Uber's Silicon Valley Employees May Be Looking to Jump Ship (fortune.com)

Some San Francisco-based recruiters and executives at Uber's rival companies told the Financial Times in a Monday article that the number of Uber employees looking to leave the ride-sharing company has spiked. From a report: "One of the main reasons is lack of faith in senior leadership," one unnamed recruiter that previously worked with Uber told the FT. The news comes as the company weathers waves of criticism regarding its leadership, political stance, and internal culture. An Uber spokesperson told the FT that its current level of departures has been normal.

Comments

Jump ship?

[DontBeAMoran]

Wait, Uber has boats now?

Re:Jump ship?

[willworkforbeer]

U-Boater

Re:Jump ship?

[Sebby]

Yes, it's the parent company of U-Boat

My nose smells BS

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't. You milk that puppy until it's dry. Plus, at the end of the day Uber is already profitable in the US. They are bleeding money competing for market share in Europe and China. The whole "profitable in the US" thing escapes the headlines but the are making bank here and they will outside the US too once the market share fight is over.

Re:My nose smells BS

[HockeyPuck]

I thought every job in the silicon valley was a six figure job...

Re:My nose smells BS

[meta-monkey]

You do if you can get another comparable job elsewhere that doesn't have the drama currently swirling around Uber.

Regardless of whether it's deserved or not, the media is currently dogpiling Uber. If you're super-committed to the organization and business model, sure, stick around. But if you're just after a paycheck, might as well try to find one that doesn't have a huge target from regulators and the media on its back.

Re:My nose smells BS

[HornWumpus]

You haven't been around much have you?

Six figures ain't much in the city these days. But senior people _do_ leave because they see trainwrecks coming, sometimes they are right, sometimes they're just butt hurt over something else and being stupid.

If you're working someplace and all the most senior operations people 'step back to spend more time with family' at the same time. Get ready, cause shit is coming.

The best time to look for a job is when you have one.

Re:My nose smells BS

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't. You milk that puppy until it's dry.

If you're good enough to command a 6-figure job, then you're good enough to make it fairly easy to find an alternative employer if you don't like your current one. And anyway, what's being reported here is a desire to move jobs, not actual movement.

Plus, at the end of the day Uber is already profitable in the US. They are bleeding money competing for market share in Europe and China. The whole "profitable in the US" thing escapes the headlines but the are making bank here and they will outside the US too once the market share fight is over.

Profitability has nothing to do with it. The "lack of faith in leadership" that is being referred to is not about whether its profitable or not; it's about the repeated and on-going ethics issues that are coming out of the company.

But since you raised profitability, the counter argument should be obvious: Uber is pouring all its money into self-driving technologies. That's how it sees its future, and it's right -- without that, Uber will always be just a taxi company with dodgy employment practices.

But Google has launched a suit against them claiming that they stole the technology. That suit basically screws Uber and makes them irrelevant, no matter what happens. Google clearly believe they have a strong case, but Uber are screwed even if Google don't win.

Law suits like this can take a decade or more to meander through the court system. The stakes for both parties are too high for either to admit defeat, so no matter who is winning, there will be endless appeals. And until it's resolved, Uber will be seen as a thief. Whether that's fair or not is ultimately up to the courts to decide, but the reputation they've built up of being amoral and arrogant makes the claim very easy to believe, so the mud sticks.

The problem for Uber is that all the time they're fighting this case, it distracts them from actually developing the technology. By the time the case is resolved, assuming it goes in their favour and they manage to catch up, they will already have lost the race to market.

Google has put them in a position from which they cannot win.

Re:My nose smells BS

[HornWumpus]

It all comes down to options vest date. If you options won't vest till after the company is sure to be dead and gone, their is no more bet to be made. Strike price matters too, but if you aren't going to get near to vesting for another 3 years, and you know it's a house of cards run by clowns? (I don't know this, just supposing.)

Best bet might be to move along in a nice orderly fashion, before Uber becomes a resume stain.

Re:My nose smells BS

[dj245]

You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't.

Well, you're wrong. I have done exactly this.

I left Toshiba more than 5 years ago. My job wasn't difficult, the pay was good, and my immediate supervisor and coworkers were OK to deal with. However, even back then, it was clear that at higher levels, they were making a lot of bad deals that looked good in the short term, but were not good in the long term. They also were transferring power from proven, profitable departments, to recent acquisitions that were questionably run. The only surprise to me about their recent financial problems is how long it has taken for these to come to fruition.

When one sees that a company's future viability is questionable, the choice to leave is not difficult. "Lack of confidence in management" doesn't fully describe all the factors considered when one leaves a company under such circumstances.

Re:Remember when they poached Carnegie Mellon?

[HornWumpus]

Poached? Does your boss own you? Have special rights?

Servile weasel.

Re:Remember when they poached Carnegie Mellon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poached? Does your boss own you? Have special rights?

Servile weasel.

Well, it beats being scrambled or fried, right?

Re:Leave San Francisco

[mlw4428]

Ah yes, because sexism in the workplace is just "BS". This is literally what a lot of former-Uber female engineers tend to comment on happening. If it were one or two, okay sure, but it's the vast majority of them. Here I thought intelligent professions like programming didn't have to care about who you were, looked like, smelled like, or anything else so long as you could write GOOD code. And the expectation of politeness is inherent to any business environment - so you can get over that.

It always has been.

[abulafia]

You're just getting old and grumpy, like me.

Re:Leave San Francisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the company/team. I for one would not care if one of my devs was a literal Silent Hill monster as long as it wrote good code with proper unit tests.

Normal top-of-bubble job hopping?

[ErichTheRed]

This will be my second dotcom bubble, and just like the first I'm working in a non-startup company watching on the sidelines. One thing I noticed about last bubble is that towards the end, people were hopping jobs every 3 to 6 months to try to maximize their salary. If you could spell HTML and CSS back then, or were a reasonably skilled sysadmin, you could hop from startup to startup for 10 or 20% salary bumps just because there was so much of a frenzy.

I guess my question is whether this is normal job hopping or whether people don't want to be associated with Uber given their bad press. Based on reports from colleagues and acquaintances who've worked at startups, all of them have insane cultures so I doubt they're jumping for better working conditions. If they do make it to self-driving cars before the startup bubble pops, and fire all their employees^Windependent contractors, they'll have a near monopoly on phone-initiated taxi service since they're basically giving away rides to boost name recognition.

Unlike most /.ers, I'm inclined to believe some of the allegations about sexism and harassment in these startups. Most don't really have HR departments in the traditional big-company sense -- every big company I've worked for has just said "zero tolerance" and fired anyone involved. Startups work people in insane working conditions, grueling hours and close quarters; I'm sure a lot of employees don't really interact with people outside the company for much of their waking hours, which could definitely lead to "interpersonal issues." And I know anecdote != data, but most inappropriate behavior I've noticed in my career has been in salesy/marketing types -- those slimy middle aged guys leering at younger women that you hope you don't get stuck with when doing engineering work at a customer site. SV startups don't have tons of hardcore "nerds" -- most are just using app SDKs and JavaScript frameworks to write the majority of their code, and so they might trend to the extroverted side of the spectrum more than a heads-down coder working on C++ for an embedded IoT thingy. I hate to use the "brogrammer" stereotype, but I have seen it and while it's not generally true, it exists.

Re:Leave San Francisco

[Anonymous Coward]

He believes that flyover country is full of shitheads, and that he represents the "non-sociopathic adults* of San Francisco.