39 ms·

By all indications, Uber has a toxic work culture that costs them both top talent and organizational velocity. I'm a college senior at a well-regarded engineer

• csharpminor 10y ago
  Anecdotally speaking, I've noticed that Uber has become a dirty word among my friends. For example, someone using Uber will generally just say that they're calling a car rather than naming the service. Lyft doesn't have the same stigma. It should be concerning to management that the company's ethos is repelling customers. Edit: Management should be far more concerned that Uber is allegedly an environment that systematically enables sexual harassment and discrimination against women.
  • AsyncAwait 10y ago
    Isn't that due to the perception that they broke the recent anti-Trump taxi strike, rather than their internal work culture?
    • afarrell 10y ago
      Anecdotally, the perception among my acquaintances is that they treat their drivers less well than Lyft does.
    • tedivm 10y ago
      In the bay area at least a lot of us know at least one or two Uber engineers, and Uber has has an awful reputation around here for a lot longer than the month or so since that strike occurred. As a result of that (plus talking to drivers who work for both services and have strong preferences for Lyft) means that most of my friends were quietly boycotting Uber for years at this point. I have one friend who worked at Uber and had years of experience working at another tech company beforehand. Uber basically refused to promote her, even going to far as to hire people significantly junior to her into those senior positions. In one case one of the people who was hired blatantly lied on their resume about their past experience, got caught out for it, and was still hired above her. Even outside of the bay area Uber has taken many reputation hits for their stupid behavior. The whole incident where they were planning on digging up dirt on a reporter to ruin her character shows a huge lack of ethics at the top of the company. The "god mode" application and research into "one night stands" shows they have no respect for privacy.
      • Throwadev 10y ago
        I also hated the permissions increase they asked for about a month ago. They want to know my location for up to five minutes after I've finished taking a ride with their app? F--- that, uninstalled immediately.
    • enjo 10y ago
      Among my peer group (Denver) it's been the same. It has alot more to do with what we hear from drivers about the respective companies. For whatever reason drivers are happy to shill for Lyft and are often almost hostile towards Uber. At some point you just get the feeling that Uber isn't what we really wanna be supporting. I should note: my peer group isn't particularly tech oriented.
      • 10y ago
  • 0898 10y ago
    I've noticed this. But tempting as it is to #DeleteUber, am I not mostly just hurting local taxi drivers who keep 75% of the revenue?
    • Teodolfo 10y ago
      Not if you use Lyft.
      • 0898 10y ago
        Unfortunately, Lyft doesn't operate in the UK where I live.
    • Throwadev 10y ago
      But if you #DeleteUber won't your money be going to the taxi drivers? I'm not sure I understood your question.
      • taneq 10y ago
        They're using the term 'taxi drivers' to refer to the Uber drivers, not to local licensed taxi operators.
        • falsedan 10y ago
          In the UK, Uber cars are local licenced private hire vehicles with the big "Pre-booked fares only" sticker on the front doors. You have to be licensed to drive for Uber[0]. 0: https://www.uber.com/en-GB/drive/requirements/ https://www.uber.com/en-GB/drive/requirements/
  • weberc2 10y ago
    I don't think there is any stigma associated with Uber in Chicago. A lot of people will even say "I'm calling an Uber" even when they're using Lyft (name brand effect).
    • floatrock 10y ago
      Definitely true. Case study in "any publicity is good publicity" -- they're always in the news as the assholes, but the market reality is it's a better service than waving your hand and maybe having a cab stop where the first thing the guy says is "meter is broken, cash only". The services are more or less identical, but I always feel like I'm in the minority when I tell friends I'm calling a lyft.
• irfansharif 10y ago
  ditto, Uber's job postings on our internal school board are avoided like the plague.
• uber_eng_throw 10y ago
  Hijacking this top comment to provide some personal experiences. I started as an engineer in the spring of 2014 and this was definitely the case there. Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering team. The misogynistic culture, in my mind, comes from most of the early employees being former frat bros. Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking; see "Work-cations" where most of the team would go to an exotic location which was half-hackathon/half boozefest. There were happy hours every week with open bar because all new employees would be flown to SF (no matter where home office was) for orientation. Crazy, most ex-employees (even the early ones) acknowledge that the culture is bad but they got their $$$ so they won't have to work again for a long time, if ever.
  • DrJaws 10y ago
    Saying that they "poached" engineers make it look like they are property of a company and can't move looking for better opportunities.
    • mnx 10y ago
      I don't like that word either, but it seems to be the standard term.
      • mikeash 10y ago
        "Hired" would work just as well here.
    • bpicolo 10y ago
      Uber recruiters once emails about 100 engineers in my company the same email...except they managed to swap around the first/last names on all of them.
      • rspeer 10y ago
        Most recruiters are comically bad at targeting -- apparently there isn't enough downside to just carpet-bombing as many e-mail addresses as they can find -- but this does not mean that recruiting is inherently wrong.
• krautsourced 10y ago
  Usually in these cases, these kind of company politics trickle down from the top, so it's unlikely the CEO does not know or has any interest in intervening. All the companies I worked at that had weird or toxic environments showed that kind of environment throughout most of their structure. A single arsehole in an otherwise great company is usually pushed out sooner than later. If however you notice there are mostly arseholes in your management structure, chances are this goes all the way to the top...
  • bifocald 10y ago
    Yes. Culture is CEO's responsibility. Period.
    • MAGZine 10y ago
      Once a culture exists, it is very, very difficult to change, even (especially) if you get a new CEO or an acquisition, etc. It is true that if you are going to _attempt_ to change a culture, it must be motivated from top-down. However, placing that responsibility on the CEO alone is misunderstanding of how culture works. It's a little akin to saying that culture is the President's responsibility. No, it's everyone's responsibility, and if you want to change it, the influential people in your org (country) must lead and reinforce that change. The best you can say is that the founder(s) laid the groundwork for the culture. As with anything, changing the foundation later is extremely difficult. That's what the research says, anyhow. I studied this briefly during my undergrad.
      • tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
        Yes. I've found it proportionally harder to change anything the bigger a group gets. After a certain size the only way to make a change stick is get rid of people that disagree. Or, you can wait for pressure to wear those people down over... A period of years. If Ubers culture is really this toxic the only way to fix it would be replacement of a fair amount of leadship in the company.
      • drharby 10y ago
• bifocald 10y ago
  The real problem in Uber's engineering orgs is that Uber hired too many people for too few real projects. From what I learned from my friends in Uber, many teams had largely overlapping responsibilities, and therefore created bogus projects to justify their existence. Their standard MO is picking a missing feature in a service, and then creating a new system that implemented that feature. It might be okay if all the talents that Uber hired could work together to build truly great software, but hell no, their management created this weird cut-throat culture by enforcing stack ranking with forced curve down to each team of first-line managers. It's hard to imagine that a team with fewer than 10 people had to name an engineer who "didn't meet expectation". Yet that was exactly what happened in Uber. They also doted out disproportional amount of bonus to a few top performers. Naturally, people's expectation was distorted, and chaos ensued.
  • michaelbuckbee 10y ago
    This is a really interesting observation and something I think doesn't factor into most people's calculus of company culture and execution. I worked an early employee at a YC startup that was developing a hardware device and I think really ran into similar issues. There were significant delays with shipping the device which meant that all the teams which had been built up to support its launch had _nothing_ to do for months. People in a "Customer Success" department with no customers. Developer evangelists with nothing to evangelize. Support departments twiddling their thumbs and the worst was the sales and marketing groups which devolved into a Lord of the Flies type environment where they tried latching onto any and every project they could just to justify their existence. Timing really is everything.
  • crooked-v 10y ago
    I have literally never seen stack ranking mentioned in any context but horror stories and toxic company culture. What on earth possesses people to keep using it?
    • rhizome 10y ago
      It means you can hire dumber managers.
• spuz 10y ago
  I think it's worth pointing out that this kind of male dominated culture doesn't just put off female engineers but male engineers too. As a male I've worked in environments with a high male to female ratio and it makes for a stifling homogeneous type of culture. I've never experienced the kind of sexist culture described at Uber but I imagine that must feel even worse as a male employee. I definitely see few women as a warning sign when interviewing.
  • jordigh 10y ago
    I totally feel the same way too (edit: but almost certainly not worse than how it feels for women). Having worked in both mixed and segregated teams, I much prefer having a good mix. It feels much more natural and normal.
  • cjbprime 10y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "even worse as a male employee", but I suspect you've drastically misspoken; you might want to fix that.
    • bendoernberg 10y ago
      I think he may have meant "worse even as a male employee" or something to that effect.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • camdenlock 10y ago
      ( T_T)＼(^-^ )
    • wolf550e 10y ago
      'spuz is familiar with male-dominated environments and finds them stifling. 'spuz is unfamiliar with a place as bad as what is described in the article and speculates that he would like that less.
      • 10y ago
• male_no_30122 10y ago
  A blog post like this gets so much attention where is the fucking evidence? I am a male from Iran having spent more than half of my life here and worked in Silicon Valley long enough to be considered an easy target for labels like terrorist and misogynist simultaneously (finally I'm beginning to believe it, how slow of me.) I have to say there is more and more similarities between the two with each passing day, with very little substance and meaning behind those concepts, just a vague feeling of unfairness, a thread to our identity and a powerful tool to control and manipulate and not on behalf of the proclaimed victims of course. Why should YC or VCs give more money to females founders, blacks and hispanics? [1] [2] Are we not pawns in an ugly game of moral superiority and virtue played out by those looking to profit from our moral outrage and fear? [1] http://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter http://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter (much high acceptance rate for those demographics) [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/winnie-grabs-2-5-million-f.. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/winnie-grabs-2-5-million-f.... (a publication about babies raises 2.5MM, female founders, having worked at places like Google and Twitter gets you a free pass with VCs if you're a woman? Homebrew Capital: Well her, she must be special not her male-counter-parts. What is special and investment-worthy about this publication and those founders, and not just adding an uptick in their portfolio's founder ratio? Hey look we got two female founders in one round!
• rdtsc 10y ago
  > My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it? I wouldn't want to be near any company that treats any of their employees like that.
  • Eridrus 10y ago
    A friend of mine worked there for less of a year, turns out he didn't realise they had a shitty reputation before joining...
  • orange_county 10y ago
    When you are a new grad, you are more willing to put up with stupid nonsense for a year. Puts great experience on the resume and opens more door than previously before which sets up nicely for your 2nd job out of college. This is true for companies like Amazon.
    • Throwadev 10y ago
      This is true. Also a lot of grads just think, "I'm not a woman/minority therefore it doesn't affect me if I work there". Others think it sucks but will do it anyway because they want to get a big name on the resume and will take anything they can get.
  • hueving 10y ago
    >The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it? Some students aren't privileged enough to graduate debt-free. Getting into any of these top compensating packages can mean being literally years less time being in debt.
  • arkh 10y ago
    Why do men end-up in dangerous yet good paying jobs? Because testosterone. Most young men are more willing to work a shit job if they can get good money than most women who value quality of life.
    • 10y ago
• cbtacy 10y ago
  The CEO is the problem. The fish stinks from the head.