4 ms·
Making a huge decision and sticking with it -- blowing through all obstacles through workarounds and hacks -- because otherwise would be deemed to be a failure
by lxe 6y ago
Making a huge decision and sticking with it -- blowing through all obstacles through workarounds and hacks -- because otherwise would be deemed to be a failure is the core issue here.
Uber's culture of "letting builders build" is fine, as long as teams have the ability to change things early and quickly. I think top-down decision making and monumental bloating of eng teams made things very difficult over time.
- nobunaga 6y agoManagement had very different incentives while engineers had different motives. The two were not aligned, and TK culture was still very prominent back then (work hard, dont go home early, we are going to be a 1 trillion dollar company etc etc) and Thuan definitely helped him spread that culture. So definitely not great days but I think the engineers took away a lot from their time there. Lots of lessons learned
- macNchz 6y agoYeah, I imagine this pressure from the top had something to do with the "90 hour weeks" cited in the thread...I've never worked in an org as large as Uber, but personally I have made some very bad engineering choices when in crunch mode, especially on the doubling-down-on-bad-decisions front. When there's no room to come up for air and look at a project from a perspective other than "this is super broken and way behind schedule" my brain just fixates on the micro-steps that need to be done to get it across the finish line (whether or not the finish line is realistically anywhere within sight). It's work being done, but none of the exhausted people working on a project like that have any energy left to consider whether it's the right work.