Uber's Toxic Ride: Lessons from the culture of fear and favours
A combined case study into toxic management cultures and my own experience
Uber are easily one of the biggest names of relatively recent times to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s irrefutable that they have provided us with the perfect solution to taxi travel within cities around the world, however, they have had a far from perfect record when it comes to their approach to expansion and treatment of employees.
The business has been heavily criticised for the various information leaks that have ended up in the public domain, lending an eye into the internal ways in which the company has been run. From sexual harassment1, shielding of senior management from any accountability and even a “no holds barred” view on expansion irrespective of whether it was legal or not2.
Thankfully, not all businesses are run the same way as Uber was, but you may still find some levels of toxicity and less than perfect managers. As it stands I have been, for the most part, fortunate to have worked in places where work culture has been friendly, collaborative, customer-centric (the healthy kind) and innovative. There has also been a nice balance of accountability, friction between decision makers (this is a good thing) and challenge from the senior leadership teams to make things tick along nicely.
Let’s dig into some examples of toxic traits within organisation and teams, which should serve as a red flag. But before we begin, you’re probably wondering why I’m picking on Uber? In fact it’s merely coincidence that I stumbled across an article talking about company culture which referenced some of the pitfalls that Uber has experienced over the years; so my interest was piqued and the rest as they say is history.
Business before people
I firmly believe Uber were (and possibly still are?) in a state of putting business before their people. The board were so engrossed in rapid expansion that nothing could theoretically get in their way; using their corporate presence as a bulldozer to making their way into different markets.
Although employees still have their right to say no to such behaviours, hence there is still a degree of accountability on them, Uber’s method of doing first and asking for forgiveness later has even landed some employees behind bars. Taking their approach to entering France as an example - they tried to circumnavigate the taxi licensing requirements by introducing their UberPop service in 20143, allowing non-professional drivers to suddenly begin ferrying people around. Heck, I find it hard enough getting in a taxi with a licensed drivers, let alone some random Monsieur Joé Bloggs who was simple allowed to just do it (don’t sue me Nike). The resulting retaliation from the French government resulted in the arrest of their top execs in France and Western Europe, a ban on their UberPop service and charges given for the operation of an illegal taxi service and concealment of documents.4
It goes without saying that regardless of whether you feel like you have golden handcuffs and owe the world to your employer (n.b. you never truly owe them that much), fundamentally breaking laws or choosing to do things that are considered morally poor is a not a wise choice…
On a comparison nothing like that of Uber’s scale, I have also experienced cultures whereby the care for people has been continually trumped by the pressing need to deliver on business outputs. Don’t get me wrong, delivering value for a business is/should be our primary goal; ultimately we are paid to convert our skills into business value and compensated as such. However, the issues arise when the outcomes are the only things which matter with no consideration for the costs associated with it. When I say ‘costs’ I’m not referring to the salary that has to be paid to individuals, I’m talking about the personal sacrifices that are endured by people following the hustle culture; feeling compelled to take 10pm calls from their boss or working until silly hours to get a PR ready for the next day.
For example, I’ve witnessed sales teams selling vapourware to customers for fixed prices/timescales without consulting the engineering teams, but then chastise them for failing to deliver a 2 month build within the one week effort they sold (read a ‘promised’) to the customer. Add in the fact we would only find out about the expected build at the last minute, engineering were stuck between a rock and a hard place and often find themselves burnt out trying to chase the impossible. When senior leadership also choose to throw in a blame culture on top of these already-insane expectations, the environment quickly becomes painfully toxic and sometimes even hard to escape.
Micromanagement Madness
“Micromanagement is the illusion of control. It's not leadership, it's dictatorship." Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
I was once hired to help reshape the engineering department within a scaling business. This involved looking at things such as engineering standards, creating growth frameworks for the engineers engineers, implementing CI/CD practices, creating an engineering strategy to move out of a legacy pit and much more. This was all good and well until the managing director, who consequently was the ex-tech director, continuously waded through every decision ever made and rendered my role practically useless. In hindsight it would appear as if the guy simply couldn’t let go of the technical reins either out of mistrust or a surrender of his dominant control.
Taking a minor step back, I was hired into the role based on my experience working with different technologies, system architectures, team shapes and sizes and my drive to help them make a change for the better. The platform was running on vastly outdated technology, architected poorly at the detriment of hosting costs and had one of the worst developer experiences I had seen in my career. That aside, I wasn’t naïve to think that things are always perfect, as I was made aware of system health during the interview process; as such I vaguely knew what to expect.
The problem here wasn’t the technical challenge of moving away from old frameworks, creating cleaner pipelines or needing to train the engineers - it was the old-school mentality of senior management playing the big boss card.
The Pipeline Pain: A quick story
The managing director wanted to move quicker (as all businesses rightfully do), yet the developer experience was abysmal and prevented the team from delivering effectively. Setup of the development environment was tedious - it took about 10 minutes to do a build and publish of the solution locally just to preview changes (no hot reloading here folks…) and the pipelines were flakey and running on a vulnerable version of TeamCity. The TeamCity issue had also previously been flagged in a security audit and would cause the business to fail an accreditation that was due in a few months time - a high priority one might think?
Having chatted with the tech leads about the situation, we came up with a plan to migrate the pipelines to Azure DevOps and simplify the build process significantly. The build scripts were currently set up as if the application was single-tenant, thus requiring the solution to be duplicated for each customer. Upon inspection the only things that were changing were assets (images and CSS), hard-coded references to the tenant name and some other minor bits. Our plan was to first consolidate the build scripts and account for multi-tenancy, this way the build pipeline could take input variables to avoid unnecessary duplication and even leverage matrix configurations to run parallel builds - reducing deployments down from > 1 hour to about 10 minutes for everything.
Aside from the pipeline improvements, the changes to the build scripts meant that the actual code solution was reduced in complexity and the barrier to development was reduced by a considerable margin (albeit not perfect). “Great…” I thought, “the managing director is going to love our progress”, but how wrong was I.
“Why is Joe Bloggs working on the pipelines?” was the first question I was asked, despite previously explaining the situation. I proceeded to (re)explained the situation with the TeamCity vulnerability, current complex configuration and our need to deployer safer and faster.
“Right, so how long is it going to take?” was the follow-up question. To which I explained it could take Joe up to a week to fully migrate the pipeline across, but the benefit would be huge. Additionally, if things go smoothly we might even be done sooner.
“It’s taking a long time to do, give it one more day before we pull Joe off the work” was the next thing I was told. Note here, Joe (obfuscated by a fake name for obvious reasons) had only been working on this for a working day in between typical meetings. I tried explaining that that would firstly be a wasted effort to just drop the work, but also that by taking our time to do this work we would without a doubt improve our ability to deploy safer, more frequently and faster. Sadly, the response to this was a (paraphrased) “we don’t have the time to be doing this stuff” in a passive-aggressive tone suggesting that our decision was wrong. The speed at which Joe was working was also pulled into question, potentially as a segue into finding them a route to the door (i.e. dismissal).
In the end I advocated enough for the change to happen and the benefits were reaped, but there was no change in the managing director’s behaviours. There was also an evident atmosphere with the guy moving forward; it was almost like a resentment for the fact we had made our lives easier and there was less of a reason to scapegoat the engineers. Obvious I speculate on this point, but my personality radar has never truly failed me in this regard and I tend to see the bigger picture. So in summary, the micromanagement continued and every decision was questioned.
Toxic Positivity
Can those two words really go together? Positivity surely breeds happiness, and happiness breeds productivity.
Sadly, too much positivity can actually be detrimental to a team and business. An overly-positive mindset leads to problems being masked, swept under the rug and forgotten about until they’re too serious to resolve.
Taking Uber’s scandals into consideration, toxic positivity was almost certainly promoted by Travis Kalanick (Uber co-founder) during the relentless expansion of the business. The “can do” mentality resulted in employees being encouraged to push through their challenges without actually voicing their concerns. This obviously resulted in a massive strain on employee well-being, with individuals such as Susan Fowler (referenced) openly discussing incidents of sexual harassment being swept under the rug so as not to taint the positive “we’re doing great” mindset.
In a moment of full transparency, I know I have likely fed into forms of toxic positivity during my career. I’m generally a happy guy and don’t tend do dwell on the negatives too long, and there are definitely times where I may have sugarcoated issues too much. It’s definitely not as serious as the case mentioned above, but there are times when I’ve reported that certain projects will be completed by a certain date only for them to slip considerably. In hindsight I didn’t want to let people down, or to give the impression that my team was incapable and hence I held on to the incorrect fact that things weren’t quite as rosy as I made them out to be. Obviously I’ve learnt to be more transparent since then (it was early in my career and didn’t know better), but it’s an example of where a manager’s over-positivity can actually make the team appear incapable as well as tainting their own reputation as a trustworthy manager.
Clique Culture
In my opinion, this kind of workplace culture is focused around groups of individuals who are looking for affinity bias - A.K.A “yes men”. These type of people will surround themselves with individuals that will go along with their ideas, and as such they receive little in terms of opposition. When such cliques are within senior management, it can breed a culture of toxicity whereby decisions are continually made amongst a small group of individuals without taking into consideration the views and opinions of the wider audience. The resulting outcome is more of a dictatorship, combining traits of both narcissistic and Machiavellian behaviours that (generally) serves nobody more than the clique itself.
In Uber’s case people willingly or unwillingly went along with the approach of “everything is fine” despite facing knowing things weren’t right. It’s evident from the testimonials and reports into the various scandals that the management tiers suffered from clique cultures, often aligning themselves to the aggressive stance of Kalanick. The driver for such behaviours might be to get better prospects of promotion or even protection from consequences as mentioned earlier in this post - either way the outcome is far from positive in terms of what one might typically deem a nice place to work.
A clique culture is not created through your typical team of people as you know it, so let’s make that distinction very clear. A unit of people working towards a common goal and sharing (positive) values is completely different to the behaviours I mean by those exhibited in a clique culture. The intent of working with similarly-minded individuals for malicious or personal gain is what separates the different types - the end goal is less ‘positive’ should we say.
Sadly I have seen this in practice during my time in industry. There’s an individual that comes to mind whereby any strong disagreement (with valid opinions/experience) meant that you were shown the door soon afterwards. Any misalignment to the individual-in-question’s own view on things simply meant you weren’t compatible with the company and there was always a way to get you removed from the business. People regularly failed probation, and I’m not talking the odd person - the attrition at this company was diabolical and it was obvious that the issue stemmed with the person doing the hiring and firing. I’ve worked with a significant number of amazing engineers, product owners, delivery mangers etc. in my career to date; but in this place I saw solid, respectable engineers, product owners and senior leadership being let go from the business. Sure, there may have been other things behind closed doors that I wasn’t privy to, but the one thing that stood out from these individuals is that they were radical, forward-thinking and not afraid to challenge the status-quo. On the contrary, there were some engineers who practiced anti-patterns for good engineering (e.g. no tests, let alone TDD, hacked things together, always created conflict in discussions) who were kept on - because they were a “yes man” and bowed down to the manager in question irrespective of if it made sense, circumnavigated process, was ethically/morally wrong etc. I’ll let you form your own opinion on the matter, but I hold mine firm.
Do the right thing
To summarise this short but hopefully insightful view into my own experience and that of some of Uber’s less-than-perfect history, we can easily see the us, as managers, can make some long lasting impact on others.
Whether you are a middle manager or are even working at board-level, the scope of influence we have on company culture and consequently the behaviours people adopt is huge. Management is a privileged position to hold so don’t abuse the impact you can have on others; avoid the coercion, challenge unethical and morally-poor decisions, look after your people and lead by example keeping your integrity in tact.
Until next time, thanks for reading!
I found myself nodding along to much of this as I relived the pains of some of my past experiences. Culture works in fractals, as above so below. Uber is a good example of questionable ethics at the top becoming a contagion that permeates throughout. Thanks for sharing your experiences so openly.