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Uber is a ship of Theseus. Lots of early people left since the Travis days. Since then, fixing the reputation damage has been a big focus in the company. Safet

by lhorie 4y ago

Uber is a ship of Theseus. Lots of early people left since the Travis days. Since then, fixing the reputation damage has been a big focus in the company. Safety center, electric fleet commitments, DEI, Ukraine initiatives, etc, are all newer initiatives in that vein. "Do the right thing" is now a company core value plastered all over the offices. Even the "off the shelf stuff doesn't meet our needs" culture alluded in the article has given way to adopting 3rd party solutions more (e.g. Slack replacing uChat, Oracle partnership, etc). Lots of things have changed over the years.

no_butterscotch 4y ago
> Safety center, electric fleet commitments, DEI, Ukraine initiatives, etc, Two of these things are not like the other two.
HopenHeyHi 4y ago
> "Do the right thing" is now a company core value plastered all over the offices. That is great, I love slogans on posters. But if they were serious Uber would invite Spike Lee to their HQ to ward off the evil spirits.
- EdJiang 4y ago
  Ask and you shall receive: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-spike-lee-celebrate-brooklyns-drivers/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-spike-lee-celebrate-brook...
  - HopenHeyHi 4y ago
    Kek. Well, we can rest easy, Uber good now. :P
myhrvold 4y ago
uChat actually saved Uber a lot of money by the way. Slack is way more expensive and it would not meet the requirements of Uber at the time, i.e. anyone being able to chat with anyone (including the famous global Pool Party room with every single employee in it). Also Slack had an issue with Uber's scale, having messaging alerts for services that would not reliably show up that engineering would use to detect outages. uChat was based on Mattermost as I recall which was open source, and saved Uber several million dollars plus over its lifetime course. I was not directly involved in its development but I (started and) ran the engineering blog, and also Uber's open source program for a time where this partnership occurred. It is funny how some of these examples are floating around about build vs buy, but uChat actually was a good deal while it lasted. Ultimately Uber decided they didn't need everyone talking to each other all at once and so bit the bullet and paid more for Slack.

by lhorie 4y ago

no_butterscotch 4y ago

> Safety center, electric fleet commitments, DEI, Ukraine initiatives, etc, Two of these things are not like the other two.

HopenHeyHi 4y ago

> "Do the right thing" is now a company core value plastered all over the offices. That is great, I love slogans on posters. But if they were serious Uber would invite Spike Lee to their HQ to ward off the evil spirits.

EdJiang 4y ago
Ask and you shall receive: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-spike-lee-celebrate-brooklyns-drivers/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-spike-lee-celebrate-brook...
- HopenHeyHi 4y ago
  Kek. Well, we can rest easy, Uber good now. :P

myhrvold 4y ago

uChat actually saved Uber a lot of money by the way. Slack is way more expensive and it would not meet the requirements of Uber at the time, i.e. anyone being able to chat with anyone (including the famous global Pool Party room with every single employee in it). Also Slack had an issue with Uber's scale, having messaging alerts for services that would not reliably show up that engineering would use to detect outages. uChat was based on Mattermost as I recall which was open source, and saved Uber several million dollars plus over its lifetime course. I was not directly involved in its development but I (started and) ran the engineering blog, and also Uber's open source program for a time where this partnership occurred. It is funny how some of these examples are floating around about build vs buy, but uChat actually was a good deal while it lasted. Ultimately Uber decided they didn't need everyone talking to each other all at once and so bit the bullet and paid more for Slack.