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Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

nytimes.com

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Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#21

Post by askafriend »

ensiferum wrote: post #7

15k employees and this number obv doesn't include the drivers. Seriously?! What do they all do?

People says this for literally every company and it's getting fairly annoying that so many people can't see how a global operations-heavy company that does business in 200+ countries and develops an incredibly complex product can require a lot of resources....it's almost like people who ask this question have never worked on scaling a real business before.

I mean theres everything from marketing, to customer support, to ground operations, to engineering, to site reliability, to infrastructure, to product, to internationalization to partnerships to HR to design to recruiting to leadership to driver onboarding to Uber Eats to self-driving...there are A LOT of moving parts in A LOT of different countries.

It is incredibly difficult to scale an operation like Uber and it takes a lot of people, time, and money.

There is a big difference between running a global business and a toy side project that someone pushed up to Heroku...and no..."b..b..but I can just add more servers" is not a valid scaling strategy for a business.

I know my comment is a bit more harsh than necessary but it's borne out of a pent up frustration after seeing a 100 of these same comments directed at every company in existence.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#22

Post by travisjungroth »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #12

I'm sure it's not "some" but a lot of employees, but most are afraid to speak out just because they have seen what happens to people who advocate for someone who's down. I know for a fact that a lot of Uber employees nowadays can't talk freely outside about the fact that they work at Uber, when they used to be proud to talk about it just a couple of years ago. I also know that many employees at Uber (men or women) ar…

You know what the difference is between a which hunt and the public reaction to Uber's bad behavior? Witches don't exist.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#23

Post by RodericDay »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #12

I'm sure it's not "some" but a lot of employees, but most are afraid to speak out just because they have seen what happens to people who advocate for someone who's down. I know for a fact that a lot of Uber employees nowadays can't talk freely outside about the fact that they work at Uber, when they used to be proud to talk about it just a couple of years ago. I also know that many employees at Uber (men or women) ar…

Uber is not just like every other company. That's seriously some "boys will be boys" type thinking to excuse the messed up behavior of a certain few.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#24

Post by sidlls »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #12

I'm sure it's not "some" but a lot of employees, but most are afraid to speak out just because they have seen what happens to people who advocate for someone who's down. I know for a fact that a lot of Uber employees nowadays can't talk freely outside about the fact that they work at Uber, when they used to be proud to talk about it just a couple of years ago. I also know that many employees at Uber (men or women) ar…

Some of us think that the similarities Uber has to other tech companies in this area is an indictment of these other companies, not an excuse for Uber.

Also, this is as much a witch hunt as Uber is a paragon of feminism.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#25

Post by marcell »

SwellJoe wrote: post #11
drenvuk wrote: post #4

I wonder if this is loyalty or fear of stock devaluation. I hope it's the former, that kind of thing is beautiful to see in employees.

I dunno. I've seen an awful lot of loyalty to ideas that don't deserve loyalty over the past several years, and it seems to keep ruining good things. A toxic culture really isn't one that deserves loyalty, and Kalanick inarguably built a toxic culture into the fabric of Uber. He's not the only one, but he's ultimately the responsible party. If you want to kill a toxic culture that starts at the top, you simply can't…

> There's a small subset of people who thrive in a toxic culture

> perhaps because they're a young white male

Really? This is such a mean generalization of 1000 people who you have never even met...

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#26

Post by prostoalex »

CalChris wrote: post #19
benicelifeshort wrote: post #17

No company can hire as fast as Uber and remain good. No company ever has and no company ever will. His mistake was not being technical or creative enough to scale the company's service without scaling the headcount. The specific symptoms are not particularly interesting or novel. In fact they were entirely predictable and the company is surprisingly good for how poorly it was built. There are a number of major pitfal…

Everything else aside, and there's a lot to set aside, Uber should have focused on turning a profit with their core business model (difficult) rather than, oh look! a shiny object: automated cars. I give them no credit for growing big and unprofitable.

It is likely more disturbing considering that this is a shiny object in a series of shiny objects. UberChina, self-driving car, Elevate autonomous drone. From the outside it seems like attempting to cargo-cult Google except for the balance sheet.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#27

Post by marricks »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #12

I'm sure it's not "some" but a lot of employees, but most are afraid to speak out just because they have seen what happens to people who advocate for someone who's down. I know for a fact that a lot of Uber employees nowadays can't talk freely outside about the fact that they work at Uber, when they used to be proud to talk about it just a couple of years ago. I also know that many employees at Uber (men or women) ar…

I’m sure there’s tons of male employees who thought the situation was overblown and wanted things to settle down. I mean, they helped enable such an awful workplace culture. Heck, I’d say select female employees may have thought it was okay, though there really wasn’t many female workers there it seems because they fled.

A couple months fear of being “witch hunted” is a small price to pay for what appears to be years of harassment women at the company had to endure.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#28

Post by needlessly »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #12

I'm sure it's not "some" but a lot of employees, but most are afraid to speak out just because they have seen what happens to people who advocate for someone who's down. I know for a fact that a lot of Uber employees nowadays can't talk freely outside about the fact that they work at Uber, when they used to be proud to talk about it just a couple of years ago. I also know that many employees at Uber (men or women) ar…

yes, remember when that New York Times article came out about Amazon's toxic work environment?

Every employee has a different experience. A huge of chunk of Amazon's employees said they didn't recognize the type described in the New York Times. There is a huge bias when you're interviewing former employees. It is largely possible a number of theses former employees were actually low performing (hiring mistakes do happen) who deserved to be fired and/or had problems building relatinships with their fellow coworks/supervisors.

Uber's situation could be similar to Amazon's. I'm not saying Travis or Uber is completely innocent. I'm just saying we don't have all the facts and often times the media does get it wrong and have their own motivations to slant the truth.

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#29

Post by Axsuul »

CalChris wrote: post #20
jph wrote: post #5

Uber is in a difficult position. On the one hand, Kalanick has built a massive company. On the other hand, Holder's investigation turned up serious problems with the work culture. And employees, drivers, and investors are caught between these. To understand it from the inside, the best source I've seen is Susan Fowler's post "Reflecting on one very strange year at Uber". https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/re…

A massive unprofitable company. Anyone can do that. Anyone.

All you're doing is looking at the numbers

Re: Some Uber Employees Balk at Travis Kalanick’s Exit

#30

Post by prostoalex »

ivanbakel wrote: post #18

Interesting to see how all the positive evaluations of him come from his contributions to the company. Nobody defends his character or his moral decisions. Does working hard absolve you of misdeeds?

The question open to debate is whether one can succeed in the taxi business without being a brash, assertive a-hole, whose opponents include brash, assertive taxicab medallion owners and drivers as well as politicians bought by them. Even Lyft's current expansion was somewhat facilitated by Uber coming to town and strong-arming the municipality into legalizing ride-sharing.
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