13 ms·

Uber is designed so that for one employee to get ahead, another must fail

227 points by amyjess 10y ago

mikestew 10y ago
Summary: Uber took that stack rank system that Microsoft gave up on ten years ago. I wonder if their interviews involve the question "how would you move Mt. Fuji?", another thing Microsoft gave up on many years ago.
- supercanuck 10y ago
  How many Ping Pong balls can you fit inside a Boeing 777 Fuselage.
  - gumby 10y ago
    How many Ping Pong balls can you fit inside Travis Kalanick's ego?
    - selimthegrim 10y ago
      Travis will no doubt dispatch a team to Tijuana, Pattaya or Manila to find out.
- skylark 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I thought their SWE interview was very fair. It was far more practical than my interviews at Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I ended up accepting an offer from another company, but I'd say the entire experience was pleasant. I liked the engineers I talked to (of whom over half were women) and it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed what they did. I guess all isn't as it seems.
  - eddieplan9 10y ago
    this. It's sad that a good portion of the hn community would rather looking for good stories that play with confirmation bias.
    - mikestew 10y ago
      Oh, calm down, I was just making a snarky comment about Uber using antiquated and long-discarded processes and acting like they invented something new. In reality, I'm confident that an Uber interview would suck just as much, but not a smidgen more, than most tech interviews these days.
- a3n 10y ago
  I like to call it "stank racking." As for Mt Fuji. I was asked some stupid question about burning ropes at an interview. My answer was "I don't know, what's the answer?" The company hired me. I was talking to the guy later, and he said he liked to ask questions like that "to see how I think." So I asked him "How do I think?" ...
  - Thirdegree 10y ago
    The answer, by the way, is to light one of the ropes on fire on both ends, the other on a single end. When the first is done, the second has half the time left and you can time whatever contrived thing you're timing with rope.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - saryant 10y ago
    Enron employees called it "rank-and-yank."
- joyofdata 10y ago
  "I wouldn't - it's a huge mountain, you can't move it."
1337biz 10y ago
An up-or-out consulting based model seems to fit to their corporate culture.
ones_and_zeros 10y ago
If your company does 360 reviews or has a "rating" system (smart companies refuse to call it a ranking), it's the same thing. It's in the corporate america HR handbook. If you are ranked highly, someone had to be ranked lowly.
- aetherson 10y ago
  I'm a manager at my company. We have a rating system, and there is no need for someone else to be ranked lowly for you to be ranked highly. What that DOES mean, though, is that someone has to keep pressure on people not to rank everyone as awesome. Because, look: a. Managers are, contrary to rumor, people too. We don't enjoy the awkward, painful meetings in which we deliver negative feedback. We don't enjoy telling people that they aren't getting a raise, or that they need to improve or be terminated. That sucks. Personally, it keeps me up nights, and I've heard the same from many other managers. b. Managers are also graded themselves on how effective their employees are. Like, if your employees are persistently rated below average, well, what's the common factor across your employees? Vice versa if they're all high performers. So if you just tell managers "rate your employees, follow your conscience," then there is a grade inflation incentive. Even if you're super-disciplined and make painfully realistic assessments of your employees' abilities, Bob one team over may give everyone fives, and then you end up looking like a bad manager and also maybe you get to go and put someone on a PIP. The company needs some way to stop this. Stack ranking is one such way. I don't like it, I think it's overall a bad way, but it's a mechanistic way, which is more valuable the larger your company. Small companies can have a powerful manager or small group of managers who "keep people honest." That doesn't scale. You can use another mechanic to keep people honest, but all mechanics are exploitable.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    So one manager is below average at hiring and randomly hires people, ending up with a nicely fit bell curve range of high and low performers. Another manager is great at hiring highly performing people, but now if they rank correctly, you look at their assessments with your cheat metric, the good manager is 'inflating' their ratings. In other words, looking at the rankings alone doesn't do anything for actually enforcing quality.
geogra4 10y ago
1980s company culture... yuck
elmar 10y ago
How can Travis Kalanick fail so much with company culture?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fullshark 10y ago
  He turned an app into a company worth 70 billion and never saw any reason to change course until now (hopefully).
- trustfundbaby 10y ago
  rocket fueled success makes waaaay too many people overlook egregious problems with company culture. Just look at Theranos and Zenefits for examples. If it wasn't this situation, we wouldn't have heard anything till something disastrous happened to Uber. Thats just the way it works.
yanilkr 10y ago
It is impossible to keep everyone happy at a company at all times. The difference between a company which seems to have happy employees and the one that doesn't seems to be the amount of PR spending. It is an advertising problem. Some companies managed to build that image by selective targeting. Otherwise how do you explain the churn rate of employees in the valley?
- swsieber 10y ago
  I would explain it as the valley is a bad place to work. I work at a company, and I think generally, most people who work here are happy. And there's not much churn.
  - Bahamut 10y ago
    What a coincidence, my company is also is full of happy employees with remarkably low churn (most employees here have been here for 3+ years, many for ~10), and it's in the Valley! ...and it's not a big company like Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc.
    - rconti 10y ago
      Ditto. I read some of these stories and wonder in what foreign land these companies are based. It's not like anywhere I've worked, or where any of my friends work. Yes, in the valley.
- glangdale 10y ago
  This seems like overgrown and irrelevant cynicism. Of course people are unhappy at any company; however, it's clear that some back better cultures and some are more toxic than others due to bad practices and conditions. The idea that it's all about PR is sophomoric.
  - yanilkr 10y ago
    How do you explain the amount of money/effort spent by the big companies in trying to attract young kids out of college and the cultish attraction for these companies from young people who know nothing about the industry? Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
a3n 10y ago
> Kalanick told the audience that he and chief product officer Jeff Holden, an Amazon vet, had spent hundreds of hours conceiving the new “philosophy of work.” I thought we knew by now that you involve the people that will live with the new "philosophy" when "conceiving."
- mikestew 10y ago
  "Hundreds of hours"? I'll bet I've got a twenty year old copy of Microsoft's performance review docs lying around a hard drive somewhere, could have saved them a week of reinventing the wheel.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    You don't even have to go back that far: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ The Encyclopedia of Stack Ranking, and IIRC this blog was one of the motivators for MSFT to drop stack ranking. The original Michael O. Church, if you will.
openmosix 10y ago
I have been working in HRTech for ~8+ years. "Most" of the tech companies operate that way - regardless if they are explicit about it or not. 9-Blocks, 360 degrees, etc are all exercises that have to fit a pre-defined distribution - i.e. "we expect at least 20% of the employees to be low performer". All the exercises of "team and department calibrations" are about to make sure the distribution fits the pre-defined/expected shape. Then some companies "act" on their low performers (stack ranking + policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% every year), some companies use perfomance-plans/other to "talent manage"
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Even the ones that don't operate that way seem to be filled with people who are convinced that it's all a zero-sum game... leading to the same essential result. The problem mainly seems to be that far from making any attempt to limit or corral that kind of behavior (and far worse) Uber either tacitly encouraged it, or almost psychotically ignored it.
- rconti 10y ago
  Do the employees know it? As far as I know, I've never worked at a company anything like this. But then it occurred to me maybe I just have no idea why I get whatever level of raise I get.
  - openmosix 10y ago
    It depends on the company. The head of the department is aware. In some cases, the hiring manager might or might not be aware of the entire process ("HR told me to stack rank my direct reports / HR told me to put my team in these 9-blocks"). In large, large company that is typically a headline "Cisco has announced will lay off 500 people next Monday".
    - openmosix 10y ago
      Just to back it up a little: * Stack ranking at Cisco http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300075791/5-things-employees-love-about-cisco-and-5-they-dont.htm/pgno/0/2 http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300075791/5-things... * Stack ranking at Google https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-stack-rank-its-employees-despite-the-high-rate-of-disapproval-and-controversy-within-the-company https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-stack-rank-its-employe... * Stack ranking at Microsoft http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-review-system-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-revie... * Stack ranking at Amazon http://insights.dice.com/2016/11/15/amazon-may-end-stack-ranking-employees/ http://insights.dice.com/2016/11/15/amazon-may-end-stack-ran...
rconti 10y ago
"“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle anymore,” GE head of human resources Susan Peters said at the time, explaining that millennial workers in particular wanted faster, more frequent, mobile-enabled feedback." Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled feedback on their job performance.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  It doesn't say that millennial workers want mobile feedback about their performance. This is millennial-aged managers or other team members wanting to instantaneously issue feedback about others. This is AmericanIdol's voting system manifest in the workplace. The most socially-connected worker wins. That's what millennials seem to want.
  - zitterbewegung 10y ago
    So when has being socially connected/disconnected in a company hasn't benefited / or hurt an employee ?
    - sandworm101 10y ago
      It's a fashion, a management style. It isn't logical. They want to work as they socialize. Constantly and publicly voting for people/things you like or of which you approve is normal. It's what highschool kids do these days. So it is completely natural for them to bring that scheme into the workplace.
- kaspm 10y ago
  This quote makes me picture the Black Mirror episode: Nosedive. I hope this is not the future of employee feedback.
- Trundle 10y ago
  The only feedback I really care about is my compensation package and a tactful way to say "money me, money now. Me a money needing a lot now" is to initiate a discussion on job performance. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that millennials are doing this more than older generations. Whenever someone has expressed some form of "work hard, keep your head down and wait" strategy to salary increase to me it's been an older person.
imh 10y ago
>As the most highly valued startup in the world, at $68 billion, Uber ... At what point is it just a plain old company? Is Facebook still a startup? Is it just because Uber's #disrupting things or some cultural BS?
- gregmac 10y ago
  Probably when their operations are at least able to break-even, instead of burning through VC..
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  When the ultra-growth stops and they go corporate, ex. IPO.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
On the plus side it makes for a sociopathic paradise, winners, losers, a score visible to everyone and voila. /s
paulddraper 10y ago
Bonuses tied to company performance are popular, yes? That's the epitome of every employee getting ahead (or failing).
norikki 10y ago
I'm perfectly happy if my profit-motive multinational corporation doesn't feign having 'corporate values' on its website.
yuhong 10y ago
Don't forget PIPs. The fun things is that the laws for firing varies by state. I think California is one of the more strict ones.
pjdemers 10y ago
My stack ranking story: I was a manager. I was asked to build a team top performers. More than asked: My bonus would be based on the quality of the team. Now, the team is in place, and it's time for for the first set of reviews. The average is 9/10. Of course they really are that good - I followed orders and built a team of top performers. But... we have stack ranking. My meta-manager told me that the average had to be 5. My response: What? You're telling me to lower my own bonus! Yes, exactly, he explained, you just figured out why we have stack ranking.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  I would like to hear proponents of stack ranking explain how stack ranking and any "we only want A players"-style policies are NOT mutually exclusive. Because if no good case can be made for both co-existing within the same organization, then seeing both can be a good signal to detect for an organization that uses stack ranking as a compensation attenuation mechanism. There may be sound organizational behavior reasons to hide the compensation attenuation in this manner, but I'm hard-pressed to find empirically-based evidence for such reasoning.
daemin 10y ago
The most amusing thing about stack ranking is that companies expect their teams to be average (at best). If a company really wanted to hire the best and only have top performers, then they should not expect their employees to fit nicely on a bell curve.

227 points by amyjess 10y ago

Summary: Uber took that stack rank system that Microsoft gave up on ten years ago. I wonder if their interviews involve the question "how would you move Mt. Fuji?", another thing Microsoft gave up on many years ago.

supercanuck 10y ago
How many Ping Pong balls can you fit inside a Boeing 777 Fuselage.
- gumby 10y ago
  How many Ping Pong balls can you fit inside Travis Kalanick's ego?
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    Travis will no doubt dispatch a team to Tijuana, Pattaya or Manila to find out.
skylark 10y ago
For what it's worth, I thought their SWE interview was very fair. It was far more practical than my interviews at Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I ended up accepting an offer from another company, but I'd say the entire experience was pleasant. I liked the engineers I talked to (of whom over half were women) and it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed what they did. I guess all isn't as it seems.
- eddieplan9 10y ago
  this. It's sad that a good portion of the hn community would rather looking for good stories that play with confirmation bias.
  - mikestew 10y ago
    Oh, calm down, I was just making a snarky comment about Uber using antiquated and long-discarded processes and acting like they invented something new. In reality, I'm confident that an Uber interview would suck just as much, but not a smidgen more, than most tech interviews these days.
a3n 10y ago
I like to call it "stank racking." As for Mt Fuji. I was asked some stupid question about burning ropes at an interview. My answer was "I don't know, what's the answer?" The company hired me. I was talking to the guy later, and he said he liked to ask questions like that "to see how I think." So I asked him "How do I think?" ...
- Thirdegree 10y ago
  The answer, by the way, is to light one of the ropes on fire on both ends, the other on a single end. When the first is done, the second has half the time left and you can time whatever contrived thing you're timing with rope.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- saryant 10y ago
  Enron employees called it "rank-and-yank."
joyofdata 10y ago
"I wouldn't - it's a huge mountain, you can't move it."

1337biz 10y ago

An up-or-out consulting based model seems to fit to their corporate culture.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago

If your company does 360 reviews or has a "rating" system (smart companies refuse to call it a ranking), it's the same thing. It's in the corporate america HR handbook. If you are ranked highly, someone had to be ranked lowly.

aetherson 10y ago
I'm a manager at my company. We have a rating system, and there is no need for someone else to be ranked lowly for you to be ranked highly. What that DOES mean, though, is that someone has to keep pressure on people not to rank everyone as awesome. Because, look: a. Managers are, contrary to rumor, people too. We don't enjoy the awkward, painful meetings in which we deliver negative feedback. We don't enjoy telling people that they aren't getting a raise, or that they need to improve or be terminated. That sucks. Personally, it keeps me up nights, and I've heard the same from many other managers. b. Managers are also graded themselves on how effective their employees are. Like, if your employees are persistently rated below average, well, what's the common factor across your employees? Vice versa if they're all high performers. So if you just tell managers "rate your employees, follow your conscience," then there is a grade inflation incentive. Even if you're super-disciplined and make painfully realistic assessments of your employees' abilities, Bob one team over may give everyone fives, and then you end up looking like a bad manager and also maybe you get to go and put someone on a PIP. The company needs some way to stop this. Stack ranking is one such way. I don't like it, I think it's overall a bad way, but it's a mechanistic way, which is more valuable the larger your company. Small companies can have a powerful manager or small group of managers who "keep people honest." That doesn't scale. You can use another mechanic to keep people honest, but all mechanics are exploitable.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  So one manager is below average at hiring and randomly hires people, ending up with a nicely fit bell curve range of high and low performers. Another manager is great at hiring highly performing people, but now if they rank correctly, you look at their assessments with your cheat metric, the good manager is 'inflating' their ratings. In other words, looking at the rankings alone doesn't do anything for actually enforcing quality.

geogra4 10y ago

1980s company culture... yuck

elmar 10y ago

How can Travis Kalanick fail so much with company culture?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 10y ago
He turned an app into a company worth 70 billion and never saw any reason to change course until now (hopefully).
trustfundbaby 10y ago
rocket fueled success makes waaaay too many people overlook egregious problems with company culture. Just look at Theranos and Zenefits for examples. If it wasn't this situation, we wouldn't have heard anything till something disastrous happened to Uber. Thats just the way it works.

yanilkr 10y ago

It is impossible to keep everyone happy at a company at all times. The difference between a company which seems to have happy employees and the one that doesn't seems to be the amount of PR spending. It is an advertising problem. Some companies managed to build that image by selective targeting. Otherwise how do you explain the churn rate of employees in the valley?

swsieber 10y ago
I would explain it as the valley is a bad place to work. I work at a company, and I think generally, most people who work here are happy. And there's not much churn.
- Bahamut 10y ago
  What a coincidence, my company is also is full of happy employees with remarkably low churn (most employees here have been here for 3+ years, many for ~10), and it's in the Valley! ...and it's not a big company like Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc.
  - rconti 10y ago
    Ditto. I read some of these stories and wonder in what foreign land these companies are based. It's not like anywhere I've worked, or where any of my friends work. Yes, in the valley.
glangdale 10y ago
This seems like overgrown and irrelevant cynicism. Of course people are unhappy at any company; however, it's clear that some back better cultures and some are more toxic than others due to bad practices and conditions. The idea that it's all about PR is sophomoric.
- yanilkr 10y ago
  How do you explain the amount of money/effort spent by the big companies in trying to attract young kids out of college and the cultish attraction for these companies from young people who know nothing about the industry? Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.

a3n 10y ago

> Kalanick told the audience that he and chief product officer Jeff Holden, an Amazon vet, had spent hundreds of hours conceiving the new “philosophy of work.” I thought we knew by now that you involve the people that will live with the new "philosophy" when "conceiving."

mikestew 10y ago
"Hundreds of hours"? I'll bet I've got a twenty year old copy of Microsoft's performance review docs lying around a hard drive somewhere, could have saved them a week of reinventing the wheel.
- rhizome 10y ago
  You don't even have to go back that far: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ The Encyclopedia of Stack Ranking, and IIRC this blog was one of the motivators for MSFT to drop stack ranking. The original Michael O. Church, if you will.

openmosix 10y ago

I have been working in HRTech for ~8+ years. "Most" of the tech companies operate that way - regardless if they are explicit about it or not. 9-Blocks, 360 degrees, etc are all exercises that have to fit a pre-defined distribution - i.e. "we expect at least 20% of the employees to be low performer". All the exercises of "team and department calibrations" are about to make sure the distribution fits the pre-defined/expected shape. Then some companies "act" on their low performers (stack ranking + policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% every year), some companies use perfomance-plans/other to "talent manage"

M_Grey 10y ago
Even the ones that don't operate that way seem to be filled with people who are convinced that it's all a zero-sum game... leading to the same essential result. The problem mainly seems to be that far from making any attempt to limit or corral that kind of behavior (and far worse) Uber either tacitly encouraged it, or almost psychotically ignored it.
rconti 10y ago
Do the employees know it? As far as I know, I've never worked at a company anything like this. But then it occurred to me maybe I just have no idea why I get whatever level of raise I get.
- openmosix 10y ago
  It depends on the company. The head of the department is aware. In some cases, the hiring manager might or might not be aware of the entire process ("HR told me to stack rank my direct reports / HR told me to put my team in these 9-blocks"). In large, large company that is typically a headline "Cisco has announced will lay off 500 people next Monday".
  - openmosix 10y ago
    Just to back it up a little: * Stack ranking at Cisco http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300075791/5-things-employees-love-about-cisco-and-5-they-dont.htm/pgno/0/2 http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300075791/5-things... * Stack ranking at Google https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-stack-rank-its-employees-despite-the-high-rate-of-disapproval-and-controversy-within-the-company https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-stack-rank-its-employe... * Stack ranking at Microsoft http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-review-system-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-revie... * Stack ranking at Amazon http://insights.dice.com/2016/11/15/amazon-may-end-stack-ranking-employees/ http://insights.dice.com/2016/11/15/amazon-may-end-stack-ran...

rconti 10y ago

"“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle anymore,” GE head of human resources Susan Peters said at the time, explaining that millennial workers in particular wanted faster, more frequent, mobile-enabled feedback." Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled feedback on their job performance.

sandworm101 10y ago
It doesn't say that millennial workers want mobile feedback about their performance. This is millennial-aged managers or other team members wanting to instantaneously issue feedback about others. This is AmericanIdol's voting system manifest in the workplace. The most socially-connected worker wins. That's what millennials seem to want.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  So when has being socially connected/disconnected in a company hasn't benefited / or hurt an employee ?
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    It's a fashion, a management style. It isn't logical. They want to work as they socialize. Constantly and publicly voting for people/things you like or of which you approve is normal. It's what highschool kids do these days. So it is completely natural for them to bring that scheme into the workplace.
kaspm 10y ago
This quote makes me picture the Black Mirror episode: Nosedive. I hope this is not the future of employee feedback.
Trundle 10y ago
The only feedback I really care about is my compensation package and a tactful way to say "money me, money now. Me a money needing a lot now" is to initiate a discussion on job performance. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that millennials are doing this more than older generations. Whenever someone has expressed some form of "work hard, keep your head down and wait" strategy to salary increase to me it's been an older person.

imh 10y ago

>As the most highly valued startup in the world, at $68 billion, Uber ... At what point is it just a plain old company? Is Facebook still a startup? Is it just because Uber's #disrupting things or some cultural BS?

gregmac 10y ago
Probably when their operations are at least able to break-even, instead of burning through VC..
stagbeetle 10y ago
When the ultra-growth stops and they go corporate, ex. IPO.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

On the plus side it makes for a sociopathic paradise, winners, losers, a score visible to everyone and voila. /s

paulddraper 10y ago

Bonuses tied to company performance are popular, yes? That's the epitome of every employee getting ahead (or failing).

norikki 10y ago

I'm perfectly happy if my profit-motive multinational corporation doesn't feign having 'corporate values' on its website.

yuhong 10y ago

Don't forget PIPs. The fun things is that the laws for firing varies by state. I think California is one of the more strict ones.

pjdemers 10y ago

My stack ranking story: I was a manager. I was asked to build a team top performers. More than asked: My bonus would be based on the quality of the team. Now, the team is in place, and it's time for for the first set of reviews. The average is 9/10. Of course they really are that good - I followed orders and built a team of top performers. But... we have stack ranking. My meta-manager told me that the average had to be 5. My response: What? You're telling me to lower my own bonus! Yes, exactly, he explained, you just figured out why we have stack ranking.

yourapostasy 10y ago
I would like to hear proponents of stack ranking explain how stack ranking and any "we only want A players"-style policies are NOT mutually exclusive. Because if no good case can be made for both co-existing within the same organization, then seeing both can be a good signal to detect for an organization that uses stack ranking as a compensation attenuation mechanism. There may be sound organizational behavior reasons to hide the compensation attenuation in this manner, but I'm hard-pressed to find empirically-based evidence for such reasoning.

daemin 10y ago

The most amusing thing about stack ranking is that companies expect their teams to be average (at best). If a company really wanted to hire the best and only have top performers, then they should not expect their employees to fit nicely on a bell curve.