And of course interns are just as good at running a business, it’s just that they should not be running a business and should focus on doing whatever it is that they need to do to get their degree. So I think that it just goes to show that there’s a certain level of inexperience that can occur from what we just saw.
I was in the Bay Area so I had a very quick glimpse of what a lot of the media has reported. That some Uber employees even knew what the technology was and knew how to operate it.
There were also reports that there was some sort of Uber team operating there as a separate unit, but I never felt that there was that team or that some team was operating behind the scenes there. I never felt like it was a separate unit at any time during my time there. So that’s where I think there was some sort of inexperience, which is unfortunate.
You mentioned that this was a big tech company. Wasn’t there a whole separate department for cybersecurity? Why would you just have one guy?
I think that there’s just a certain level of security that any company that has been around for a certain amount of time should have a certain level of security. Just because we didn’t use the industry standard and some of the best security protocols out there, it doesn’t make it any less. It doesn’t make it any less safe. I mean, look, we were dealing with some pretty large sums of money. We were dealing with some pretty powerful people who are in charge of very important things, so they should be taken very seriously when we talk about the security of this type of an operation. So I don’t really think that this was meant to be a malicious attack. I think it was just a lack of experience, and I don’t think that that should be an excuse for the people that were involved.
Did you feel like you had a lot of respect and power among your peers? Did you have a level of importance to your coworkers?
That was one of the things that I had thought of, which is that it wasn’t like I was some intern. I wasn’t your typical intern. I wasn’t there because I needed the experience, and I wasn’t there because I was some kid that didn’t have anything to do and couldn’t do better. I mean, the majority of the people who were there at Uber were full-time employees. And because of that, I feel like it was a little more difficult to really get into trouble. Especially because the way that they ran the company, we’re all under strict guidelines and rules of what we could do and what we couldn’t do. If we wanted to go somewhere, they would have to approve it, whether that be for a client meeting or whatever. They wanted to ensure that we weren’t just there for the weekend and that we were getting something out of it as well.
Could you have made more money with Uber?
I’m sure. I mean, if you don’t want to do a lot of overtime and work 12-hour days every day of the week. It was definitely a pretty high-stress job. It was definitely a very long commute, but I think for me, it was the environment and the people that I worked with was what made the environment unique. That was a good part of my job and my work experience was very enjoyable.
After you decided to quit Uber, did you ever get a call to return?
I did hear from my manager because it was a bittersweet ending. She had heard the news and she told me that Uber wanted to offer me some other internships in an effort to get me back on the road. But I have to tell you, that offer is not really what I’d be hoping to see because that was really the only type of job that I really hated doing. I wouldn’t have been working there had I known that was the end. So I think it was just one of those things that we all work for the first time or work for a company and never again, especially if they’re going to be around for a long time.
The one year anniversary of Uber’s unicorn status happened this past Sunday, which means a lot of news and press is going to be flooding the internet and that’s definitely been the case. In an effort to highlight some key pieces of Uber’s business, I started writing a few stories about the issues we saw and about Uber’s business a few months ago. One of my favorite interviews was with an ex-Uber intern who detailed some of her experiences on the inside of the company, even going so far as to detailing how many hours per week she worked, which team she was on, and so forth.
One of my friends recently joined Uber, and one of my friends was an Uber intern a year ago. So I called him up and asked him if he’d like to do a phone interview. I went over a few topics, the culture of Uber, how the hours can get pretty crazy in the office, and how there’s never a shortage of people willing to get some work done. I feel that the last one may have been a bit controversial in some instances.
I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on the culture that you witnessed inside of Uber and how that compares to the culture that you’ve seen in other tech companies you’ve interviewed at, whether it be Dropbox or some other Silicon Valley companies.
My company was Uber, and I have to admit that it was a pretty intense environment. Just as an interviewee, you’re working a certain amount of hours a week, you’re getting assigned projects, but not everything has to be done the exact same way.
People say that we’re at the forefront of tech, and we have people that are working on the newest, most innovative stuff. But one thing I would like to comment on is the working hours that we had to do. They were very long and grueling hours, so I feel like you should be compensated for those hours if you work. Otherwise, it’s only going to lead to your career not going as far. If I knew I had to go through those times for them to be able to be successful as a company, it would have been so much better if they had offered me a better compensation package for that amount of work. So I would like to say that when I first interviewed at Uber, I went in expecting to be paid overtime but was told that I was not supposed to be working any overtime in any given week.
From my experiences, people were doing way more hours than what you’d be paid for overtime, and they’d usually start at 9 or 10 in the morning and you’d go through the rest of the day until, depending on the company, sometimes until 10, 11, or 11 at night, and that’s not really my definition of overtime. So I thought this was strange, but my work ethic was too strong, and I wasn’t just going to let my boss pay me overtime that they didn’t want to. So I asked one of my superiors how this work ethic was going to pay off in the long term, and they said something along the lines of, “Oh, we just have a few things for you to focus on.” The other thing they said is, “If you work harder, then you can move up to other positions and eventually, you can be a manager yourself.” So I said okay and then continued working my regular hours, and sometimes I would put in more than 40 hours a week without missing a single day. Sometimes I was working close to 60 hours a week because we were crunching towards the end of the quarter. But of course when I went back after my internship and asked about this, I was told that you could only expect to see a maximum of 60 hours a week as a full-time employee.
In other words, your hourly rate is going to be lowered because you’re working more hours, and you should plan on getting paid overtime unless your boss signs a waiver for it. So that’s basically how they want to operate and how that’s going to go. But I have to say that if there were issues with getting overtime because there were managers that were supposed to be responsible for you in your area, you were supposed to be doing so much overtime. I would encourage any other employees in this type of situation, if they’re doing over 40 hours a week, to say something and voice their concerns about the manager if they think they’re being mistreated because of a lack of time or overtime. Otherwise, people like me won’t be able to speak up about these types of things.
What you experienced is definitely no way a secret, but what really surprised me was how they were going to try to hide it, which is that they are not going to get fired for paying you overtime when they know that you’re going to be asking for a lot of overtime. They’re probably going to get fired from getting caught. So as far as I’m concerned, the number one thing that people should expect when they enter a company like Uber is that you may be working long hours and you may be making a certain amount of money, but you may not necessarily be getting any extra money.
Uber has certainly generated a lot of goodwill and publicity over the past few months. When Uber started generating such press, Uber was taking on the big boys from Google, Apple, and Microsoft
