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Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

OP here. We did not get any additional compensation for the long hours beyond you could expense food at late hours and on weekends. And at the end of the project, my director told everyone to take their SO to the most expensive restaurant, hire a babysitter if they have kids and expense the whole thing. I submitted a bill of €300.

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.

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So you work (at least) double hours, a bunch of employees quit, "extreme stress", everyone "giving 110%", and you get nothing but a dinner out of it and the salary you'd have got if you'd worked a normal role. Uber's stock, meanwhile, got as big as Travis's ego...

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."

There is always gamedev, where after a year of 80 hour weeks, the game is launched and… half the people get fired because they are no longer needed.

> world where this is deemed reasonable

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.

That sounds ignorant of reality and abusive at best. In my former org when we go into q4 things get a bit crazy and chaotic. Once the dust settles my manager would let us take a week off and do whatever we wanted. No vacation needed, just don't come to office and do something fun.

Its sad how many orgs still abuse salaried employees time.

Let me guess, some kind of ad, marketing or e-government agency? The "clients have leftover budget they need to burn or next year's budget shrinks" problem is real.

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.

Sorry, to be clear I don't and never have worked at Uber. My former org was a reference to a team I was on prior to current team at another company.

Sure, I understand, it's a relationship that is still quite good, so if you are young, healthy and can manage the stress, it's probably not a problem.

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.

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