full range of feelings reading this... not what i was expecting to do this evening, but here's an attempt: i have a uniquely close perspective to all that stuff having interviewed and then later reported to the guy who first harassed Susan when she started and working with her on the team she transferred to, and ostensibly "not as part of the problem" (though you could take my inaction in this whole saga as a grain of salt.)

I started working at Uber the same month as Will after the infrastructure team passed on my resume without even a phone call and handed it off to another infra team which Will neglected to mention -- a "shadow infrastructure" team created as an artifact of technical differences and personal grudges which both doubled every six months like our head count, we were responsible for edge services' business logic written in Node.js instead of the Python 2 predominant in the rest of the engineering org. I joined as a junior engineer out of two failed ruby on rails startups with ~0 positive Node.js experience but a good enough sense of Linux systems engineering and administration to be doing release engineering and on call for those edge services three weeks later. Everyone had a similar trial by fire in that time, and many didn't "make it" a month despite having a smoother hiring experience than the story Will related.

The infrastructure org was lucky to have Will. I didn't have a manager for months, reporting to a 20-something "director" who was too far in over his head and too up his own ass to care about that, and taking day to day "marching orders" from someone who is the most technically brilliant people I ever worked with but with the EQ of a bat. This leadership debt was a recurring pattern through out the whole engineering organization throughout the years of insane growth, even after the "new SRE" came to be. But that toxic division and leadership debt and the "shadow" infrastructure organization itself festered in to some of the awful behavior which ended up exploding in the saga with Susan et al. We promoted two senior engineers on my team in to management who proceeded to compete to be the first manager to hire a woman in to our 100 man, 0 woman engineering group. A year and a some change later Susan ended up reporting to one of them when we had all finally made up under the new SRE leadership.

I have some very surreal memories of these times, some dear memories of the brilliant folks I worked with, some unspeakably regretful memories of both, and some of this I had completely blocked out. It's hard to believe in the two year arc of this blog post, we hired endlessly (occasionally poorly, often brilliantly), we brought up four data centers including a reverse-engineering of our tech stack to launch two from first-principles in China, rebuilt entire parts of the company's architecture from empty git repos to a thousand plus servers in a quarter, and nearly burst at the seams doing it.

It's an irreplicable and irreplaceable experience but I can't say I'd go through with it again. I'm not even sure I'd wish it for someone: after three years on these infrastructure teams and two more on the privacy team after #deleteuber and starting work on GDPR compliance 6 months before the enforcement started, I left. two years later, I am still recovering from burnout spending down my little dragon's hoard healing a complete lack of interest in technical work.

I'm glad that Will has been distilling and expressing the lessons we learned so that others can go through this sort of experience in a less extreme and painful fashion.