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Comment by michaelvoz | Hacker News Reader

Uber employee here too. Would never ever check any data of anyone not related to debugging crashes, race conditions, unexpected app behavior etc etc, its just not worth losing my job. Despite the bad press it is actually a pretty freaking great place to work. Also wanna +1 the warnings about data access and only looking at PII for legitimate purposes are all over the place.

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> Despite the bad press it is actually a pretty freaking great place to work.

that's not what I heard from my friends that worked / currently work there.

I understand and appreciate your attitude, but to me this just says that Uber employees who aren't so conscientious and caring may well have no trouble accessing this data.

Giving people a ton of warnings about the dire consequences of accessing data they're not supposed to is really easy. Preventing them from actually doing it is substantially harder.

> Despite the bad press it is actually a pretty freaking great place to work.

So, how many hours a week do you drive? Oh, I'm sorry... those aren't "workers" -- they're just being nice and sharing their cars in their free time.

Actually I do drive. I drive so I can sympathize with the partners I am serving and better server them by making the product the rely on to make money better, and more reliable.

So now they are making exceptions for employees to drive? Pretty sure that the employee handbook and HR made it crystal clear that employees can't be drivers because then things get real fuzzy legally...

So, you occasionally drive Uber as an experiment/hobby, not as a job, which is not the same experience as relying on it for your next meal.

That's uncalled for. How many software developers ever bother to use the software they develop, or work with (or even talk to) the people who use the software as part of their job? Actually doing the job that your users do, even part time, is fantastic dedication. Doing it full-time is absurd; when would he make use of what he's learned?

>That's uncalled for.

It's not an insult. It's a statement of fact: it is a different experience than depending on Uber driving for your livelihood. So one should not read much into it regarding the hardships/issues of drivers as professionals.

The same way a NLE developer that "eats his own dog food" by editing his daughter's birthday video doesn't exactly have the same experience/needs/issues of using the software as a professional editor in TV or film.

It doesn't even seem physically possible to do it full-time if he's also a developer at Uber.

Relying on Uber for your livelihood is really dumb. It's a part-time hobby job. (I drive for Uber part-time).

Someone should tell the folks at Uber that, somehow it's left out of the billboards they put up in poor neighborhoods. Instead they tell potential drivers that they'll take home a middle-class income.

It's pretty obvious that anything someone paid to display on a billboard is a half-truth at best.

If you can't get other work where you are, it's an option.

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