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As someone who worked at Uber at this time and a fair amount after it is really funny reading the comment sections on threads like these. I wish we were as comi

As someone who worked at Uber at this time and a fair amount after it is really funny reading the comment sections on threads like these. I wish we were as comically “morally flexible” (also seems to mean evil for a lot of you) as you think. It would make for a good book.

blairbeckwith 4y ago
Is this a sarcastic comment, given a pretty good book was written about exactly that?
- Insanity 4y ago
  which one?
  - lhorie 4y ago
    Superpumped, by Mike Isaac. Mind you, he was a journalist working off of leaks, presumably from disgruntled employees (of which there were many in the high attrition era), and he obviously had a journalitically oriented profit motive of his own. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      I love how people always try to run unpaid damage control for a documented shitstorm of ethical and professional misconduct. Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities? How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations. How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report? How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology. How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests. How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India? But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.
      - lhorie 4y ago
        What unpaid damage control? The shitstorms are well documented at this point. You forgot the security breach cover up, the espionage, and probably a bunch of other stuff. What I "love" is people talking as if they are subject matter experts on shit they only read about in the news and have no first hand experience with. Gell-mann amnesia and all that.
        jonathankoren 4y ago
        What unpaid damage control? Implying that all the stories are made up or at least highly exaggerated by claiming that they’re all from people motivated to lie. That’s the unpaid damage control. And now the very guy that said “take [the documented and admitted gross misconduct] with a grain of salt” is shocked — “shocked”, I say — to be called out on his very actions, ignoring the very words written here visible to everyone? Amazing!
        lhorie 4y ago
        That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation and goes to show you're just here to inject your own biases into stuff you read online and make strawman/ad hominem arguments to make you feel good about yourself. Nobody is implying any of the scandals were fake, but there was one other comment in the thread wondering about whether superpumped is sensationalized, and these are my two cents wrt where the source material for that book / TV series comes from. Nobody is implying anyone was lying either. Plenty of people were disgruntled because yeah hearing there's multiple cases of sexual harassment going on in your company sucks. Doesn't mean people are gonna go around lying about stuff, in fact a number of people built up the guts to come forward w/ their own horror stories after Fowler. But you are only going to hear those stories, not the ones about the board member that got kicked out for sexist remarks or the people that got fired after HR investigations, because those aren't outrage-bait. That's what I mean by taking it w/ grain of salt when consuming media. Also, whatever damage there may be was already done years ago, so there's nothing to "damage control" at this point anymore. As GP implied, people tend to hold on to weak opinions strongly for stuff that frankly they don't even have any reason to be emotionally invested in, and I sure as hell am not interested in trying to "convince" you of anything.
juunpp 4y ago
What is your argument? What's written about the company is pretty clear. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-global-expansion-00044914 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-...
- medellin 4y ago
  I’m not arguing as it’s pointless online and with people who get so emotional at Uber. But you can find lots of news pieces that makes every company look bad posting one or several isn’t really saying anything about the employees who worked at the company.
  - juunpp 4y ago
    You seem to get defensive. The management deciding to go the illegal route (and yes, "morally flexible" is appropriate) doesn't say anything about you. I just don't understand how you can defend the older management, which seems to be the point of your original comment.
    - blindriver 4y ago
      Only on HN would you find people bending over backwards to support the taxi monopoly just to try to prove Uber was somehow immoral.
      - UncleEntity 4y ago
        Seriously, dude, the “taxi monopoly” everyone gets on about was in very few markets. In places like, IDK, Phoenix all you needed to be a taxi was a certified meter, rates posted on the side of your car, a sticker which they gave you when you fulfilled all these requirements and, here’s the big one which allowed Uber/Lyft to undercut everyone, commercial insurance. If your drivers don’t have to pay for expensive insurance and you can sell your product for under the actual cost it’s no big surprise you can gain a large foothold against the “taxi monopoly”. Whenever I get back to Phoenix and take a Lyft I always talk to the drivers to see how things are working out for them after the “monopoly” was broken and, from what I can gather, they’re getting paid fewer peanuts than I did driving a cab and have to maintain their vehicles at their own expense. Sure, tell me how “the warranty covers all that”, they aren’t killing their resale value by putting in a million miles and the $0.50 fuel surcharge for a 23 mile trip helps out when gas prices are over $4/gal. Only on HN…
zamnos 4y ago
How (in)accurate is Superpumped? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped_(TV_series)
- myhrvold 4y ago
  Inaccurate overall IMO; a caricature of what actually went on. But accurate in terms of capturing the sentiment that a lot of Uber skeptics had during the height of Uber mania, say 2015-2019. So the series is more a reflection of that than a faithful accounting of Uber's rise.
blindriver 4y ago
When I was at Uber, the vast majority were extremely moral people who felt strongly that we were empowering people to work for themselves in a well paying job. Everyone I worked with had the drivers and riders at the top of their minds and it's the only company where I strongly believed in the mission. Yes, there were problems with incentives where some bad actors would do whatever it took to get into Zone 1 and get a 10X multiplier for a bonus, but the sad fact is that happens in every company. And yes, things that happened to Susan Fowler were horrible and the idea that it actually happened when everyone was trying to create a very progressive environment was extremely demoralizing. But her experience at Uber was definitely uncommon, all the women I worked with felt strongly that Uber was a principled and progressive company.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  I hate to say it but intentions mean fuck all when the results are bad. People working at Facebook in the early 10s thought they were bringing people together and fostering openness in communication and helping the world, and instead we got a toxic hotbed of misinformation, conflict, and enabling genocide and the greatest increase in adolescent mental health problems and depression in recorded history. The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors. Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.
  - myhrvold 4y ago
    Nah the taxi industry was a lot worse than Uber. Most of the arguments over whether Uber drivers are employers to me are baffling; most taxi drivers took set, long hourly shifts from the medallion owners -- a much greater hallmark of an employee/employer relationship -- and were mafia backed and run quite crookedly. Many taxi drivers to this day have much worse working conditions and pay rates. On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides. Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.) In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way. Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...
ipaddr 4y ago
As per a comment below were you part of the wokeness or against during this time period.
kodah 4y ago
I hate to break it to you, but if you ask every software engineer which companies are morally flexible you'll quickly have a notch in every companies belt and then some. It also usually isn't engineers that are the morally flexible ones, though that's certainly not a rule. It's executive leadership and people who lead products. It doesn't take many of those types to develop a side brand as morally flexible, and frankly, sometimes it's just the outcome of hard decisions. There's plenty of specific indictments of Uber, but most of them don't involve the peons. Engineers passing on judgement to other engineers about where they've worked is pretty silly.
- uoaei 4y ago
  Engineers contributing to the ability of assholes to continue making others miserable is a pretty clear chain of causation. Everything I've read about people's moral convictions says they consider causal relationships to be morally relevant.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Under your logic we've mostly all morally failed. The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment. These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      We all morally fail all the time. It's ok because we are fallible beings with limited access to information about the happenings around us. Asserting that we are capable of perfection as a core tenet only leads to a cynical disappointment-cum-misanthropy. This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood. It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.

blairbeckwith 4y ago

Is this a sarcastic comment, given a pretty good book was written about exactly that?

Insanity 4y ago
which one?
- lhorie 4y ago
  Superpumped, by Mike Isaac. Mind you, he was a journalist working off of leaks, presumably from disgruntled employees (of which there were many in the high attrition era), and he obviously had a journalitically oriented profit motive of his own. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    I love how people always try to run unpaid damage control for a documented shitstorm of ethical and professional misconduct. Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities? How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations. How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report? How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology. How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests. How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India? But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.
    - lhorie 4y ago
      What unpaid damage control? The shitstorms are well documented at this point. You forgot the security breach cover up, the espionage, and probably a bunch of other stuff. What I "love" is people talking as if they are subject matter experts on shit they only read about in the news and have no first hand experience with. Gell-mann amnesia and all that.
      - jonathankoren 4y ago
        What unpaid damage control? Implying that all the stories are made up or at least highly exaggerated by claiming that they’re all from people motivated to lie. That’s the unpaid damage control. And now the very guy that said “take [the documented and admitted gross misconduct] with a grain of salt” is shocked — “shocked”, I say — to be called out on his very actions, ignoring the very words written here visible to everyone? Amazing!
        lhorie 4y ago
        That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation and goes to show you're just here to inject your own biases into stuff you read online and make strawman/ad hominem arguments to make you feel good about yourself. Nobody is implying any of the scandals were fake, but there was one other comment in the thread wondering about whether superpumped is sensationalized, and these are my two cents wrt where the source material for that book / TV series comes from. Nobody is implying anyone was lying either. Plenty of people were disgruntled because yeah hearing there's multiple cases of sexual harassment going on in your company sucks. Doesn't mean people are gonna go around lying about stuff, in fact a number of people built up the guts to come forward w/ their own horror stories after Fowler. But you are only going to hear those stories, not the ones about the board member that got kicked out for sexist remarks or the people that got fired after HR investigations, because those aren't outrage-bait. That's what I mean by taking it w/ grain of salt when consuming media. Also, whatever damage there may be was already done years ago, so there's nothing to "damage control" at this point anymore. As GP implied, people tend to hold on to weak opinions strongly for stuff that frankly they don't even have any reason to be emotionally invested in, and I sure as hell am not interested in trying to "convince" you of anything.

juunpp 4y ago

What is your argument? What's written about the company is pretty clear. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-global-expansion-00044914 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-...

medellin 4y ago
I’m not arguing as it’s pointless online and with people who get so emotional at Uber. But you can find lots of news pieces that makes every company look bad posting one or several isn’t really saying anything about the employees who worked at the company.
- juunpp 4y ago
  You seem to get defensive. The management deciding to go the illegal route (and yes, "morally flexible" is appropriate) doesn't say anything about you. I just don't understand how you can defend the older management, which seems to be the point of your original comment.
  - blindriver 4y ago
    Only on HN would you find people bending over backwards to support the taxi monopoly just to try to prove Uber was somehow immoral.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      Seriously, dude, the “taxi monopoly” everyone gets on about was in very few markets. In places like, IDK, Phoenix all you needed to be a taxi was a certified meter, rates posted on the side of your car, a sticker which they gave you when you fulfilled all these requirements and, here’s the big one which allowed Uber/Lyft to undercut everyone, commercial insurance. If your drivers don’t have to pay for expensive insurance and you can sell your product for under the actual cost it’s no big surprise you can gain a large foothold against the “taxi monopoly”. Whenever I get back to Phoenix and take a Lyft I always talk to the drivers to see how things are working out for them after the “monopoly” was broken and, from what I can gather, they’re getting paid fewer peanuts than I did driving a cab and have to maintain their vehicles at their own expense. Sure, tell me how “the warranty covers all that”, they aren’t killing their resale value by putting in a million miles and the $0.50 fuel surcharge for a 23 mile trip helps out when gas prices are over $4/gal. Only on HN…

zamnos 4y ago

How (in)accurate is Superpumped? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped_(TV_series)

myhrvold 4y ago
Inaccurate overall IMO; a caricature of what actually went on. But accurate in terms of capturing the sentiment that a lot of Uber skeptics had during the height of Uber mania, say 2015-2019. So the series is more a reflection of that than a faithful accounting of Uber's rise.

blindriver 4y ago

When I was at Uber, the vast majority were extremely moral people who felt strongly that we were empowering people to work for themselves in a well paying job. Everyone I worked with had the drivers and riders at the top of their minds and it's the only company where I strongly believed in the mission. Yes, there were problems with incentives where some bad actors would do whatever it took to get into Zone 1 and get a 10X multiplier for a bonus, but the sad fact is that happens in every company. And yes, things that happened to Susan Fowler were horrible and the idea that it actually happened when everyone was trying to create a very progressive environment was extremely demoralizing. But her experience at Uber was definitely uncommon, all the women I worked with felt strongly that Uber was a principled and progressive company.

Eisenstein 4y ago
I hate to say it but intentions mean fuck all when the results are bad. People working at Facebook in the early 10s thought they were bringing people together and fostering openness in communication and helping the world, and instead we got a toxic hotbed of misinformation, conflict, and enabling genocide and the greatest increase in adolescent mental health problems and depression in recorded history. The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors. Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.
- myhrvold 4y ago
  Nah the taxi industry was a lot worse than Uber. Most of the arguments over whether Uber drivers are employers to me are baffling; most taxi drivers took set, long hourly shifts from the medallion owners -- a much greater hallmark of an employee/employer relationship -- and were mafia backed and run quite crookedly. Many taxi drivers to this day have much worse working conditions and pay rates. On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides. Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.) In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way. Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...

ipaddr 4y ago

As per a comment below were you part of the wokeness or against during this time period.

kodah 4y ago

I hate to break it to you, but if you ask every software engineer which companies are morally flexible you'll quickly have a notch in every companies belt and then some. It also usually isn't engineers that are the morally flexible ones, though that's certainly not a rule. It's executive leadership and people who lead products. It doesn't take many of those types to develop a side brand as morally flexible, and frankly, sometimes it's just the outcome of hard decisions. There's plenty of specific indictments of Uber, but most of them don't involve the peons. Engineers passing on judgement to other engineers about where they've worked is pretty silly.

uoaei 4y ago
Engineers contributing to the ability of assholes to continue making others miserable is a pretty clear chain of causation. Everything I've read about people's moral convictions says they consider causal relationships to be morally relevant.
- kodah 4y ago
  Under your logic we've mostly all morally failed. The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment. These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    We all morally fail all the time. It's ok because we are fallible beings with limited access to information about the happenings around us. Asserting that we are capable of perfection as a core tenet only leads to a cynical disappointment-cum-misanthropy. This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood. It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.