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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 en

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.
    - bpicolo 10y ago
      The funny bit was the swapped names, it's like they had a spreadsheet but shifted a column down. Didn't double check the names against emails so I assume it was automated.
bootload 10y ago
"Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking;" For me this is a red flag. Booze + programming == pissed programming This leads to bad code also bad team dynamics. Ultimately this will reflect on the product and bottom line. For individuals this reads like a culture where the barrel is creating ^bad apples^. Not a good look on a resume.
- luckydude 10y ago
  Why is this getting down voted? Am I missing something in bootload's post? Seems pretty reasonable to me. Don't get me wrong, I like to drink, but drinking and programming don't mix well for me at least. I need my brain cells working, not partying, when I'm trying to write code. Maybe that's my age showing.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "Why is this getting down voted? Am I missing something in boatload's post?" @luckeydude, it's a sort of reaction test for brogrammers who work in toxic environments. I can't think of any job (not after hours) where alcohol improves your performance and output.
  - metafunctor 10y ago
    Probably because it's conflating drinking and misogyny. Drinking and programming surely don't mix well. However, a culture that involves, or even promotes, drinking and partying doesn't have to be misogynistic. I've worked in companies that held parties several times per week, with plenty of booze, and they were nothing like what was depicted in TFA.
    - bootload 10y ago
      "it's conflating drinking and misogyny." Good point @metafunctor, didn't even think of that.
  - rodgerd 10y ago
    Because it's telling people something that might be true and makes them uncomfortable.
home_boi 10y ago
The booze thing gets exaggerated at many places. It is usually the marketing/HR/business dev/sales teams that indulge in that culture. The engineering team is usually much more constrained in their alcohol consumption, although the media groups them with the frat boys from sales.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  i don't know many BD/sales people who contribute to hackathons... seems like the person above you was speaking specifically about engineers.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I don''t agree with this at all. This certainly hasn't been my experience. Enthusiastic appreciation of craft beer and Scotch are very much a part of tech startup culture.
  - lostboys67 10y ago
    Try working for a Civil engineering company :-) I no longer drink snakebite and black at lunch :-)
ChuckMcM 10y ago
> Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people > were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering > team. It is always a bit sad when one of the top characteristic of an engineer from organization X is their political ability to carve out an empire. I'm a bit surprised she doesn't have at least one law firm trying to get her to be the lead claimant in a class action lawsuit. Seems like she did everything right and has a pretty sold case. Of course she may have signed that option away when she left. Also, in California at least, your employer has to give you your full personnel record if you request it. She might ask them to do that.
- grey-area 10y ago
  I'm a bit surprised so many people want to give her advice. She's already taken a really bold step and written cogently and in a balanced way about her situation, the toxic culture at Uber, and made it clear she's moved on to a better place. Why talk about what she should be doing and hasn't done as if there is only one way to resolve this? Why not give thanks to the writer for writing this and putting up with all the drama it will cause in the hope of a better world. Why not talk about how wrong Uber was in every way and at every level - allowing a manager to attempt to proposition new direct reports for sex on their first day, not immediately firing them for this, trying to suppress this when taken to HR, rewarding the perpetrator, killing her career there for vague reasons, let alone all the other dysfunction she mentioned in passing? Even just one of those points means a really toxic culture. There are little bits of men's behaviour in every large organisation which resemble this, why not talk about that and ways to make this better? There are so many ways this story can inspire us to do better.
  - Mz 10y ago
    Listing what she can/should/coulda/woulda/shoulda is one way to avoid looking in the mirror and all that. It is one reason victim blaming is popular: If it is the victim's fault, then other people don't have to wonder what they might do differently or get off their lazy duff and walk the walk instead of just engaging in smack talk. I appreciate you making the comment. I don't imagine it will go over well.
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billconan 10y ago
I went to visit the instagram office on the fb main campus and saw a huge liquor exhibition.
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- jonathankoren 10y ago
  There are tons of bars at FB. My experience was that people would only go on the fortnightly drinking event, and then it was mostly grabbing an hors dourve and then retiring back to their desk after a single bottle of that. It's pantomime of a drinking culture.
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gydfi 10y ago
Honestly though that sounds pretty good, if you're a man and you like drinking.
male_no_30122 10y ago
Same here. 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!
flootch 10y ago
Did any of you folks talk about the enormously unethical ways you treat drivers? Those folks who are mostly poorer than you who do the actual work that provides value? I find it laughable to hear Uber engineers cry about how unfairly Kalanick treats them. Self-awareness 0.
- tezka 10y ago
  this is almost on the same level of stupidity as "All lives matter".
  - flootch 10y ago
    Must be nice to be a woke young webdev able to ignore how Uber mistreats the poor, and the POC. How Uber breaks laws. How Uber uses VC money to undermine taxi drivers who are paid a living wage, how Uber uses VC money to undermine public transit that serves the poor, blind and disabled. Dude you are so woke you are blinding.
true_religion 10y ago
Can you elaborate more on the misogyny that was part of the culture? So far you've only identified that they like drinking, traveling and were part of the Greek social system in university. What I'm looking for are instances of demeaning women, discounting their achievements, systemic disapproval for the words of women, favours being handed out on the basis of gender, solicitation of sexual favours in non-equal power relationships, or if no examples can be provided then at least people stating that they are 'in favour' of such, or are lax in enforcing rules against such. I don't mean this as an attack of any sort (the article gives examples after all). I simply want to know more.
- computerex 10y ago
  Did you not read the article? Literally has an example of everything you are referring to.
  - true_religion 10y ago
    The person I'm responding to actually worked at Uber, so they can potentially give more information than what the article contains. What do you have against talking to other witnesses 'of the crime' so to speak?
    - computerex 10y ago
      My bad, I have nothing against talking to other witnesses of the crime and wasn't paying attention and didn't know the person you were talking to was an Uber employee and had additional context to provide. I just thought you were being a jerk and didn't read the article. Oops.
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bogomipz 10y ago
>"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." Can you explain why they don't have to work again? How did they become wealthy? Those options aren't worth anything if the company doesn't IPO.
orthoganol 10y ago
"Workcation" is an incredible idea, as is letting employees work remotely for x weeks/ months per year from wherever they want. Even though it's not vacation-vacation it's still a revitalizing, memory forming experience, and if you want a happy motivated work force, I think it's a great idea. That and a sound proof studio with piano on premise would be enough to make me quit my job. That said Uber's been on my douchebag radar at least since their execs bragged about threatening journalists. Hopefully your acquaintances already sold their shares on secondary markets because losing ~3 billion a year would worry me if I was expecting to get rich from them.
Throwadev 10y ago
Just curious, what happens to employees who don't drink?
- wentoodeep 10y ago
  They dehidrate and crumble.
hkmurakami 10y ago
Longtime friend was there in 2011 iirc when they were still "Ubercab" and was cut bc he was "not a culture fit". Aka quiet Russian hacker types not wanted in the frat brotherhood.

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.
  - bpicolo 10y ago
    The funny bit was the swapped names, it's like they had a spreadsheet but shifted a column down. Didn't double check the names against emails so I assume it was automated.

bootload 10y ago

"Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking;" For me this is a red flag. Booze + programming == pissed programming This leads to bad code also bad team dynamics. Ultimately this will reflect on the product and bottom line. For individuals this reads like a culture where the barrel is creating ^bad apples^. Not a good look on a resume.

luckydude 10y ago
Why is this getting down voted? Am I missing something in bootload's post? Seems pretty reasonable to me. Don't get me wrong, I like to drink, but drinking and programming don't mix well for me at least. I need my brain cells working, not partying, when I'm trying to write code. Maybe that's my age showing.
- bootload 10y ago
  "Why is this getting down voted? Am I missing something in boatload's post?" @luckeydude, it's a sort of reaction test for brogrammers who work in toxic environments. I can't think of any job (not after hours) where alcohol improves your performance and output.
- metafunctor 10y ago
  Probably because it's conflating drinking and misogyny. Drinking and programming surely don't mix well. However, a culture that involves, or even promotes, drinking and partying doesn't have to be misogynistic. I've worked in companies that held parties several times per week, with plenty of booze, and they were nothing like what was depicted in TFA.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "it's conflating drinking and misogyny." Good point @metafunctor, didn't even think of that.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  Because it's telling people something that might be true and makes them uncomfortable.

home_boi 10y ago

The booze thing gets exaggerated at many places. It is usually the marketing/HR/business dev/sales teams that indulge in that culture. The engineering team is usually much more constrained in their alcohol consumption, although the media groups them with the frat boys from sales.

wheelerwj 10y ago
i don't know many BD/sales people who contribute to hackathons... seems like the person above you was speaking specifically about engineers.
bogomipz 10y ago
I don''t agree with this at all. This certainly hasn't been my experience. Enthusiastic appreciation of craft beer and Scotch are very much a part of tech startup culture.
- lostboys67 10y ago
  Try working for a Civil engineering company :-) I no longer drink snakebite and black at lunch :-)

ChuckMcM 10y ago

> Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people > were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering > team. It is always a bit sad when one of the top characteristic of an engineer from organization X is their political ability to carve out an empire. I'm a bit surprised she doesn't have at least one law firm trying to get her to be the lead claimant in a class action lawsuit. Seems like she did everything right and has a pretty sold case. Of course she may have signed that option away when she left. Also, in California at least, your employer has to give you your full personnel record if you request it. She might ask them to do that.

grey-area 10y ago
I'm a bit surprised so many people want to give her advice. She's already taken a really bold step and written cogently and in a balanced way about her situation, the toxic culture at Uber, and made it clear she's moved on to a better place. Why talk about what she should be doing and hasn't done as if there is only one way to resolve this? Why not give thanks to the writer for writing this and putting up with all the drama it will cause in the hope of a better world. Why not talk about how wrong Uber was in every way and at every level - allowing a manager to attempt to proposition new direct reports for sex on their first day, not immediately firing them for this, trying to suppress this when taken to HR, rewarding the perpetrator, killing her career there for vague reasons, let alone all the other dysfunction she mentioned in passing? Even just one of those points means a really toxic culture. There are little bits of men's behaviour in every large organisation which resemble this, why not talk about that and ways to make this better? There are so many ways this story can inspire us to do better.
- Mz 10y ago
  Listing what she can/should/coulda/woulda/shoulda is one way to avoid looking in the mirror and all that. It is one reason victim blaming is popular: If it is the victim's fault, then other people don't have to wonder what they might do differently or get off their lazy duff and walk the walk instead of just engaging in smack talk. I appreciate you making the comment. I don't imagine it will go over well.

deleted 10y ago

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billconan 10y ago

I went to visit the instagram office on the fb main campus and saw a huge liquor exhibition.

deleted 10y ago
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deleted 10y ago
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jonathankoren 10y ago
There are tons of bars at FB. My experience was that people would only go on the fortnightly drinking event, and then it was mostly grabbing an hors dourve and then retiring back to their desk after a single bottle of that. It's pantomime of a drinking culture.
deleted 10y ago
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gydfi 10y ago

Honestly though that sounds pretty good, if you're a man and you like drinking.

male_no_30122 10y ago

Same here. 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!

flootch 10y ago

Did any of you folks talk about the enormously unethical ways you treat drivers? Those folks who are mostly poorer than you who do the actual work that provides value? I find it laughable to hear Uber engineers cry about how unfairly Kalanick treats them. Self-awareness 0.

tezka 10y ago
this is almost on the same level of stupidity as "All lives matter".
- flootch 10y ago
  Must be nice to be a woke young webdev able to ignore how Uber mistreats the poor, and the POC. How Uber breaks laws. How Uber uses VC money to undermine taxi drivers who are paid a living wage, how Uber uses VC money to undermine public transit that serves the poor, blind and disabled. Dude you are so woke you are blinding.

true_religion 10y ago

Can you elaborate more on the misogyny that was part of the culture? So far you've only identified that they like drinking, traveling and were part of the Greek social system in university. What I'm looking for are instances of demeaning women, discounting their achievements, systemic disapproval for the words of women, favours being handed out on the basis of gender, solicitation of sexual favours in non-equal power relationships, or if no examples can be provided then at least people stating that they are 'in favour' of such, or are lax in enforcing rules against such. I don't mean this as an attack of any sort (the article gives examples after all). I simply want to know more.

computerex 10y ago
Did you not read the article? Literally has an example of everything you are referring to.
- true_religion 10y ago
  The person I'm responding to actually worked at Uber, so they can potentially give more information than what the article contains. What do you have against talking to other witnesses 'of the crime' so to speak?
  - computerex 10y ago
    My bad, I have nothing against talking to other witnesses of the crime and wasn't paying attention and didn't know the person you were talking to was an Uber employee and had additional context to provide. I just thought you were being a jerk and didn't read the article. Oops.
  - deleted 10y ago
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bogomipz 10y ago

>"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." Can you explain why they don't have to work again? How did they become wealthy? Those options aren't worth anything if the company doesn't IPO.

orthoganol 10y ago

"Workcation" is an incredible idea, as is letting employees work remotely for x weeks/ months per year from wherever they want. Even though it's not vacation-vacation it's still a revitalizing, memory forming experience, and if you want a happy motivated work force, I think it's a great idea. That and a sound proof studio with piano on premise would be enough to make me quit my job. That said Uber's been on my douchebag radar at least since their execs bragged about threatening journalists. Hopefully your acquaintances already sold their shares on secondary markets because losing ~3 billion a year would worry me if I was expecting to get rich from them.

Throwadev 10y ago

Just curious, what happens to employees who don't drink?

wentoodeep 10y ago
They dehidrate and crumble.

hkmurakami 10y ago

Longtime friend was there in 2011 iirc when they were still "Ubercab" and was cut bc he was "not a culture fit". Aka quiet Russian hacker types not wanted in the frat brotherhood.