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I think you're misplacing motives here. The root cause for the founder sentiment in this thread is empathy. The firestorm Uber is facing may be self-inflicted

I think you're misplacing motives here. The root cause for the founder sentiment in this thread is empathy. The firestorm Uber is facing may be self-inflicted and justified, but the management team there is made up of real people that are in all likelihood good at heart. When you have an ongoing PR crisis, a letter like this makes things impossibly difficult. And, the fact that it's written by someone who's supposed to be a trusted team member is an arrow through the heart.

st3v3r 10y ago
I have absolutely no empathy for the management team at Uber. They are the ones that set their company up to be like this. They have known for a long, long time that their company culture was terrible. The only reason they're appearing to do anything now is because it became public. I absolutely wish this "stress" on them, because they deserve it for letting their company get to this state. And people who are good at heart don't let their company's culture get like that.
- eddieplan9 10y ago
  > people who are good at heart don't let their company's culture get like that This kind of comment is too harsh and over-simplifies the kind of decisions that growth-phase startups have to face. You have many battles to fight, and sometimes you have to make a trade-off. In Uber's case, they prioritized hiring and firing people to manage performance over dealing with culture issues. Not saying the trade-off they make is right - I think they all realize now they cannot treat themselves as a startup any more - but claiming the management at the company are not good at heart is just totally unjustified. Do you also think startups that lay off people when they don't need them or move operations to cheap regions to also have bad heart?
  - pjc50 10y ago
    > lay off people when they don't need them or move operations to cheap regions to also have bad heart? Those are always rather cold-hearted actions. Employees are not a disposable quantity that you can dump at Goodwill like surplus furniture; companies should make sincere efforts to avoid layoffs.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    No. You can try to rationalize it all you want, but at the end of the day, as you said, they prioritized managing performance over dealing with harassment and sexism. And that is NOT what good hearted people do. EVERY manager over at Uber has to own this. They are the ones at fault. And right now, they need to prove they are good hearted. That is not an assumption to make by default.
mrkgnao 10y ago
I'm sorry, but "PR crisis" continues the worrying (if thankfully rare) trend of people talking about this whole ... situation like it's an unfortunate but incidental bug that just needs to be ironed over, akin to some kind of "cost of doing business". There is a very important category difference between, say, Cloudbleed, and allegations of sexual harassment. Bounds-checking errors and the like do happen, and in rare cases reach catastrophic proportions, as we saw today. Downplaying what happened in that kind of situation isn't quite right, but it's still victimless in a certain sense -- you're minimizing the PR damage to yourself while not exactly hurting any other party. But Uber's behaviour here is essentially an attempt to apply the kind of "mitigation" that a situation report for a security vulnerability documents to a human conflict. (Non-serious aside: do they have an in-house "Fowler incident report" being edited every ten minutes?) It'd be far more admirable if they could go the completely Homo economicus route and declare "We don't honestly care, as long as we're profitable, and we're going to do everything possible to combat this eventuality." or something along those lines that actually reflects what they think of this, but obviously that would be ... suboptimal. Yes, Uber management may be (in fact, from the emails they're sending out to people "deleting Uber", they definitely are) suffering as a result, but the lack of a contrite "Yes, this happened, it shouldn't have" instead of the "This is contrary to our values, our ethos, and a few other words that conjure associations of fine, upstanding citizenship in our communities and such" (read "Lies!"), together with the obviously impartial steps they're taking to "investigate" the matter, make it difficult to find empathy for their pain here. (Any strawmen or logically suspect arguments in the above are unintentional and I'd love being told about them. Damn, I'd use that for an HN signature if those were supported.)
pjc50 10y ago
> real people that are in all likelihood good at heart So are the harassment victims and underappreciated employees. Spread your empathy around. "Good at heart" is kind of meaningless anyway. Judge people by their actions, and their sincerity by how they respond to criticism and mistakes. It's a character test and they're failing it.

st3v3r 10y ago

I have absolutely no empathy for the management team at Uber. They are the ones that set their company up to be like this. They have known for a long, long time that their company culture was terrible. The only reason they're appearing to do anything now is because it became public. I absolutely wish this "stress" on them, because they deserve it for letting their company get to this state. And people who are good at heart don't let their company's culture get like that.

eddieplan9 10y ago
> people who are good at heart don't let their company's culture get like that This kind of comment is too harsh and over-simplifies the kind of decisions that growth-phase startups have to face. You have many battles to fight, and sometimes you have to make a trade-off. In Uber's case, they prioritized hiring and firing people to manage performance over dealing with culture issues. Not saying the trade-off they make is right - I think they all realize now they cannot treat themselves as a startup any more - but claiming the management at the company are not good at heart is just totally unjustified. Do you also think startups that lay off people when they don't need them or move operations to cheap regions to also have bad heart?
- pjc50 10y ago
  > lay off people when they don't need them or move operations to cheap regions to also have bad heart? Those are always rather cold-hearted actions. Employees are not a disposable quantity that you can dump at Goodwill like surplus furniture; companies should make sincere efforts to avoid layoffs.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  No. You can try to rationalize it all you want, but at the end of the day, as you said, they prioritized managing performance over dealing with harassment and sexism. And that is NOT what good hearted people do. EVERY manager over at Uber has to own this. They are the ones at fault. And right now, they need to prove they are good hearted. That is not an assumption to make by default.

mrkgnao 10y ago

I'm sorry, but "PR crisis" continues the worrying (if thankfully rare) trend of people talking about this whole ... situation like it's an unfortunate but incidental bug that just needs to be ironed over, akin to some kind of "cost of doing business". There is a very important category difference between, say, Cloudbleed, and allegations of sexual harassment. Bounds-checking errors and the like do happen, and in rare cases reach catastrophic proportions, as we saw today. Downplaying what happened in that kind of situation isn't quite right, but it's still victimless in a certain sense -- you're minimizing the PR damage to yourself while not exactly hurting any other party. But Uber's behaviour here is essentially an attempt to apply the kind of "mitigation" that a situation report for a security vulnerability documents to a human conflict. (Non-serious aside: do they have an in-house "Fowler incident report" being edited every ten minutes?) It'd be far more admirable if they could go the completely Homo economicus route and declare "We don't honestly care, as long as we're profitable, and we're going to do everything possible to combat this eventuality." or something along those lines that actually reflects what they think of this, but obviously that would be ... suboptimal. Yes, Uber management may be (in fact, from the emails they're sending out to people "deleting Uber", they definitely are) suffering as a result, but the lack of a contrite "Yes, this happened, it shouldn't have" instead of the "This is contrary to our values, our ethos, and a few other words that conjure associations of fine, upstanding citizenship in our communities and such" (read "Lies!"), together with the obviously impartial steps they're taking to "investigate" the matter, make it difficult to find empathy for their pain here. (Any strawmen or logically suspect arguments in the above are unintentional and I'd love being told about them. Damn, I'd use that for an HN signature if those were supported.)

pjc50 10y ago

> real people that are in all likelihood good at heart So are the harassment victims and underappreciated employees. Spread your empathy around. "Good at heart" is kind of meaningless anyway. Judge people by their actions, and their sincerity by how they respond to criticism and mistakes. It's a character test and they're failing it.