Uber to Resume in Calgary December 6 2016

[jlemire]

Originally Posted by Weitz

My only complain with Uber is that the drivers I have gotten seem to be in their first year of driving or something stupid. So timid. Drive 30 km/h. Missing turns on their GPS.

Good grief.

while im not sticking up for anyone I will say the GPS on the App is awful! one trip I had to Cougar Ridge told me to go straight up the COP hill!! so while it may look like they missed a turn if you know the city well enough it could be a case of taking the better route.

[Weitz]

Originally Posted by jlemire

while im not sticking up for anyone I will say the GPS on the App is awful! one trip I had to Cougar Ridge told me to go straight up the COP hill!! so while it may look like they missed a turn if you know the city well enough it could be a case of taking the better route.

Most of the guys I have had put up google maps I think?

Unless it just looks similar and is actually the app.

[Lil Pedro]

Uber has been great thus far; my wife and I use it all the time now. I was a little concerned that living in the deep south (midnapore) that we would have an issue getting cars regularly, but that has not been the case. Will never take a taxi again.

[Swarly]

Originally Posted by Lil Pedro

Uber has been great thus far; my wife and I use it all the time now. I was a little concerned that living in the deep south (midnapore) that we would have an issue getting cars regularly, but that has not been the case. Will never take a taxi again.

Copperfield crew checking in. I have had similarly great experiences with Uber. I checked NYE at 5am and was able to get a ride from Mahogany to Copperfield. Have used them a bunch of times since, after/before games, or just late after work beers (that accidently went till we were kicked out of the Shwarma place at 4am). No complaints and amazing prices. Used to be $70 cab from DT to CF, then after Uber entered the first time it was $50 cab as they forced cab prices down, now I pay $30-35 to Uber for the same ride.

[psyang]

Originally Posted by jlemire

while im not sticking up for anyone I will say the GPS on the App is awful! one trip I had to Cougar Ridge told me to go straight up the COP hill!! so while it may look like they missed a turn if you know the city well enough it could be a case of taking the better route.

I'm pretty sure there is a road that goes up COP into Cougar Ridge - I've taken it a couple of times.

[Canehdianman]

Originally Posted by psyang

I'm pretty sure there is a road that goes up COP into Cougar Ridge - I've taken it a couple of times.

I think it was closed a few years ago

[Regular_John]

So Uber's got a bit of a PR crisis playing out right now, originating from a blog post written by a female engineer who worked there for a year.

Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/20...e-year-at-uber

New York Times has dove deeper into this and paints another bleak picture of Uber's corporate culture, which given how they interact with lawmakers is not overly surprising.

Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture
SAN FRANCISCO — When new employees join Uber, they are asked to subscribe to 14 core company values, including making bold bets, being “obsessed” with the customer, and “always be hustlin’.” The ride-hailing service particularly emphasizes “meritocracy,” the idea that the best and brightest will rise to the top based on their efforts, even if it means stepping on toes to get there.

Those values have helped propel Uber to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories. The company is valued at close to $70 billion by private investors and now operates in more than 70 countries.

Yet the focus on pushing for the best result has also fueled what current and former Uber employees describe as a Hobbesian environment at the company, in which workers are sometimes pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/t...ture.html?_r=0

For the tech industry folks I follow this is becoming the last straw, many heavy Uber users are deleting their accounts and vowing never to use them again. Part of this is that Uber embodies the worst of start up/Silicon Valley's "tech bro" culture, and coupled with the recent Trump support... it's not been a good year for Uber's public image.

[Canehdianman]

Well that's a pretty ####ty thing to have to go through. Given that we only really get her side of the story, I'd be interested to see what the investigation that Travis initiated reveals.

I just hope that, if there is a culture that propagates this, that it is quickly stomped out.

[Weitz]

How much of a cut on a trip does the Uber company take?

I mean what happened to her sounds awful and all but I feel like if Uber is cheaper and since there are local drivers it would be tough for most people to stop using it due to the parent companies culture.

[Calgary14]

Originally Posted by psyang

I'm pretty sure there is a road that goes up COP into Cougar Ridge - I've taken it a couple of times.

It's still open but there's a gate now and you need a pass to use the road. Winsport owns the road and put this policy into place 1-2 years ago, before that it used to be open for the public to use

[llwhiteoutll]

Is there a way in the app to get a multi-point ride? Or do I have to do the first leg and then request another Uber for the second leg?

I need to get from my house, to the girlfriend's and then to the airport.

[Muta]

Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll

Is there a way in the app to get a multi-point ride? Or do I have to do the first leg and then request another Uber for the second leg?

I need to get from my house, to the girlfriend's and then to the airport.

Put the address of your GF's first, then in the cab tell them you gotta go to the airport after. Once you get to the GF's house you'll be asked to switch the address to the airport, which is easy to do. The fee is adjusted accordingly.

[para transit fellow]

lots of insights into driving for Uber over at:

https://uberpeople.net/threads/new-i...rth-it.137733/

and

https://uberpeople.net/threads/an-op.../#post-2135387

[FireGilbert]

Originally Posted by jaydorn

So Uber's got a bit of a PR crisis playing out right now, originating from a blog post written by a female engineer who worked there for a year.

Didn't they also cause a bit of controversy for breaking an airport taxi strike in response to the travel ban?

I would love to use another service other than Uber however if the current choice is Uber vs a taxi, I will choose Uber every time.

[Regular_John]

Originally Posted by FireGilbert

Didn't they also cause a bit of controversy for breaking an airport taxi strike in response to the travel ban?

I would love to use another service other than Uber however if the current choice is Uber vs a taxi, I will choose Uber every time.

I don't recall hearing about that specifically... but given their track record it wouldn't surprise me at all if they were on the wrong side of that incident and continued chasing $.

[LIP MAN]

Originally Posted by Weitz

My only complain with Uber is that the drivers I have gotten seem to be in their first year of driving or something stupid. So timid. Drive 30 km/h. Missing turns on their GPS.

Good grief.

Must have been okay. Had one guy with the phone on his lap. Guy needed to get a phone holder for his dash.

[Itse]

I guess this might interest people in this thread.

Uber is Doomed

After a discombobulated 2016, in which Uber burned through more than $2 billion, amid findings that rider fares only cover roughly 40 percent of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists, it’s hard to imagine Kalanick could take the company public at its stunning current valuation of nearly $70 billion.

And now, in the past few weeks alone, Uber has been accused of having a workplace that fosters a culture of misogyny, accused of stealing from Google the blueprint of a successful self-driving system, and has lost 200,000 customers over ties to President Donald Trump and how it responded to a taxi driver boycott.

Yet even when those factors are removed, it’s becoming more evident that Uber will collapse on its own. Barring a drastic shift in the company’s business—an implausible rollout of self-driving car fleets across the U.S., an increase of fares by three-fold, or a complete monopolization of the taxi and ride-hailing markets—Uber’s lifeline is shrinking. Its business model could collapse if one court case, and there are many, goes against it. Or perhaps more pressing, if it simply runs out of cash.

Well worth reading the whole story. It's obviously written from a certain angle, but there's a lot to think about here.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Itse

I guess this might interest people in this thread.

Uber is Doomed



Well worth reading the whole story. It's obviously written from a certain angle, but there's a lot to think about here.

Does it matter if Uber is doomed? Prices likely go up but now that they did the leg work getting taxi laws restructured someone more efficient should fill the gap.

[Amethyst]

I think it's doomed at current prices. I used it in LA and it was ridiculously cheap. I was happy to get that rate, but I don't see how they can be successful at those rates long term.

[calgaryblood]

I think in 5-10 years we will look back at über and wonder how we didn't see their demise coming sooner.

I really think they'll be out of business within 10 years. Likely sold and then lose so much money they're forced into bankruptcy.