Uber employees lose faith and explore exit
Competitors and recruiters find more job applications from car-hailing app workers
9 HOURS AGO by: Leslie Hook in San Francisco
Recruiters in the Bay Area and executives at rival companies say they have seen an uptick in job applications from Uber employees, as its workers lose faith in the company’s leadership and start to doubt the value of their stock options.
Uber has gone from crisis to crisis over the past five weeks, prompting increasing numbers of employees to explore the idea of leaving a start-up that was once considered one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious and lucrative workplaces.
“I have seen quite a few people who have been looking to leave Uber,” said one recruiter, who previously worked at the car-hailing company. “One of the main reasons is lack of faith in senior leadership.”
He said the number of unsolicited résumés from Uber employees coming across his desk spiked last week, a time when two former employees published personal accounts alleging harassment and sexism at the company. He received more résumés from Uber in one week than he had the previous month.
For employees at Uber, quitting the company often means walking away from restricted stock units or stock options worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in Silicon Valley’s most highly valued private company. With Uber currently worth about $70bn, a typical middle manager position comes with RSUs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that vest over a four-year period.
“Historically, it has been incredibly difficult to recruit from Uber, which partly has to do with people being unwilling to leave their stock options on the table,” says Guillaume Champagne, president at SCGC Executive Search. “From a purely financial perspective, Uber would need to become an awful place for them to leave.”
Nevertheless, in the past few weeks, Mr Champagne has seen an increase of about 5-10 per cent in the number of people interested in leaving, particularly those who are “a bit less of a culture fit”, he says. “To be fair, people typically know what they are getting into when they join Uber. They know it is a very male-dominated, high-octane, investment banking type of culture,” he adds.
In the past two weeks a series of public embarrassments, including a video in which chief executive Travis Kalanick berates an Uber driver, have left the company struggling to recover its image. Mr Kalanick issued an unusual apology after the video was published, saying: “I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.”
Two senior executives quit the company last week, adding to employees’ sense of uncertainty. Ed Baker, who was vice-president of product and oversaw Uber’s rapid expansion over the past three years, resigned on Friday, attributing his departure to an interest in going into public service. Uber did not comment. Amit Singhal, vice-president of engineering, left the company on Monday.
A spokesman for Uber said the company had not seen attrition rates above normal.
Adding to Uber’s woes, the company was sued last week by Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, which alleges that its rival stole trade secrets and infringed on patents relating to autonomous vehicles. Uber called the allegations “a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor” and said it would defend itself in court.
However, the lawsuit, and the extreme shortage of technical talent in the autonomous vehicle sector, has made the self-driving research unit particularly susceptible to poaching.
“There are definitely more people thinking about leaving,” says Alex Rodrigues, who co-founded Embark, a rival driverless trucking start-up, last year. Several employees in Uber’s advanced technology group, which is based in Pittsburgh, have left to join rivals in the past month.
More than anything, Uber’s recent stumbles have taken the shine off a company that many in Silicon Valley once saw as being invincible, and employees who had planned to stay with Uber through its eventual initial public offering are reconsidering.
While a public offering typically offers an attractive financial prize to employees with equity, Mr Kalanick has said publicly that he wants to delay an IPO as long as possible, meaning that employees’ shares will remain illiquid.
“People were lured in with the promise of equity . . . but now they are realising that they won’t see a return on that for a long time,” says the recruiter who previously worked at Uber. “There is a lot of resistance in upper management to doing an IPO.”
Others say that doubt is starting to sink in. “Previously it was difficult to get them [Uber employees] because of their stock. Now they don’t seem so confident about what that’s worth,” says an executive at one of the largest tech companies in the Valley.
Unlike in the official version, different branches of the London Overground Network are now in different colours, although annoyingly the original east london line is nither called that nor orange. The Northern Line is also split into the the Northern line and the Edgeware Line
Some handy interchanges are highlighted and the correct geographical relationship between some stations is shown. Also stations close to each other where the ticketing system allows passengers to make interchanges are grouped together, like Euston and Euston Square.
London, UK - Full Stack PHP / Magento Engineer - Full Time
Swoon Editions is about getting beautifully crafted furniture from the workshop floor straight to your door at an exceptional price. We cut out expensive retail overheads without ever compromising on quality. We are building a leading direct to consumer online sales app with a data platform for trend analysis, demand prediction and logistics optimization. We are fairly unique in the Ecommerce world as everything we do is data driven. We test all assumptions from web page layouts to button colours, from the physical products we launch to the finish of the material. We're a small and passionate group of people based in the old Southwark Playhouse in London, with a growing team here and abroad overseeing our workshop partnerships.
We also have some great benefits:
* Unlimited Holidays
* The best hardware Mac or PC
* Free Company Gym
* Regular Team Lunches, Drinks and more
* Fully stocked kitchen and drinks fridge
* Amazing Company Culture
* Just a little too much trust
Full Stack PHP / Magento Engineer - You should have a track record of solving problems across all parts of the development stack, from debugging JS in the browser to full “OOP SOA API Design”. We spend the majority of our time working in PHP with Magento and its APIs so prior experience would be great but we will also consider candidates with all strong programming backgrounds that want a new challenge. - http://swoon.workable.com/jobs/32943
If you have questions, you can email me Ciaran the CTO on - [email protected]
London, UK - Various Engineering Positions - Full Time
Swoon Editions is about getting beautifully crafted furniture from the workshop floor straight to your door at an exceptional price. We cut out expensive retail overheads without ever compromising on quality. We are building a leading direct to consumer online sales app with a data platform for trend analysis, demand prediction and logistics optimization.
We are fairly unique in the Ecommerce world as everything we do is data driven. We test all assumptions from web page layouts to button colours, from the physical products we launch to the finish of the material.
We're a small and passionate group of people based in the old Southwark Playhouse in London, with a growing team here and abroad overseeing our workshop partnerships. We're are hiring smart people for all positions across engineering.
We also have some great benefits:
* Unlimited Holidays
* The best hardware Mac or PC
* Free Company Gym
* Regular Team Lunches, Drinks and more
* Fully stocked kitchen and drinks fridge
* Amazing Company Culture
* Just a little too much trust
Backend Software Engineer - You should have a track record of solving difficult engineering problems across all parts of the business. You should be as at home performing regressions across complex cohort models as building and designing APIs for our front end team. We spend the majority of our time working in both Python and PHP and developing APIs so prior experience would be great but we will also consider candidates with all strong programming backgrounds that want a new challenge. - http://swoon.workable.com/jobs/32947
Full Stack PHP Engineer - You should have a track record of solving problems across all parts of the development stack, from debugging JS in the browser to full “OOP SOA API Design”. We spend the majority of our time working in PHP with Magento and its APIs so prior experience would be great but we will also consider candidates with all strong programming backgrounds that want a new challenge. - http://swoon.workable.com/jobs/32943
Frontend Software Engineer - You should have a track record of solving frontend problems, from creative concepts to polished code, particularly for consumer projects. This role will be responsible for evolving the experience of our online store. You'll be collaborating with analysts, developers and marketers to devise and develop new features, and tests as we roll out an ambitious roadmap. - http://swoon.workable.com/jobs/32948
QA Engineer - We’re looking for a Web App Test Engineer to join our team in London. You should have a track record of end-to-end testing and quality assurance. This testing will be predominantly manual to start and moving to automation as our team grows and we hone our requirements. Our website is the face our our brand, so this role has the potential to have a big impact on our business. - http://swoon.workable.com/jobs/32952
If you have questions, you can email me Ciaran the CTO on - [email protected]
Like many other have said Europe is on your doorstep. I run and engineering team in London and most of my recent hires have been people emigrating from countries like Spain, Italy and Poland. For most they are coming from backgrounds similar to yours. Our Office is hugely diverse with staff from all over the world. This is the case with most London startups and the are looking looking for talented engineers to join them.
Would like to see the stories numbered struggling to sperate the stories.
Also maybe a way to turn the snipits of?