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The day Uber goes public there will be a mass exodus of employees waiting for years to leave the company. I wonder if Uber will stay private permanently to prev
by luckyt 9y ago
The day Uber goes public there will be a mass exodus of employees waiting for years to leave the company. I wonder if Uber will stay private permanently to prevent this?
- sockgrant 9y agoDo you know anyone that works there? Is the engineering culture messed up or something?
- jonathankoren 9y agoThere's always an exodus after a liquidity event. As far as the culture goes, from what I understand it's very backstabby and culty. Basically, Travis set the culture, and it permeates the company.
- influx 9y agoThere is a year lockout of Uber employees after an IPO. Source: ex Uber employee.
- marioestrada 9y agoIf you quit during that time can you sell?
- mikeokner 9y agoI think the same rules apply. You can exercise but you'll owe taxes and can't sell any shares to cover the tax.
- lhorie 9y agoI don't know details on stock options, but for RSUs, my understanding is that it works like this: your signing bonus and part of yearly perf bonus is in equity. Signing bonus matures in four years, incrementally. 25% vests at the end of 1st year, the rest vests incrementally by month. Perf bonus vests in 1 yr. Once a RSU vests, it's yours. If you leave the company before a RSU vests, you lose it. At IPO, RSUs get converted into stocks, however, there's a restriction that you can't sell them for 1 year from the IPO date. Tax obligation is handled by subtracting a portion of the units, rather than by paying out-of-pocket.
- influx 9y agoNo, you have to wait the year.
- sockgrant 9y agoHow's the eng culture?
- influx 9y agoThey hired too many, too fast. When I was there, the whole thing was chaos. Instead of using a cloud provider, they are building basic infrastructure because engineers have to do something. Beyond the obvious HR issues that Susan Fowler exposed, it was a bad place to work for almost any engineer. I would stay far away if you get an offer there.
- olivermarks 9y agoI just submitted this FT piece on Fowler https://www.ft.com/content/b4bc2a68-dc4f-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482 https://www.ft.com/content/b4bc2a68-dc4f-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b...
- lhorie 9y ago> Instead of using a cloud provider As I understand, we tried using AWS to power key infrastructure but ran into scalability/cost issues. We still use 3rd providers for various things but my understanding is that a lot of this eng work is to reduce the costs incurred from these services. I do agree though, as a new hire, that the culture here is quite a bit on the NIH side, compared to a more traditional software shop.
- influx 9y agoI probably can't say a lot due to NDA, but does it make sense to you that AWS or Google Cloud can't scale to the level of Uber, such that Uber has to build their own datacenters and write their own Lambda equivalent? Further, does it make sense that you'd rather buy hardware up front to scale for Halloween and New Years instead of being able to dynamically surge your infrastructure?
- mlazos 9y agoDoes it make sense that managing your own hardware and data center is extraordinarily expensive? Why do you think public cloud providers are so popular? I don’t buy your scalability argument either. Netflix has about 100m users and moved from having their own data centers to AWS and is extremely profitable. Uber has 40m. Given they might have different requirements for a system it might make sense but if scalability is the main reason, that is a bad excuse to undertake a huge infra investment.
- rockinghigh 9y agoThe lockout conditions are 6 months after IPO and one year after vesting.
- lhorie 9y agoAFAIK Most employees have RSUs now, which don't have these issues related to exercising options. As the article mentioned, Dara has expressed that he would like to take the company public in a couple of years. Not sure what his pay structure looks like, but assuming it includes equity, I would imagine it would be in his interest to go public