There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.
https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833
I'm curious though, what tipped her off? While I've worked at tech start-ups before and can believe all the behavior she outlined (because I've seen similar things myself, it's very believable) it still bothers me to continue to take someone's word at face value. I mean I do, I would trust what she says over Uber any day, but I wish more of this type of information was verifiable.
>This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.
From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong.
Since we're clearly not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S
To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted.
>I'm curious though, what tipped her off?
I'd wager an employee.
Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands / CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a while.
For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written. Never raised to management though.
But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling" value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle, sweetheart") to skewer it.
Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking).
Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little dramatic for me.
Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.
I would give Uber a fair 50% chance unless there is strong evidence on the table.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-investi...
They did the same to intimidate journalists:
http://fortune.com/2014/11/18/uber-rides-into-new-pr-storm-o...
Streisand Effect in 3... 2... 1...
It's 2017. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?
(You shouldn't use corporate wifi for a personal phone anyway)
It's literally an admission that what is written on Blind is actually true and leadership is in panic mode. The right response was to dismiss it all as gossip and act nonchalant; moving from the "laugh at you" step to the "fight you" step means they're on their way to defeat.
(working at a startup so can't just sign up and see it myself...)
MS was amongst the first, or perhaps the first, Blind forum. It started off as a successor to MiniMSFT so people used it to compare comp (salaries, raises, bonuses, stock awards) since then it's massively expanded into other companies all with their own private forums, there are also forums visible to everyone.
The most popular thread in the shared Tech industry forum is "What is your age and base salary?" and it makes for some soul-crushing reading (e.g. late-20s kids at Uber SF with $200k base, $400k stock).
Back on the MS forum, it's usually layoff rumours (one regular poster who comments on layoff rumour threads claims to be in HR), people asking how to get VSA severance, and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.
I'm glad that people at MS themselves complain about how awful Skype has become. This proves that there are still sane people over there, for a moment I thought that me and my colleagues who still rely on Skype (Slack has never caught on with us) are not paranoid when we complain among ourselves about it.
I like to think I did my part - I made small UI/UX improvements that I snuck into my official feature work (it all passed peer-review and testing, don't worry) - things like bad margins/padding around controls, something with the wrong color scheme, etc.
(if you do find any vulnerabilities you should of course report them responsibly)
And god beware they start asking what Blinds business model is going to be!
It should be assumed as a given that any company or hotel wifi network is monitored and HTTPS is quite possibly is MITMed.
If an employer wants to issue me a company phone, that's fine. If an employer wants to enable IMAP, that's fine. Otherwise, I won't have mobile access to email, because the risk is unacceptable. And if that's not fine - well, it's been great talking with you, and I appreciate your time, but I'm afraid this position doesn't seem like a good fit after all.
This doesn't tell you the content but if an employee uses the app. Make of this what you want but given Uber's previous actions I don't think they would just ignore this.
It appears that one has to register using a corporate email address, so it's trivial to figure out which employees are using this service.
...
>And over 2,000 Uber employees in total use Blind, says Blind's head of operations Alex Shin.
Jebediah O. Springfield! As the "head of operations" at an "anonymous chat app" you have ONE JOB, Alex Shin! And you just blew it.
(To be explicit, I am saying Alex is way out of line for disclosing this information. An anonymous app should not have such information revealed even in the aggregrate - you can see what just happened as a result. Instead his public, and private, statements should have been "We do not disclose - confirm or deny - any users who may or may not use Blind, their affiliations or locations.")
In point of fact I do agree with sharing this news, however it should be presented disclosing as little information about employees as possible. Plus the app isn't doing a very good job if its traffic is easily distinguishable from other apps' traffic (technically making it possible for Uber to take the actions we've just read about, or directly monitor based on telephone MAC addresses, the exact employees using the app and the timing of their doing so).
But there's not so much that can be done about that. However, revealing the number of users at a company is not information that should be given out, in my opinion.
