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While Uber seems to be the current whipping boy of Silicon Valley, I wish I could say that this article would sound different if I replaced Uber with any other
by cbanek 9y ago
While Uber seems to be the current whipping boy of Silicon Valley, I wish I could say that this article would sound different if I replaced Uber with any other big tech company.
Getting yelled at constantly, usually with profane language? On call for weeks at a time with no help? Put in a double bind by management? Put on an impossible task, or a task made impossible? Stack ranked that you don't drink enough? Staying around late trying to look productive?
I wish I could say any of those weren't ubiquitous in SV.
- Apocryphon 9y agoAirBnB is probably the anti-Uber in that regard.
- santaclaus 9y agoReally? I found their interview process to be downright creepy...
- cbanek 9y agoBoth of these comments sound interesting, and make me want to go interview there and report back! :)
- Apocryphon 9y agoThey go out of their way to be the opposite of Uber, not completely intentionally. I'm not saying it's necessarily the best thing to be.
- MegaButts 9y agoDo you have any examples? I'd never heard this before.
- Apocryphon 9y agoThey go out of their way to interview for good culture fit, trying to preserve a very cooperative, nice, opposite of Uber type of environment. So much so that as others have pointed out, it seems cult-like, but in a way that is favorable to employees, or at least engineer employees. Many other unicorns just have the typical SV elitist cutthroat competitive environment that existed even before Uber.
- dawhizkid 9y agoAre you kidding? Look at their recent Glassdoor reviews.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- anth1988 9y agoHaving worked at 2 of the biggest I can say that some lesser version of some of those happened sometimes. Uber seems like an extreme case.
- atmz 9y agoIt's not this way everywhere! At my (mid-sized, public, SF-based) workplace, I work 8 hours/day, good postmortems, and understanding at all levels of the importance of work-life balance and how oncall (a sad inevitability) should work. If your employer doesn't do this, move on - that's how things change.
- cbanek 9y agoThat sounds pretty sweet. I'd love to know where that is, if you don't mind sharing. The problem about the "moving on" from bad workplaces is that it's hard to tell if your next workplace is going to be the same, even looking at reviews, like Glassdoor. Plus you're taking a fairly big risk to move to a new job. There's a lot of bait-and-switch type things going on, both in terms of role and culture. For example, in one job I worked at, I hired on as an embedded engineer, but then I ended up writing a big data solution (and did nothing embedded). In terms of culture it's very unlikely you'll meet the toxic members of the group, or be exposed to any of the politics during the interview. People will be on their best behavior, not their normal behavior. I have found that asking straightforward questions and trying to use my Bene Gesserit powers of truthsaying to see if they're putting me on has a pretty good S/N ratio. Also looking for that tired/sad/dejected/depressed look of random people in the hallways.
- atmz 9y agohttps://www.yelp.com/careers/home https://www.yelp.com/careers/home (let me know if you want to chat) And yeah, especially as you gain more experience/skills/system knowledge, moving on gets hard. Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve.
- cbanek 9y agoThanks - that's a good datapoint. > Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve. 100% true in my experience. For interesting problems, there's always an endless list of applicants, which almost allows for those companies to abuse their employees. Same for the game industry.
- NelsonMinar 9y agoIt's really not like that everywhere. Demand better from your employer.