There has not been a new Uber scandal breaking today (though we're still a while from the end of the business day Pacific Daylight Time). There is, however, an epic, 6,500-word exposé from BuzzFeed News that goes deep into Uber’s “asshole culture” and interviews dozens of current and former Uber employees. The BuzzFeed News piece does not contain any new revelations on Uber’s well-documented sexual harassment scandals, regulatory and criminal shenanigans, alleged theft of other companies’ intellectual property, and rampant executive immaturity that led to the ouster of CEO Travis Kalanick. But it sheds new light on the recent suicide of an Uber engineer in what employees call “a culture of finger-pointing” that makes them “hella uncomfortable.”

“Asshole culture is promoted at Uber,” one recently departed female employee told BuzzFeed News, summing up the whole enchilada with an obvious sentiment. “You’ve got to be a certain assholeish type of personality, otherwise you’re considered weak,” she said, describing Uber as a workplace where “Either you are an asshole, or you are considered not valuable.”

The entire BuzzFeed News report is a nearly 7,000-word opus that will take you an hour to read. So SFist has summed up the good parts in a TL/DR analysis, with the most surprising findings represented in bullet points below:



Uber had a creepy algorithm to determine the lowest salary that an employee would accept before making an employment offer



Top executives routinely humiliated individuals in all-company emails and at all-hands company meetings



Uber employees were not compensated for being on-call 24/7, nor for putting out fires at 3 a.m and on weekends



At one point in 2016, Uber asked employees to drive Uber routes on evenings and weekends “as a means of better understanding the organization”  but the employees weren’t paid for it



Employees were workplace-harassed whenever they used their sick days, and held to the expectation that working seven-day, 80-hour workweeks was just “how Uber works”



Employees received free dinner, but it wasn’t served until 8:15 p.m., in order to keep employees around longer



Uber had internal knowledge that drivers’ wages were “roughly equivalent to an employee at McDonald’s”



Top-performing employees were treated to “workcations” as if this were a perk, though employees had to pay their own airfare out of pocket



We have a general sense that Uber drivers are treated quite poorly while corporate employees live large. This BuzzFeed News analysis puts the lie to that, noting burnout-inducing culture of little sleep and constant work. “There was a three- to four-month period where I was getting woken up every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 3 or 4 in the morning to fix something,” an Uber engineer said anonymously. “Months of that, on top of working 10-plus hours a day.”

BuzzFeed also notes the rampant drug and alcohol use at the company, where a not-so-soft bias was in place against employees who did not drink or party enough. “There was a lot of pressure to go to events and drink. That was seen as making your way up,” one former employee told BuzzFeed News. “If you weren’t participating in that party culture and going to all those drinking events, you weren’t going to get promoted. You’d get sidelined.”

The report does not come out and use the word “cocaine”, but does make repeated references to “substance abuse” and “self-harm” as common workplace coping mechanisms.

The real shocker is that Uber employees are actually paid pretty poorly on the tech sector continuum. What they are lured with is the tease of stock compensation from a constantly delayed IPO that still has not yet occurred. “It’s a money cult. People are putting up with massive amounts of abuse, mental abuse, constant threats to fire you so you’re losing your equity,” one former employee said. “The equity, people see that as their future, their retirement, the reason they moved to America, or why they moved halfway across the country, or across the country.”

It’s probably no accident that so many Uber employees are chirping to the press right now. It may be the effect of a “Ding, dong, Travis is gone” sentiment wherein the lack of a current CEO presents less threat of retribution toward leaking employees. Or given that Uber’s new chief human resources officer Liane Hornsey goes on record extensively in the article, it may be a PR attempt show that a “new Uber” is here and putting the “old Uber” culture behind it. Or it could be that employees companywide have hit a breaking point with Uber’s “asshole culture.”

“You can’t change the culture. It’s set,” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “Travis can’t hire Eric Holder or Arianna Huffington and change the culture of a 10,000-person company. It’s unrealistic. People pay lip service to change knowing it’s not coming.”



Related: Nobody Wants To Be Uber's Next CEO