39 ms·
Uber blocks employees at work from chatting on Blind App
- urahara 10y agoThis is very much like a sign that Uber again takes an old path of silencing people and problems instead of fixing toxic culture. Makes me think that they also prepare to blackmail Fowler.
- cbanek 10y agoSeems like they have probably already started: https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833 https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoThis seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise. I'm curious though, what tipped her off? While I've worked at tech start-ups before and can believe all the behavior she outlined (because I've seen similar things myself, it's very believable) it still bothers me to continue to take someone's word at face value. I mean I do, I would trust what she says over Uber any day, but I wish more of this type of information was verifiable.
- toyg 10y agoLikely an ex-colleague she kept in touch with, who tipped her that s/he had been tapped. I know I would react that way, if anyone started asking pointed questions about a friend.
- watwut 10y agoI find it fascinating that on one hand many people call what she described as standard and on the other people still call SV meritocracy. Even if you ignore sexism, the environment seemed to favor political maneuvring over skill and achievement.
- beaconstudios 10y agoI don't think a whole region can really be called a meritocracy - that strikes me as a pervasive myth. It would seem that meritocracy is something that a lot of SV companies strive for, but you'll always get companies that operate like Uber where meritocracy takes a back seat to politics and posturing.
- jordigh 10y agoWhile in principle being judged by nothing by your actions is a great, well, principle, in practice "meritocracy" ends up favouring people who were already socially advantaged in some way or another (e.g. male) to elicit the actions that the meritocratic judge is looking for. The idea sounds nice, but it ends up just reinforcing cronyism. If you belong to the right in-group, usually stratified along some social injustice, you'll display the merits that in-group wants.
- beaconstudios 10y agothe point of a meritocracy is to produce the best possible work and reward good performance, not to right real or perceived injustices. Statistically speaking, if the majority of developers are male then a majority of high-performing developers will also be male. Hiring lower-performing females to attempt to achieve balance does not fix the original issue, and it serves to harm the hiring company by choosing people based on social group rather than skill. Solving underrepresentation issues is, in my opinion, more about changing the perception of the industry for those poorly represented groups and performing outreach at younger ages, rather than having companies hire disproportionately more women or people of colour so that their employees look more diverse. That doesn't really solve anything.
- jordigh 10y agoOkay, so when I object and say "cronyism" you hear "let's hire idiots just because they're women". It doesn't have to be either of these. A simple thing you can do is publicly state, "we encourage women and other minorities to apply". And that's all. You encourage them. You don't have to give them any preferential treatment to pad your numbers (and I don't think anyone ever really does that, but a lot of people seem to be afraid that it happens). You just have to explicitly direct your invitation to them. That's enough to increase your hiring pool and give your company culture a nudge in the right direction. If you object to the alleged benefits of having a diverse staff, I can't imagine you would object to attracting more people to apply who otherwise wouldn't. A further point I want to emphasise: what is merit? Who decides what is merit? If you think being nice to others has no merit (or is not "good performance"), then you may end up hiring toxic employees like Fowler's sexual harasser and then keep him around because of your merit metric. This will end up costing you good employees like Fowler.
- uberthrowaway1 10y agoUsing a throwaway for obvious reasons. >This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise. From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong. Since we're clearly not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted. >I'm curious though, what tipped her off? I'd wager an employee. Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands / CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a while. For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written. Never raised to management though. But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling" value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle, sweetheart") to skewer it. Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking). Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little dramatic for me. Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.
- alphonsegaston 10y agoThanks for the insights. Question about the inside view - do people really buy Kalanick's fake apologies/victim act at this point? We've gone through this ruse so many times, from the outside it just seems like a laughable caricature of malignant narcissism. From your comments about the CTO, I'm guessing he surrounds himself with "empathizable cover" after the classic abusive pattern (if you come after me, think about the damage it will do to the nice people around me).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tn13 10y agoTrue. In most such cases there is always an another side that we totally forget when looking at the victim's story. I would give Uber a fair 50% chance unless there is strong evidence on the table.
- dllthomas 10y agoShe says in her next tweet that she doesn't know who it is or what their aims are. I doubt Uber is attempting to smear her. I don't think the people involved are that evil, but I'm pretty confident they aren't that stupid.
- alphonsegaston 10y agoThey previously (and probably illegally) hired a private intelligence firm to dig up dirt on their opponents in a court battle: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-investigation-lawsuit-fraud-travis-kalanick http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-investi... They did the same to intimidate journalists: http://fortune.com/2014/11/18/uber-rides-into-new-pr-storm-over-digging-dirt-on-hostile-press/ http://fortune.com/2014/11/18/uber-rides-into-new-pr-storm-o...
- dllthomas 10y agoTo be clear, in this case I think it's quite unlikely, specifically, that Uber is looking for information with an intent to discredit, disparage, or defame Susan Fowler. > They previously (and probably illegally) hired a private intelligence firm to dig up dirt on their opponents in a court battle What was done there seems obviously inappropriate. It's unclear to what degree the intent was (I certainly understand wanting context). The situation was obviously very different. > They did the same to intimidate journalists Maybe. On the other hand: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicole-campbell/what-was-said-at-the-uber_b_6198250.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicole-campbell/what-was-said-... And even in the Ben Smith's account they didn't actually do it.
- alphonsegaston 10y agoWhy is it unlikely, given that they've done this exact thing in the past? You're entitled to think whatever you want, but you can't in good faith argue that this isn't their pattern of behavior. You're right that the circumstances are different, but the only constant is Uber underhandedly going after anyone who criticizes them. And an editorial in HuffPo from someone who pals around with the person engaging in the abusive behaviour is a pretty weak defense. Especially since they did a similar thing before: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/19/uber-investigates-top-executive-after-journalists-privacy-was-breached https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/19/uber-inve...
- dominotw 10y agoHuffington said this time all problems will be fixed. I trust her, can we give them some time before saying 'takes an old path '.
- mcguire 10y agoIt's fun to listen to what people say, but you really need to watch what they do.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- retube 10y agoSounds like there's a pretty simple work around, just use mobile Internet not wifi. (You shouldn't use corporate wifi for a personal phone anyway)
- toyg 10y agoYeah, this move is just stupid. It's 2017 California, there are umpteen connectivity options. It's literally an admission that what is written on Blind is actually true and leadership is in panic mode. The right response was to dismiss it all as gossip and act nonchalant; moving from the "laugh at you" step to the "fight you" step means they're on their way to defeat.
- k_sh 10y ago> "Our activity at Uber has gone up 3x since they blocked us on their WiFi," Shin says. Streisand Effect in 3... 2... 1... It's 2017. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?
- hardlianotion 10y agoIt's really not more surprising than the thought there are still new, well-funded and high profile companies that have seriously misguided ways of dealing with sexual harassment complaints.
- zouhair 10y agoFor the same reason where even in countries where the death penalty exist, people still commit murder.
- rhizome 10y agoThis will definitely help fix things.
- passivepinetree 10y agoThis is hopefully a prelude to a Streisand effect type situation here, but my biggest reaction to this came in the ad below the piece: an "article" describing the reason behind the F and J bumps on any keyboard. Does there really need to be an article about that? It seems like common sense, or something you might learn in any typing exercise ever.
- taneq 10y agoThere are probably enough younger people around who've rare even used a physical keyboard, let alone have formal touch-typing training. I imagine mentioning the 'home row' would usually just get you a blank stare.
- sfifs 10y agoSo employees are trying to chat "anonymously" on a tech company's wifi network? Seems remarkably dumb for tech employees. It should be assumed as a given that any company or hotel wifi network is monitored and HTTPS is quite possibly is MITMed.
- Symbiote 10y agoAn employee's personal phone wouldn't accept the certificate if HTTPS was MITMed.
- RyJones 10y agoIf the employer uses an MDM as a precondition for email access, it might.
- throwanem 10y agoThat's a hard stop for me; no employer may have that degree of control over anything I own. I won't even configure an account with Exchange's protocol, because that enables remote device wipe. If an employer wants to issue me a company phone, that's fine. If an employer wants to enable IMAP, that's fine. Otherwise, I won't have mobile access to email, because the risk is unacceptable. And if that's not fine - well, it's been great talking with you, and I appreciate your time, but I'm afraid this position doesn't seem like a good fit after all.
- Programmatic 10y agoI like seeing more awareness of this! It's always depressing to hear people say that they don't care or that it's not a big deal. There are various third party applications that will allow you to use Exchange protocols without the OS integration: they'll let the Exchange server admins wipe the application's container/data rather than the entire phone. I think it's a much fairer implementation.
- dboreham 10y ago
- thewhitetulip 10y agoEven in 2017, we are still not understanding that if you block something it becomes more exciting just for the fact that it was banned, ignore it and it'll die.
- asdfologist 10y agoChina's a counterexample. Their censorship efforts are pretty damn effective.
- throwanem 10y agoChina's government has a degree of ubiquitous control that no Western company can hope to match.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Flammy 10y agoFirst time hearing of Blind, can anyone share their experiences? (working at a startup so can't just sign up and see it myself...)
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoI'm on the Microsoft Blind forum as a former FTE as they don't (yet) revalidate accounts. MS was amongst the first, or perhaps the first, Blind forum. It started off as a successor to MiniMSFT so people used it to compare comp (salaries, raises, bonuses, stock awards) since then it's massively expanded into other companies all with their own private forums, there are also forums visible to everyone. The most popular thread in the shared Tech industry forum is "What is your age and base salary?" and it makes for some soul-crushing reading (e.g. late-20s kids at Uber SF with $200k base, $400k stock). Back on the MS forum, it's usually layoff rumours (one regular poster who comments on layoff rumour threads claims to be in HR), people asking how to get VSA severance, and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.
- paganel 10y ago> and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible. I'm glad that people at MS themselves complain about how awful Skype has become. This proves that there are still sane people over there, for a moment I thought that me and my colleagues who still rely on Skype (Slack has never caught on with us) are not paranoid when we complain among ourselves about it.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoPretty much everyone at the IC-level at Microsoft is well-aware of the systemic issues plaguing many products - lower management too - but these issues don't get fixed because of whatever decisions being made at the Director level (mostly of the "evil" kind, like how improving UI responsiveness won't raise profitability but adding video ads will, or how no-one will switch to OneDrive-for-Business simply because the desktop client actually works - it'll be because the sales team drove a hard bargain with an enterprise customer and now their poor users are stuck with it). I like to think I did my part - I made small UI/UX improvements that I snuck into my official feature work (it all passed peer-review and testing, don't worry) - things like bad margins/padding around controls, something with the wrong color scheme, etc.
- omar3550 10y agoCan I somehow register to be an Uber employee on the app without actually being one? Would love to read all the crap employees are going through as lessons learned when I start my own company (one day). Any ideas? The blind app requires an uber.com email address. Any employees want to help out a fellow HN'er?
- emmab 10y agoYou could try spoofing your email address with the correct reply-to? (if you do find any vulnerabilities you should of course report them responsibly)
- chinathrow 10y agoWTF how stupid is that? You use a company address to sign up, leaving trails within an internal mail service...
- dajohnson89 10y agoYeah, I wondered the same thing. Verification by company email reduces spam/noise, so I understand why it's done. Probably useful to have non-employees filtered out. But there's no way I'd trust the service enough to use it. Not to mention my latent fear of a data breach/leak ruining my career.
- omar3550 10y agoAren't there any company mailing list addresses someone can provide? Someone inside uber needs to have some connections with IT - could be done easily I think. No email will be sent I am assuming? Or is there a verification step where one has to click on a link? Someone who has the app should verify.
- sand500 10y agoJust got the app. Apparently you just need to add your work email as your primary email on LinkedIn.
- victor9000 10y agoThis is really saavy marketing by Blind App
- revelation 10y agoWell, until people awake from their righteous fervor and ask why the anonymous Blind app knows there are 2000 Uber employees using it And god beware they start asking what Blinds business model is going to be!
- uxp100 10y agoBecause you are required to sign up with a company email. It's anonymous for the users, not for blind.
- logicallee 10y ago>Many do on an anonymous chat app called Blind. ... >And over 2,000 Uber employees in total use Blind, says Blind's head of operations Alex Shin. Jebediah O. Springfield! As the "head of operations" at an "anonymous chat app" you have ONE JOB, Alex Shin! And you just blew it. (To be explicit, I am saying Alex is way out of line for disclosing this information. An anonymous app should not have such information revealed even in the aggregrate - you can see what just happened as a result. Instead his public, and private, statements should have been "We do not disclose - confirm or deny - any users who may or may not use Blind, their affiliations or locations.") In point of fact I do agree with sharing this news, however it should be presented disclosing as little information about employees as possible. Plus the app isn't doing a very good job if its traffic is easily distinguishable from other apps' traffic (technically making it possible for Uber to take the actions we've just read about, or directly monitor based on telephone MAC addresses, the exact employees using the app and the timing of their doing so). But there's not so much that can be done about that. However, revealing the number of users at a company is not information that should be given out, in my opinion.
- kelnos 10y agoThis really stood out to me as well. A company that, say, runs a non-anonymous social network for businesses shouldn't give out numbers like that (at least, not without their customers' permission)... a company running a supposedly-anonymous place for employees to chat giving out that info is a serious breach of trust. I was curious about Blind (though certainly not curious enough to give it my LinkedIn credentials), but after reading that line, I wouldn't even remotely consider using this product.
- mavelikara 10y agoWhat if Alex was bluffing? An average Uber employee reading this would think that some massive congregation of his/her peers is happening on Blind and would rush to install it.
- logicallee 10y agoVery interesting, though as an officer I'm not sure if he's allowed to make specific numerical misstatements like that. :)
- KKKKkkkk1 10y agoThe only source of the story seems to be Blind's founder.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ilurkedhere 10y agoWhat makes Uber uniquely asshole-like?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mooted1 10y agoI work at Uber. I was on the wifi yesterday. I was successfully using blind. If business insider would like video evidence, I'm happy to work with their reporters 1:1. There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.
- rabbidruster 10y agoHmm I downloaded it just to try yesterday and I was not able to access it from uGuest. Not sure if it's Uber or blind blocking it though.
- strathmeyer 10y agoGee how did you get HR permission to work with the press so quickly?
- diebir 10y agoWhat's "Blind"? Never heard of it. So far I have never encountered anything blocked internally at Uber. Nor is anyone is talking over anything secret at Uber. People normally talk in person, but there isn't even much of that going on.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]