fpoijasw

Hello Uber Engineer here!

Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion. I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team had mobile/web, severe shortage on infra teams since head count was already taken by main Uber teams. We even started building and maintaining our own chat app. I disagree that all the cool eng project that we put out and share here is a waste of time or resources. Those project was initiated by real needs on Uber and only the best make it out into the rest of the world. Engineers that shipped those projects are still here and we would've done it regardless of whether the 435 people that were hired in the first spot. I fully realize that it's an insensitive thing to say but I think it's important that it's expressed somewhere.

I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress. Learn to plan better and to prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done.

Actually I agree with them here, it's much more peaceful now than before. When we were trying to break into China and facing against Didi that really seemed like we were at war. Like we would start a growth campaign and merely hours after we launch, Didi would launch the exact same campaign. Even after the merger I'm not sure if this is true but we found 16 employees who were on both Ubers and Didi's payroll.

I'm sorry to hear this. Can you describe what happened?

Also from the end of 2016 the company encouraged not wearing Uber swag. We had few employees, in I think the middle East, attacked by taxi drivers. They were wearing Uber swag.

Disclaimer: I work at Uber.

Wow tell me what company you're recruiting for. I'll make sure to never apply there. This is really priveleged thinking, I've worked for Google, Amazon, and Uber, and two start ups. Let me tell you the engineering culture aren't all that different across all orgs I've worked at. It's really simplistic and naive of you to take what you hear on the media as truth. It's only "widely regarded" because Uber is under heavy scrutiny, because of the industry we operate in. Tell me what company do you work for? If all of media put a magnifying glass over you and all your coworkers, I'll gauarntee, you'll soon be widely regarded as toxic. If your company is even remotely successful, I'll gauarntee that the media will find or spin up a business malpractice of some kind.

It's not really a claim, just my personal opinion. I mean there are women engineers who I talked to and they definitely most agree it's better. We all agree on one thing. Ubers a completely different company. Ask anyone that works here.

There are some who I've spoken with that told me that their previous company (think Google/Facebook/Microsoft caliber companies) which had worse culture of misogyny even compared to pre Susan Fowler Uber.

I think there's a misunderstanding of TKs character. At least internally, whenever there was a critcism externally against Uber whether it be deleteuber or greyball our engineering team only grew more determined. The more backlash from the media it made us closer together and stronger. TK was the most inspirational after external media attack and even after Waymos lawsuit he displayed vigor and confidence that we are the righteous ones and that alphabet is going to lose this battle against us. There's a misconception that these attacks weakened our culture or confidence in our leadership. It's the opposite it was a signal that we were moving fast and changing the world, and TK was at the helm defending us.

This narrative and solidarity broke down soley due to Susan Folwer. I really want to emphasize this point. Her blog post is the only piece of controversy that really made ourselves question whether we were doing the right thing. The only time we saw our great leader unable to justify our hypergrowth and the only time I personally saw him break out in tears, was the all hands discussing Susan Fowler's blog post.

So again please don't discredit Susan Folwer's blog post.

Hey engineer at Uber here. I'm a male engineer started working at Uber two years ago. I'm seeing a lot of comments here that is discrediting Susan Fowler's accomplishments in taking TK down, and I would like to correct the notion that the culture/TK himself/Waymo is what brought TK down.

To preface I've work both at Google as an engineer, and frankly speaking the engineering culture at Uber didn't differ all that much. Both org had the same amount of soft misogyny, politics, and HR that protected its highest performers. In fact a lot of characters mentioned in Susan's blog post works at Google today. So what led up to the downfall of TK? Susan Fowler's blog post. What she described is what a lot of people go through in every company, but she was brave enough to post her experience using her real name. I'm willing to bet if she never posted her blog post none of this would've happened, and it would've been business as usual at Uber.

Susan Fowler exposed the weakness in our culture and it catapulted an internal French Revolution where every head had a possibility of getting axed. This put our executives in a disarray and naturally external enemies decided to strike at us when we were weakest. The Waymo lawsuit only happened when it did and only effective as it was because of the chaos Susan Fowler initiated.

So please stop discrediting Susan Fowler, what she did was really the catalyst, the trigger, for Uber to set course on a better path. It's just too bad she wasn't able to stay and see the real impact of her words. Ubers a great place to work now.