What defines a great company culture?
A great company culture is one where everyone is aligned to the mission of the company and everyone is aligned, empowered and incentivized in this exact same direction.<p>I’ve worked at a couple of companies that had great culture and the best was Uber. Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo, was hands down the best company I’ve ever been at. Everyone was aligned together which meant that everyone was working together, everyone had the same mission and understood it and we were empowered to do great things.<p>Similar to Facebook, TK had weekly Q&amp;A that was incredibly open and transparent. TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person and it showed in the company. Things weren’t perfect, but perfection isn’t the enemy of great and it was great working at Uber between about 2014 and 2017.<p>The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed. People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture. By 2020, when I left, the engineering culture was a bad joke. The only thing on most people’s minds was “How do I get promoted?” and the incompetency of engineering leadership lead to decisions like “Toil vs Talent” which meant incentivized people to create their own microservices and not work together with others.<p>I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo, everything she wrote was verified by Thuan Pham himself. I didn’t know her personally but I know people that did, and she was known to be very smart. But her experience was not the majority experience. I think most people and especially most women had very positive things to say about working at Uber. But it was a wake up call that things needed to be changed, but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great. It’s a fascinating topic that I daydream about writing a multi-part Medium post about but never will.