A great company culture is one where everyone is aligned to the mission of the company and everyone is aligned, empowered and incentivized in this exact same direction.
I’ve worked at a couple of companies that had great culture and the best was Uber. Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo, was hands down the best company I’ve ever been at. Everyone was aligned together which meant that everyone was working together, everyone had the same mission and understood it and we were empowered to do great things.
Similar to Facebook, TK had weekly Q&A that was incredibly open and transparent. TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person and it showed in the company. Things weren’t perfect, but perfection isn’t the enemy of great and it was great working at Uber between about 2014 and 2017.
The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed. People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture. By 2020, when I left, the engineering culture was a bad joke. The only thing on most people’s minds was “How do I get promoted?” and the incompetency of engineering leadership lead to decisions like “Toil vs Talent” which meant incentivized people to create their own microservices and not work together with others.
I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo, everything she wrote was verified by Thuan Pham himself. I didn’t know her personally but I know people that did, and she was known to be very smart. But her experience was not the majority experience. I think most people and especially most women had very positive things to say about working at Uber. But it was a wake up call that things needed to be changed, but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great. It’s a fascinating topic that I daydream about writing a multi-part Medium post about but never will.
> TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person
Travis Kalanick illegally obtained and read the private medical records of an Indian worman who was raped by her Uber driver. He publicly claimed she was lying to frivolously sue the company, despite absolutely no evidence to support those allegations.
> Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo
The "shenanigans"--I think you mean systemic discrimination against women via a culture of sexual harassment by high-ranking men with the complicity of HR--continued until Susan Fowler published her memo and the board belatedly fired TK.
> The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed.
> I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo
This reads like you're trying to blame the fall of Uber's engineering culture on Susan Fowler without saying so. And sure, there's room for people to disagree: I personally think the board fired Travis Kalanick because he didn't IPO as quickly as they wanted. But this honestly reads like "Everything at Uber was great until this one woman complained and ruined it for all of us." And I don't think that's what you actually want to communicate.
By shenanigans I mean all the stuff they did in the name of competition. Lyft and Uber both did shitty things to each other but somehow Uber got the rap as the bad one. Globally, every single company Uber competed against did shitty, illegal stuff but you never hear about it. Didi sent in spies to Uber China to work there and steal
data. No one talks or cares about that.
You didn’t read the article you linked to, didn’t you? It’s pretty funny. Neither TK nor Uber blamed the victim ever. And TK didn’t order getting the medical records. His subordinate, Eric Alexander, who I had the pleasure to work with once and he was an asshole, obtained them and showed TK. TK shouldn’t have looked at it, but he did. Nothing came of it except Eric Alexander was fired.
I didn’t blame Susan Fowler. I know you have an agenda against Uber, so feel free to believe what you want to believe. The reaction to her memo ruined Uber because leadership was incompetent. She was right to have written that memo, so don’t try to make it seem like I’m blaming her.
Companies the size of Uber will always have harassers and assholes. It’s unavoidable. The best you can do is create a culture that calls it out and fires them immediately. Uber hired a VP of engineering from Google but he was fired because he left Google because of sexual harassment. But Google covered it up. Same with Andy Rubin and his sex slaves. Yet how many of you still use Android?
I agree that TK should have brought Uber to IPO years sooner.
"The Uber executives who viewed her files, which included CEO Travis Kalanick and senior vice president Emil Michael, had started to believe the incident had somehow been orchestrated by Indian ride-hailing company Ola, according to reports"
The Guardian:
"Last week, however, it was reported that Uber took a different view of the assault internally. Alexander, then the president of business for Uber Asia Pacific, reportedly traveled to India in the days after the attack and obtained the victim’s medical records. He then allegedly shared those records with Kalanick and Michael, the senior vice-president for business, and the group theorized that the victim was part of a conspiracy by rival Indian firm Ola to damage Uber’s reputation."
BBC:
"Several media reports cited in the lawsuit said that senior staff at the ride-hailing company, including Travis Kalanick, the former Uber chief executive who was ousted in June this year, and former executives Emil Michael and Eric Alexander, had questioned the victim's account of her ordeal."
The suit settled out of court, so we'll never see all the evidence, but this behavior by Kalanick and other upper management would be in line with his their hiding Uber's actions from regulators via "Greyball" and spying on Lyft's drivers. (Google "Uber Greyball" or "Uber Hell" to learn more about those programs. Contrary to your claims, neither of them were ended before Fowler's open letter.)
It is certainly true that their competitors also behaved badly. But your original post was about how amazing Uber's engineering culture was before Susan Fowler publicized the ongoing, systemic discrimination against women there, at which point all the goodness went away and your good times were spoiled. That honestly makes you look like a clueless, sexist jerk, which I would like to think that you are not.
Everything you wrote above disproves everything you wrote in your first comment and reinforces everything I said in my comment. TK didn’t order for the medical records to be gotten. A subordinate got them on his own and then shared them with TK. TK shouldn’t have looked at it, but he probably didn’t understand the long term consequences of the optics of doing that.
Also, TK and Uber never publicly accused the victim of anything according to all of your links. Did they have closed door meetings where they questioned whether or not the victim was faked by Ola? Maybe. But publicly they didn’t even hint of that. If you are accusing TK of a thought crime, for going through the exercise of figuring out if there was a motive, then you are engaging in totalitarian beliefs at this point. How many horrible things have you thought or said in your life behind closed doors but were never brought to light because the media isn’t gunning after you?
After everything Uber had been through, was it so crazy to think they Ola would bribe someone to fake a sexual assault to hurt Uber? Of course not. Was it right to obtain a victim’s medical records? Of course not. And Eric Alexander was fired for it. Did Uber ever even hint publicly that maybe the sexual assault was fake? No, and all your links say the same thing. Publicly, in every single link you provided, Uber and TK decried the assault and paid a settlement to the victim.
I know people that worked on Greyball. It was a tool created because competitors in areas like France, were calling Ubers to locations and then physically attacking them. Greyball was used to protect these drivers. Subsequently, police officers would also call Ubers and then try to ticket them. Whether or not you agree with the legality of that is your own right, but it was a way of protecting drivers from getting huge tickets or fines. To qualify that as a mechanism to subvert regulators, well I guess I disagree with you. And in the end Uber ended up being right.
I have plenty of female friends and coworkers that would vouch for Uber as a safe, progressive and supportive environment for women. If any company like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc went through as thorough a review as Uber did, I would wager much worse things would come up. I’m glad Uber went through it, to rid our ranks of people who sexually harassed women or worse, but only 20 out of 15,000 people were fired. I don’t think that qualifies as “system discrimination against women.” I think that Uber is/was largely a great place to work.
And I know you have an agenda against Uber, so everything you want to believe is going to reflect that agenda. I frankly don’t care what you think of me, and my words speak clearly for themself.
No. The culture seemed great at the time, because all the skeletons were still in the closet.
Alcohol was rampant. There was all sorts of sexual harassment and execs having affairs with reports. There was politics and subterfuge and extremely non-blameless postmortems (i.e. you were fired). People were working 60 hour weeks.
Hiring was a total shit show. There was no standard practice -- managers were hiring their friends left and right. Nepotism, not meritocracy, ruled. Recruiters blatantly lied to candidates about offers. There were a few suicides.
People were spying on their ex's, celebrities, fighting and committing fraud, giving friends credits or discounts. Thousands upon thousands of borked fares where drivers or riders were respectively paid or charged incorrectly.
From a technical standpoint, it couldn't be worse. Sure it was fast and exciting, but some of the worst, biggest technical debt decisions ever were made in this time. Almost all of the engineers who made this decisions are no longer there. China, schemaless, M3, all the ops shenanigans. On call was a nightmare. Teams were competing internally by solving the same problem but not talking to each other.
You wanna know why the culture seemed great? Because they were burning money like there is tomorrow. There was no oversight. So the firehouse got turned off, the party was over.
Fowler was a symptom. Her memo didn't cause culture to implode, it was already a time bomb.
> but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great
Please explain more. Did they change more than just sexual and other harassment reporting and handling policies? Why did any of the changes have any effect on engineering?
The engineering culture didn’t working together to succeed. It incentivized people to keep creating new services that were a little different so that they could get promotions. It caused a lot of unnecessary work and an explosion of services. It was very stupid. Blame Thuan for that. He was a terrible CTO.
Okay, but what does Susan Fowler's memo about systemic sexual harassment have to do with incentivizing engineering siloes? You seem to draw a pretty direct line.
> People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture.
Same with Google. The intentional misrepresentation and ousting of Damore was a turning point where engineering culture was run over by activist culture.
I’ve worked at a couple of companies that had great culture and the best was Uber. Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo, was hands down the best company I’ve ever been at. Everyone was aligned together which meant that everyone was working together, everyone had the same mission and understood it and we were empowered to do great things.
Similar to Facebook, TK had weekly Q&A that was incredibly open and transparent. TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person and it showed in the company. Things weren’t perfect, but perfection isn’t the enemy of great and it was great working at Uber between about 2014 and 2017.
The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed. People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture. By 2020, when I left, the engineering culture was a bad joke. The only thing on most people’s minds was “How do I get promoted?” and the incompetency of engineering leadership lead to decisions like “Toil vs Talent” which meant incentivized people to create their own microservices and not work together with others.
I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo, everything she wrote was verified by Thuan Pham himself. I didn’t know her personally but I know people that did, and she was known to be very smart. But her experience was not the majority experience. I think most people and especially most women had very positive things to say about working at Uber. But it was a wake up call that things needed to be changed, but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great. It’s a fascinating topic that I daydream about writing a multi-part Medium post about but never will.