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A great company culture is one where everyone is aligned to the mission of the company and everyone is aligned, empowered and incentivized in this exact same di

A great company culture is one where everyone is aligned to the mission of the company and everyone is aligned, empowered and incentivized in this exact same direction. I’ve worked at a couple of companies that had great culture and the best was Uber. Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo, was hands down the best company I’ve ever been at. Everyone was aligned together which meant that everyone was working together, everyone had the same mission and understood it and we were empowered to do great things. Similar to Facebook, TK had weekly Q&A that was incredibly open and transparent. TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person and it showed in the company. Things weren’t perfect, but perfection isn’t the enemy of great and it was great working at Uber between about 2014 and 2017. The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed. People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture. By 2020, when I left, the engineering culture was a bad joke. The only thing on most people’s minds was “How do I get promoted?” and the incompetency of engineering leadership lead to decisions like “Toil vs Talent” which meant incentivized people to create their own microservices and not work together with others. I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo, everything she wrote was verified by Thuan Pham himself. I didn’t know her personally but I know people that did, and she was known to be very smart. But her experience was not the majority experience. I think most people and especially most women had very positive things to say about working at Uber. But it was a wake up call that things needed to be changed, but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great. It’s a fascinating topic that I daydream about writing a multi-part Medium post about but never will.

challengly 6y ago
> People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture. Same with Google. The intentional misrepresentation and ousting of Damore was a turning point where engineering culture was run over by activist culture.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Would you argue that the outsing of Gebru and others is a turning point where engineering culture is running back over activist culture?
  - challengly 6y ago
    That's pushback, but engineers haven't reclaimed the culture and are mostly still silent and afraid.
triceratops 6y ago
> but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great Please explain more. Did they change more than just sexual and other harassment reporting and handling policies? Why did any of the changes have any effect on engineering?
- plank_time 6y ago
  The engineering culture didn’t working together to succeed. It incentivized people to keep creating new services that were a little different so that they could get promotions. It caused a lot of unnecessary work and an explosion of services. It was very stupid. Blame Thuan for that. He was a terrible CTO.
  - ketzo 6y ago
    Okay, but what does Susan Fowler's memo about systemic sexual harassment have to do with incentivizing engineering siloes? You seem to draw a pretty direct line.
teachrdan 6y ago
> TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person Travis Kalanick illegally obtained and read the private medical records of an Indian worman who was raped by her Uber driver. He publicly claimed she was lying to frivolously sue the company, despite absolutely no evidence to support those allegations. > Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo The "shenanigans"--I think you mean systemic discrimination against women via a culture of sexual harassment by high-ranking men with the complicity of HR--continued until Susan Fowler published her memo and the board belatedly fired TK. > The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed. > I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo This reads like you're trying to blame the fall of Uber's engineering culture on Susan Fowler without saying so. And sure, there's room for people to disagree: I personally think the board fired Travis Kalanick because he didn't IPO as quickly as they wanted. But this honestly reads like "Everything at Uber was great until this one woman complained and ruined it for all of us." And I don't think that's what you actually want to communicate. https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-assault-rape-medical-records https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-a...
- plank_time 6y ago
  By shenanigans I mean all the stuff they did in the name of competition. Lyft and Uber both did shitty things to each other but somehow Uber got the rap as the bad one. Globally, every single company Uber competed against did shitty, illegal stuff but you never hear about it. Didi sent in spies to Uber China to work there and steal data. No one talks or cares about that. You didn’t read the article you linked to, didn’t you? It’s pretty funny. Neither TK nor Uber blamed the victim ever. And TK didn’t order getting the medical records. His subordinate, Eric Alexander, who I had the pleasure to work with once and he was an asshole, obtained them and showed TK. TK shouldn’t have looked at it, but he did. Nothing came of it except Eric Alexander was fired. I didn’t blame Susan Fowler. I know you have an agenda against Uber, so feel free to believe what you want to believe. The reaction to her memo ruined Uber because leadership was incompetent. She was right to have written that memo, so don’t try to make it seem like I’m blaming her. Companies the size of Uber will always have harassers and assholes. It’s unavoidable. The best you can do is create a culture that calls it out and fires them immediately. Uber hired a VP of engineering from Google but he was fired because he left Google because of sexual harassment. But Google covered it up. Same with Andy Rubin and his sex slaves. Yet how many of you still use Android? I agree that TK should have brought Uber to IPO years sooner.
xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
No. The culture seemed great at the time, because all the skeletons were still in the closet. Alcohol was rampant. There was all sorts of sexual harassment and execs having affairs with reports. There was politics and subterfuge and extremely non-blameless postmortems (i.e. you were fired). People were working 60 hour weeks. Hiring was a total shit show. There was no standard practice -- managers were hiring their friends left and right. Nepotism, not meritocracy, ruled. Recruiters blatantly lied to candidates about offers. There were a few suicides. People were spying on their ex's, celebrities, fighting and committing fraud, giving friends credits or discounts. Thousands upon thousands of borked fares where drivers or riders were respectively paid or charged incorrectly. From a technical standpoint, it couldn't be worse. Sure it was fast and exciting, but some of the worst, biggest technical debt decisions ever were made in this time. Almost all of the engineers who made this decisions are no longer there. China, schemaless, M3, all the ops shenanigans. On call was a nightmare. Teams were competing internally by solving the same problem but not talking to each other. You wanna know why the culture seemed great? Because they were burning money like there is tomorrow. There was no oversight. So the firehouse got turned off, the party was over. Fowler was a symptom. Her memo didn't cause culture to implode, it was already a time bomb.

challengly 6y ago

> People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture. Same with Google. The intentional misrepresentation and ousting of Damore was a turning point where engineering culture was run over by activist culture.

tolbish 6y ago
Would you argue that the outsing of Gebru and others is a turning point where engineering culture is running back over activist culture?
- challengly 6y ago
  That's pushback, but engineers haven't reclaimed the culture and are mostly still silent and afraid.

triceratops 6y ago

> but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great Please explain more. Did they change more than just sexual and other harassment reporting and handling policies? Why did any of the changes have any effect on engineering?

plank_time 6y ago
The engineering culture didn’t working together to succeed. It incentivized people to keep creating new services that were a little different so that they could get promotions. It caused a lot of unnecessary work and an explosion of services. It was very stupid. Blame Thuan for that. He was a terrible CTO.
- ketzo 6y ago
  Okay, but what does Susan Fowler's memo about systemic sexual harassment have to do with incentivizing engineering siloes? You seem to draw a pretty direct line.

teachrdan 6y ago

> TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person Travis Kalanick illegally obtained and read the private medical records of an Indian worman who was raped by her Uber driver. He publicly claimed she was lying to frivolously sue the company, despite absolutely no evidence to support those allegations. > Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo The "shenanigans"--I think you mean systemic discrimination against women via a culture of sexual harassment by high-ranking men with the complicity of HR--continued until Susan Fowler published her memo and the board belatedly fired TK. > The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed. > I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo This reads like you're trying to blame the fall of Uber's engineering culture on Susan Fowler without saying so. And sure, there's room for people to disagree: I personally think the board fired Travis Kalanick because he didn't IPO as quickly as they wanted. But this honestly reads like "Everything at Uber was great until this one woman complained and ruined it for all of us." And I don't think that's what you actually want to communicate. https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-assault-rape-medical-records https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-a...

plank_time 6y ago
By shenanigans I mean all the stuff they did in the name of competition. Lyft and Uber both did shitty things to each other but somehow Uber got the rap as the bad one. Globally, every single company Uber competed against did shitty, illegal stuff but you never hear about it. Didi sent in spies to Uber China to work there and steal data. No one talks or cares about that. You didn’t read the article you linked to, didn’t you? It’s pretty funny. Neither TK nor Uber blamed the victim ever. And TK didn’t order getting the medical records. His subordinate, Eric Alexander, who I had the pleasure to work with once and he was an asshole, obtained them and showed TK. TK shouldn’t have looked at it, but he did. Nothing came of it except Eric Alexander was fired. I didn’t blame Susan Fowler. I know you have an agenda against Uber, so feel free to believe what you want to believe. The reaction to her memo ruined Uber because leadership was incompetent. She was right to have written that memo, so don’t try to make it seem like I’m blaming her. Companies the size of Uber will always have harassers and assholes. It’s unavoidable. The best you can do is create a culture that calls it out and fires them immediately. Uber hired a VP of engineering from Google but he was fired because he left Google because of sexual harassment. But Google covered it up. Same with Andy Rubin and his sex slaves. Yet how many of you still use Android? I agree that TK should have brought Uber to IPO years sooner.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago

No. The culture seemed great at the time, because all the skeletons were still in the closet. Alcohol was rampant. There was all sorts of sexual harassment and execs having affairs with reports. There was politics and subterfuge and extremely non-blameless postmortems (i.e. you were fired). People were working 60 hour weeks. Hiring was a total shit show. There was no standard practice -- managers were hiring their friends left and right. Nepotism, not meritocracy, ruled. Recruiters blatantly lied to candidates about offers. There were a few suicides. People were spying on their ex's, celebrities, fighting and committing fraud, giving friends credits or discounts. Thousands upon thousands of borked fares where drivers or riders were respectively paid or charged incorrectly. From a technical standpoint, it couldn't be worse. Sure it was fast and exciting, but some of the worst, biggest technical debt decisions ever were made in this time. Almost all of the engineers who made this decisions are no longer there. China, schemaless, M3, all the ops shenanigans. On call was a nightmare. Teams were competing internally by solving the same problem but not talking to each other. You wanna know why the culture seemed great? Because they were burning money like there is tomorrow. There was no oversight. So the firehouse got turned off, the party was over. Fowler was a symptom. Her memo didn't cause culture to implode, it was already a time bomb.