- if you are on any sort of Support or Operations team, you will always be short staffed and pretty much considered the bottom of the barrel in the company. Higher ups do not care about your feedback, although they will pretend to. Expect goalposts to be moved and for all other teams to receive better benefits (like the previously mentioned summer half days off). - Often my team was asked to do things they didn't sign up for, and eventually it became expected of you to do other people's jobs. Of course, don't expect more pay or your consent. Just expect to be voluntold what to do, or else.
- much more of a customer service and tech support role than a traditional operational role. It's also an hourly rate, not salary, so you have to punch in and punch out and announce your lunch break on a daily basis. You're expected to talk like a live chat agent to applicants all day. I did not know I signed up to be a help desk agent. Again, not mentioned in the job ad or interview (although they did state that the "occasional phone call to drivers was needed" but guess how often I was randomly asked to call and harass drivers? At least 1hr per week was spent cold calling them and getting hung up on)
- Claims to be "remote," but it's only "remote" if you are lucky with your team + market assignment. Sales was required to attend occasional onsite meetings as well. If you're assigned to + happen to live in or around Seattle, California, DC/MD/VA, Philadelphia, or Denver, those are markets that hold in person events, and they WILL require you to go to them weekly in the summer to host job fairs alone with the public, without asking you your availability in advance, without a clear plan, and without detailed training on what to expect at them and how to conduct them properly. If you plan to move, they can't hire in several states. Totally sounds like a "remote" job right? Just call it hybrid or list in the ad where you cannot hire so this conversation never has to happen (sidenote: the onsite events require a very different skillset than the job's daily activities that are done online, and it will NOT be clear in your interview or listed in the job ad that this is required)
- speaking of this event, they have some outdated strategies for retaining drivers. They're constantly being asked last minute to ask them to go to some inconvenient location at an inconvenient time to finish a step ASAP, usually for a cheap gift card that covers nothing. At one point they did offer gift cards to drivers to continue applying (before they even cleared any background checks and took a ride... so a total waste of money in most cases), and yet at the same time would not offer their employees a raise, or anyone who worked at in-person events a stipend or incentive.
- After drivers are able to use the app, management requires that you waste hours doing a "call campaign" to get drivers to actually use the app even though they're independent contractors. Gross. Sometimes you have to do a call campaign before then too, usually last minute to cover up some upper manager's mistake where they expected a # of drivers to be at x step. People have plans and aren't going to bend their necks for a side job, which is what this is for drivers, but the company pretends that it's not that.
- in general, most changes and updates that happen will be told to you last minute by upper management. Team changes happened a lot over the course of 1 year so you were constantly spending time retraining your peers or even management.
-a group of employees brought up concerns about COVID, pay, and equity with peers around the in-person events (fun fact: not all specialists have to do them. Only the unlucky ones who happen to live nearby them), management verbally agreed to the concerns, then days later in writing went back on their word and got defensive about "the company's position" without actually properly addressing the valid issues that were brought up. At one meeting employees were incredibly grossly told "since you already are going to concerts and large events, we expect you to be at our [upcoming in person work event]." (citation needed, and WOW, what a bold assumption and disrespectful, ableist, bad hot take to have during a pandemic)
- Low pay & has the audacity to pretend like it's fair for a California role (it's not, especially when you're *required* to be located close to a specific major city). When brought up anonymously in the weekly company-wide meetings, CEO said a tone deaf response that claimed pay was already reviewed and "a fair rate", despite the majority of lower level employees living in Los Angeles. This was brought up numerous times and pushed aside every.single.time. They liked to gaslight about pay and say to bring it up to your manager & that it'll be updated during reviews, but my manager had no control over pay and told me point blank.
- I witnessed the company gradually stop caring about quality, and instead they prioritized quantity and speed for the sake of "scaling." Several of the checks and balances in place are based on the honor system even though children are the majority of passengers in the app. Management continuously deflected and dismissed concerns about this that were brought up
- High turnover and burnout in support/operations roles, which have no real career progression. Over the course of 1 year only 1 new Manager role opened in my department, and they outsourced it instead of hiring a specialist from within, because a higher up got a referral bonus. Also weird rules are in place about who gets a promotion - if your team already has a senior member on it, you won't ever get that promotion unless they also move off your team
- Used to be fairly easy to improve processes, but in 2022 it became more and more difficult to improve obvious pain points for the sake of "standardization." Different markets legally require different things, and because of this stubbornness to change, you can expect to answer the same questions over and over and over again for months at a time with no hope of solving any problems
Early red flags I should have paid more attention to (again YMMV):
- I was lied to about the pay range when I was hired. They also never include salary ranges on their new job openings, despite being asked to by employees. I explicitly told them my expectations in the interview, Hiring manager said "that was fine," then out of nowhere in the offer letter the pay was waaaay below the discussed range. I eventually had to call one of their HR reps to negotiate, and was told there was "a cap of x in this position." A week after I begrudgingly accepted this role out of desperation and naive hope, the HR person I had negotiated with suddenly had quit.
-People often would suddenly leave the company like this without warning, you only found out they were gone after the fact. For months we lost seemingly happy people once a week.
-marketing ads for drivers were totally a bait and switch and it felt awful to lie to drivers. I asked for clarity numerous times early on. Ads would say "make up to x an hr" but it's not hourly, it's per ride, and rides often begin far away from your location.
Fares were actually lower than min wage per ride in some areas, and only increased if they're urgently needed last minute! Make that clear in the ad!! Fare rates aren't advertised on their website. Drivers were obviously constantly upset with this discovery and we were constantly putting out fires from being given misinformation. We were also often unknowingly lying to them or making drivers waste their time (and money) by asking them to complete these long background checks in areas where there were no rides at all! This was largely marketing's fault, and it was incredibly difficult to get their strategies to change. Marketing was generally out of touch and one to avoid working with due to some poor management and several outdated strategies (posting flyers in random schools/cafes, "on the ground" work of trying to get new drivers as a street ambassador in several states, etc)
