8 ms·

Uber launches 'urgent investigation' into sexual harassment claims

155 points by robbiet480 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago
Well that was certainly quick. Context (Not that anyone needs it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022
- mc32 10y ago
  Well, with something so public and damning, an organization so exposed to public opinion has to _do Something_ --even if that includes collateral damage or whether it actually accomplishes something internally. It has to do something for public relations reasons, if nothing else. That's not being cynical, that's just how it is. It's not very different from companies who sell directly to the public having to fire people who make inexcusable statements which become public --it's not as though in private, out of customer's earshots, lot's of unbecoming things aren't said. But when something becomes public, they have to do something, with cause or not.
- toast76 10y ago
  No, it wasn't quick. It is way way too late. It shouldn't require someone to publicly shame them before taking action. Acting now, after what was known privately is now public, is a cynical effort to appease the masses whilst continuing to condone ongoing practices within their organisation. The people involved should've been fired long ago, and for Kalanick to come out and say what happened is "against everything Uber stands for and believes in", thus suggesting he was unaware, only serves to reinforce his failure as leader. Blame ultimately lies with the CEO, no matter what. Women shouldn't need to put their careers on the line to publicly shame a company before justice is seen. (edit: apologies to the parent, was not pointing fingers at you...anger was misdirected)
  - x0x0 10y ago
    Not to mention the (presumably) millions of dollars she was forced to walk away from. I can't imagine that HR allowing repeated sexual harassment claims to go without any consequences, not to mention a manager feeling comfortable propositioning a direct report OVER WRITTEN CHAT, comes from anything but people certain the company allowed their actions.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    You're right of course, but to be clear I only meant it was a short period of time from the story breaking, to a response. I'm not praising Uber, I'm not noting the intensity and rapidity of their, "Oh shit" reaction.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      It took him 10 minutes, if that, to text the person who's going to investigate so they heard it from him first, then a couple of tweets.
altoz 10y ago
This reminds me why calling out a company on twitter for something that goes wrong is way more effective than calling customer support. Basically a life lesson: Public shaming is way more effective than the processes set up to handle these things.
- spaceflunky 10y ago
  You're not wrong, but at a certain point public shaming as a method will lose it's efficacy or become so ubiquitous that everybody is publicly shaming everybody else. Is public shaming, just another name for mob justice? I guess what I'm saying is, it is a powerful weapon, so we should be really careful with how we use it.
  - gydfi 10y ago
    Especially since we have absolutely nothing to go on, in this case, except the word of one disgruntled former employee. Maybe it's all true, maybe it's totally made up, maybe it's basically true but exaggerated and missing important information. We don't know, but plenty of people are happy to pile on.
    - mijustin 10y ago
      It's highly unlikely that Susan's account is untrue. Making an untrue statement, this publicly, would mean Uber's lawyers would have a strong civil case to sue her for defamation: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-defamation-law http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-defamation-law Susan was brave to share her story. There's very little upside for her, and tons of potential downside.
      - ScottBurson 10y ago
        Furthermore, she says she has evidence in the form of emails. I'm not suggesting she will, or even should, make them public, but it would be a hell of a gamble to claim publicly to have them if she didn't, as she will need them if she finds herself in court.
partycoder 10y ago
The accusation is not only against the managers but mainly against their HR department. The CHRO is now being asked to investigate their own department? Doesn't seem very effective.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Agreed. I think an external consulting company should be hired to do the investigation, both for efficacy and for optics.
- dankohn1 10y ago
  According to the article, the CHRO is newly appointed. Presumably, all of Fowler's email complaints should still be on file (and if they're not, the company is potentially guilty of spoliation [0]). If they're not, I hope Fowler kept a copy. Let's also see if Uber starts reporting the percentage of women, as other top tech companies do. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence
  - partycoder 10y ago
    I think she achieved her objective which is shedding light on the internal problems at Uber. While many people do that via Glassdoor or similar websites, she opted for doing it in a non-anonymous way, which means that Uber may retaliate legally if they can, or that future employers might try to avoid someone who is perceived as being "problematic", to name some few scenarios. Now, HR departments operate in borderline illegal ways. Many contract clauses are non-enforceable, but they all insist in doing it anyways. If you feel collectively pissed off, get all the women employees to unionize and start a collective bargain for better terms of employment and even go on strike.
- hamburglar 10y ago
  I really hope they're able to corroborate some of the claims about how HR responded, because there was a whole list of responses that make it clear that at least one person in HR is a liability to the company: * waving away sexual harassment because the offender is a "high performer" * repeatedly lying about the same person committing their "first offense" * telling the reporter that retaliation should be expected and there's nothing HR can do about it * implying the reporter must be the problem because the common element in all of her complaints is her * telling the reporter that it's unprofessional to report these problems via email and to keep records of them These are all responses of an HR department that is going out of their way to not hear complaints, and any company of Uber's size should be very, very concerned about this attitude coming back to bite them in the ass. If these responses all came from one HR contact, that person should be out on their ass ASAP. If they came from various people, then HR management is completely fucked.
swsieber 10y ago
Unless people are fired and policies are changed and enforced, this will only be a PR stunt. It'll be interesting to see if this is a PR stunt or if it's for real.
linkregister 10y ago
It seems like widespread change only happens at Uber in response to a media inquiry (privacy violations, now sexual harassment offenses). It's pretty suboptimal, but whatever works.
Shoot_The_Moon 10y ago
Hopefully this isn't solely a PR exercise and will be a process to start fixing Uber's culture.
prymitive 10y ago
It's yet another source claiming that Uber is a dysfunctional organization. At this point it's hard for me to expect they're going to rise to the challenge here. The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?", everything else is likely to be the good old game of "let's pretend we're doing something while people forget about this".
- edblarney 10y ago
  Sadly, a company can have some very bad attributes and still make a lot of money. Paradoxically, most companies are really good at some things, whilst being simultaneously bad at others.
  - nenreme 10y ago
    Uber is losing money at astonishing rates.
    - owebmaster 10y ago
      And now we know where. 1000s of microservices?
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?" Seems like it'd be easier to have them sign the NDA when they arrive. True, that doesn't solve the problem of current employees.
vorotato 10y ago
Uber has always felt skeevy, but now I know that the whole damn fish is rotten.
moocow01 10y ago
Im going to assume that this is just damage control to handle the media accusations. Ive never been an Uber employee but have been apart of previous large SV companies that were driven by what I perceived to be management structures plagued (or driven?) by in-fighting and unethical behaviors. Perhaps Im being presumptive about Uber's internals but from my experience once you define a company culture its almost impossible to turn it around in any meaningful way. From what I hear about Uber internally and externally it smacks of the same cultures of places of the past like Zynga or Groupon. It seems to me watching SV over the years companies of this profile follow a pattern of hype, exuberant growth and then an unabated fall over a long period of time after which the CEO gets thrown out and the company survives on life support. I guess we'll see if Uber is different.
- cavisne 10y ago
  Its an interesting point, interacting with both Zenefits and Uber I got the same impression, the "bros" from the early days were being pushed out by the "pros" from Yammer (Zenefits) and FB/Google (Uber). However this doesn't seem to have helped at Zenefits, and I guess it didn't help at Uber either. Even more concerning is I would guess (and Linkedin corroborates this a bit) that the SRE org where this harassment occurred was basically lifted from the Google org tree.
  - chris11 10y ago
    I'm not sure if this is necessarily indicative of harassment at FB/Google. I've heard rumors that SRE at Uber was pretty bad. I had classmate who interned out in the bay area and was thinking about working in SRE. They mentioned that Uber was poaching a lot of engineers to do SRE work with crazy high offers. But they wouldn't stay around a long time because apparently both the technical and non-technical cultures were pretty bad. Sometimes jobs can be a lot a lot worse than you expected, and you can't really change much as a new hire.
    - GauntletWizard 10y ago
      I just quit Uber SRE after only six months. There was a combination of really bad tech and really bad culture - There was a huge seniority culture despite the face that nobody had been there for more than three years. There was a focus on 'big impact' that felt just like a recent article[1] about feature mills - Despite being, you know, the division charged with keeping things going. They'd drilled and drilled on solving simple problems, but hadn't fixed the engineering reasons why those problems kept showing up. And they couldn't keep technical staff who knew what they were doing. The people I actually liked and respected at Uber were leaving in droves. Even new hires barely stuck around - A full third of my new hire orientation class left before me. And, oh, yeah - I had three managers in that six months. One was fired, one quit precisely at his one year, and the third had 70 direct reports. If you see candidates coming from Uber, tenure past a year is a warning sign. I knew a few I'd want to work with again - A lot more I wouldn't. [1]https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory-44a5b938d6a2#.9b8uajv1g https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...
jbhatab 10y ago
All signs point to a terribly caustic culture, but I'm a stern believer in innocent until proven guilty. What was the message actually sent to the girl? I feel like this is a vital piece of information.
- 27182818284 10y ago
  >What was the message actually sent to the girl? I feel like this is a vital piece of information. From the posting, she supposedly had screenshots. I'd love to see them. Also, I'm betting the screenshots are of a system that doesn't easily allow for others to look in to abuse such as Slack, Basecamp, etc.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    Errr, a lot of places have retention policies for chat, and that is a platform independent thing. After that retention time anything else is the same level of screenshots. You can implement retention policies on IRC, slack[1], mattermost, hipchat, etc. On-prem / open vs hosted it doesn't change that. [1] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Custom-message-and-file-retention https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Custom-me...
  - HappyTypist 10y ago
    It's Uber, so it's Hipchat.
- x0x0 10y ago
  What a shock you called her a girl.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- adrienne 10y ago
  Woman. Ms. Fowler is a woman, not a girl.
- obstinate 10y ago
  Best not to refer to professional women as "girl," especially in the context of harassment.
27182818284 10y ago
The original poster had screenshots If you didn't fucking automatically rely on things like Slack, etc, this should be a five minute lookup to verify.† † My organization switched to slack from our own IRC too... :-(
gefh 10y ago
"We're very, very sorry - that we got caught".
securingsincity 10y ago
Total armchair observer viewpoint - In reading Susan's blog, there are a lot of sexual harassment claims but there are many claims of cloak and dagger behavior. This points to a dysfunctional organization that lacks trust. And in that, I couldn't help but think of Conway's law [1] and the video from the goto; conference [2] about Uber's infrastructure. "We have so many services in production we don't even know how many there are." This may reflect a few different trust issues. One of which includes "Not invented here" thus building services that are duplicative. The goal of which is to show value and get promoted. Given the blog, the communication and reporting structure is also broken. Which, results in >1000 services in production and it being unclear how many there are and what they all do. Most likely, this is how the teams are structured as well. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY
- uladzislau 10y ago
  From my brief interaction with Uber - you got a point about teams building their own product to get a promotion. It looked to me like an unnessassry and waste of resources endeavour but it totally makes sence now.
pkkim 10y ago
This reminds me of the one-week safety investigation that Tesla promised to undertake after one of their workers published a blog post. http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/
sgentle 10y ago
My prediction: the manager gets fired, we are treated to a hand-wringing "What We Learned" Medium post, and the cultural disease behind this particular symptom continues unabated. What would be nice instead: A serious and in-depth analysis going from incidental to systemic to cultural, like NASA's "oops we dropped NOAA-19" report - https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf (summary on pages 8-10) Most companies could stand to learn some lessons from NASA, where cultural failure means dead astronauts rather than bad PR. When their culture is bad, they change the culture. What will Uber do?
- pedrosorio 10y ago
  "My prediction: the manager gets fired" Impossible. From Susan Fowler's post: "We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that. Eventually he "left" the company. I don't know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him. "
  - shard972 10y ago
    They can always find another scapegoat.
- khazhou 10y ago
  Wouldn't firing the manager, plus the inevitable internal memo, plus the fact that everyone there will be talking about this tomorrow, enough to cause meaningful change within the company? At the very least, this should dissuade managers from soliticing open-relationship sexual partners, on employees' first day. I consider that a major win! :-\
- LordHumungous 10y ago
  >What would be nice instead: A chasm opens up and sucks Uber into the bowels of Hell, never to be seen again. The tech industry rejoices. ftfy
  - aisofteng 10y ago
    This sort of rhetoric does not advance any cause.
Geekette 10y ago
The non-independent format of investigation potentially compromises effectiveness. Given the size of the company, nature of allegations and how systemic the alleged infractions appear to be, the better course would have been to source an investigator externally.
laughfactory 10y ago
I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber. Livid is more like it. I'm also disappointed in the men who work there, some of whom worked with her, but who apparently didn't behave like honorable human beings and demand the behavior stop. Granted, I'm assuming other men knew of this behavior, but I don't think that is likely to be much of a stretch. We all have a responsibility to look out for each other, no matter our gender. So yeah, Uber screwed up massively, and made me and my wife rethink ever using their services again, but I'm also disappointed in their whole workforce for not rooting out this behavior organically. "But I needed a job," isn't a good excuse, when the fundamental value we should all hold is decency. If you run across this shit in your own organizations make sure you speak up. Keep records. Make sure they know that retaliation will be handled with legal representation and with outreach to the state Department of Labor. Will there sometimes be negative repercussions for you personally? Yes. Will you sleep better at night? Yes. Will things improve in the aggregate over time? Yes, if enough of us simply refuse to stay quiet when we see and hear this kind of thing.
- aisofteng 10y ago
  >I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber. We have heard a story given by one person, uncorroborated by others, and without any of the supposed abundant evidence. It may well be a true account, but it is premature and wrong to assume it is true right now.
- MrQuincle 10y ago
  The CEO should have access to the mentioned metrics. + average stay of an employee + percentage female employees over time It's not so hard to assume something is wrong in HR or company culture if these figures show anomalies. I think if Uber was more data minded about their own progress and efficiency, the board would have catched it even if they are in some kind of ivory tower.
clickbait 10y ago
I personally won't have anything against Uber until these claims are proven to be true; too often is it found out that the claims are lies.
- jjirsa 10y ago
  Already a long history of similar stories out of Uber - trend isn't proof, but it puts the burden on them, not the accuser
  - clickbait 10y ago
    This past year has been filled with a vast amount of false accusations; in my opinion, it would be wise to be sceptical of any claims that aren't backed up with any evidence. Anyone could write an article saying that Uber was misogynistic towards them in some way, and everyone will eat it up because they already hate Uber over the JFK airport stuff.
  - gydfi 10y ago
    There's also the issue that a certain sector of the political left declared war on Uber a few weeks ago.
- wehere 10y ago
  lol what incentive does she have to lie about this, knowing full well she has to face the brunt of shitlords like you?
  - clickbait 10y ago
    I find it amusing that because I have a differing opinion and choose to remain sceptical - without ever interacting or saying anything negative about Susan - I'm labelled a "shitlord" and bombarded with downvotes. Hivemind mentality much?
    - glangdale 10y ago
      People might be less inclined to call you a shitlord if your account did something other than post one- and two-liners about hot-button political events that largely just express your opinion. OK, great, you're skeptical about her account because "too often these stories are lies", says Mr Instant Facts. Have you got anything to back this up, or are you just making things up because it's fun to post things to the Internet? The woman in question at least posts her stuff under her real name...
w00tw00tw00t 10y ago
There is an old saying: a fish rots from the head down.
mhkhung 10y ago
I think it is common to have incompetents running HR in these high-valued startups, when the VP is probably just a beer-buddy or the wingman of the founder, with no formal HR education or experience. I have had one of those asking the big no-no questions in an interview and I can't stop rolling my eyes.
rongway 10y ago
I have to give Kalanick at least some credit- he is pretty good at lying
- meowface 10y ago
  He's a CEO; that's at least 60% of the job.
rongway 10y ago
I have to give Kalanick at least some credit- he is pretty good at lying

155 points by robbiet480 10y ago

Well that was certainly quick. Context (Not that anyone needs it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022

mc32 10y ago
Well, with something so public and damning, an organization so exposed to public opinion has to _do Something_ --even if that includes collateral damage or whether it actually accomplishes something internally. It has to do something for public relations reasons, if nothing else. That's not being cynical, that's just how it is. It's not very different from companies who sell directly to the public having to fire people who make inexcusable statements which become public --it's not as though in private, out of customer's earshots, lot's of unbecoming things aren't said. But when something becomes public, they have to do something, with cause or not.
toast76 10y ago
No, it wasn't quick. It is way way too late. It shouldn't require someone to publicly shame them before taking action. Acting now, after what was known privately is now public, is a cynical effort to appease the masses whilst continuing to condone ongoing practices within their organisation. The people involved should've been fired long ago, and for Kalanick to come out and say what happened is "against everything Uber stands for and believes in", thus suggesting he was unaware, only serves to reinforce his failure as leader. Blame ultimately lies with the CEO, no matter what. Women shouldn't need to put their careers on the line to publicly shame a company before justice is seen. (edit: apologies to the parent, was not pointing fingers at you...anger was misdirected)
- x0x0 10y ago
  Not to mention the (presumably) millions of dollars she was forced to walk away from. I can't imagine that HR allowing repeated sexual harassment claims to go without any consequences, not to mention a manager feeling comfortable propositioning a direct report OVER WRITTEN CHAT, comes from anything but people certain the company allowed their actions.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  You're right of course, but to be clear I only meant it was a short period of time from the story breaking, to a response. I'm not praising Uber, I'm not noting the intensity and rapidity of their, "Oh shit" reaction.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    It took him 10 minutes, if that, to text the person who's going to investigate so they heard it from him first, then a couple of tweets.

altoz 10y ago

This reminds me why calling out a company on twitter for something that goes wrong is way more effective than calling customer support. Basically a life lesson: Public shaming is way more effective than the processes set up to handle these things.

spaceflunky 10y ago
You're not wrong, but at a certain point public shaming as a method will lose it's efficacy or become so ubiquitous that everybody is publicly shaming everybody else. Is public shaming, just another name for mob justice? I guess what I'm saying is, it is a powerful weapon, so we should be really careful with how we use it.
- gydfi 10y ago
  Especially since we have absolutely nothing to go on, in this case, except the word of one disgruntled former employee. Maybe it's all true, maybe it's totally made up, maybe it's basically true but exaggerated and missing important information. We don't know, but plenty of people are happy to pile on.
  - mijustin 10y ago
    It's highly unlikely that Susan's account is untrue. Making an untrue statement, this publicly, would mean Uber's lawyers would have a strong civil case to sue her for defamation: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-defamation-law http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-defamation-law Susan was brave to share her story. There's very little upside for her, and tons of potential downside.
    - ScottBurson 10y ago
      Furthermore, she says she has evidence in the form of emails. I'm not suggesting she will, or even should, make them public, but it would be a hell of a gamble to claim publicly to have them if she didn't, as she will need them if she finds herself in court.

partycoder 10y ago

The accusation is not only against the managers but mainly against their HR department. The CHRO is now being asked to investigate their own department? Doesn't seem very effective.

linkregister 10y ago
Agreed. I think an external consulting company should be hired to do the investigation, both for efficacy and for optics.
dankohn1 10y ago
According to the article, the CHRO is newly appointed. Presumably, all of Fowler's email complaints should still be on file (and if they're not, the company is potentially guilty of spoliation [0]). If they're not, I hope Fowler kept a copy. Let's also see if Uber starts reporting the percentage of women, as other top tech companies do. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence
- partycoder 10y ago
  I think she achieved her objective which is shedding light on the internal problems at Uber. While many people do that via Glassdoor or similar websites, she opted for doing it in a non-anonymous way, which means that Uber may retaliate legally if they can, or that future employers might try to avoid someone who is perceived as being "problematic", to name some few scenarios. Now, HR departments operate in borderline illegal ways. Many contract clauses are non-enforceable, but they all insist in doing it anyways. If you feel collectively pissed off, get all the women employees to unionize and start a collective bargain for better terms of employment and even go on strike.
hamburglar 10y ago
I really hope they're able to corroborate some of the claims about how HR responded, because there was a whole list of responses that make it clear that at least one person in HR is a liability to the company: * waving away sexual harassment because the offender is a "high performer" * repeatedly lying about the same person committing their "first offense" * telling the reporter that retaliation should be expected and there's nothing HR can do about it * implying the reporter must be the problem because the common element in all of her complaints is her * telling the reporter that it's unprofessional to report these problems via email and to keep records of them These are all responses of an HR department that is going out of their way to not hear complaints, and any company of Uber's size should be very, very concerned about this attitude coming back to bite them in the ass. If these responses all came from one HR contact, that person should be out on their ass ASAP. If they came from various people, then HR management is completely fucked.

swsieber 10y ago

Unless people are fired and policies are changed and enforced, this will only be a PR stunt. It'll be interesting to see if this is a PR stunt or if it's for real.

linkregister 10y ago

It seems like widespread change only happens at Uber in response to a media inquiry (privacy violations, now sexual harassment offenses). It's pretty suboptimal, but whatever works.

Shoot_The_Moon 10y ago

Hopefully this isn't solely a PR exercise and will be a process to start fixing Uber's culture.

prymitive 10y ago

It's yet another source claiming that Uber is a dysfunctional organization. At this point it's hard for me to expect they're going to rise to the challenge here. The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?", everything else is likely to be the good old game of "let's pretend we're doing something while people forget about this".

edblarney 10y ago
Sadly, a company can have some very bad attributes and still make a lot of money. Paradoxically, most companies are really good at some things, whilst being simultaneously bad at others.
- nenreme 10y ago
  Uber is losing money at astonishing rates.
  - owebmaster 10y ago
    And now we know where. 1000s of microservices?
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?" Seems like it'd be easier to have them sign the NDA when they arrive. True, that doesn't solve the problem of current employees.

vorotato 10y ago

Uber has always felt skeevy, but now I know that the whole damn fish is rotten.

moocow01 10y ago

Im going to assume that this is just damage control to handle the media accusations. Ive never been an Uber employee but have been apart of previous large SV companies that were driven by what I perceived to be management structures plagued (or driven?) by in-fighting and unethical behaviors. Perhaps Im being presumptive about Uber's internals but from my experience once you define a company culture its almost impossible to turn it around in any meaningful way. From what I hear about Uber internally and externally it smacks of the same cultures of places of the past like Zynga or Groupon. It seems to me watching SV over the years companies of this profile follow a pattern of hype, exuberant growth and then an unabated fall over a long period of time after which the CEO gets thrown out and the company survives on life support. I guess we'll see if Uber is different.

cavisne 10y ago
Its an interesting point, interacting with both Zenefits and Uber I got the same impression, the "bros" from the early days were being pushed out by the "pros" from Yammer (Zenefits) and FB/Google (Uber). However this doesn't seem to have helped at Zenefits, and I guess it didn't help at Uber either. Even more concerning is I would guess (and Linkedin corroborates this a bit) that the SRE org where this harassment occurred was basically lifted from the Google org tree.
- chris11 10y ago
  I'm not sure if this is necessarily indicative of harassment at FB/Google. I've heard rumors that SRE at Uber was pretty bad. I had classmate who interned out in the bay area and was thinking about working in SRE. They mentioned that Uber was poaching a lot of engineers to do SRE work with crazy high offers. But they wouldn't stay around a long time because apparently both the technical and non-technical cultures were pretty bad. Sometimes jobs can be a lot a lot worse than you expected, and you can't really change much as a new hire.
  - GauntletWizard 10y ago
    I just quit Uber SRE after only six months. There was a combination of really bad tech and really bad culture - There was a huge seniority culture despite the face that nobody had been there for more than three years. There was a focus on 'big impact' that felt just like a recent article[1] about feature mills - Despite being, you know, the division charged with keeping things going. They'd drilled and drilled on solving simple problems, but hadn't fixed the engineering reasons why those problems kept showing up. And they couldn't keep technical staff who knew what they were doing. The people I actually liked and respected at Uber were leaving in droves. Even new hires barely stuck around - A full third of my new hire orientation class left before me. And, oh, yeah - I had three managers in that six months. One was fired, one quit precisely at his one year, and the third had 70 direct reports. If you see candidates coming from Uber, tenure past a year is a warning sign. I knew a few I'd want to work with again - A lot more I wouldn't. [1]https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory-44a5b938d6a2#.9b8uajv1g https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...

jbhatab 10y ago

All signs point to a terribly caustic culture, but I'm a stern believer in innocent until proven guilty. What was the message actually sent to the girl? I feel like this is a vital piece of information.

27182818284 10y ago
>What was the message actually sent to the girl? I feel like this is a vital piece of information. From the posting, she supposedly had screenshots. I'd love to see them. Also, I'm betting the screenshots are of a system that doesn't easily allow for others to look in to abuse such as Slack, Basecamp, etc.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Errr, a lot of places have retention policies for chat, and that is a platform independent thing. After that retention time anything else is the same level of screenshots. You can implement retention policies on IRC, slack[1], mattermost, hipchat, etc. On-prem / open vs hosted it doesn't change that. [1] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Custom-message-and-file-retention https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Custom-me...
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  It's Uber, so it's Hipchat.
x0x0 10y ago
What a shock you called her a girl.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
adrienne 10y ago
Woman. Ms. Fowler is a woman, not a girl.
obstinate 10y ago
Best not to refer to professional women as "girl," especially in the context of harassment.

27182818284 10y ago

The original poster had screenshots If you didn't fucking automatically rely on things like Slack, etc, this should be a five minute lookup to verify.† † My organization switched to slack from our own IRC too... :-(

gefh 10y ago

"We're very, very sorry - that we got caught".

securingsincity 10y ago

Total armchair observer viewpoint - In reading Susan's blog, there are a lot of sexual harassment claims but there are many claims of cloak and dagger behavior. This points to a dysfunctional organization that lacks trust. And in that, I couldn't help but think of Conway's law [1] and the video from the goto; conference [2] about Uber's infrastructure. "We have so many services in production we don't even know how many there are." This may reflect a few different trust issues. One of which includes "Not invented here" thus building services that are duplicative. The goal of which is to show value and get promoted. Given the blog, the communication and reporting structure is also broken. Which, results in >1000 services in production and it being unclear how many there are and what they all do. Most likely, this is how the teams are structured as well. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY

uladzislau 10y ago
From my brief interaction with Uber - you got a point about teams building their own product to get a promotion. It looked to me like an unnessassry and waste of resources endeavour but it totally makes sence now.

pkkim 10y ago

This reminds me of the one-week safety investigation that Tesla promised to undertake after one of their workers published a blog post. http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/

sgentle 10y ago

My prediction: the manager gets fired, we are treated to a hand-wringing "What We Learned" Medium post, and the cultural disease behind this particular symptom continues unabated. What would be nice instead: A serious and in-depth analysis going from incidental to systemic to cultural, like NASA's "oops we dropped NOAA-19" report - https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf (summary on pages 8-10) Most companies could stand to learn some lessons from NASA, where cultural failure means dead astronauts rather than bad PR. When their culture is bad, they change the culture. What will Uber do?

pedrosorio 10y ago
"My prediction: the manager gets fired" Impossible. From Susan Fowler's post: "We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that. Eventually he "left" the company. I don't know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him. "
- shard972 10y ago
  They can always find another scapegoat.
khazhou 10y ago
Wouldn't firing the manager, plus the inevitable internal memo, plus the fact that everyone there will be talking about this tomorrow, enough to cause meaningful change within the company? At the very least, this should dissuade managers from soliticing open-relationship sexual partners, on employees' first day. I consider that a major win! :-\
LordHumungous 10y ago
>What would be nice instead: A chasm opens up and sucks Uber into the bowels of Hell, never to be seen again. The tech industry rejoices. ftfy
- aisofteng 10y ago
  This sort of rhetoric does not advance any cause.

Geekette 10y ago

The non-independent format of investigation potentially compromises effectiveness. Given the size of the company, nature of allegations and how systemic the alleged infractions appear to be, the better course would have been to source an investigator externally.

laughfactory 10y ago

I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber. Livid is more like it. I'm also disappointed in the men who work there, some of whom worked with her, but who apparently didn't behave like honorable human beings and demand the behavior stop. Granted, I'm assuming other men knew of this behavior, but I don't think that is likely to be much of a stretch. We all have a responsibility to look out for each other, no matter our gender. So yeah, Uber screwed up massively, and made me and my wife rethink ever using their services again, but I'm also disappointed in their whole workforce for not rooting out this behavior organically. "But I needed a job," isn't a good excuse, when the fundamental value we should all hold is decency. If you run across this shit in your own organizations make sure you speak up. Keep records. Make sure they know that retaliation will be handled with legal representation and with outreach to the state Department of Labor. Will there sometimes be negative repercussions for you personally? Yes. Will you sleep better at night? Yes. Will things improve in the aggregate over time? Yes, if enough of us simply refuse to stay quiet when we see and hear this kind of thing.

aisofteng 10y ago
>I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber. We have heard a story given by one person, uncorroborated by others, and without any of the supposed abundant evidence. It may well be a true account, but it is premature and wrong to assume it is true right now.
MrQuincle 10y ago
The CEO should have access to the mentioned metrics. + average stay of an employee + percentage female employees over time It's not so hard to assume something is wrong in HR or company culture if these figures show anomalies. I think if Uber was more data minded about their own progress and efficiency, the board would have catched it even if they are in some kind of ivory tower.

clickbait 10y ago

I personally won't have anything against Uber until these claims are proven to be true; too often is it found out that the claims are lies.

jjirsa 10y ago
Already a long history of similar stories out of Uber - trend isn't proof, but it puts the burden on them, not the accuser
- clickbait 10y ago
  This past year has been filled with a vast amount of false accusations; in my opinion, it would be wise to be sceptical of any claims that aren't backed up with any evidence. Anyone could write an article saying that Uber was misogynistic towards them in some way, and everyone will eat it up because they already hate Uber over the JFK airport stuff.
- gydfi 10y ago
  There's also the issue that a certain sector of the political left declared war on Uber a few weeks ago.
wehere 10y ago
lol what incentive does she have to lie about this, knowing full well she has to face the brunt of shitlords like you?
- clickbait 10y ago
  I find it amusing that because I have a differing opinion and choose to remain sceptical - without ever interacting or saying anything negative about Susan - I'm labelled a "shitlord" and bombarded with downvotes. Hivemind mentality much?
  - glangdale 10y ago
    People might be less inclined to call you a shitlord if your account did something other than post one- and two-liners about hot-button political events that largely just express your opinion. OK, great, you're skeptical about her account because "too often these stories are lies", says Mr Instant Facts. Have you got anything to back this up, or are you just making things up because it's fun to post things to the Internet? The woman in question at least posts her stuff under her real name...

w00tw00tw00t 10y ago

There is an old saying: a fish rots from the head down.

mhkhung 10y ago

I think it is common to have incompetents running HR in these high-valued startups, when the VP is probably just a beer-buddy or the wingman of the founder, with no formal HR education or experience. I have had one of those asking the big no-no questions in an interview and I can't stop rolling my eyes.

rongway 10y ago

I have to give Kalanick at least some credit- he is pretty good at lying

meowface 10y ago
He's a CEO; that's at least 60% of the job.

rongway 10y ago

I have to give Kalanick at least some credit- he is pretty good at lying