‘The ability to make a big difference’: CTO Thuan Pham on Uber’s mission.
As 2016 wound to a close, Uber hardly seemed — from the outside at least — to be speeding toward a major crisis.
The ride-hailing startup had expanded to 500 citiesN in more than 70 countries, and had surpassed more than 2 billion total rides.N Venture capital continued to pour in, taking Uber’s valuation past $60 billion.N Though the business remained unprofitable, net revenue had tripled year-over-year, from about $2 billion to more than $6 billion.NIn 2016, Uber had doubled its workforce, from about 6,000 to 12,000.N
A number of PR and legal woes were in the rear-view mirror. Uber had settled with a woman who claimed she was raped by a driver in India, and with drivers who had challenged their classification as independent contractors rather than employees. The company had also resolved allegations that it had stalked a reporter using a secret software feature called “God View.”N
For a timeline of Uber's history, click here
But Chief Technology Officer Thuan Pham and his team were sensing that there may be some bumps in the road ahead. Some engineers were complaining that it was becoming harder and harder to get things done. Others were starting to chafe over what they perceived as unfair pay and promotion practices.
“2016 was all good [externally]. The stress was all internal, because internally our challenge was, fundamentally, we had a lot of junior managers. And we could start seeing friction,” said Ganesh Srinivasan Uber's vice president of engineering. N
“You’d see a lot of frustration in terms of people unable to move teams, people who were getting bottle-necked on what they were doing. … We rolled out some compensation [changes] and other changes that also played a big part. We were just getting a lot of pressure back.”
Yet when managers looked at the results of their periodic internal “pulse” survey, the numbers didn’t ring alarm bells. “Our NPS [net promoter score] was favorable, delivering a plus 30. Extremely good,” Srinivasan recalled. “Those numbers were looking great. But they just masked what people were really feeling.”
As 2017 dawned, Uber suddenly found itself lurching from one disastrous situation to the next.
In January, the company faced a boycott that saw hundreds of thousands of customers delete the Uber app amid concerns that the company was trying to capitalize on a New York taxi work stoppage related to President Trump’s attempt to ban immigrants from several majority-Muslim countries.N
In February came an explosive blog post by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, detailing sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation she said she experienced while working at the company, and describing an organization in “complete unrelenting chaos.” Fowler claimed Uber’s human resources team brushed off her formal complaints about the incidents.N
In March, CEO Travis Kalanick was captured on video arguing with an Uber driver and using obscenities when the driver complained about declining payouts.N And the company came under scrutiny for an initiative called Greyball, a worldwide program to deceive authorities in some markets where its service was resisted by law enforcement or had been banned. N
The company ordered several reviews by outside legal experts. One, by law firm Perkins Coie, resulted in 215 complaints of inappropriate workplace behavior, including sexual harassment, bullying and retaliation; 20 employees were fired.N A subsequent report by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recommended a host of changes, including curtailing the role of Kalanick, hiring a strong chief operating officer, installing an independent chairman of the board, improving human resources record-keeping and revisiting Uber’s cultural values. N
Click here for the full text of the Holder Report
In June, prominent investors demanded Kalanick’s resignation, and he stepped down.N
A new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, took the wheel in September 2017.N Uber’s senior executives began working to get the company back on track, and started looking ahead to an IPO.N As they took stock of the many tumultuous months they had just endured, they asked themselves: How could they not let this crisis go to waste?
Thuan Pham and others in Uber’s engineering organization were asking: What exactly had derailed them? What practices did they need to change, and what should they keep? What could or should they have done differently? How could they avoid over-correcting and losing what made the company innovative and special?
“Uber needs to focus on getting its mojo back… in a controlled fashion. Uber is still disrupting a lot of things. We have to do this all responsibly, though. We have to do this within the confines of a multi-billion dollar mega company that we are today, and it's tricky. How do you get that swagger back and maintain your sort of global responsibility? But that's what we have to do; otherwise, we'll just become a company that will be around for a long time, but it won't be world-changing. It will plateau here if we don't get that back within the next, I would say, year. It will still IPO nicely. It will still make people a bunch of money. But if it wants to be here 20 years from now, it needs to get that swagger back.”
--Ryan Sokol, head of Engineering for UberEverythingN