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Great thread. Thanks for sharing! It's interesting to me that the author feels that things were great with Uber in 2016 pre-Trump and that Trump's election wa

by dap 6y ago

Great thread. Thanks for sharing! It's interesting to me that the author feels that things were great with Uber in 2016 pre-Trump and that Trump's election was the catalyst for the negative sentiment. Susan Fowler's famous post was early 2017, and maybe _posting_ it was catalyzed by the issues surrounding Trump, but clearly the serious cultural problems she described at Uber had been going on for some time before that. I'm trying to figure out what to make about a lot of these mis-steps. On the one hand, many of them seem preventable: you could imagine identifying ahead of time that load time and binary size might be risks for the new app and scale-testing these very early in the process to de-risk it. You could imagine testing the new app long enough (and widely enough) to discover the location issues (drivers going to the wrong blocks, etc.). You could imagine foreseeing users being upset about suddenly needing their location data when they're not using the app. Obviously hindsight is 20/20, but is there also a pattern (that we see all the time, especially in Silicon Valley it seems) of not really thinking through the consequences of a lot of decisions, especially where things like user privacy are concerned?

saagarjha 6y ago
I think the election of Trump may have made it possible for these cultural problems to come to light, the same way that (for example) women speaking up about sexual assault can empower others to do the same. People saw the issues that were placed on a national stage, then looked inwards and saw similar issues much closer to home, and these things started coming out as people were no longer OK with keeping quiet about it. For the other half of your comment: I personally think many companies have issues focusing on non-technical problems. From the thread, the issues were clearly that they were writing far too much code, it seems like they were not testing enough, they lacked a person who would tell them how their changes would be perceived by the public. This is not unique to Uber in any way, these problems show up to various degrees across companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. And you can see the solutions: while highly technical and "awesome", they are obvious band-aids. It's just that it's much easier to slap on technical band-aids than fix the root, non-technical problem.
- dap 6y ago
  > I think the election of Trump may have made it possible for these cultural problems to come to light, the same way that (for example) women speaking up about sexual assault can empower others to do the same. > I personally think many companies have issues focusing on non-technical problems...This is not unique to Uber in any way, these problems show up to various degrees across companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. I agree with all that. To me, this is about taking responsibility. Our industry has shown a pattern of thinking poorly about non-technical problems while rolling out changes that affect millions of people. That's part of why so many people are angry at the tech industry -- and for good reason. The thread is thoughtful in a lot of ways, but I get a whiff of not-taking-responsibility through some of it. The first example struck me for whatever reason. I get that people in 2016 didn't necessarily know what was going on or how bad it was. But I would expect that in 2020, we'd look back at 2016 as the time when serious issues beneath the surface were about to explode as a result of choices made at Uber, not some golden time before external forces made life hard for Uber. I don't mean to be too hard on the author or even Uber (and after all, this was a casual tweet thread). I think it's a widespread challenge for our culture in the tech industry.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Yes, I think that many engineers can often have a hard time understanding that problems that occur at their workplace don't exist because the media changed attitudes but because it shone a light at internal issues. I remember talking to someone at Facebook privacy and they were somewhat indignant that the media was making them out for being such a privacy nightmare–ignoring the fact, of course, that the tide was turning against surveillance and data gathering in general and Facebook was just one of the most prominent examples of what everyone hated ;)

by dap 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

I think the election of Trump may have made it possible for these cultural problems to come to light, the same way that (for example) women speaking up about sexual assault can empower others to do the same. People saw the issues that were placed on a national stage, then looked inwards and saw similar issues much closer to home, and these things started coming out as people were no longer OK with keeping quiet about it. For the other half of your comment: I personally think many companies have issues focusing on non-technical problems. From the thread, the issues were clearly that they were writing far too much code, it seems like they were not testing enough, they lacked a person who would tell them how their changes would be perceived by the public. This is not unique to Uber in any way, these problems show up to various degrees across companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. And you can see the solutions: while highly technical and "awesome", they are obvious band-aids. It's just that it's much easier to slap on technical band-aids than fix the root, non-technical problem.

dap 6y ago
> I think the election of Trump may have made it possible for these cultural problems to come to light, the same way that (for example) women speaking up about sexual assault can empower others to do the same. > I personally think many companies have issues focusing on non-technical problems...This is not unique to Uber in any way, these problems show up to various degrees across companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. I agree with all that. To me, this is about taking responsibility. Our industry has shown a pattern of thinking poorly about non-technical problems while rolling out changes that affect millions of people. That's part of why so many people are angry at the tech industry -- and for good reason. The thread is thoughtful in a lot of ways, but I get a whiff of not-taking-responsibility through some of it. The first example struck me for whatever reason. I get that people in 2016 didn't necessarily know what was going on or how bad it was. But I would expect that in 2020, we'd look back at 2016 as the time when serious issues beneath the surface were about to explode as a result of choices made at Uber, not some golden time before external forces made life hard for Uber. I don't mean to be too hard on the author or even Uber (and after all, this was a casual tweet thread). I think it's a widespread challenge for our culture in the tech industry.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Yes, I think that many engineers can often have a hard time understanding that problems that occur at their workplace don't exist because the media changed attitudes but because it shone a light at internal issues. I remember talking to someone at Facebook privacy and they were somewhat indignant that the media was making them out for being such a privacy nightmare–ignoring the fact, of course, that the tide was turning against surveillance and data gathering in general and Facebook was just one of the most prominent examples of what everyone hated ;)