The day Uber goes public there will be a mass exodus of employees waiting for years to leave the company. I wonder if Uber will stay private permanently to prevent this?
As the article mentioned, Dara has expressed that he would like to take the company public in a couple of years.
Not sure what his pay structure looks like, but assuming it includes equity, I would imagine it would be in his interest to go public
As far as the culture goes, from what I understand it's very backstabby and culty. Basically, Travis set the culture, and it permeates the company.
At IPO, RSUs get converted into stocks, however, there's a restriction that you can't sell them for 1 year from the IPO date. Tax obligation is handled by subtracting a portion of the units, rather than by paying out-of-pocket.
Beyond the obvious HR issues that Susan Fowler exposed, it was a bad place to work for almost any engineer. I would stay far away if you get an offer there.
As I understand, we tried using AWS to power key infrastructure but ran into scalability/cost issues. We still use 3rd providers for various things but my understanding is that a lot of this eng work is to reduce the costs incurred from these services.
I do agree though, as a new hire, that the culture here is quite a bit on the NIH side, compared to a more traditional software shop.
Further, does it make sense that you'd rather buy hardware up front to scale for Halloween and New Years instead of being able to dynamically surge your infrastructure?
Oh, that was what I was told during new employee training. I'm not in the infra org and tbh, I don't really buy the do-it-in-house-for-scalability argument either. I've also seen other employees express sentiments similar to influx's wrt infra.
But then my (white male) interviewer wanted to spend the left over 45 minutes talking about how diverse Uber was blah blah blah and that they were just unfairly represented in the press. I decided not to follow up after that.
Hopefully their culture improves, but it's not somewhere I'd consider working currently.