It feels plainly obvious that Uber is run by assholes, and that anyone who works there has a black mark on their resume forever.
But that's how it feels. Is Lyft just better at PR?
But that's how it feels. Is Lyft just better at PR?
At a certain point you just have to apply Occam's Razor and realise that Uber is run by a collection of assholes.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/24/technology/social/uber-gett/
At this point Uber can't reasonably claim that these were rogue employees. It's pretty obvious to everyone that this is officially sanctioned.
[edit] Side note: this is not the first time a YC company has been caught engaging in highly unethical business behavior (see: AirBnb marketing). What is YC, and other investors, doing to curb this kind of behavior? Or is this level of abuse tolerated because money?
[edit2] Bah, brain farted, Uber is indeed not a YC company.
Although, many companies that use baity "growth hacking" strategies are indeed YC, but that's a seperate issue.
There's always been a bit of ambiguity about the sort of rule-breaking ("hacking") that is and isn't encouraged in these sort of start-ups. One person's hack is another person's unethical behavior. I know a couple folks who founded a YC company and self-reviewed their awesome iPhone app, acquiring some imaginary children in the process...
And to answer your question, it's completely tolerated. Just look at the iOS store and the massive botnets that used to plague it. Every major company hired botnets to game the charts.
Welcome to the Valley.
Edit: sorry, they called this "growth hacking".
Though, YC staff (including Sam Altman) do tend to speak highly of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100101. pg also used to effusively praise Uber: "Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it" -- https://twitter.com/paulg/status/222462460978937856
I know and have met with a few times the Uber team in my local city and they're quite nice and normal people - definitely not assholes.
There is however, a strong culture of 'hustle' (I've heard that exact word a couple times) within the company that I guess could encourage people looking the other way at this behaviour.
I've used both services quite heavily, and talked to tons of drivers. Drivers seem happy with both the services. I wonder if Uber is just getting big enough that some media names love to take sides. Knowing many people at these companies, I'm not sure if we are objectively assessing this situation.