Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

The typical interaction between manager & engineer is that a manager tells an employee what to do, and the employee does it. From the manager's perspective, any employee that's reasonably competent will do: success is binary, either you did the assigned task satisfactorily or you didn't.

From the engineer's perspective, if you're good you considered a lot of alternative ways of solving the problem and finally settled on the best. It seems ridiculous that all employees could be interchangeable, because it's a pretty good bet that some engineers did not consider some of the alternative solutions you did. But remember that the whole reason the manager hired you was so that he didn't need to think about the details. All of those alternative solutions are outside of his conscious awareness; he's condensed his mental model of the problem to a binary "is this good enough to ship?", which frees up mental space for him to think about other stuff. Among those engineers that you think of as "not good enough", there are some who may not have thought of the brilliant solution that you came up with but still have code that is "good enough to ship" in the manager's estimation, and those are the irritating folks on your team who IYNSHO always produce shitty code but stay on the team because they have your manager's political favor. And then there are the folks who both you and your manager agree are too shitty to get the job done, and they're fired.

Who's right? Well, both of you, and neither of you. It's fairly likely that you're overestimating the quality requirements for the job, which is why a number of your shitty coworkers still have jobs. It's also fairly likely that your manager does not have complete visibility into all the long-term consequences of all the code being produced, which is why whole teams occasionally just catastrophically fail.

But it's worth remembering that every time you enter a transaction, you're having your work reduced to a pass/fail grade. It's the fundamental bargain you make when you take a job, and it also is the fundamental bargain you make when you sell a product (entrepreneurs are not exempt from this, and it's a major cause of startup failure among technical founders...including, quite possibly, mine). The advantage of producing better work is that it qualifies you for more different opportunities - which may or may not be relevant, depending on whether you take advantage of those opportunities.

I learned this lesson pretty early in my career when most senior engineer on the team left. I and everyone else freaked out because he was the only one on the team who fully understood how everything works. But you know who was not freaked out? My manager. And he was right, we did not even miss deadlines. In two month everything was back to normal with other people filling his shoes.

Obviously you can't replace Principal engineer with fresh grad and expect success but most of the work done is not that unique or hard.

In my experience most programming jobs don't really require deep domain expertise or share it by osmosis. Ideally a smart, dedicated person that gets a 40 hour a week crash course from experts in the field should get up to speed reasonably quickly.

In the absence of experts there exists a whole slew of technology that democratizes hard fields like game creation and machine learning. You can commit all sorts of sins and still end up with a well functioning product. Partly resting on technology developed as an enabler and partly resting on the sheer amount of available compute.

IMO people are far more easily replaced in terms of making an individual code contribution than they are as members of a team and it's the latter that is significantly more important. Good teams are multipliers for their members. Replacing a team member in a well functioning team is a super risky prospect. Yet we live in a world of frequent re-orgs, teams smooshed together haphazardly and overvaluing individual technical skill.

I don't see that changing anytime soon as it all sort of works and there is an endemic lack of interest.

The response to other reports are standard. Whether it is a homosexual boss or a female boss, the company will seek to protect itself.

I have no idea what her compensation package looks like, it doesn't really matter to the point I'm making.

My point was simply this: if you're waiting for your payout, you're keeping your mouth shut by not walking out. If you have some sort of serious ethical disagreement with your employer, you have to weigh how much you care about that to how much you will benefit from your future stock package.

If you say everything they're doing is incredibly evil and they need to be stopped, but you're waiting around for your $12 million payday, we figured out your price.

You can walk away from things with multiple zeros on the end. I've seen people do it. You might end up happier in the end. All depends on the situation.

The name "golden handcuffs" seems to imply that someone doesn't have a choice in the matter. They do. If you find yourself in one of the situations, don't forget that's an option.

FWIW, I think it was brave of Ms. Fowler to write this (most probably stay silent for fear of retribution).

They've raised over $10B...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...

If your only concern is the sticker price, then that is a ethical choice that you're certainly entitled to make, but that also necessarily involves a choice not to account for what goes into that sticker price (parallels with e.g. Walmart), and thus is a pretty limited principle. Possibly limited to the degree that it is actually merely self-serving.

I think overall the experience of taking a taxi is not going to change that much, but there's going to be a big repricing when Uber runs out of loss-leader. I imagine the dream is for inflation to absorb most of that by the time the axe falls, but uber/lyft/taxi pricing across the board will have to find an equilibrium. Or differentiators.

I also learned about this from the Tech Solidarity people. The key here though is that actions are only protected if they're taken collectively by multiple employees. A single employee protesting can still be fired without recourse.

It is also totally true that you are not squeaky clean in your employment (never been late once? Never missed a deadline?), and that your performance management targets are set by the people against whom you are protesting. You can be performance managed out of a position in months, even if your right to protest is protected and you are literally a Saint in the workplace.

I'm not saying it's right, just that it's true.

It is also totally true that you are not squeaky clean in your employment (never been late once? Never missed a deadline?), and that your performance management targets are set by the people against whom you are protesting. You can be performance managed out of a position in months, even if your right to protest is protected and you are literally a Saint in the workplace.

I'm not saying it's right, just that I've seen it done. There is always a way to remove "difficult" employees regardless of protection laws.

A union is what gives you the ability confront management about these kinds of things.

If you believe that H1-B employees are abused in software development shops, that's all the more reason to organize.

A professional association by contrast does not work to help workers in a workplace dispute. It is fundamentally an advocacy group for the profession itself and works to advance it by creating professional standards, lobbying, offering education and certification, etc. The AMA for example, does not engage in collective bargaining with the management of a hospital and has no legal right to compel such a thing under the NLRA. The AMA does however lobby politicians and puts its people on medical boards to limit the supply of doctors. Furthermore a professional organization works at the level of a single profession and doesn't organize workplaces in strikes, which is the major power of a union.

Unions can aggregate under federations that often resemble and provide the same function as professional associations, but a professional association provides almost none of the benefits of a union.

> How does one protect oneself in cases of sexual impropriety then?

Document, document, document. Not because you're going to sue, but because this is rarely a 1-off situation and when the class action comes around you will be prepared with ammunition.

Which is exactly what happens... When the harasser is not a 'Top performer' in a culture that claims to reward meritocracy.

Unions were reinforced by the NLRA to enable workers to bargain collectively. That can mean a lot of things

A union for software engineers is a blank slate. It hasn't been done before. It could be anything someone makes of it.

Even if this we take this for granted, its completely untrue that all unions commoditize a trade by flattening pay. There are plenty of unions that have chosen not to put standardized salaries in contracts or have advocated tiered salary agreements or merit pay. Whether or not these are good things, they are things that unions have done and should dispel with the notion that unions are inflexible towards these concerns by workers.

As for your concern that unions "force employers to do things", well I suggest you consider all of the ways your employer can coerce you to do things and whether you actually have a mutualistic relationship. Many workers don't feel that they do.

The beauty of a union is there doesn't have to be an objective definition. A union gives you a democratic voice to advocate for what you think is fair. Without organized labor power, your voice is completely ignorable.

> Speaking generally, if employees aren't getting a fair deal, they should look for better jobs. If they can't find better jobs, they're getting a fair deal. There are certainly anti-competitive exceptions, but nothing posted so far suggests we're in such exceptional territory.

This is a completely naive understanding of what finding a job is like. Leaving a job can be a strike against a person in the hiring process, not to mention it consumes a lot of time, leaves someone uncompensated and without benefits during the process, etc. This also assumes engineer competency is something we can effectively gauge in the hiring process or otherwise (just search "hiring" on hacker news to get the general sentiment among engineers about how good we are at this).

Imagine if this was the suggestion given to factory workers and coal miners and the early 20th century (not that I think the worker conditions are comparable, but its illustrative of how naive it is to believe that market forces are sufficient for providing fair compensation). This is a marginalist's definition of "fair" that doesn't jive with any real human person's.

The real question is why you are so fervantly against having a democratic voice in the workplace.

In an idealized market, yes. But given incidents like this, it seems like some employees must be being treated for more fairly than others -- which suggests there's no fairness at all.

Also, it sets their BATNA as well - how much value they miss out on while working on replacing you.

Right now, companies like Uber can treat workers poorly -- apparently at a policy/organizational level even -- because the only thing they feel they have to fear is a bit of bad PR. No one has these workers' backs. HR is concerned with protecting the company. And the workers likely don't have the time, money nor stamina to fight a huge corporation with a lawsuit.

That's why workers need to band together to look out for one another. The deck is already stacked against them.

As a student member of the AMA, I can attest that they aren't the most effective organization, but they do plenty to further physician interests.

I think what you're likely getting at is how heterogenous physician interests are considering each specialty.

The British Medical Association certainly claims to be a trade union.

https://www.bma.org.uk/about-us/bma-as-a-trade-union

And they have engaged in collective action - e.g. the junior doctors strike.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/01/what-you-nee...

Maybe we have different perspectives on how popular the anti-immigrant position is in tech (and how many neo-reactionary/dark enlightenment dipshits there are), I guess I'd just ask that you keep an open mind about this and make a decision if and when workers approach you to join a union. I certainly wouldn't knock you for opposing a group that doesn't have your interests at heart, but the union I want to form would take solidarity seriously and would explicitly go to bat for women, people of color, lgbtqia people, disabled people, and immigrants.