<i>Uber uses an algorithm to estimate the lowest possible compensation employees will take in order to keep labor costs down</i><p>Of course they do.<p>I'd like to blame Uber. I'd like to blame Kalanick. But I keep coming back to blaming us, the engineers, for being the willing hands that let Silicon Valley dismantle every good thing we'd built up. We built algorithms to find out how little we could pay ourselves. We built apps to turn employees into contractors earning MacDonald's level wages. We routed around the government's limitations on surveillance and record-keeping by selling ourselves open microphones to Amazon's data centers.<p>It seems almost quaint, looking back on the 90s, how what we feared were bureaucrats in government offices.
While Uber seems to be the current whipping boy of Silicon Valley, I wish I could say that this article would sound different if I replaced Uber with any other big tech company.<p>Getting yelled at constantly, usually with profane language? On call for weeks at a time with no help? Put in a double bind by management? Put on an impossible task, or a task made impossible? Stack ranked that you don't drink enough? Staying around late trying to look productive?<p>I wish I could say any of those weren't ubiquitous in SV.
<i>As one former employee said, explaining why he joined the company, it seemed like a “libertarian playground where the best would rise to the top.” But, he said, “I quickly realized that environment also means work becomes a blood sport.”</i><p>A libertarian is someone who is hell bent on discovering exactly why and how societies choose to govern themselves, the hard way.
I've heard that the hard-charging culture at many investment banks and law firms is similar. People work ultra long hours, because if you don't, there's always someone who is willing to and ready to replace you. Associates at law firms routinely have billables of 2000+ hours a year. Bankers are often in at 7am and leave at midnight. Long hours seem to be par for the course. So then, why are we any different from law firms and banks like GS?<p>I strongly believe that this kind of toxic culture has no place in any organization. So I'm in no way condoning the culture at Uber or similar SV companies. I for one, never want to work at a place like that. I am curious though, what makes us different?
> In May 2015, an on-call engineer failed ... At the time, Uber had recently reached a valuation of $50 billion.<p>I find that astonishing. Outside Silicon Valley, I think that it would be quite unusual to leave $50 billion of plant running overnight, but pinch pennies by not paying anyone to stay up and check the oil levels during the dog watches.
Holy crap.
I've seen people getting hard looks for even suggesting the project's team should stay after the 8 hours shift.
Only once a manager asked me to stay, very dreaded and saying he was really sorry he had to ask me that all the time. And they paid me twice the time I've been there and my performance review skyrocketed because I came in when I didn't need to.<p>But I make about 15k USD (if converting currencies) so there's that haha.
> But at a company with more than 15,000 people<p>Uber has over 15,000 employees? That seems a lot. That's almost the same headcount as Facebook. Why does Uber have so many people?
Goldman Sachs was an early adopter of stack ranking. Employees gamed the performance review process, politicking and gaming as annual reviews were to begin -- if you give me a high rating, I'll give you one (.. or will I), turning the office into a game of Diplomacy. Stack ranking and other human resource strategies created an electric atmosphere of productivity but unfortunately was accompanied by many negatives. Some elements of this story about Uber's culture, excluding hostility towards women, seemed familiar. It wasn't until long past the Financial Crisis that Goldman decided to reform its ways, retiring stack ranking in 2015/2016, adopting a continuous performance review process, and changing other managerial practice.<p>Emulating one leading organization's practices and expecting similar results is a fool's errand. These tech companies are learning that the hard way, I hope.
> In college I took several business classes, and one was about Southeast Asian business. The professor said ... there's this spectrum of stress level. You want workers to be as stressed as possible, but not over the line...<p>Anyone have links/references that name and describe this business style?
It's disingenuous (or misinformed) to talk about on-call engineers being annoyed that they're always being woken up by alerts. That's the job.<p>A lot of companies mis-manage their ops department and flood the on-call staff with after hours alerts because someone is not fixing the underlying issues. This situation is not unique to Uber. (One alternative is to have a 24/7 NOC staff to deal with recurring alerts (and resolving them using a NOC playbook) and escalate to engineers as necessary, which they may have already been doing)<p>Reporting on these specific issues in this way makes me wonder what other examples in this article might be commonplace in many industries. There's no easy way to know if Uber is a truly horrible place to work, or if they just dug up every inflammatory remark they could find, and confirmation bias is feeding what we want to be true. Although the executives (like the CTO) definitely aren't afraid to sound like dicks.
I am uncertain on this.<p>Once said that most probably Uber and its culture are the roots of all Evil, there is something I smell as being fishy.<p>If it was a case of exploitation of "humble", "normal" labour it would be a thing.<p>But the exploitation of an "elite" of professionals in a "niche" field (such as programming/software engineering), people that are - at least reportedly - paid at a very high level and that every company is looking for (i.e. - stil reportedly - a field where supply is not enough to fulfill demand)?<p>I mean, if you force a secretary or a clerk or a labourer to do more hours, and go back to the workplace at night and on weekends they have very likely no other choice than to comply.<p>I can undersatnd how people with a H-1B would have no other choice.<p>But a 100,000-120,000 US$/year programmer/engineer?<p>Does he/she have not another choice?<p>Cannot he/she resign and look for another job if the environment at Uber is felt as "toxic"?<p>(and find such new job at the same pay level and relatively easily?)