6 ms·

How's the eng culture?

influx 9y ago
They 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Does 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.
      - influx 9y ago
        I think we are violently agreeing :)
      - lhorie 9y ago
        > I don’t buy your scalability argument Oh, that was what I was told during new employee training. I'm not in the infra org and tbh, I don't really buy the do-it-in-house-for-scalability argument either. I've also seen other employees express sentiments similar to influx's wrt infra.
      - alexeldeib 9y ago
        OP mentioned below, but for clarity you are in complete agreement with the comment you replied to.
jdavis703 9y ago
I had a technical phone screen there. The idea was to build some web frontend against a RESTFul service. I finished it in about 15 minutes, out of the 60 minutes that had been set aside. The fact that the entry test was that easy was a turn off, especially considering the interviewer seemed surprised at how fast I finished. But then my (white male) interviewer wanted to spend the left over 45 minutes talking about how diverse Uber was blah blah blah and that they were just unfairly represented in the press. I decided not to follow up after that. Hopefully their culture improves, but it's not somewhere I'd consider working currently.

They 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Does 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.
    - influx 9y ago
      I think we are violently agreeing :)
    - lhorie 9y ago
      > I don’t buy your scalability argument Oh, that was what I was told during new employee training. I'm not in the infra org and tbh, I don't really buy the do-it-in-house-for-scalability argument either. I've also seen other employees express sentiments similar to influx's wrt infra.
    - alexeldeib 9y ago
      OP mentioned below, but for clarity you are in complete agreement with the comment you replied to.

jdavis703 9y ago

I had a technical phone screen there. The idea was to build some web frontend against a RESTFul service. I finished it in about 15 minutes, out of the 60 minutes that had been set aside. The fact that the entry test was that easy was a turn off, especially considering the interviewer seemed surprised at how fast I finished. But then my (white male) interviewer wanted to spend the left over 45 minutes talking about how diverse Uber was blah blah blah and that they were just unfairly represented in the press. I decided not to follow up after that. Hopefully their culture improves, but it's not somewhere I'd consider working currently.