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

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.