Grubhub

• Free t-shirts now easily adapted into makeshift plague masks.

• If you don't mind occasionally getting paged during dinner, work-life balance for engineers is above average.

This company used to provide a valuable service, back when it was hard for restaurants to set up their own online ordering systems. But now it's easy, and the only way Seamless/Grubhub (or a competitor) seems to be able to thrive is by using SEO to inject itself as a middleman into the process—not adding value, just taking a painful cut.

And Grubhub's now adopting DoorDash's model where restaurants are added without their consent, leading to terrible experiences with outdated menus and hours. Grubhub loses money on those orders on average, so it's lose-lose-lose for the restaurants, diners, and shareholders—the only point is to create the illusion of growth in order to prop up the stock price.

While it's possible Grubhub is still useful in some communities, in major cities it's a net negative at a time when restaurants are in crisis anyway. Working for a company that shouldn't exist is demoralizing to say the least.

Restaurants are the main victim here, but the company is fairly open about its willingness to deny pay to drivers for issues that aren't their fault and skirt privacy laws for customers... whatever they can get away with.

The engineering leadership culture is also problematic. The department doesn't solicit or use 360 reviews—there's no real opportunity, formally or informally, for employees to give feedback on their managers.

So while most of the managers (and directors, and VPs) are perfectly fine, jerks are also able to thrive—there's minimal consequence for being abusive to your direct and indirect reports, even when they quit (or request transfers) in droves as a result.

Concerns cannot safely be taken to one's manager or to HR—they're simply relayed, without anonymization, to the person in question, and despite company policy there is no actual protection against retaliation.

Not everybody in tech has to deal with the bullies all that much, but their spheres of influence seem like they will keep growing, and poisoning the rest of the culture.

Perhaps as a result, communication about compensation has tended to be highly misleading.

Have a little ethics, as a treat! If you want to stop the endless bad publicity, start thinking of the small restaurants you interact with as customers you're serving, not business partners with whom "all's fair in love and war." You wouldn't start charging diners for orders they never made, or impersonating them on the internet, and then excuse it with "well, it said in the fine print that we could" or "anybody is free to opt out as soon as they find out what we're doing to them and figure out the right number to call." Don't do that with restaurants either.

If you really want to spend buckets of money to crush your competitors, rather than just inflating order numbers with unsustainable promotions, consider hiring drivers as actual employees, with benefits, in competitive areas. DoorDash can't compete if they have to pay a living wage.

Institute a real 360 review process that has at least a chance of deterring people from being pleasant to their bosses but terrible to their subordinates.

And, maybe most importantly, find a way to add value again. Being a parasite rots the soul.