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It's trendy right now to "listen and believe." Outrage can score you some serious Internet popularity points, particularly when your claims are about men being

It's trendy right now to "listen and believe." Outrage can score you some serious Internet popularity points, particularly when your claims are about men being sexist pigs. Don't ask for any evidence, just grab the pitchforks! That being said, it's tempting to just believe everything Fowler wrote and hope for sweet justice. We all love a good story, after all. Unfortunately, what makes for a gripping story of justice in the face of wrongdoing doesn't always align with reality, and it can be difficult to convince the lynch mobs of that fact.

muglug 10y ago
She's staked her reputation (and, at this point, probably her career as well) on not lying about the harassment. She says she has both documentary evidence and other female Uber employees to back up her claims. "Guilty until proven innocent" is how our courts work, and rightly so. But, as a layperson, there's nothing wrong in assessing the evidence and saying: "the chance these claims are false is vanishingly small, given all the publicly available information about the author of the blog post, Uber's culture, the heavily-documented problems faced by female developers in SF and elsewhere, and the very very low proportion of these sorts of claims that turn out to be false".
- discodave 10y ago
  I think you accidentally a word (or you don't understand how courts work in the US). :)
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Nobody here does. It's a civil case and the standard of evidence is "preponderance of the evidence".
  - muglug 10y ago
    Commenting at 2am has its drawbacks...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mistercow 10y ago
  Don't forget Uber's response. They threw the CEO's competence under the bus to buy themselves some slack.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  > "Guilty until proven innocent" is how our courts work, and rightly so. um....
xenadu02 10y ago
You're being disingenuous. Please stop. This is far from the first time we've had people complaining about Uber's toxic engineering culture. Using stack ranking, managers building fiefdoms and undermining each other's projects... these are hardly secrets. At this point there is so much smoke that yes: it is entirely appropriate to believe there is a fire. The only thing unique about this case is it is a woman and her first negative experience was a manager sexually harassing her. The rest of her post perfectly matches Uber's reputation as an engineering organization.

muglug 10y ago

She's staked her reputation (and, at this point, probably her career as well) on not lying about the harassment. She says she has both documentary evidence and other female Uber employees to back up her claims. "Guilty until proven innocent" is how our courts work, and rightly so. But, as a layperson, there's nothing wrong in assessing the evidence and saying: "the chance these claims are false is vanishingly small, given all the publicly available information about the author of the blog post, Uber's culture, the heavily-documented problems faced by female developers in SF and elsewhere, and the very very low proportion of these sorts of claims that turn out to be false".

discodave 10y ago
I think you accidentally a word (or you don't understand how courts work in the US). :)
- matt4077 10y ago
  Nobody here does. It's a civil case and the standard of evidence is "preponderance of the evidence".
- muglug 10y ago
  Commenting at 2am has its drawbacks...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mistercow 10y ago
Don't forget Uber's response. They threw the CEO's competence under the bus to buy themselves some slack.
metaphorm 10y ago
> "Guilty until proven innocent" is how our courts work, and rightly so. um....

xenadu02 10y ago

You're being disingenuous. Please stop. This is far from the first time we've had people complaining about Uber's toxic engineering culture. Using stack ranking, managers building fiefdoms and undermining each other's projects... these are hardly secrets. At this point there is so much smoke that yes: it is entirely appropriate to believe there is a fire. The only thing unique about this case is it is a woman and her first negative experience was a manager sexually harassing her. The rest of her post perfectly matches Uber's reputation as an engineering organization.