How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your employer doesn't do this, move on - that's how things change.
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.
I'm sorry your experience has been so bad-- it's really not that bad everywhere!
And yeah, especially as you gain more experience/skills/system knowledge, moving on gets hard. Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve.
> Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve.
100% true in my experience. For interesting problems, there's always an endless list of applicants, which almost allows for those companies to abuse their employees. Same for the game industry.
A libertarian is someone who is hell bent on discovering exactly why and how societies choose to govern themselves, the hard way.
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?
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.
> 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.
>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.
As an employee who has been on-call for production systems for most of his career, this smacks of someone who's never been on-call and is indeed looking for a scapegoat. From the article:
> “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.”
The key phrase is "flood of other alerts" - to me, this sounds as if other shit was hitting the fan and the engineer rolled the dice on letting this sit while fixing something else that was perceived to be more important. Unfortunately, that seems to have been a bad move.
However, it's an eminently understandable move (and indeed, one I've made myself). How much disk is left? What's the rate of change? Can you even know that immediately while still trying to deal with the "flood of other alerts?"
This sounds like there's a lot of things went wrong here, but I doubt the engineer was one of them.
The key phrase is "flood of other alerts"
In 2005 the entire power grid for the clean, famed and punctual Swiss Federal Railways shut down:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4121072.stm
Yep, exactly that. Every train on the entire network shut down due to an overload of the grid. Probably the only disadvantage on being on a 100% electrified network.
It would have been avoidable, the errors where displayed on the relevant consoles, drowned by 100s of other irrelevant errors and warnings and thus not noticed.
Blaming it on the guy who should have made sense of it all and essentially throwing him under the bus in a corporate wide email just about shows what a shitty company Uber really is.
There's no question of someone operating in bad faith in the article, though. Pham has a concern about negligence, but that is not bad faith. An engineer can be operating in good faith and be negligent.
I think the emails go beyond bad timing. They clearly indicate ahead of time that the post mortem will be "negligence or a root cause that would have effected a different engineer".
That's not a blameless post-mortem. That's the opposite.
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.
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.
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.
But I make about 15k USD (if converting currencies) so there's that haha.
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?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...
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.
Anyone have links/references that name and describe this business style?
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.
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!
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?)
>“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."