Uber · Primly Community

Uber work life balance and culture, honest take: 18 months in, here's what I actually think

quietquit_quincy · 5 replies

I joined Uber SRE about 18 months ago coming from a startup where I thought I was busy. So I have some reference points.

Honest take:

The good. Uber operates serious infrastructure at genuine scale. If you want to work on real distributed systems problems, reliability at a level that most companies never touch, it's legitimately interesting. The SRE org in particular has gotten better about on-call runbooks and postmortems. The tooling is solid. I've learned more in 18 months here than in 3 years at my last place.

The not-so-good. The company runs lean in ways that are sometimes exciting and sometimes exhausting. Uber went through significant layoffs in 2022-2023 and the headcount never fully recovered in some orgs. My team does work that used to be done by a team 40% larger. That math shows up as: more on-call rotations per person, slower background work, and the occasional Sunday Slack message that isn't really optional.

On-call specifically: my rotation is every 5 weeks. Each on-call week is genuinely variable. Some weeks it's quiet. Some weeks you're getting paged at 2am and writing a P1 postmortem by 7am. The org has improved tooling and escalation paths but you should go in clear-eyed that SRE at Uber is a real on-call org.

Culture. Post-Kalanick the cultural reset is real. The explicit 'Be an Owner' and 'Big Bold Bets' values have some teeth. My manager is good. I've had no harassment experiences and have not witnessed the things you read about from the 2016-2018 era. It's a different company.

WLB for IC SWE on a product team (not SRE) sounds better than my experience. Friends on Rides or Eats product teams describe something closer to a 45-50 hour week with reasonable expectations.

Bottom line: not a 9-to-5, not a death march. Depends heavily on team and org.

5 replies

hardware_hugo

The on-call density difference between SRE and product teams is real everywhere, not just Uber. If you're an SWE who doesn't want aggressive on-call, ask specifically about rotation frequency and P1 volume in your team interview. Don't assume.

ops_omar

What's the internal mobility situation? If I joined one org and wanted to move after a year, is that realistic or does it feel politically messy?

sre_sol

Internal transfers exist and aren't rare. You generally need 12+ months in your current role and manager support. I've seen it work smoothly and I've seen it stall when headcount on the receiving team dried up. Not a guaranteed path but not blocked either.

firsttime_mgr

Did the lean headcount affect engineering quality or is the team skilled enough to absorb it? I'm always nervous about joining a team where the prior layoffs left a gap in institutional knowledge.

sre_sol

Honestly it depends on the team. Some teams kept their strongest people, some had real knowledge gaps. I'd ask in the team interview specifically: how many people have been on this team for 2+ years? You'll get a feel fast.