Hacker News Reader

Comment by yakaccount4 | Hacker News Reader

The culture at Uber is weird. In my opinion, there was way too much emphasis on titles. An employee's title is literally in your face in almost every internal site. This creates a lot of situations of bias because every time you get a message on slack, one of the first things you see is their pay grade.

In combination with what you listed above, and the rigid, narrow pay bands, it's no wonder everyone is fishing for constant promotions.

View on HN

Wow. This is such a good comment. I remember when I was a junior engineer and knew more than many of the "senior" engineers at a job a few years back. It didn't matter at all, as seniority outranked sensibility.

I was thinking about this a bit after reading your comment. Now, I say this as having recently negotiated pretty hard for a "Staff" title, and previously had a "Team Lead" title. I think in certain situations it makes sense to have the title authority to shoot obviously bad engineering problems down, but this has been the exception, rather than the rule, in most of my 12 years of being a software engineer.

So your comment makes me wonder: would it make sense to have a system where everyone would simply be called "Engineer", but allow engineers to vote secretly after having worked with another engineer, on various aspects of their colleague's technical expertise. Engineering Managers or perhaps HR would be aware of the engineering votes, but engineers wouldn't, which would remove much of the implicit bias in engineering meetings. Rather, pay grades would be determined by votes, but no one would ever just "Leave it to Yakaaccount, she's the principal engineer". Everyone would have responsibility to be a solid engineer.

If members of the team had trusted each other enough to trust the votes that related to pay grade, you’d probably don’t need the votes already

I think its a good idea to remove implicit bias where ever you can. But doing that by making a structure that does exist be invisible is dangerous. That hierarchy does exist. Even if it's not in your face. It's human nature and it's a good thing in some situations. I think the better angle on this is to have an open culture where the discussion can happen and everyone listens and asks the questions without fear, consensus is built and those with power (because there is always someone with power) wield it sparingly. This is much harder to get to, but it's more sustainable.

What you describe reminds me of the peer review system in place at a previous company I worked at. The review period was every 6 months. The way it worked was that as an individual you'd rank (and comment on) everyone you had worked with the previous 6 months based on your perception of how much value they added to the company over those previous 6 months. It could be based on some project they delivered, or them simply always answering your questions about something you needed to know to move your own projects forward, or them participating thoughtfully in company wide discussions. Once everyone had submitted their rankings, an algo would figure out everyone's final rank. The various pay level cutoffs would then be decided by eng management.

It so happens that at that company everyone's title was simply 'Software Engineer'. There was no ego bs so it was a great place to work. I think how helpful you were to others being part of the review is another reason for that. There was a way to see some people's 'rank' by looking at the org chart if you really wanted to. In general swe and senior swe would be under an eng manager, if someone was directly under a director that told you something, and if someone was directly under a vp that also told you something.

> So your comment makes me wonder: would it make sense to have a system where everyone would simply be called "Engineer", but allow engineers to vote secretly after having worked with another engineer, on various aspects of their colleague's technical expertise.

I worked at a place that had a system like this. Started great, but turned toxic after a hiring spree.

> Everyone would have responsibility to be a solid engineer.

You would think so, but people with other intentions try to find ways to manipulate the system to achieve various strange goals. They're often successful.

Post-Fowler, HR became very concerned about income inequality. They implemented this by severely compressing the range of compensation at each level. For a year or two, there was no way to meaningfully reward a high performer in her level other than to promote her.

Since mid-2019 or so, the company realized this mistake and the pendulum swung back towards TK’s more Ayn Randian compensation philosophy. But the damage was done. FWIW I never saw much of a power dynamic around title. But it is definitely the most important task of an engineering manager to secure promotion-worthy projects and hand them out intelligently. Since promotion is based on impact, it’s almost entirely determined by the project charter. Difficulty or skill deployed in execution is a tertiary concern.

Also given the precipitous drop in equity value, promotions with hefty raises are required just to keep people’s TC in moderate decline instead of freefall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com