When I joined Uber, my compensation effectively doubled from my last - already pretty well-paying gig - so even if calculating the per-hour wages for those 3 months, I made good money, and nothing comparable to the hospitality industry.
Its sad how many orgs still abuse salaried employees time.
I wonder why no large company has ever discovered the absurd waste this budget policy causes.
Add to that the problems associated with tenders (= sometimes absurd amounts of money wasted for pitching) and the overhead of way too many stakeholders and feedback loops on client side... in many a project the single thing that makes the most savings is a competent (!) PO on client side that gets "dictatorship powers" from their C-level that can override petty politics and internal squabbles if they threaten progress too much.
What a fucked up world where this is deemed reasonable. You're even able to justify it as "hey it was tough and ridiculous and half the people didn't make it but look, I wrote some books and was able to become a manager."
I mean... the world where uber engineers are getting paid 300k a year, is probably that world where people might think that this is reasonable, given the compensation at companies like uber.
I have another question though that's somewhat unrelated: I use Uber quite often in latin america when I'm travelling, and my main issue is driver cancellations after 10-30 minutes of waiting for the Uber to start coming to my place (outside the city). It's quite frustrating to me to read about all the UI improvements over the year at Uber, and it seems that software engineers at Uber don't care about the real user experience (waiting a lot for nothing). I would happily pay more to the drivers if this behaviour would stop (they cancel because I'm outside the city usually), but nothing has changed in the last 5 years about it. I don't care about the nice icons or dark mode or other UI changes BTW, because that's not what I remember after a ride.
I agree that this crunch time seems unnecessary, but it's mathematically impossible for Uber engineers to work enough to reduce their wages to anything near fast food wages.
Even someone working 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks per year at $15/hour would earn $62K. That's less than half the starting salary for entry level engineers at Uber.
Entry-level compensation at Uber is around $160K, with senior software engineers earning $400K or more: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engine...
Someone not salaried would be eligible for overtime and double time if working 7day weeks. That would significantly change the amount earned at $15/hour