Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matt4077 3410 days ago
A: If the engineer has any reasonable alternatives (which they should have, as you're pointing out) it's somewhat indefensible on moral terms. Maybe, possibly, you could count this news as indication that the process is working as expected and defer judgement for a while.

More importantly, though: it's completely stupid to join Uber now. It's pretty clear that the work environment has always been the sort of thing that kills any humanity people may have had. With this investigation, the backstabbing will only get worse. You'll get there (without any knowledge of the internal structure) and have to navigate a maze while it's on fire.

Somewhere above, I'm also making the case of an upcoming Uber->Under transformation. They were burning cash as if Elon Musk was trying to escape from the Federal Mint. Now, their revenue is taking a hit and investors won't touch them with a 10-foot pole in an open relationship.

Apart from engineers, their management may at the verge of collapse: If your vesting is nowhere in sight (and I believe Uber's vesting is tied to exit scenarios, so good luck with that), it's time to cut your losses before Holder's successor starts the actual investigation. If there's anything suspicious with their finances (which people have long been speculating about, considering they stopped publishing them), you don't want to be an innocent guy/gal in a guilty org.

3 comments

I joined Uber as an engineer last year. Professionally this is the best thing to happen to me. I work with great engineers, i learnt a lot from them. There are people from diverse backgrounds, people for top CS universities to people without any formal CS education but who are 2-3x better than most engineers i have seen. That said, it is not the place for everyone, things move really really fast. Lots of engineers are from Google & FB. Some tooling is inadequate but that is normal for any young company

I like TK, he is honest & anti-burecracy (which is very important for engineers). We have weekly town hall & he answers all sort of questions from employees with honesty that i haven't seen in my previous companies. I feel Uber is going through growing pains since they grew too fast. They have hired/hiring managers from bigger companies who will help them transitioning into a mature company.

Uber was legitimately at the top of my list of companies that I was going to apply for.

After what happened to Susan.... Yeah, not anymore.

I think you're exaggerating just a bit. This is going to result in 7-8 figures of hush money being paid to Fowler.