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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 team

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.
- owenmarshall 10y ago
  Most companies operate on the myth that the people responsible for doing work are interchangeable cogs that can be eliminated and replaced by a new doer with little to no impact to how the company functions. So if you have enough traumatic brain damage to buy that line, stack ranking makes a ton of sense.
  - kartickv 10y ago
    I had this exact same conversation with a manager who seemed suprised when I told him people are not interchangeable cogs. He said that some people may be quicker at a particular technology / domain / whatever, or quicker to ramp up, or do slightly better work, but smart engineers can and do learn anything needed and do work that's good enough after a ramp-up that's short enough. Beyond that, he says, there are minor differences he doesn't worry about as a manager. I didn't know how to respond to that.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      " I don't doubt that has been true on all the teams you've managed. My experience differs significantly, and there's a lot of data which indicates my experiences may have been more representative. Caveat Emptor, of course
      - kartickv 10y ago
        Can you share that data? "My experience differs significantly" might sound like "I can't pick up new technologies and work on them". What did you have in mind?
        taneq 10y ago
        It might also mean "I can make things work in a way that none of the other people on my team can do, and if I leave, they're gonna be boned."
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      This is largely a natural difference in perspective. The typical interaction between manager & engineer is that a manager tells an employee what to do, and the employee does it. From the manager's perspective, any employee that's reasonably competent will do: success is binary, either you did the assigned task satisfactorily or you didn't. From the engineer's perspective, if you're good you considered a lot of alternative ways of solving the problem and finally settled on the best. It seems ridiculous that all employees could be interchangeable, because it's a pretty good bet that some engineers did not consider some of the alternative solutions you did. But remember that the whole reason the manager hired you was so that he didn't need to think about the details. All of those alternative solutions are outside of his conscious awareness; he's condensed his mental model of the problem to a binary "is this good enough to ship?", which frees up mental space for him to think about other stuff. Among those engineers that you think of as "not good enough", there are some who may not have thought of the brilliant solution that you came up with but still have code that is "good enough to ship" in the manager's estimation, and those are the irritating folks on your team who IYNSHO always produce shitty code but stay on the team because they have your manager's political favor. And then there are the folks who both you and your manager agree are too shitty to get the job done, and they're fired. Who's right? Well, both of you, and neither of you. It's fairly likely that you're overestimating the quality requirements for the job, which is why a number of your shitty coworkers still have jobs. It's also fairly likely that your manager does not have complete visibility into all the long-term consequences of all the code being produced, which is why whole teams occasionally just catastrophically fail. But it's worth remembering that every time you enter a transaction, you're having your work reduced to a pass/fail grade. It's the fundamental bargain you make when you take a job, and it also is the fundamental bargain you make when you sell a product (entrepreneurs are not exempt from this, and it's a major cause of startup failure among technical founders...including, quite possibly, mine). The advantage of producing better work is that it qualifies you for more different opportunities - which may or may not be relevant, depending on whether you take advantage of those opportunities.
- softawre 10y ago
  Because you have to do it on some level? How do you choose who to let go when for whatever reason you have to cut 10% of your staff?
  - crooked-v 10y ago
    There's a substantial difference between "using stack ranking" and "using employee evaluations".
- rodgerd 10y ago
  For a long time it was, "successful company x uses stack ranking, and we want to be successful, so we use stack ranking." Microsoft were often cited. You'll note that their renaissance coincides with their elimination of stack ranking.
- danek 10y ago
  Management is interesting because you can be a terrible manager yet still have a successful career at it. A lot of competent management practices seem counter-intuitive if you've never been exposed to them. Most managers I know have have never even read a book on the subject. Management is often the blind leading the blind. Most likely this kind of environment will scare away any good managers, so the cycle continues. So, unfortunately, it shouldn't be surprising that these counter-productive practices continue. That said, reports like this never cease to amaze me.
lowbloodsugar 10y ago
Woman accuses Uber of systemic misogyny, but, no, "the real problem" is poor project management? So, systemic misogyny not a real problem for you?
- mst 10y ago
  It sounds to me like the cutthroat system OP describes would cause the rise of the sort of people who would perpetuate systemic misogyny. If by "the real problem" they meant "the root cause" then their theory does appear to fit the facts. I personally suspect it was "both" rather than "one caused the other" but have insufficient data to go beyond "suspect".
- home_boi 10y ago
  There is a difference between misogyny and sexual occurrences. If OP had been a male, she would have had as bad, if not worse experience.
  - meowface 10y ago
    That doesn't explain the bizarre jacket drama, or reports from other female coworkers.
    - home_boi 10y ago
      The jacket drama had nothing to do with gender really and she was making a big deal out of something trivial. I can imagine the scenario is like "ok we're too cheap to create custom jackets for everyone so we will order the jacket size that fits the majority and the minority can try to fit in it". If the gender ratio was the other way around, there would be a similar situation. The response to other reports are standard. Whether it is a homosexual boss or a female boss, the company will seek to protect itself.
      - lowbloodsugar 10y ago
        Sure, and we could save money by only have women's restrooms on every other floor, or not at all since we can certainly save money by not hiring women at all. Its just economic sense: we know that its easier to find men, so lets just optimize for men. Then there's all that diversity training. And don't forget women create tension at the office because they are pretty and their women parts distract the men who can't be expected to control themselves. If you think that any of this is trivial, you are part of the problem.
patmcguire 10y ago
This is true of most big companies. Internally, there are at least three competing versions of what outsiders would consider the same project.
ryguytilidie 10y ago
I realized Uber was in pretty bad shape 2 years ago when the company i was at was trying to hire one of their VPs of Engineering. Not only did they have many VPs of Engineering, they had multiple VPs of Engineering in his specific discipline. It seemed like people were literally only there to get a title and a piece of the kingdom. Which is funny because my experience at Uber was EXACTLY the same. 3 years ago one of the heads of their department emailed me and asked me to come in and give a talk to their managers as the team wasn't doing so well. After I did this, I asked the VP if they were hiring at my level (I was a director/senior manager at the time) and she said yes. When I came to interview it was clear that I was interviewing for the job of one of the people who were interviewing me. Everyone seemed to love me except for this person, who told me they don't hire managers and that I would have to report to him. He was very junior to me and seemed to only want to keep his title/piece of the kingdom. It was obvious I didn't want to be a part of that, so I declined the offer and not only was the person gone a few weeks later, they were gone from their next job a few months after that. There's some serious political stuff going on at Uber.

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.
owenmarshall 10y ago
Most companies operate on the myth that the people responsible for doing work are interchangeable cogs that can be eliminated and replaced by a new doer with little to no impact to how the company functions. So if you have enough traumatic brain damage to buy that line, stack ranking makes a ton of sense.
- kartickv 10y ago
  I had this exact same conversation with a manager who seemed suprised when I told him people are not interchangeable cogs. He said that some people may be quicker at a particular technology / domain / whatever, or quicker to ramp up, or do slightly better work, but smart engineers can and do learn anything needed and do work that's good enough after a ramp-up that's short enough. Beyond that, he says, there are minor differences he doesn't worry about as a manager. I didn't know how to respond to that.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    " I don't doubt that has been true on all the teams you've managed. My experience differs significantly, and there's a lot of data which indicates my experiences may have been more representative. Caveat Emptor, of course
    - kartickv 10y ago
      Can you share that data? "My experience differs significantly" might sound like "I can't pick up new technologies and work on them". What did you have in mind?
      - taneq 10y ago
        It might also mean "I can make things work in a way that none of the other people on my team can do, and if I leave, they're gonna be boned."
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    This is largely a natural difference in perspective. The typical interaction between manager & engineer is that a manager tells an employee what to do, and the employee does it. From the manager's perspective, any employee that's reasonably competent will do: success is binary, either you did the assigned task satisfactorily or you didn't. From the engineer's perspective, if you're good you considered a lot of alternative ways of solving the problem and finally settled on the best. It seems ridiculous that all employees could be interchangeable, because it's a pretty good bet that some engineers did not consider some of the alternative solutions you did. But remember that the whole reason the manager hired you was so that he didn't need to think about the details. All of those alternative solutions are outside of his conscious awareness; he's condensed his mental model of the problem to a binary "is this good enough to ship?", which frees up mental space for him to think about other stuff. Among those engineers that you think of as "not good enough", there are some who may not have thought of the brilliant solution that you came up with but still have code that is "good enough to ship" in the manager's estimation, and those are the irritating folks on your team who IYNSHO always produce shitty code but stay on the team because they have your manager's political favor. And then there are the folks who both you and your manager agree are too shitty to get the job done, and they're fired. Who's right? Well, both of you, and neither of you. It's fairly likely that you're overestimating the quality requirements for the job, which is why a number of your shitty coworkers still have jobs. It's also fairly likely that your manager does not have complete visibility into all the long-term consequences of all the code being produced, which is why whole teams occasionally just catastrophically fail. But it's worth remembering that every time you enter a transaction, you're having your work reduced to a pass/fail grade. It's the fundamental bargain you make when you take a job, and it also is the fundamental bargain you make when you sell a product (entrepreneurs are not exempt from this, and it's a major cause of startup failure among technical founders...including, quite possibly, mine). The advantage of producing better work is that it qualifies you for more different opportunities - which may or may not be relevant, depending on whether you take advantage of those opportunities.
softawre 10y ago
Because you have to do it on some level? How do you choose who to let go when for whatever reason you have to cut 10% of your staff?
- crooked-v 10y ago
  There's a substantial difference between "using stack ranking" and "using employee evaluations".
rodgerd 10y ago
For a long time it was, "successful company x uses stack ranking, and we want to be successful, so we use stack ranking." Microsoft were often cited. You'll note that their renaissance coincides with their elimination of stack ranking.
danek 10y ago
Management is interesting because you can be a terrible manager yet still have a successful career at it. A lot of competent management practices seem counter-intuitive if you've never been exposed to them. Most managers I know have have never even read a book on the subject. Management is often the blind leading the blind. Most likely this kind of environment will scare away any good managers, so the cycle continues. So, unfortunately, it shouldn't be surprising that these counter-productive practices continue. That said, reports like this never cease to amaze me.

lowbloodsugar 10y ago

Woman accuses Uber of systemic misogyny, but, no, "the real problem" is poor project management? So, systemic misogyny not a real problem for you?

mst 10y ago
It sounds to me like the cutthroat system OP describes would cause the rise of the sort of people who would perpetuate systemic misogyny. If by "the real problem" they meant "the root cause" then their theory does appear to fit the facts. I personally suspect it was "both" rather than "one caused the other" but have insufficient data to go beyond "suspect".
home_boi 10y ago
There is a difference between misogyny and sexual occurrences. If OP had been a male, she would have had as bad, if not worse experience.
- meowface 10y ago
  That doesn't explain the bizarre jacket drama, or reports from other female coworkers.
  - home_boi 10y ago
    The jacket drama had nothing to do with gender really and she was making a big deal out of something trivial. I can imagine the scenario is like "ok we're too cheap to create custom jackets for everyone so we will order the jacket size that fits the majority and the minority can try to fit in it". If the gender ratio was the other way around, there would be a similar situation. The response to other reports are standard. Whether it is a homosexual boss or a female boss, the company will seek to protect itself.
    - lowbloodsugar 10y ago
      Sure, and we could save money by only have women's restrooms on every other floor, or not at all since we can certainly save money by not hiring women at all. Its just economic sense: we know that its easier to find men, so lets just optimize for men. Then there's all that diversity training. And don't forget women create tension at the office because they are pretty and their women parts distract the men who can't be expected to control themselves. If you think that any of this is trivial, you are part of the problem.

patmcguire 10y ago

This is true of most big companies. Internally, there are at least three competing versions of what outsiders would consider the same project.

ryguytilidie 10y ago

I realized Uber was in pretty bad shape 2 years ago when the company i was at was trying to hire one of their VPs of Engineering. Not only did they have many VPs of Engineering, they had multiple VPs of Engineering in his specific discipline. It seemed like people were literally only there to get a title and a piece of the kingdom. Which is funny because my experience at Uber was EXACTLY the same. 3 years ago one of the heads of their department emailed me and asked me to come in and give a talk to their managers as the team wasn't doing so well. After I did this, I asked the VP if they were hiring at my level (I was a director/senior manager at the time) and she said yes. When I came to interview it was clear that I was interviewing for the job of one of the people who were interviewing me. Everyone seemed to love me except for this person, who told me they don't hire managers and that I would have to report to him. He was very junior to me and seemed to only want to keep his title/piece of the kingdom. It was obvious I didn't want to be a part of that, so I declined the offer and not only was the person gone a few weeks later, they were gone from their next job a few months after that. There's some serious political stuff going on at Uber.