The "Odin" platform, which eventually managed all of Uber's stateful workloads, began as a project to containerize sharded MySQL for a single team. This bottom-up approach allowed them to prove the concept and build a working system before seeking wider, more political adoption.
When rolling out the Odin platform at Uber, the team intentionally avoided a big-bang launch. They started with their own systems, then expanded to friendly teams, using an incremental approach to build momentum and prove value before approaching more resistant groups.
The path to senior engineering levels is tied to the scope of your work's influence. Rather than explicitly seeking promotions, focus on projects with natural potential to grow from solving a team's problem to solving an organization's. The promotions will follow the impact.
Early promo committees at Uber involved managers verbally advocating for reports in large, unprepared meetings. This was highly unfair because an employee's promotion depended heavily on their manager's ability to present a compelling case, not solely on their performance.
Joachim Rekt believes writing code is a non-negotiable daily practice for anyone with "engineer" in their title. This keeps skills sharp, ensures continuous growth, and is the most fundamental way to contribute, contrary to the common advice for senior engineers to delegate more.
When senior engineers move away from hands-on coding, their understanding of the system becomes abstract. This leads to designs disconnected from reality, and they lose the trust of their team, who see them as out-of-touch architects without "skin in the game."
Contrary to conventional wisdom, a distinguished engineer advises senior engineers to delegate the most challenging, interesting work. They should instead take on necessary but unglamorous tasks, which builds immense credit and allows junior engineers to grow faster on high-impact problems.
As you become more senior, you're exposed to more arbitrary, top-down strategic planning, which can feel like 'plain stupidity'. A key survival tactic is to maintain your own significant project work, giving you a valid reason to decline involvement in these political and often fruitless endeavors.
The most satisfying outcome of influence is not receiving credit, but witnessing a colleague who initially resisted your idea later advocate for it with conviction, believing it to be their own. This indicates you've planted a seed that grew into genuine alignment, not forced compliance.
Mentoring's value increases when done outside your direct org. It becomes a two-way street: you learn about other parts of the business, and you can plant seeds of influence and better engineering practices that can grow and spread organically throughout the company.
A cultural shift towards top-down management, where engineers were no longer part of key decisions like moving to the cloud, led to a mass exodus of senior talent. When senior ICs cannot stand behind leadership's decisions, they lose the motivation to stay, even if the pay is good.
Uber repeatedly tried and failed to mandate the adoption of distributed tracing across all services. Despite years of emails and deadlines, the initiative never got done. This serves as a prime example that in a strong engineering culture, top-down directives without true buy-in will be ignored.