Uber

• Pretty high pay.
• Monthly vesting for RSUs.
• ESPP.
• 401(k) matching.
• WLB not bad depending on the team.
• Yearly refreshers and bonus.

Engineering culture specifically has turned into a political game of who can put up the most diffs and ERDs. You are now stack ranked amongst your peers and put into PIP, does not meet bar, bar, above expectations, and exceeds expectations. Know now that the above expectations and exceeds expectations is exceptionally rare, and the percentage allowed in that bucket is very, very low. Over the past two years, the number of people put on PIP and in the does not meet expectations requirements has increased a lot. Without warning, too, really. I have seen good people put in the does not meet expectations bucket who are actually the smartest and team leads. And what is the reason for it?

Oh, you are below on diff count for a certain amount of months; surely, that means you are slacking on your velocity. Oh, you only wrote one ERD over the past couple of months. I don't care that it is 50 pages and is one of the biggest projects on the team. You clearly don't have enough impact if you only delivered one of the most major projects on the team. You have to deliver 5 or 6 projects per half minimum. That is the name of the game now.

You will see everyone, from people who coast to even the smartest people in the company, put up code changes that are essentially just one-liner log or metric changes and go around begging teammates for stamps just so they can hit their diff count at the end of the month. What does this accomplish?

Remove this productivity metric tracking nonsense and using it as a core benchmark for performance. It just ruins morale and stops actual meaningful work from being done. I've seen most of the good engineers in my org leave the company because of this.