How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained

https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/how-ubers-hard-charging-corporate-culture-left-employees?utm_term=.vqV45Y6J6#.lcXVl9xpx

by smb06 • 9 years ago

90 59 9 years ago

buzzfeed.com

linkregister• 9 years ago

This seems fairly accurate based off of the accounts of friends and colleagues who have worked at Uber.

thisrod• 9 years ago

In May 2015, an on-call engineer failed ... At the time, Uber had recently reached a valuation of $50 billion.

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.

potlee• 9 years ago

There are many different people on-call for many different things at any given time. This is standard industry practice.

WalterBright• 9 years ago

For mission critical systems, there should be a backup plan should the on-call engineer not respond. Like an airliner has a copilot.

cbanek5• 9 years ago

The problem is, unlike a copilot who is trained on the system, usually on-call people are winging it at best, and after the horse has left the barn.

I've been on many on call rotations for many different projects. Some of them have had such great ideas as "you'll learn a lot from being on call, so we'll add you to the rotation (on your first day)."

Sadly, people don't normally document code and emergency procedures nearly as much as they should. Unlike an airliner, there's no emergency manual sitting around. Even a normal manual would be hard to find, and who knows if it's current.

One place I worked had solved this problem by having an actual operations team, a practice that seems to have faded with time. Our operations team was great. They were there in 3 shifts, 24/7, to cover your ass. They knew more about how the service ran than any dev. There were standards for documenting procedures, and if you got the call (there wasn't an on call rotation, you were only called if everyone was clueless and you wrote it), it's because things were really bad. This was before "devops" was minted the silver bullet.

While a dedicated operations team can save you, and your reputation, most organizations would rather not pay that, and push that cost onto the devs, and make them "feel the pain" of their mistakes.

kevan2• 9 years ago

I can understand not doing butts in chairs 24/7, but I'm really surprised they managed to make it to that scale without adding paging escalation. If someone doesn't respond after X minutes then page their manager. Repeat until you get to the CEO.

oh_sigh5• 9 years ago

Yes....that's the way it is set up at Amazon, and I recall one time a page from my little teams project with no revenue or customer implications for downtime managed to make it all the way to one level below Bezos before it was acked (this was 1am after Thanksgiving, 2012).

jfoutz• 9 years ago

That was my initial thought as well. But, low disk space on the master DB? And you need a human to go futz around with it? There is either a whole lot of missing monitoring and automation, or those are completely worthless pages.

I understand the freakout, i assume it could take down the site. But, like, not responding to a page is like the very last on the list of things to fix. Calling in random engineer is pretty much last ditch, hail mary, the world is on fire, oh fuck we're going to go out of business disaster. At a certain point, you kind of have to assume one possibility is your oncall person is dead. Whatcha gonna do then?

I seriously doubt all of their careful high availability planning failed. I would bet their paging is (hopefully was) just stupid.

oh_sigh5• 9 years ago

From the article, it is stated that the oncall engineer acked the pages for low disk space repeatedly but never took any corrective actions. So, escalation wasn't exercised in this case because the engineer tricked the system into thinking they handled it.

rrix2• 9 years ago

That's exactly what happened though and no one bothered mentioning this to this reporter.

I was in the post mortem for this event, the alert for database disk space was piled in to 500 other alerts incorrectly assigned to a rotation notorious for being the most painful in the company. The alerts escalated through to an infrastructure manager and then to an at-the-time director of engineering, none of whom acknowledged the alert themselves.

The alert itself was also of the "disk is 90% full" variety rather than "at rate of growth the disk will be full in an hour and by the way this is the master db". The former wouldn't be a need to panic as you'd have at least a day to resolve it, unless someone is back filling large sets of data.

ncallaway2• 9 years ago

“We try to have a blameless postmortem,” said one engineer. “That email from Thuan [...] was great example of not following that.” Besides, the employee added, “if you’ve been woken up at 3 a.m. for the last five days, and you’re only sleeping three to four hours a day, and you make a mistake, how much at fault are you, really?”
In a follow-up email two days later, Pham addressed criticism of his decision to email the staff about the engineer’s mistake. "It came to my attention that some people in the org think that my note to the company is overly critical and has the feel of throwing people under the bus,” he wrote.
“I don't want to create a culture [where] people are fearful of making mistakes or causing outages because they want to move fast and take smart risks, but I also don't want a culture where we do substandard work and cause outages that are easily avoidable,” Pham wrote.
He continued: “Feeling defensive, or feeling like a victim, is NOT the way to get ourselves better.”

I find Pham's response to criticism about the blameless post-mortem to be lacking in self-reflection. The entire point point of a blameless post mortem is to ensure that people don't feel defensive or feel like a victim. To get criticism about failing to follow a blameless post-mortem process and respond by saying: "don't feel like a victim?" tells me that they haven't internalized the criticism in any way.

oh_sigh5• 9 years ago

Blameless post mortems only work when you know that engineers or whoever is on call are operating in good faith. From Pham's first email, it seems like there is some question whether that was the case, because the engineer repeatedly acked the pages without resolving any issue:

The on-call engineer received/acknowledged three alerts about master database being low on disk space, but ignored it. This is not acceptable,” Pham wrote in the email, sent to more than 3,500 employees and obtained by BuzzFeed News. “We are looking to determine whether this is negligence or whether a different on-call engineer could have reasonably missed the alerts amidst a flood of other alerts from the systems at that time.”

I think the timing of the statement was bad - it should have been a result of the post mortem if it was negligence, and not so explicitly stated publicly going in, if only because it can tarnish someone's reputation even if it turns out not true.

draw_down2• 9 years ago

Oof, that's really bad. At the point you're publicly shaming people to do better, you need to fix your organization. Like fast.

cbanek5• 9 years ago

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.

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?

I wish I could say any of those weren't ubiquitous in SV.

Apocryphon3• 9 years ago

AirBnB is probably the anti-Uber in that regard.

santaclaus• 9 years ago

Really? I found their interview process to be downright creepy...

dawhizkid• 9 years ago

Are you kidding? Look at their recent Glassdoor reviews.

atmz2• 9 years ago

It's not this way everywhere! At my (mid-sized, public, SF-based) workplace, I work 8 hours/day, good postmortems, and understanding at all levels of the importance of work-life balance and how oncall (a sad inevitability) should work.

If your employer doesn't do this, move on - that's how things change.

cbanek5• 9 years ago

That sounds pretty sweet. I'd love to know where that is, if you don't mind sharing.

The problem about the "moving on" from bad workplaces is that it's hard to tell if your next workplace is going to be the same, even looking at reviews, like Glassdoor. Plus you're taking a fairly big risk to move to a new job. There's a lot of bait-and-switch type things going on, both in terms of role and culture.

For example, in one job I worked at, I hired on as an embedded engineer, but then I ended up writing a big data solution (and did nothing embedded).

In terms of culture it's very unlikely you'll meet the toxic members of the group, or be exposed to any of the politics during the interview. People will be on their best behavior, not their normal behavior. I have found that asking straightforward questions and trying to use my Bene Gesserit powers of truthsaying to see if they're putting me on has a pretty good S/N ratio. Also looking for that tired/sad/dejected/depressed look of random people in the hallways.

NelsonMinar• 9 years ago

It's really not like that everywhere. Demand better from your employer.

continuations2• 9 years ago

But at a company with more than 15,000 people

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?

CardenB• 9 years ago

I would wager facebook has more employees than that, and uber likely has many more employees that aren't software engineers than facebook to handle operations around the world.

continuations2• 9 years ago

According to this[1] Facebook has 17,048 at Dec 2016. So it's more than what Uber has but not by that much. Good point about the local ops people Uber needs.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

rockinghigh• 9 years ago

Around 1/3 are engineers.

blizkreeg• 9 years ago

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?

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?

psidium• 9 years ago

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.

But I make about 15k USD (if converting currencies) so there's that haha.

splitrocket• 9 years ago

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.”

A libertarian is someone who is hell bent on discovering exactly why and how societies choose to govern themselves, the hard way.

valuearb• 9 years ago

If you believe people are essentially predatory, government can't save you from them, it just makes it easier to do predation on a mass scale.

piva00• 9 years ago

The devil you know vs. the devil you don't.

draw_down2• 9 years ago

Ha! What a great line.

sigsergv• 9 years ago

I think Fincher should make a movie about Uber.

frik• 9 years ago

The Social Network (2010) movie was superb. Yes Fincher as director and Sorkin as screenplay writer would be phenomenal. It would take a good book about Uber internals though. Unfortunately the former head of Sony Pictures in L.A. screwed the dream team over the Steve Jobs movie.

lloydde• 9 years ago

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...

Anyone have links/references that name and describe this business style?

peterwwillis2• 9 years ago

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.

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)

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.

bkor• 9 years ago

On call doesn't mean you're working. It means you might get a call.

The people I know whom were on call weren't paid at 100% but more in the 10-30% range (on top of their normal salary). They might get a call and were paid accordingly. If they'd get too many calls that had an obvious effect on their performance.

I completely disagree with your statement that being "on call" means that it is their job to "always being woken up by alerts". If you get so many alerts the company should have someone _working_ (roster, etc), not have people on call!

peterwwillis2• 9 years ago

We are not in disagreement... you essentially re-stated my comment. But your experience of on-call may be different from mine. (I'm assuming you have also been on-call for a multi-million-dollar 24/7 production service?)

fatbird2• 9 years ago

Uber uses an algorithm to estimate the lowest possible compensation employees will take in order to keep labor costs down

Of course they do.

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.

It seems almost quaint, looking back on the 90s, how what we feared were bureaucrats in government offices.

eternalban• 9 years ago

It appears the PC was a black swan event for the establishment. The establishment was anticipating a mainframe future with centralized servers and dumb terminals for the masses. The Personal Computer, and the imaginal political and social aspirations of the workers in that era, posed a very real threat to their hold on power, in my opinion.

Throwing money and social prestige at a select and compliant few; diminishing the economic power of the American software developer with outsourcing of jobs to developing world; [non-stop] propaganda about "hackers"; and pouring VC money into organizations, such as Google and Facebook, that had a contrary social and political view to the 80s and 90s idealists and promoted a curiously infantile ideal of the workplace, all took their toll.

Today, they have their centralized and controlled servers ("cloud") and armies of coders who have nothing but $ signs in their eyes.

Anderkent2• 9 years ago

Why does it make a difference if it's an algorithm estimating what you're willing to work for rather than some person in the corporation structure?

Yes, corporations will always try to figure out what's the least they could pay you. But it's still up to you to set that number.

fatbird2• 9 years ago

You don't negotiate in a vacuum. If you participate in writing that algorithm that exerts downward pressure on salaries generally (because it's more efficient/effective, and it's applied at the level of a tech behemoth with a lot of influence), you're incrementally lowering the baseline from which you and everyone else negotiate. You're basically arming the other side of the negotiating table--and that other side is already a multi-billion dollar unicorn.

At some point, you'd think a basic sense of self-interest would remain. I swear, if someone held a contest to design a better rope for hanging engineers, we'd fall all over ourselves trying to win. If someone kickstarted that idea, they'd need new stretch goals in an hour.

Dowwie• 9 years ago

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.

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.

jaclaz2• 9 years ago

I am uncertain on this.

Once said that most probably Uber and its culture are the roots of all Evil, there is something I smell as being fishy.

If it was a case of exploitation of "humble", "normal" labour it would be a thing.

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)?

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.

I can undersatnd how people with a H-1B would have no other choice.

But a 100,000-120,000 US$/year programmer/engineer?

Does he/she have not another choice?

Cannot he/she resign and look for another job if the environment at Uber is felt as "toxic"?

(and find such new job at the same pay level and relatively easily?)

ryan2611• 9 years ago

Did you read the article? It says on numerous occasions that they're 'trapped' by the lure of equity, they see this as their retirement fund.

jaclaz2• 9 years ago

Sure I did read it, but the whole point is that what they are "trapped" by is (in your words) "lure of equity" (I would personally call that a - slight - form of "greed", which while rhyming with "need" is not the same thing). It is a choice, from the article:

“It’s a money cult. People are putting up with massive amounts of abuse, mental abuse, constant threats to fire you so you’re losing your equity,”

BTW: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained

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