9 ms·

Sure they're not your friend, but Jesus Christ, the amount of legal trouble this particular HR establishment exposed themselves to through their actions is brea

Sure they're not your friend, but Jesus Christ, the amount of legal trouble this particular HR establishment exposed themselves to through their actions is breathtaking. THAT'S their job: to prevent the company from getting sued!! In this case I'm completely bewildered as to why HR handled this particular situation so clumsily.

hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
Agreed. The "HR is not your friend" trope gets thrown out a lot, but in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  > Should be able to go Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
  - abraae 10y ago
    That's a sweeping statement that I utterly disagree with. We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.
    - bambax 10y ago
      My experience is different. Every HR person I have ever interacted with was either entirely clueless or immensely evil.
      - raverbashing 10y ago
        I've had some bad experiences, but I've never felt the need to describe them in those terms. And yes, even in the worse case
      - veidr 10y ago
        OK; how many is that?
      - balladeer 10y ago
        This has been my experience too. Always. Without fail. Though I still believe it must be because many (if not most) firms invest very little in their HR departments and hence they get what they pay for and employees make do with it until something blows up; e.g. scenarios like this. And I am sure there are stellar HR departments out there I have never interacted with. But then again an industry, a field, or a practice is usually stereotyped based on the reputation of the majority and majority in this case, in my humble opinion, seems to be lying somewhere down south.
    - calibraxis 10y ago
      Why would you hear about it? Do all of them share each email with you, which you read daily and investigate? Do you confidentially interview their employees? Would they brag about "that harassment case"? It is not like this reaches 50% of their time. (I would hope.)
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      This kind of behaviour isn't advertised in the newspaper, you know about it only by experience, the dark side (if you choose to ignore it, please do). This is like the earlier people who said "there is no black swan" because all swans I have seen are white, no, there are events which happen without you being aware of them
    - mud_dauber 10y ago
      33 years across 6 companies, from Fortune 500 to 20-person startups. HR departments have been, without exception, absolutely useless except to protect the company's hide.
      - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
        > absolutely useless except to protect the company's hide. But that's my point. If Uber's HR properly cared about protecting the company's hide, they would have immediately disciplined the manager involved, and "sexually propositioning a first-day direct report" is so egregiously over the line that they would have fired the manager. Uber's HR failed here not because they only cared about protecting the company's hide, but because they didn't.
        thewhitetulip 10y ago
        They did care but in their short sighted way. They don't really mean "save company", it means dancing at the tone of the HR boss, if they truly cared for the company they'd do something about this. So, they just don't care about employees
  - HelloMcFly 10y ago
    I'm an HR professional. I've done extensive consulting to organization of people processes and HR functioning. I've found that companies typically get what they pay for in their HR department. Many organization echo the sentiment that many contributors on HN have (i.e., that HR is a sometimes necessary evil; the people are marginally skilled; etc.). Organizations that have that mentality of HR hire HR teams that are fine at transactional work, "saying yes", and managing to targets. And then when situations arise - either acute situations like sexual harassment or problems that manifest over longer timeframes - they pay the price. Like any department, HR should be staffed with intelligent, values-driven leaders with the spine to take strong perspectives and the ability to form collaborative vs. transactional relationships with the business. Constantly saying "yes" and failing to push back or take principled stands is not collaborative. Yet that is what many young companies want out of their HR department. I've found this more true in young(er) tech companies, though my sample size is limited. When you build your HR function as a transactional service center, you get short-sighted decision-making. That's all just my professional opinion.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      I agree with your assessment. Quality insight is worth the price, and lack of it will ultimately cost more, whether you want it to or not.
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      From what I have observed, there is a tussle between Eng managers and HRs for supremacy, plus few HR folks have overly inflated ego. A friend of mine was asked to relocate in a firm, she refused due to personal reasons, she was harassed daily by the HR fellow, daily he asked her to come to his cabin to mert at 10am and never did meet her and when he did meet her he basically threatened her. (She lives next to a HR person, she was told by her neighbour that "this is what we are paid to do, you should have recorded his audio and threatened to leak audio in public, he'd have come begging to you"). This, well, this is what the dark side can be. Of course, at the end of the day it depends on the org and the kind of people we let grow, if the people in our org are good, capable then it is fine, but from the words of that HR friend of my friend, that's the job of HR.
- the-dude 10y ago
  No. Hire a laywer
- HelloNurse 10y ago
  Reading between the lines of Mrs. Fowler's account, the company's goal was being nice to a more important employee than her: a common situation in sexual harassment cases and other workplace conflicts.
  - Sharlin 10y ago
    And they miscalculated the extend to which said person was more of a liability than an asset, after all.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I'd also point out the possibility that Uber HR has no power... or upper HR management (formerly Renee Atwood, now Liane Hornsey?) is complicit. They have a management chain just like everyone else, and if the person at the top (or the person above them) says "We're not going to discipline this guy" then the best HR can do is try to deescalate the situation.
    - aioprisan 10y ago
      If true that HR has no power (and it's starting to look like that's the case), then it's clear that the company culture itself it so rotten as to remove any accountability chain just for the sake of a few (sexual predator) engineers spinning out a few more features that will make the company a few (or a lot) more dollars. Shame!
      - ethbro 10y ago
        I already deleted the shortcut off my launcher. We'll see how going Lyft-only for a while works.
      - intrasight 10y ago
        Then we'll find out who did have the power, and also find out if the board has the power to discipline those individuals.
        10y ago
- lnanek2 10y ago
  > in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go. That's definitely not the case in my experience. I spent a few months at Fitbit before being harassed by a manager, Sam Trychin. All I wanted to do was do my work, be treated fairly, and not be harassed. HR was definitely not the place to go. As soon as I made the complaint, Jade Curtis at HR had a meeting with me where she lied to my face (claimed all their managers are exactly the same when I had gone around asking other employees and explicitly confirmed my manager was not following company policy or even treating me fairly compared to his other team members), told me they would refuse to transfer me when I asked about solutions like that, and asserted that the solution was I had to talk more. The next week they brought me in a fired me with never a written or even verbal warning, and never a negative performance review or a missed meeting, or even a late JIRA implementation. Indeed, everyone said good things about my performance. I had also followed her advice to "talk more". Again they refused to entertain any option of continuing at the company when I offered to try anything that would solve things. The only thing Fitbit HR cared about was A) to get as much ammunition for a lawsuit as possible, and B) fire me as fast as possible after I was harassed. They didn't try at all to solve things at the company. In terms of what happened, everything was fairly normal for a couple months. Then one day my wife drove me in to the office because my back was hurting and standing an hour on the BART made things even worse. We followed every rule for her to be in the building. We arrived at 8am after a 2 hour drive, waiting until the front desk was open at 8:30am and got her a badge, then proceeded to my desk which is safely outside all the signs indicating no guests are allowed due to unreleased projects being worked on. The developer to my right was super friendly and talkative and awesome to my wife - completely normal. My manager came in later (he was rarely around and always left early at 4pm, one of those pre-IPO people who don't put any effort in now that they have their options) and blew up after 10 minutes - super strange. His face turned all red and he was breathing heavy and he took me aside to a private room. He said my wife is too distracting for him to get any work done and she has to move. We immediately left the area and went to the couches across from the front desk to figure out what to do. Then I took her off campus. She never visited again any day after that (who would bring their wife back when their manager is acting creepy toward her?), but my manager continually blew up about her and made up new rules about her. For example, the week after, he took me aside to a private room again and said she couldn't visit ever again. Meanwhile when other team member's family visited, he was super nice and even booked a conference room for a full day for another team member's kids to visit. At the same time he started treating me very unfairly. For example, he said any exercise on my part counted as a "long lunch" and wasn't allowed. Meanwhile it was "Steptember" and all employees were encouraged to exercise and had internal teams competing with who could do the most exercise. Similarly I was in an automatic activity tracking beta test, and all short exercises had failed to trigger the new logic, so I took a 1 hour bike ride on the Embarcadero instead of lunch to try to get a positive result for my beta test data - he blew up about this as well. The manager claimed the PM had been trying to contact me all day and wasn't able to because I took that bike ride. This was not true. The PM Hipchatted me on the way back from the bike ride, I stopped at a cafe on the way back, and did the code review the PM wanted from me immediately, within 10 minutes. So the manager was lying about my interaction with the PM to justify his not letting me exercise and his blowing up any time I was away from my desk - which I had to be pretty often because I was writing the Bluetooth pairing code and there's a step that aborts if there are too many devices nearby, like at our desks. The test group lead actually worked from home at least one day a week for precisely this reason and I was only working down the hall at some tables, which should not have been a problem. Meanwhile everyone else at the company I talked to encouraged exercise, and one manager I talked to even recommended an afternoon nap for getting your energy back to code some more! So my manager was definitely not following company policy or treating me fairly. All HR cared about was firing me, though. I found out later the manager was divorced and that's probably why he went nuts over my wife. It actually sounds really similar to Susan Fowler's experience at Uber. She had a manager acting creepy and weird because of his own marital issues. Then HR invented fake "undocumented performance issues" that were never communicated before and didn't hold up to scrutiny when other employees were asked about it, so that HR could deny transfer and any other solutions, and the manager could keep looking good at the company.
xiphias 10y ago
Sure..the thing I don't understand is why she didn't go to a lawyer? That would have been the next logical step for me. At least 1 person should get to prison if there is enough evidence collected by multiple women.
- discodave 10y ago
  I used to have this attitude until I heard harassment stories from two close personal friends in the last year. It's really hard to come forward, especially if you're early in your career and struggled to get any job in the first place. Apart from potentially being difficult emotionally there are tons of negative outcomes that could come from taking the legal route Here's a list of potential negative outcomes of lawyering up: * getting terminated (remember, at-will employment) * getting blacklisted by other teams at your current employer * getting blacklisted by potential future employers. Court cases are often public and in some industries companies are forced to make ongoing litigation public * having your weird texts, emails, personal life and sexual history being dragged out in a public court case * losing and still having to pay all those lawyer fees * winning but not getting any meaningful compensation * getting harassed on twitter/wherever by the alt-right/gamergate crowd. Yes, people should be getting in trouble but it's a prisoners dilemma where each individual victim is not incentiviced to do anything.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    I just came from a different thread on HN, where highly compensated software developers were afraid to even point out to their managers that what they were suggesting was a bad idea for the company. People literally fearing for their jobs, because they want to do their jobs well and not just blindly follow orders that will be costly to their employer. So you can imagine how many multiples of that it is when you're trying to rock the boat on harassment.
  - letientai299 10y ago
    I feel sad that there's are so many reasons that stop you to d the RIGHT THING. What is the better way then, beside leaving the company despite doing your job very well?
lostboys67 10y ago
Yes it's either collusion or NCI (Non Culpable Incompetence) Gross misconduct is another potential
StreamBright 10y ago
Essentially they opened up the company for a class action lawsuit.
- koolba 10y ago
  Are there even enough women there to form a class? There's no legal minimum but it's more difficult to form a class with a handful of people.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 10y ago

Agreed. The "HR is not your friend" trope gets thrown out a lot, but in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go.

thewhitetulip 10y ago
> Should be able to go Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
- abraae 10y ago
  That's a sweeping statement that I utterly disagree with. We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.
  - bambax 10y ago
    My experience is different. Every HR person I have ever interacted with was either entirely clueless or immensely evil.
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      I've had some bad experiences, but I've never felt the need to describe them in those terms. And yes, even in the worse case
    - veidr 10y ago
      OK; how many is that?
    - balladeer 10y ago
      This has been my experience too. Always. Without fail. Though I still believe it must be because many (if not most) firms invest very little in their HR departments and hence they get what they pay for and employees make do with it until something blows up; e.g. scenarios like this. And I am sure there are stellar HR departments out there I have never interacted with. But then again an industry, a field, or a practice is usually stereotyped based on the reputation of the majority and majority in this case, in my humble opinion, seems to be lying somewhere down south.
  - calibraxis 10y ago
    Why would you hear about it? Do all of them share each email with you, which you read daily and investigate? Do you confidentially interview their employees? Would they brag about "that harassment case"? It is not like this reaches 50% of their time. (I would hope.)
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    This kind of behaviour isn't advertised in the newspaper, you know about it only by experience, the dark side (if you choose to ignore it, please do). This is like the earlier people who said "there is no black swan" because all swans I have seen are white, no, there are events which happen without you being aware of them
  - mud_dauber 10y ago
    33 years across 6 companies, from Fortune 500 to 20-person startups. HR departments have been, without exception, absolutely useless except to protect the company's hide.
    - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
      > absolutely useless except to protect the company's hide. But that's my point. If Uber's HR properly cared about protecting the company's hide, they would have immediately disciplined the manager involved, and "sexually propositioning a first-day direct report" is so egregiously over the line that they would have fired the manager. Uber's HR failed here not because they only cared about protecting the company's hide, but because they didn't.
      - thewhitetulip 10y ago
        They did care but in their short sighted way. They don't really mean "save company", it means dancing at the tone of the HR boss, if they truly cared for the company they'd do something about this. So, they just don't care about employees
- HelloMcFly 10y ago
  I'm an HR professional. I've done extensive consulting to organization of people processes and HR functioning. I've found that companies typically get what they pay for in their HR department. Many organization echo the sentiment that many contributors on HN have (i.e., that HR is a sometimes necessary evil; the people are marginally skilled; etc.). Organizations that have that mentality of HR hire HR teams that are fine at transactional work, "saying yes", and managing to targets. And then when situations arise - either acute situations like sexual harassment or problems that manifest over longer timeframes - they pay the price. Like any department, HR should be staffed with intelligent, values-driven leaders with the spine to take strong perspectives and the ability to form collaborative vs. transactional relationships with the business. Constantly saying "yes" and failing to push back or take principled stands is not collaborative. Yet that is what many young companies want out of their HR department. I've found this more true in young(er) tech companies, though my sample size is limited. When you build your HR function as a transactional service center, you get short-sighted decision-making. That's all just my professional opinion.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    I agree with your assessment. Quality insight is worth the price, and lack of it will ultimately cost more, whether you want it to or not.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    From what I have observed, there is a tussle between Eng managers and HRs for supremacy, plus few HR folks have overly inflated ego. A friend of mine was asked to relocate in a firm, she refused due to personal reasons, she was harassed daily by the HR fellow, daily he asked her to come to his cabin to mert at 10am and never did meet her and when he did meet her he basically threatened her. (She lives next to a HR person, she was told by her neighbour that "this is what we are paid to do, you should have recorded his audio and threatened to leak audio in public, he'd have come begging to you"). This, well, this is what the dark side can be. Of course, at the end of the day it depends on the org and the kind of people we let grow, if the people in our org are good, capable then it is fine, but from the words of that HR friend of my friend, that's the job of HR.
the-dude 10y ago
No. Hire a laywer
HelloNurse 10y ago
Reading between the lines of Mrs. Fowler's account, the company's goal was being nice to a more important employee than her: a common situation in sexual harassment cases and other workplace conflicts.
- Sharlin 10y ago
  And they miscalculated the extend to which said person was more of a liability than an asset, after all.
- ethbro 10y ago
  I'd also point out the possibility that Uber HR has no power... or upper HR management (formerly Renee Atwood, now Liane Hornsey?) is complicit. They have a management chain just like everyone else, and if the person at the top (or the person above them) says "We're not going to discipline this guy" then the best HR can do is try to deescalate the situation.
  - aioprisan 10y ago
    If true that HR has no power (and it's starting to look like that's the case), then it's clear that the company culture itself it so rotten as to remove any accountability chain just for the sake of a few (sexual predator) engineers spinning out a few more features that will make the company a few (or a lot) more dollars. Shame!
    - ethbro 10y ago
      I already deleted the shortcut off my launcher. We'll see how going Lyft-only for a while works.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      Then we'll find out who did have the power, and also find out if the board has the power to discipline those individuals.
      - 10y ago
lnanek2 10y ago
> in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go. That's definitely not the case in my experience. I spent a few months at Fitbit before being harassed by a manager, Sam Trychin. All I wanted to do was do my work, be treated fairly, and not be harassed. HR was definitely not the place to go. As soon as I made the complaint, Jade Curtis at HR had a meeting with me where she lied to my face (claimed all their managers are exactly the same when I had gone around asking other employees and explicitly confirmed my manager was not following company policy or even treating me fairly compared to his other team members), told me they would refuse to transfer me when I asked about solutions like that, and asserted that the solution was I had to talk more. The next week they brought me in a fired me with never a written or even verbal warning, and never a negative performance review or a missed meeting, or even a late JIRA implementation. Indeed, everyone said good things about my performance. I had also followed her advice to "talk more". Again they refused to entertain any option of continuing at the company when I offered to try anything that would solve things. The only thing Fitbit HR cared about was A) to get as much ammunition for a lawsuit as possible, and B) fire me as fast as possible after I was harassed. They didn't try at all to solve things at the company. In terms of what happened, everything was fairly normal for a couple months. Then one day my wife drove me in to the office because my back was hurting and standing an hour on the BART made things even worse. We followed every rule for her to be in the building. We arrived at 8am after a 2 hour drive, waiting until the front desk was open at 8:30am and got her a badge, then proceeded to my desk which is safely outside all the signs indicating no guests are allowed due to unreleased projects being worked on. The developer to my right was super friendly and talkative and awesome to my wife - completely normal. My manager came in later (he was rarely around and always left early at 4pm, one of those pre-IPO people who don't put any effort in now that they have their options) and blew up after 10 minutes - super strange. His face turned all red and he was breathing heavy and he took me aside to a private room. He said my wife is too distracting for him to get any work done and she has to move. We immediately left the area and went to the couches across from the front desk to figure out what to do. Then I took her off campus. She never visited again any day after that (who would bring their wife back when their manager is acting creepy toward her?), but my manager continually blew up about her and made up new rules about her. For example, the week after, he took me aside to a private room again and said she couldn't visit ever again. Meanwhile when other team member's family visited, he was super nice and even booked a conference room for a full day for another team member's kids to visit. At the same time he started treating me very unfairly. For example, he said any exercise on my part counted as a "long lunch" and wasn't allowed. Meanwhile it was "Steptember" and all employees were encouraged to exercise and had internal teams competing with who could do the most exercise. Similarly I was in an automatic activity tracking beta test, and all short exercises had failed to trigger the new logic, so I took a 1 hour bike ride on the Embarcadero instead of lunch to try to get a positive result for my beta test data - he blew up about this as well. The manager claimed the PM had been trying to contact me all day and wasn't able to because I took that bike ride. This was not true. The PM Hipchatted me on the way back from the bike ride, I stopped at a cafe on the way back, and did the code review the PM wanted from me immediately, within 10 minutes. So the manager was lying about my interaction with the PM to justify his not letting me exercise and his blowing up any time I was away from my desk - which I had to be pretty often because I was writing the Bluetooth pairing code and there's a step that aborts if there are too many devices nearby, like at our desks. The test group lead actually worked from home at least one day a week for precisely this reason and I was only working down the hall at some tables, which should not have been a problem. Meanwhile everyone else at the company I talked to encouraged exercise, and one manager I talked to even recommended an afternoon nap for getting your energy back to code some more! So my manager was definitely not following company policy or treating me fairly. All HR cared about was firing me, though. I found out later the manager was divorced and that's probably why he went nuts over my wife. It actually sounds really similar to Susan Fowler's experience at Uber. She had a manager acting creepy and weird because of his own marital issues. Then HR invented fake "undocumented performance issues" that were never communicated before and didn't hold up to scrutiny when other employees were asked about it, so that HR could deny transfer and any other solutions, and the manager could keep looking good at the company.

xiphias 10y ago

Sure..the thing I don't understand is why she didn't go to a lawyer? That would have been the next logical step for me. At least 1 person should get to prison if there is enough evidence collected by multiple women.

discodave 10y ago
I used to have this attitude until I heard harassment stories from two close personal friends in the last year. It's really hard to come forward, especially if you're early in your career and struggled to get any job in the first place. Apart from potentially being difficult emotionally there are tons of negative outcomes that could come from taking the legal route Here's a list of potential negative outcomes of lawyering up: * getting terminated (remember, at-will employment) * getting blacklisted by other teams at your current employer * getting blacklisted by potential future employers. Court cases are often public and in some industries companies are forced to make ongoing litigation public * having your weird texts, emails, personal life and sexual history being dragged out in a public court case * losing and still having to pay all those lawyer fees * winning but not getting any meaningful compensation * getting harassed on twitter/wherever by the alt-right/gamergate crowd. Yes, people should be getting in trouble but it's a prisoners dilemma where each individual victim is not incentiviced to do anything.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  I just came from a different thread on HN, where highly compensated software developers were afraid to even point out to their managers that what they were suggesting was a bad idea for the company. People literally fearing for their jobs, because they want to do their jobs well and not just blindly follow orders that will be costly to their employer. So you can imagine how many multiples of that it is when you're trying to rock the boat on harassment.
- letientai299 10y ago
  I feel sad that there's are so many reasons that stop you to d the RIGHT THING. What is the better way then, beside leaving the company despite doing your job very well?

lostboys67 10y ago

Yes it's either collusion or NCI (Non Culpable Incompetence) Gross misconduct is another potential

StreamBright 10y ago

Essentially they opened up the company for a class action lawsuit.

koolba 10y ago
Are there even enough women there to form a class? There's no legal minimum but it's more difficult to form a class with a handful of people.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]