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by uberthrowaway1 3407 days ago
Using a throwaway for obvious reasons.

>This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.

From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong.

Since we're clearly not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S

To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted.

>I'm curious though, what tipped her off?

I'd wager an employee.

Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands / CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a while.

For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written. Never raised to management though.

But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling" value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle, sweetheart") to skewer it.

Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking).

Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little dramatic for me.

Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.

2 comments

Thanks for the insights. Question about the inside view - do people really buy Kalanick's fake apologies/victim act at this point? We've gone through this ruse so many times, from the outside it just seems like a laughable caricature of malignant narcissism. From your comments about the CTO, I'm guessing he surrounds himself with "empathizable cover" after the classic abusive pattern (if you come after me, think about the damage it will do to the nice people around me).
Wait, your CTO cried at the all hands? Like publicly burst into tears in front of the entire meeting? I'm just curious, what did someone say to them that had that effect?