The Quest for Uber Engineering

"What the fuck are you doing? Why the fuck isn't it working" Travis yelled as he loomed over the engineer responsible for dispatch. It was late 2012 and Uber was experiencing one of its normal outages. Buckling from the weight of tremendous growth, Uber's software infrastructure was consistently giving out. The regular outages were fixed by Travis rushing to the engineering desks to stare deep into an engineer's monitor while sending warm, bull like breaths down the engineer's spine and out his back. Streaks of sweat could be seen dripping down the cheeks of these young engineers as they suffered Travis' verbal condemnation while struggling for the water they needed to survive, a fix. Found it, found it! The patch which needed to be thrown in with the growing cesspool of hideous patches necessary to get us to the next weekend. git push --force, sudo reboot. Done! "It's working" stuttered the engineer. Travis returned to his pin, satisfied with his handling of the situation. Hopefully, Travis will be traveling during next weekend's inevitable outage we dreamed. This chaos continued weekend after weekend as the barrage of inconceivable growth laid a crippling siege to our infrastructure. The infrastructure, which was born as a PHP monolith coughed up by a Mexican consulting firm, had become a Python monolith dependent on Postgres after considering MySQL inadequate. Ironically, this monolith then transitioned into an architecture comprised of 2,000 services using a NoSQL storage wrapper service built on MySQL called Schemaless.  We needed a change, we needed a hope that we could overcome. Both Travis and the board realized this so they set out to fix the solution. The answer: Thuan Pham. Recommended by famous investor Bill Gurley, Thuan was a no name, mid-level VP who had seen success at Double Click. He was currently battling the war for VMware's cloud management platform in some of the dirtiest politics enterprise software has ever seen. An refugee from Vietnam, Thuan never knew peace. He was born in a country torn by decades of war. He survived on cents a day earned by swimming across rivers to acquire candy and selling them at a mark up price. Life hardened him. Forged by the fires of suffering and the pressures of death, he was the perfect match for Travis' fierce, confrontational personality. After months of randomly placed phone calls, in early 2013 he became the no name head of a small engineering org at a no named company. Thuan was delighted! He always craved power as a way to correct for his terrible upbringing. He was number one, number one at a chaotic, unknown company but number one nonetheless. Unsatisfied with the current situation, he set out to build one of the greatest engineering organizations the world has ever seen. He would not hire the stars from Google, Facebook, and Apple but forge them in his own high-pressure environment. He desperately wanted to become a star and knew exactly what he needed to do to activate the fusion. He knew he was nothing before this but forced himself to believe that Uber didn't bring stars, Uber created them! This ideal stuck. He knew very well that stars were formed under immense pressure, most would explode and amount to nothing, but some would find balance in the chaotic pressure then fuse into greatness. So he set out to rule his empire by imposing a culture which worshipped stars and top performers. Forming these treasures by purposefully squeezing the life out of engineers in the name of Uber first and finding their "red line" (point of exhaustion). The pillars of Thuans empire were planted with stack ranking, late dinners, backstabbing, crazy deadlines, 80 hour work weeks, fierce ownership over all, empires, and awarding those who forwarded his ideals with lavish amounts of money. He completely swept the old guard who were unwilling to perform his beckoning and replaced them with his own minions. He instituted these loyal generals into leadership positions deep within the foundation of engineering so that his grip could never be loosened by better technologist, better engineering. Storage, fraud, money, infrastructure, etc would forever be his. The successes flooded in! His organization supported the largest growth of any business in the history of the world. They shipped new architectures, arose international data centers in months, established new products, and shipped features which fueled Uber's domination. Still, his quest for greatness and the ideal of great performers were always second to people. Tired, weak, and broken from infighting, engineers knew not where to turn. With sexual harassment, disrespect, and dehumanizing interactions everywhere we needed a new hope. Enter the greatest battle in Uber's history! Thuan has reigned with a tight grip, encouraging infighting via stack ranking to distract the plebs from his lack of technical knowledge. However, the one which was foretold during the floods of schemaless and udeploy now rides into Thuan's dark empire welding immense technical knowledge and the dream of advancement through technical skills rather than politics. The one they call Amit. He knows not what awaits him as Thuan was forged in the darkness, spreading it across his Uber empire. He has been empowering fierce minions to do his bidding and consume everything in the name of "good infra and best practices". I fear that Thuan and his minions have mastered the great weapon of toe stepping to the point where they know exactly where to step and feel no pain. Can one born in the land of Google fight such tenacious monsters in their own swamp? The kingdoms of the future will be built by the answer. Turns out Amit was a ruse, a false prophet fired from Google for sexual harassment. At least Thuan is not an immoral pervert! Now, there is no hope. The animals have taken over. The great institutions of our day are built by these creatures who forgo year's of human evolution in the name of meritocracy. And yet we happily comply...not for better futures, not for changing the world, and not for building greatness but so we can cash out and buy a fucking house in Silicon Valley so that our kids can grow old to play in the same mud pit we flop around in now.   Uber onward! Silicon Valley onward! We are changing the world, I promise.