Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

susanjfowler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 1001 posts

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#431

Post by softawre »

crooked-v wrote: post #309
bifocald wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem in Uber's engineering orgs is that Uber hired too many people for too few real projects. From what I learned from my friends in Uber, many teams had largely overlapping responsibilities, and therefore created bogus projects to justify their existence. Their standard MO is picking a missing feature in a service, and then creating a new system that implemented that feature. It might be okay if all the…

I have literally never seen stack ranking mentioned in any context but horror stories and toxic company culture. What on earth possesses people to keep using it?

Because you have to do it on some level? How do you choose who to let go when for whatever reason you have to cut 10% of your staff?

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#432

Post by nikdaheratik »

trowawaway wrote: post #330
minimaxir wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, OP's subsequent employment by Stripe is a very strong endorsement for the workplace culture of the company.

Is it? A person in need of a lifeboat will take one. Also, the author repeatedly used the percentage of women engineers as an index of workplace quality/sanity. So we'd expect Stripe's to be much higher, right? Is that the case?

Right, because moving from one market leading tech company to another, with a book deal and tech talks thrown in for good measure, is the definition of "needing a lifeboat" in software engineering.

It's not like she got a job working at the DMV or something.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#433

Post by syswsi »

I'm curious if it's actually worth keeping high performing people on your company if they create a lot of internal conflict and employee turnover. Have there been studies that have looked into this? Are there HR tools that track this?

This situation reminds me of the Jeremy Clarkson Effect (https://blog.vanillaforums.com/help/how-to/dealing-with-toxi...) where you keep people on board because they are high performers/popular until the point where the amount of damage they cause versus value they provide is too high and must let them go. If, for example, you lose 5 good tech people because of one amazing tech person, is it still worth to have that one amazing person? I feel like if you could quantify something like this, it would be easier to get rid of toxic people.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#434

Post by cjbprime »

spuz wrote: post #276
logandavis wrote: post #69

By all indications, Uber has a toxic work culture that costs them both top talent and organizational velocity. I'm a college senior at a well-regarded engineering school. My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, in large part because of its reputation for internal misogyny and general assholery. Four classmates interned there last summer, and as far as I know none are interested in returning…

I think it's worth pointing out that this kind of male dominated culture doesn't just put off female engineers but male engineers too. As a male I've worked in environments with a high male to female ratio and it makes for a stifling homogeneous type of culture. I've never experienced the kind of sexist culture described at Uber but I imagine that must feel even worse as a male employee. I definitely see few women as…

I don't know what you mean by "even worse as a male employee", but I suspect you've drastically misspoken; you might want to fix that.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#435

Post by TheCoelacanth »

Eridrus wrote: post #213
tptacek wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software developers have incredible leverage right now, perhaps more than any cohort of employees in the country, and while most don't have salary to organize around, there are plenty of other practices --- transparency and liquidity of equity compensation being a great example --- that generate a broad base of support across the whole industry. People hear the term "union" and they think "shop rules" and "union cont…

So what organising principles should a software developer union have? It's easy to say they could be anything we want it to be, but I'm not sure there's a real consensus on any particular principle. Lots of people who talk about unions seem to value privacy protections for consumers, but there are clearly software developers writing this software who have a different view. Ubers reputation has been trash for almost a…

There are a lot of labor practices that most software developers would agree on changing: unpaid overtime, unreasonable on-call requirements, lack of transparency in equity compensation, unreasonably short windows for exercising vested stock options after leaving the company.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#436

Post by knucklesandwich »

morgante wrote: post #400
tptacek wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software developers have incredible leverage right now, perhaps more than any cohort of employees in the country, and while most don't have salary to organize around, there are plenty of other practices --- transparency and liquidity of equity compensation being a great example --- that generate a broad base of support across the whole industry. People hear the term "union" and they think "shop rules" and "union cont…

> People hear the term "union" and they think "shop rules" and "union contract salary". The problem is that a significant number of the people who push "unions" (especially on places like HN) are actually trying to push for those things. Just look in this thread to find people arguing over whether there actually are large differences in developer performance. If people want a professional association (I do!) let's ca…

Hi, I assume you're talking about me (the person above expressing some skepticism about the 10x programmer thing). I'm actually open to be proven wrong, but I'm not sure that makes much of a difference in terms of how compensation is justified in the real world (again, ask your employer to provide justification for salaries if you think 10x programmers exist and they are paid as such). Whether or not I'm right, I'm one person with one vote in a union.

A professional association by contrast does not work to help workers in a workplace dispute. It is fundamentally an advocacy group for the profession itself and works to advance it by creating professional standards, lobbying, offering education and certification, etc. The AMA for example, does not engage in collective bargaining with the management of a hospital and has no legal right to compel such a thing under the NLRA. The AMA does however lobby politicians and puts its people on medical boards to limit the supply of doctors. Furthermore a professional organization works at the level of a single profession and doesn't organize workplaces in strikes, which is the major power of a union.

Unions can aggregate under federations that often resemble and provide the same function as professional associations, but a professional association provides almost none of the benefits of a union.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#437

Post by MBCook »

fullshark wrote: post #358
tptacek wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't swallow it! Spit it back out at them. Uber is entirely dependent on the goodwill of its engineers. They're irreplaceable. Uber's financial situation is such that they're absolutely required to execute. They cannot afford organized employee protests and will cave to them like an overripe grape trying to hold up a cinderblock. People like you could be running the table there. Why not hold them to account? What…

Golden handcuffs are called handcuffs for a reason.

They're not handcuffs, involuntary servitude is illegal.

'Golden handcuffs' means you care more about your future payout than whatever missbehavior/illegality/immorality you're overlooking.

Also believing that same missbehavior won't cause the contract to be worthless by the time you get to collect.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#438

Post by nicksergeant »

polemic wrote: post #365
fullshark wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golden handcuffs are called handcuffs for a reason.

Fools gold, pretty soon.

This. I would be ashamed to have Uber on my resume for much longer after this story ran, and will think twice when interviewing a candidate who does.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#439

Post by mendelk »

Uber CEO responded in this article[0]:

> I have just read Susan Fowler's blog. What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber -- and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/19/14664474/uber-sexism-alleg...

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#440

Post by lowbloodsugar »

bifocald wrote: post #200
logandavis wrote: post #69

By all indications, Uber has a toxic work culture that costs them both top talent and organizational velocity. I'm a college senior at a well-regarded engineering school. My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, in large part because of its reputation for internal misogyny and general assholery. Four classmates interned there last summer, and as far as I know none are interested in returning…

The real problem in Uber's engineering orgs is that Uber hired too many people for too few real projects. From what I learned from my friends in Uber, many teams had largely overlapping responsibilities, and therefore created bogus projects to justify their existence. Their standard MO is picking a missing feature in a service, and then creating a new system that implemented that feature. It might be okay if all the…

Woman accuses Uber of systemic misogyny, but, no, "the real problem" is poor project management? So, systemic misogyny not a real problem for you?
Post reply on HN