Uber's 'hustle-oriented' culture becomes a black mark on employees' résumés
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The scale of this industry is substantial. It's doing at least $1.2 billion a year in income, and that's the part that pays taxes in Israel. This has been going on for almost a decade, and the scam was growing rapidly.
Then, in 2016, the jaws began to close. The US CFTC won a big case against the biggest binary option firm in Israel, Banc de Binary. They had to pay back everybody who lost money and pay huge damages. (Banc de Binary once offered $10,000 to anyone who would remove that info from their Wikipedia entry. That attempt backfired, badly.) Then there was a 15-part expose in the Times of Israel, titled "The Wolves of Tel Aviv".[1] Now, finally, there are more investigations and a bill to make it illegal to run this scam out of Israel. Banc De Binary ceased operation a few weeks ago. (Or at least they disappeared, removing their sign from the Banc De Binary Tower.) At least four other binary option "brokers" have gone out of business in recent weeks.
As a result, there are lots of layoffs. Scamming people from a phone bank was a good-paying job. The companies liked to hire recent immigrants to Israel who could speak the languages of their target countries fluently. English and Arabic were the most popular languages. A lobbyist for the binary option industry, testifying before a committee of the Knesset, claimed that there are 20,000 people employed in binary options in Israel, and 60,000 people indirectly. "You see the building boom right now in Tel Aviv? Well, you can just say goodbye to that because most skyscrapers in Tel Aviv will be empty. There will be no one to fill them up." There's even a claim from the binary option industry that shutting down this scam will increase terrorism, because it will take away the income of thousands of Arabs.
So 20,000 scammers are becoming unemployed, in a city of only 400,000 people. A former employee of a binary option company faces a far worse black mark than being from Uber. The binary option salespeople are full time con artists. Nobody legit in finance is going to hire them. Getting any legit job will be tough.
(World's smallest violin plays.)
[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...
I suspect what you say is true, this is a 'black mark'. Working for Uber? Maybe if you are in upper management, would it be a similar "black mark" but even then, are you going to blame every C_O for their scandals? Probably not all. As for the 98% of employees? I doubt working for Uber will seriously impact their next job (and much less all following jobs).
Just think, today we don't hold it against middle management or individual contributors who happened to be employed at Enron at the wrong time...
Do you have enough knowledge of recruitment in the energy sector to make that remark?
Debatable?
https://books.google.com/books?id=qwDFL2xIX4kC&pg=PA88&lpg=P...
He had some trouble finding a job afterwards, and wound up working at a call center (where I met him). Seems folks didn't want to take the chance that he just might have been in on it, nor did they want to un-train a toxic culture out of him. Really was a shame as the dude was a joy to work with.
It's pretty weird to take into account only population of Tel Aviv and not the whole metropolitan area; and anyway, there are a lot of people working in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Givataym, Petakh Tikva and other cities around the center who actually commute from the north of the country or other regions.
Or maybe we just confuse cliches with averages and averages with individuals.
It turns out that in my anecdotal experience, every sales book I read from 'the greatest' advocated an honest, sustainable approach to customer relationship, because trust and word of mouth get you much farther than any immediate 'win' on a deal. The matter of the fact is that you don't want to ever be the sole 'winner' of a deal, you want all parties to win: otherwise no one will want to deal with you anymore at some point. Business isn't about winning, not even about sole profit, it's about sustainable profit, and honest cooperation gets you there.
Which fits my personal work experience as well --worked at Esprit de Corp (retail clothes) when I was younger and was among the top sellers, always telling the truth to customers; e.g. "these pants don't fit you, sorry I don't have anything else, please do check back on us often". Note: this was the brand's policy as well, that satisfaction was the real product we were selling, even if it did not always translate into an immediate sale. In the long run, I'm positive the trust we built was a key factor to making this brand top 3 worldwide sustainably (as far as the frontend is concerned, quality/price and having great stores in every major commercial location being the other two).
In this particular brand and in many of our competition (Zara etc.), not only would "pathological lying" be frowned upon as you'd expect from most (normal) human beings, it would be just about the worst sales tactics, ever, if you wanted customers to be satisfied, thus come back for more (which is the bulk of your profit in volume retail).
I wasn't there to see how things went at Uber, but from what I heard/read, it's obvious their culture was everything but sustainable.
Is that really true? There's a pretty meaningful distinction between someone who lies all the time as part of their profession and someone who lies out of a compulsion. It seems like being unable to stop lying would be a handicap.
Uber's apparent bad work culture is an entirely separate point. And so are the laws they skirt. I think most of those laws should be scrapped anyway.
Tell me about it! ;-)
(Actually, it was still the best workplace I've ever seen, a few dbag partners screwed the entire company built on a man's principles and vision.)
But Wikipedia stayed near the top of search results. Something had to be done about Wikipedia, which was tracking the lawsuits, news stories, and regulatory actions. There was a huge effort by Banc De Binary to get the "bad stuff" out of their Wikipedia article. This resulted in one of the worst paid editing disputes in Wikipedia history.[1] We got to see their "hustle-oriented culture" in action. Eventually, all Banc De Binary editors were blocked.
The "hustle" was that the call center people claimed to be "brokers", acting on behalf of the customer and trading options on some exchange. In reality, there was no exchange and no third party on the other side of the transaction. The "broker" is a shill for the house. This is called a "bucket shop", illegal in the US and seldom seen since the 1920s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
The problem isn't scrappiness. It is when you push far past scrappiness and start breaking the law.
It is not just the "hustle" people don't like. People view their employees as sexist bigots. All the smart companies don't want people from that culture.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/zenefits-under-investigati...
If you can keep your bro-ness under wraps for 4 hours for the interview, you can get hired at a company with a reasonable culture and that will continue to mold and shape you, just like any other community influence to which you are consistently exposed.
I'm not making a judgment about "ought to be" just "is".
As much as that makes sense, it's also interesting considering that TFA makes it sound like people are leaving because of their dislike of that culture. And having trouble because they're being associated to the thing their fleeing.
It's about putting a "merit"ocracy in place that encourages people to backstab and generally act like jerks in order to get ahead.
It's about priorities. I'd rather work in a slightly less-profitable company if it didn't have a toxic work environment.
I don't know why you put meritocracy in quotes, because that's what it is. The merits that are rewarded just so happen to be acting like jerks. In general society that is not a merit; but in the company it is a merit therefore Uber is a meritocracy.
The example is from original article by susan who started current backslash.
Merit implies a quality of being good, or otherwise praiseworthy. Being a backstabbing misogynist dickbag gets you ahead at Uber but I would not describe you as worthy of merit.
A system that encourages people to backstab to get ahead is effectively just a medeival court, in which employees act as petty nobles jostling for the king/boss's approval.
And there's a difference between being scrappy and hustling.
Essentially, scrappy is, IMHO, finding shortcuts and detours to avoid an obstacle. Hustling feels more like beating down that obstacle until it gets out of the way.
But that's all semantics, and therefore my personal opinion. I've always heard "scrappy" as a positive thing, and "hustling" as something either ambiguous or just plain bad.
If I had "Low Level Enron Employee" on my resume would the top executives' misconduct be a black mark I had to explain to future interviewers?
Is this really a thing?
Is it fair? No. Will some people do it anyway? Absolutely.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/International/pope-benedict-dogged-naz...
My Mexican Jesuit friends called him “Nazinger” for his political actions as an adult, not for his past. German Catholics called him the “Panzerkardinal”.
http://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498804659/former-wells-fargo-e...
It turns out Wells Fargo had written on Jeremy's U5 report card that he admitted to opening accounts for customers without their authorization. A bank is required to report wrongdoing on a U5. But Jeremy says in his case it just wasn't true. "The second I found out about the U5 information I was appalled," he says. "And now it all made sense." That is, all the times he'd get so close to getting a job only to have it get yanked away after a background check.
Employment lawyers say getting a negative mark on your U5 is like getting the mark of Cain in the world of bankers and brokers. The U5 database is maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, which is an industry self-regulatory organization. The goal of the U5 system is to hold financial advisers, brokers and bankers who sell securities accountable for wrongdoing.
Some major banks have a flat-out "zero-tolerance policy," says attorney Scott Matasar with the firm Matasar Jacobs. "They just flat out will not hire" anyone with an entry on their U5 that even suggests a sales practice violation or unethical behavior, he says.
Uber employees, both current and former, will have no problem getting good offers - tech companies have biases but are smart enough not to mass generalize. The fact that they "made it into Uber" far outweighs any speculation around Uber's culture.
The real black mark is the "hit job oriented" culture of media. They need to step back and rethink what they stand for.
MSM hit jobs seem to be increasingly frequent, although it is an old tactic. I think (or at least hope) more people are starting to see through it now though. But the MSM is subtle and many reports that might not seem it are actually hit pieces as well. Sometimes it is as subtle as the phrasing of a single line in an otherwise ordinary article.
About ten years ago, one of our local papers did a 23 piece series on a pile of dirt with trace amounts of old pesticides in a middle school. Everyone at the school was transparent and forthcoming and the health rick of this temporary pile of dirt was beyond miniscule. That's not just my opinion. I interviewed the toxicologist who authored the newest and toughest environmental regulations.
That local journalist had successfully push vague innuendo that hijacked many parent's worst fears and sense of outrage and they ended up firing the superintendent. Based on the models, the increased risk of cancer from being exposed to these pesticides were something around 1/250,000. Your normal risk of cancer is between 1/3 to 1/2. Many of these parents were convinced their kid's health faced an imminent threat and the photos of their outraged faces reflected that.
But they sold a lot of papers running that series and I'm sure it was the boost that journalist needed to make it to the next level.
Although these issues are experienced everywhere, they appear to have a higher occurrence at Uber, so it makes sense to focus more on Uber than the industry as a whole.
> it's only fair to assume that they will come out of this mess and fix their problems as soon as possible
That's appears to be part of the issue with Uber - their culture of self-promotion at all costs. I have no doubt Uber will do whatever they can to make it through this mess. My major concern is that "whatever they can" is merely superficial change, like maybe firing some token dude who's only been there a month and saying, "See? We've changed!"
The linked article, by associating risk with merely being employed at Uber, does the industry a favor by helping uber to do the Right Thing and protect itself by protecting its employees.
The real change that needs to happen, is that people that work at Uber are safe. What better way to make that happen then threaten Uber's ability to hire and retain talent?
I assume this is in reference to Amit Singhal. I don't think "some token dude" is a good characterization of the Senior Vice President of Engineering, and while that was a good sign it's very much not all Uber is doing.
I work at Uber, and many of us are quite fired up about holding the company to account. While there are definitely things we can critique, it does seem that the situation being taken seriously and we're all hoping (and, with reservations, expecting) that there will be real change.
People may have worked there for a variety of reasons and/or in different team. Let alone that stuff like Stockholm syndrome exists for a reason.
You get judged in interviews, and it is a best case scenario if it is over recent stuff you had control over.
What sucks is sweeping generalisations. Which is exactly what is going on. I'm pretty sure most people went were because of tech challenge and/or money. Not because of chasing bro culture or possibility to offend coworkers.
From what I read about Uber, it looks like most people were not happy about what was going on. There were a small amount of assholes (which exist in any company or community). The problem is that management is OK with assholes and give them a pass. However, all the good folks are thrown together with few assholes.
P.S. I'd be happy to see Uber gone. I'm not using it on principle for their "disruption" mentality. As well as the rest of "sharing economy".
The choice of where to work is just that--a choice. Choices have consequences. If you willingly accept continued association with a known group of bad actors, it's reasonable that someone might judge your character poorly for that choice.
It's as reasonable to think ex-Uberist is douche as that ghetto-looking dude stole a bicycle on the way to job interview. Possible? Yes. More likely than average citizen? Yes. Reasonable?
If people would be (soft-)forced to steer clear from anyone who might look like a bad actor, it'd suck big time. Want to take down opponents? Spread some rumours and people are afraid to work with them. Or companies would be over-the-top to look good instead of focusing on what they actually do. Github and their diversity team comes to mind.
No, but then they've made a decision and sometimes those come back to haunt you. That said: I wouldn't dismiss someone from a position just because they've worked at Uber, but I would ask "pointed questions" to quote the article. At the end of the day you will have to work with that person and I'd rather work with nice people than not.
I won't hire someone who moved to large powerful country X, because they could immigrate to europe and not support such a bad government with their tax dollars. I wont hire a person who moved to city X, because they generate the housing disaster displacing poor people. I wont hire a religious person, becaue religion has done horrible things. I wont hire a non-religious person, because they have no morals.
I won't hire a guy who stayed at media-hated company for X years even though I have no idea what their personal situation was. Maybe if they left, their green card would be delayed for a year a two. A year of someones life is nothing right? Maybe the 100 person team at their 10-50k employee company was really nice and had none of the toxic crap reported by the media.
It's a dangerous road to judge people like that, lest you be judged the same, in secret.
Speaking of which, what's the polite euphemism YC now uses to describe its relationship with Peter Thiel? and how likely is anyone to believe they're continuing that in order to stand on principle vs. baser reasons?
If you substitute "poor programming skills environment" it suddenly makes sense. That's the thing with substitutions. They change the meaning.
I'm all in favour of letting people discriminate on these grounds. They're the people reducing their own hiring pool. Everyone else is going to evaluate the candidates directly for culture and consequently have a competitive advantage.
Why would it? From my experience, companies with poor code quality are great to poach junior-to-mid programmers. They're super happy to jump the ship and they're well aware of code smells and problems poor code causes.
> I'm all in favour of letting people discriminate on these grounds.
Would you discriminate based on person himself or because he dared to work for company you don't like?
But I think it's important that other people are able do it.
Also I picked "poor programming skills environment " to mean everyone there has poor programming skills.
I inserted a variety of choices, and it always came out sounding like a false equivalency.
(Hint: you can be born black, but I've heard no reports of someone being born an Uber employee.)
It may be unfair to make a "black mark" on every journalist at The Guardian, but after the false "WhatsApp considered harmful" stories, I am unable to take anything they print at face value. Response by moxie: https://whispersystems.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoo...
I've worked with some nerds who were awful mean-spirited tyrants, and some bro dudes who were really kind and sweet.
If you substitute the gender or the color of "young, white physically fit dude" you get blatant racism or sexism.
If someone did something wrong, then hold that against them. Being biased against someone's color or gender isn't ok.
The whole point of interviewing and reading resumes is to filter people out (or in) based on their experience. If recruiters start tossing out resumes because they mention Uber that's not "discrimination" in any powerful sense; it's simply caution in the light of recent events.
If someone reads a resume from a former Uber employee, and the evaluation process includes well, his parents came from Korea and he doesn't lift weights, so..., is that really a good thing?
I've said this on HN before - if you work for Uber and you're worried about it becoming toxic to your future career, speak up when you see the sort of behaviour other companies think make you a risky hire. You're perfectly placed to stop the problem.
Speak up wherever you work. This problem isn't limited to Uber.
I agree. If I did have a bias against white males I might consider it technically racism or sexism, but not blatant.
In my view it's simplistic to think of bias based on gender or race as sexism or racism without considering the larger societal context. Can a historically dominant gender/race in a given society feel the occasional isolated sting of racism and/or sexism? I believe they can, but I also believe it's a false equivalency to view that with the same lens as the often systemic and institutionalized racism and sexism faced by those in the marginalized minority.
So yeah, I can't really imagine applying that judgement to people who never had the time/position to shape the culture.
My faith in humanity has been instantly restored by 10% :)
What bothered me was all the back stabbing. Those are strong black marks for me against anyone that has worked in management in Uber.
It's very easy for assholes to 'hide' their assholishness if the people with power aren't looking for it, and won't listen to the people who see it. However, even people like that are now on notice that Uber employees are tainted.
Note the above rant doesn't excuse illegal or discriminatory behavior. I'm just addressing the simplistic "hustle = bad" argument.
Going without consensus is also one way companies (esp. small ones) implode or do unethical and illegal things.
What is more, this hustling approach discounts brand perception and PR. We see the effects. You may be fast, but if you damage your brand badly enough in the process you might have as well not have done anything.
So people who like to stop working (you know, weekends, nights, etc.) need not apply? How did the world ever progress when we had companies willing to quit bugging people with inane busywork? So much of "hustle" is "look at me I'm emailing at 9:30 PM I must be super dedicated!"
"eh, we can always do it later" - I think this is what some people hear when somebody who's played the game before says "we can take the time to do it right" - they know that in the long run you get a better product and they won't be stuck issuing hotfixes at 2 AM. Sometimes you need to get to MVP quick, true, but sometimes the arbitrary deadline that a dudebro pulled out of their ass is just that.
I'm honestly more shocked at the myopic discussion in this thread, quite lacking in understanding the range of motivations of people who work there. I'm a long-time engineering employee, and seen a lot of ups and downs. To build a service that was used by a few thousand in one city to millions all over the world has been one of the most exciting jobs I've had, with great feats of engineering and operational execution. Numbers don't lie that we've built a reliable service - the negative media cycles don't hurt the business. There have been a ton of growing pains, with a lot of agenda-driven empire builders, bro-ey-ness, and general lack of careful cultural development that have contributed to the current situation, and left quite a few rankled employees in its wake. Whether it will come out strong from this situation is up to the strength of the leadership, and we'll see what the remedy holds.
FWIW, I have seen a huge uptick in recruiter inbounds in the last few weeks (understandably), with all the best names Facebook, Google, Amazon and Tesla on the list.
If you're not part of the water cooler circle, focus on your work and the problems you are solving and have a nice bunch of direct colleagues and a manager that's not a big jerk (to you and anybody you see him/her interact with at least) you really might be surprised about hearing this stuff.
If you join Uber in 2017 or later then I feel you might deserve a stigma. But somebody hacking on the API 10 hours per day and minding his own business? Not so much.
"Develop an incomplete solution and beat them to the market" is, of course, the Google Way, the Microsoft way, the Bell Labs way, the IBM way, ..."
Time to market is important.
“A lot of them have told me that they’re having a hard time finding something new.”
I'm not convinced that this is because they are tained by Uber. It could be that the property "having worked at Uber" carries a statistical bias with "hard to employ elsewhere" simply because perhaps Uber was blindly on-boarding toms, dicks and harriets off the street. (Maybe the way they get drivers at the bottom of the org chart permeates how they staff the rest of it.)
Joe: Worked at LinkedIn for 3 years
With only this information, which person is more likely to engage in backstabbing or sexual harassment?
With the information available to me, the answer seems clear: Bob
Can somebody explain the fault in my reasoning please?
If the above reasoning is prejudice, does that make prejudice a good thing?
Statistically some ethnic groups are more likely to have a criminal record. Don't just assume - go ahead and check.
Is it more effort? Yes. That's why we call it "the right thing to do" and not "the convenient thing to do".
>Can somebody explain the fault in my reasoning please?
The fault is in insisting that you have to come up with an answer.
I think the biggest lesson I learned in grad school was learning not to make decisions with inadequate data. And rooting out those who do.
This is how it plays out. In an year or 2 'tainted' management is ejected replaced by new management with folks who have the right reputation and say all the right things. They can then move into respectable territory pretty quickly.
For now it suits the decision makers to play this out to their maximum advantage.
I suspect it might be more of an issue for high-level execs and possibly project/program managers, but you have to screen for assholery for those titles regardless of where they come from.
But now that accusations of sexual harassment at the office has been aired, they are suddenly "unclean".
Almost makes one wonder if the whole "feminism/women's rights" terminology has been hijacked and weaponized by some entity that could not care one bit about actual women, but are using the terms and methods for social assassination objectives.
Many different publications pile on to vulnerable targets in order to catch up with reader interest. See Fatty Arbuckle, Lindy Chamberlain.
Back in 2000, we had an asset bubble, primarily in tech stocks but also in stocks generally. But the bubble was not primarily debt-fuelled (Thank you, post-great-depression limits on margin loans!); when in burst, it had no direct, lasting consequences. Sure, a lot of people felt less wealthy, which caused a bit of a general slowdown, but the economy recovered fairly quickly.
In 2007, we had an asset bubble in the housing market, fuelled primarily by consumer debt. When the bubble started bursting, consumers stopped being able to get big loans, meaning they couldn't buy at those prices and couldn't refinance their existing huge loans. Housing prices dropped, meaning even fewer loans, more foreclosures, more houses on the market and lower prices. Because consumer debt was also financing the rest of the economy, the collapse of that and the ensuing pessimism put the binders on the whole economy, hard.
In the midst of this, the institutions that had been making the loans discovered that the paper they had been shuffling around was actually worthless, leaving them with many debts and few assets. The bailouts were intended to do two things:
1. Improve the balance sheets of the financial institutions, preventing them from going bankrupt and falling over like a sack of doorknobs. (IMO, this was ultimately both good and bad. Uncontrolled collapse would have been bad, but a restructuring and breakup of those firms is still necessary or it's going to happen again.)
2. Increase the money supply, through the banks-make-loans-loans-go-into-accounts-banks-make-loans cycle. This was necessary to avoid deflation and support the overall economy. (Want to shoot an economy in the head? Think inflation is bad? Check out deflation.) Unfortunately, banks weren't making loans, so that didn't happen. Modern economic theory at its finest, ladies and gentlemen. Oopsie.
I maintain that the big, primary difference is the amount of leverage applied on the downside.