate gets a chance to consider it. Alternatively, I suppose you could say, "We're giving both you and someone else an offer simultaneously. First person to accept gets it." But that seems equally bad (especially since the candidate has no way to know whether it's even true). It seems like the higher level a position you're interviewing for, and the more unique, the shorter a time window the company can have to leave the offer open. When someone is given the offer to be the CEO of a large company, do they get more than a day to decide? Granted, none of this reasoning should apply to typical engineering positions that people regularly encounter, for companies that want to hire as many people as they can, and I am not trying to excuse pointless exploding offers.
user5994461 10y ago
These things get easier when you don't read your emails every day. You just check your email and then you discover the stupid offer is already gone. You can skip straight to the "acceptance" phase and the "god. they are really dumb".
DINKDINK 10y ago
If they're going to be that aggressive/shortsighted with negotiating, why not -- at least counter -- accept the offer Then, get competing offers and if Uber loses, quit. If their compensation is substantially off, they deserve the employee churn.
paulddraper 10y ago
This practice is so weird. If I was a good hire yesterday, am I a good hire today? I like to ignore offer deadlines. I just don't understand them.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Reminds me of my second job. I have a firm rule of answering phone calls only when I feel like doing so. I didn't feel like answering the call about the job offer over the weekend :). Still got the job.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    The funny thing is, in general people tend to respond positively to you not being available every second of the day. Sometimes it backfires, but most of the time setting limits tends to 1) make you look busier, 2) signaling that your time is valuable to you. Both tends to make people think you're more important and worth more, not usually make them strike you off their list and move on to the next person. The exception would be really low level positions where they see people as interchangeable, but even then in most cases people have already mentally chosen you when they call, and not being available makes you more desirable, not less, so for them to move on they need to have cared very little to begin with. ... which is another reason to not be instantly available - I for one don't want to work for people who see little enough value in me to be prepared to drop me if I don't answer the phone 24/7 unless I've been contracted specifically to be available at any time (and you better believe they'll pay through the nose for that). A lot of younger employees could do with learning to set boundaries, be unavailable and say "no", and experience how that can often get them a lot more respect and better job conditions.
  - derwiki 10y ago
    Out of curiosity, what is your second job? Software or something else?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I meant the second (software) job I took in my life. Not second in parallel to some other.
mahyarm 10y ago
Just ignore it, it's shitty recruiter tricks. It might even be an individual recruiter and not SOP. I've never heard of this before from uber or on their glassdoor when I looked a while back.
employee8000 10y ago
I was given an offer with non-aggressive deadline of 2 weeks. In terms of the equity portion, they were pretty straightforward with me and I had no surprises with my equity portion. In addition, none of my coworkers have complained about their packages either. I don't know this employee but he certainly doesn't speak for the vast majority of us. That said I don't know what recruiters are doing these days. My boss would never let our recruiter pull shit like that, but I can't speak for other teams.
- kevinburke 10y ago
  (Assuming you work at Uber - Thanks, this is good to know.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mavelikara 10y ago
  Thanks! What is the general sentiment about (1) the refusal to allow secondary sales and (2) 30 day exercise window among your colleagues?
  - employee8000 10y ago
    1) none of my coworkers care. I'm sure very early employees may care but I don't know any and I can't speak for them. 2) most have RSUs. But if you're going to exercise in 90 days then you're going to exercise in 30 days so it doesn't even matter.
    - mavelikara 10y ago
      Thanks! > none of my coworkers care. I'm sure very early employees may care but I don't know any and I can't speak for them Interesting that your colleagues and you don't seem to care that the management had instituted policies that hurt the very engineers who first built up the company. I would be very wary of such a management that it would some day turn against me too.
wwalser 10y ago
I had an offer from Uber and was given sufficient time to decide and turn them down. I had a whole host of reasons for turning them down many of which felt dirty/scammy/untrustworthy and nothing about this story surprises me but I didn't have the specific experience that you've described.
usrusr 10y ago
> the practice of calling candidates in the morning, making them an offer, and demanding that they accept or decline by the end of the day? Sounds like an effective filter to have applicants self-select for the combination of never questioning higher-ups and low diligence fast decisionmaking. Brilliant in the same way as bad grammar in "Nigerian prince" mails.
tlogan 10y ago
This is just negotiation trick. In general, they might simply be interested in knowing if you are genuinely excited about the job or not. In these cases you should just say "yes - I accept. Please send me paperwork for my lawyer to review and sign". Then the real negotiations starts :-) There is one book (forgot the name) which explains that tactic and how to respond to it.

ndirish1842 10y ago

FWIW, I've had a few friends receive entry level offers (as software engineers) recently and they all had no deadline to accept

aisofteng 10y ago
Entry level engineers are generally easily replaceable.
Merad 10y ago
Entry level offers made to students are really an entirely different ballgame. They're usually made months in advance of the expected start date, often as far out as 8-10 months.
- ndirish1842 10y ago
  hence the FWIW ;)
ndirish1842 10y ago
*EDIT: To be clear offers from Uber

pdxandi 10y ago

This happened to me a few months ago at a different company and I was shocked by how unprofessional I thought that approach was. I ended up declining the offer because I thought that kind of pressure to commit was an indicator of how poorly the company may be run. It was for a senior level position and I had been at the same firm for nearly five years and it just seemed unnecessarily aggressive.

hkmurakami 10y ago
It's not really an indicator of how well or poorly it's run, but it definitely is an indicator of the culture there (had a 48 hour exploding offer before, and the C brass culture was quite toxic).
- davedx 10y ago
  You don't think toxic culture leads to a poorly run company? I guess Amazon is a good example of that...
  - danpalmer 10y ago
    I think it depends on how the culture is toxic. Amazon's culture seems to be "toxic" in a very specific way: that it selects for a very particular kind of person, with particular kinds of motivations - those who don't align with that are unhappy and leave quickly, those that are stay and perform very well. I think there are ways Amazon could improve its culture, but apart from widening the potential pool of effective hires, I'm not sure it would benefit the company a huge amount. However I think Amazon is the exception to the rule, and in general I think toxic cultures are a significant hindrance to most companies.
Pyxl101 10y ago
I don't like this practice at all, just to be clear, but let me play devil's advocate for a second: Let's say that a company is trying to hire for "a senior level position", as you put it. Let's also take it as an assumption that senior level positions are relatively unique, carry responsibility within the company, and are not a homogeneous fungible engineering role. In other words, you can't hire two people for one senior level position and squeeze them both in somewhere. The company doesn't just interview one candidate at a time, much as a candidate doesn't interview only one company. If there are two candidates in the pipeline and the company likes both of them, it would be unethical to give both candidates an offer at the same time (since the company can only hire one person, it would need to rescind the offer from one of those two people if they both accepted). So, the company might tell the candidate they like most: "We really like you for this position. We'll give you 24 hours to decide, and hold the position until then. After that, since we can't hold up our recruiting pipeline indefinitely while you decide, the offer may expire." If you are a candidate, getting an offer a day or two later than you're expecting could seem like a big delay, after all. I assume that this is not what you were told, or how it was messaged, but how would you feel about a situation like that? How would you want it to be messaged? If multiple people are competing for one position, you can only have one outstanding offer at a time, which means it needs to have a reasonable time expiration so that the next-best candidate gets a chance to consider it. Alternatively, I suppose you could say, "We're giving both you and someone else an offer simultaneously. First person to accept gets it." But that seems equally bad (especially since the candidate has no way to know whether it's even true). It seems like the higher level a position you're interviewing for, and the more unique, the shorter a time window the company can have to leave the offer open. When someone is given the offer to be the CEO of a large company, do they get more than a day to decide? Granted, none of this reasoning should apply to typical engineering positions that people regularly encounter, for companies that want to hire as many people as they can, and I am not trying to excuse pointless exploding offers.

user5994461 10y ago

These things get easier when you don't read your emails every day. You just check your email and then you discover the stupid offer is already gone. You can skip straight to the "acceptance" phase and the "god. they are really dumb".

DINKDINK 10y ago

If they're going to be that aggressive/shortsighted with negotiating, why not -- at least counter -- accept the offer Then, get competing offers and if Uber loses, quit. If their compensation is substantially off, they deserve the employee churn.

paulddraper 10y ago

This practice is so weird. If I was a good hire yesterday, am I a good hire today? I like to ignore offer deadlines. I just don't understand them.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Reminds me of my second job. I have a firm rule of answering phone calls only when I feel like doing so. I didn't feel like answering the call about the job offer over the weekend :). Still got the job.
- vidarh 10y ago
  The funny thing is, in general people tend to respond positively to you not being available every second of the day. Sometimes it backfires, but most of the time setting limits tends to 1) make you look busier, 2) signaling that your time is valuable to you. Both tends to make people think you're more important and worth more, not usually make them strike you off their list and move on to the next person. The exception would be really low level positions where they see people as interchangeable, but even then in most cases people have already mentally chosen you when they call, and not being available makes you more desirable, not less, so for them to move on they need to have cared very little to begin with. ... which is another reason to not be instantly available - I for one don't want to work for people who see little enough value in me to be prepared to drop me if I don't answer the phone 24/7 unless I've been contracted specifically to be available at any time (and you better believe they'll pay through the nose for that). A lot of younger employees could do with learning to set boundaries, be unavailable and say "no", and experience how that can often get them a lot more respect and better job conditions.
- derwiki 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what is your second job? Software or something else?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I meant the second (software) job I took in my life. Not second in parallel to some other.

mahyarm 10y ago

Just ignore it, it's shitty recruiter tricks. It might even be an individual recruiter and not SOP. I've never heard of this before from uber or on their glassdoor when I looked a while back.

employee8000 10y ago

I was given an offer with non-aggressive deadline of 2 weeks. In terms of the equity portion, they were pretty straightforward with me and I had no surprises with my equity portion. In addition, none of my coworkers have complained about their packages either. I don't know this employee but he certainly doesn't speak for the vast majority of us. That said I don't know what recruiters are doing these days. My boss would never let our recruiter pull shit like that, but I can't speak for other teams.

kevinburke 10y ago
(Assuming you work at Uber - Thanks, this is good to know.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mavelikara 10y ago
Thanks! What is the general sentiment about (1) the refusal to allow secondary sales and (2) 30 day exercise window among your colleagues?
- employee8000 10y ago
  1) none of my coworkers care. I'm sure very early employees may care but I don't know any and I can't speak for them. 2) most have RSUs. But if you're going to exercise in 90 days then you're going to exercise in 30 days so it doesn't even matter.
  - mavelikara 10y ago
    Thanks! > none of my coworkers care. I'm sure very early employees may care but I don't know any and I can't speak for them Interesting that your colleagues and you don't seem to care that the management had instituted policies that hurt the very engineers who first built up the company. I would be very wary of such a management that it would some day turn against me too.

wwalser 10y ago

I had an offer from Uber and was given sufficient time to decide and turn them down. I had a whole host of reasons for turning them down many of which felt dirty/scammy/untrustworthy and nothing about this story surprises me but I didn't have the specific experience that you've described.

usrusr 10y ago

> the practice of calling candidates in the morning, making them an offer, and demanding that they accept or decline by the end of the day? Sounds like an effective filter to have applicants self-select for the combination of never questioning higher-ups and low diligence fast decisionmaking. Brilliant in the same way as bad grammar in "Nigerian prince" mails.

tlogan 10y ago

This is just negotiation trick. In general, they might simply be interested in knowing if you are genuinely excited about the job or not. In these cases you should just say "yes - I accept. Please send me paperwork for my lawyer to review and sign". Then the real negotiations starts :-) There is one book (forgot the name) which explains that tactic and how to respond to it.