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I'm really happy she felt comfortable doing this. What an incredibly brave and strong person—I can't imagine what she must be feeling. What I really want to se

by tyre 10y ago

I'm really happy she felt comfortable doing this. What an incredibly brave and strong person—I can't imagine what she must be feeling. What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. We cannot rely on the abused to stand up for themselves; for every one who does there are thousands who cannot. It is on every one of us to report abhorrent behaviour, even if we think someone else has/will. Change comes from those in power, from people who could very rationally not care, but who go out of their way to do the right thing. It isn't an economic decision, a business decision, or a political decision. It is a personal decision on the world one wants to live in. We can do better. We must do better. Enough is enough.

macsj200 10y ago
What specifically is the move forward here, though? I suppose hn as a community has the power to boycott applying to the company, but how else can we drive internal change from an external position? Uninstalling the app and simply choosing to use a competitor's services are another option, but sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if not more so. Do you think this merits organized public protest? Is the average Uber user aware of the issues/incensed enough to actually take to the streets? Obviously I'd like to see a change, but I'm struggling with how best to actually make this happen.
- hsod 10y ago
  Consumer action like boycotts and social media posting is nice, but I think the solution to this problem is lawsuits. Victims can seek redress through the courts, which both compensates them and holds the company directly to account for their actions. For a lot of reasons participating in lawsuits is challenging for the victims, and I am in no way criticizing any individual for not going through all of that. I just think that really making an impact is going to require more than a few hundred app deletions and some bad PR.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    How about a class action? Lois E. Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. Jock v. Sterling Jewelers Inc.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  The drivers aren't going to be hurt; half of them are already working for Lyft anyway (they have two phones, one for each service), so the rest will just move to the competition if Uber goes under, and they'll probably be better off for it anyway. Same goes for the developers; there's no shortage of jobs in Silicon Valley. There is no way to change a company's internal culture from outside. The only thing you can do is punish it.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  This is kinda like saying, "We should never punish a company for wrongdoing, because they'll pass that on to customers and employees." It doesn't really hold water.
- _yosefk 10y ago
  OK Cupid blocked Firefox, a non-profit with less questionable business practices than most tech companies and certainly Uber, over Eich's quiet private donation which ought to be a smaller deal than systematic sexual harassment with consequences for victims instead of perpetrators (although the donation was proven while the harassment is alleged; I doubt this tips the scales of public sentiment though.) The overall reaction on HN was mostly positive. I'm sure an Uber boycott can be figured out. (Is it a good idea? I dunno, in Eich's case the question is different from this case and there's much to discuss, I'm just saying that people these days are fairly eager to boycott and fairly good at it once the proper mood sets in.)
  - vacri 10y ago
    OK Cupid behaved poorly in that matter - after getting what they wanted (Eich resigning), they didn't act to resolve the reputational damage they'd done. All too quick to pop up a message saying "mozilla is the devil"[1], but afterwards, no message saying "okay, the situation has been resolved in our favour, you should go back and try it out". I lost a lot of respect towards the site from that. [1] despite gay and lesbian developers coming out and saying that Eich's personal opinions on the issue didn't translate to company culture and they felt a positive atmosphere working there.
  - Justsignedup 10y ago
    an interesting debate. if i build my company on abuse and shady tactics, but i now employ 10,000 employees, is it okay to let me get away with it because so many depend on me? This is the too-big-to-fail issue.
    - CaptainZapp 10y ago
      This whole too-big-to-fail reasoning really galls me. When a company is too big to fail it means that if it fails there's a systemic risk for an entire economy. Banks (and it's mostly banks), which are too big to fail are so interewoven with other banks, multinational companies and the economy as a whole that a failure can bring other institutions to the brink of exctinction and by extension wreck havoc on the entire economy. Thousands of people out of a job does not mean too big to fail. No more being able to hail an Uber may be inconvenient, but it's no systemic risk to the economy. Look at Enron. They had north of 20'000 employees when they imploded. And they where in a far more critical sector of the economy than Uber can ever dream to be. While it was brutal for the employees (who partially lost their life savings) and while I think there should be a special place in hell for the responsible executives Enron's demise had hardly any effects on the economy as a whole. I'm not jumping on you personally. It's just that this too-big-to-fail nonsense in combination with Uber is thrown around an awful lot recently. And it's utter bullshit.
- ForHackernews 10y ago
  > sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if not more so. Drivers can easily move to Lyft or other competitors (at least in markets where Lyft is active). In fact, I would venture that most drivers already drive for both Lyft and Uber. Developers can (and should) look for jobs at other companies.
- elsewhen 10y ago
  i think public pressure of the board of directors is the right approach here: Shervin Pishevar, John Gurley, David Bonderman, David Drummond, Arianna Huffington, Garrett Camp, Ryan Graves some of these people have reputations that are worth more than their stake in uber. the desire to uphold their reputations may be enough to get them to truly act on this matter.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    At this point, the ouster of Kalanick is the only blood sacrifice that would be sufficient. The rot goes all the way up to the CEO.
mcmoose75 10y ago
A good deal of this is the entire system of control Uber has (or really, hasn't) implemented here. We already know that managers at Uber use reviews to punish those on their team that are at all critical of them (especially for ethic issues). The "20 men on her team", even if they did want to say something, could reasonably expect to have their careers (and potentially a material amount of Uber stock vesting) impacted by standing up. That's not to say that these men couldn't have or shouldn't have stood up, but they would've had to take some amount of risk to do so. In a company with better controls, these men would've felt comfortable criticizing this manager (and confident that they weren't endangering their careers or financial well-being by doing so).
- tyre 10y ago
  If Uber had implemented a good system of control, we wouldn't be talking about this in the first place. The question is what do we do when there isn't a good system. Yes, there is risk to speaking out. It wouldn't be brave to do so if there were no risk. I do think it takes people who are already in a relative position of power to minorities and women in tech–which includes men at the same level—saying that this will not stand, in order for real change to come about.
  - solidsnack9000 10y ago
    > If Uber had implemented a good system of control, we wouldn't be talking about this in the first place. The system of control doesn't have to be optimized for good. In a situation like this -- where managers seem to operate without fear of reporting or push back from underlings -- there likely is a lot of control in place already. > Yes, there is risk to speaking out. It wouldn't be brave to do so if there were no risk. The same could be said of the victims themselves and highlights the problem with this attitude: betting on bravery is long odds. If workers are highly dependent on managers' approval -- not of their work, but of their opinions, character, manner -- then they will learn to keep their heads down and go along to get along. It's too late when something like this happens.
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  One of the dirtiest tricks that Uber uses -And I found this out through firsthand experience - Is doing performance reviews where all feedback is public (I think technically it's only shown to your manager and team lead, except they're expected to make it public). This prevents you from writing negative feedback, and even damning with faint praise is a sure strategy to face retaliation. Rather than work out, privately, when one of your coworkers is underperforming, you only have the option of naming and shaming. I'd really like a culture where this was viable - I'd love for nearly everything to be done in the public sphere, and even 'backstabbing' to be handled in the clear, but since Diffie–Hellman exists, it's not viable.
gradstudent 10y ago
> What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. You're being surprisingly lenient in your assessment here. I'd argue they need to tell their bosses to fuck off and find another job.
- stouset 10y ago
  I don't disagree, but consider that many of these engineers are sitting on illiquid stock options valued at millions to tens of millions of dollars. You're asking people to stand up for what's right when it may cost them millions of dollars of incentives and the loss of years of their life in career investment. That doesn't make it right to look the other way when these kind of abuses occur, but is it any wonder that people don't speak up when the incentives are lined up so strongly against doing so?
  - Kalium 10y ago
    It's always easy to ask someone else to make a significant sacrifice for the sake of your moral code. It's much harder to do so yourself.
huckyaus 10y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair
- myblake 10y ago
  That happens to be one of the quotes in one of the related articles Medium suggests at the bottom that's worth the read: https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea#.wqdpspoto https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-d...
TorKlingberg 10y ago
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- rapfaria 10y ago
  Agreed, and I'm not defending Mike#2 in any way, but good men perhaps have children. Mortgage. Family plans and life goals. It's a really shitty situation. Perhaps evil triumphs if great men do nothing?
  - ssalazar 10y ago
    Thats a little hyperbolic. These aren't rust belt coal miners. With a name brand like Uber on your resume you could quickly get plenty of competitive job offers in SF/SV without even trying. Its hard for me to see an excuse for this, other than widespread cultural acceptance/willful ignorance of these practices.
  - flamedoge 10y ago
    Well it's great for them to have those, but they gotta do more for me to consider them as good. In my eyes, they're just looking out for themselves and their family.
  - tehwebguy 10y ago
    The bar for "good" is lowered when there is money on the line?
nanolith 10y ago
If I saw a manager do what she described, no matter how high up the food chain he was, I'd frog march him to HR myself. I don't even care if they fire me for it. We don't tolerate stuff like this in this century.
- aorloff 10y ago
  I know. What I'm struck by in all this is that much of Uber's staff must be really junior. Not just the assholes at the center of these stories, but everyone else around these incidents. Which kind of contradicts the idea that they are a bunch of high performers.
  - xapata 10y ago
    I had much the same thought. It's far easier to death march the youth. Try the same management style on someone older and they'd simply quit.
    - lokedhs 10y ago
      Are there any avail statistics on their age distribution? Based on what I've read, it seems like people over 30 is in a minority, not to mention the impossibility to find anyone over 40.
      - xapata 10y ago
        That'd be hard to find in a public company, let alone private.
- revscat 10y ago
  Have you seen who is President these days?
  - zepto 10y ago
    Putin
gerbilly 10y ago
Reminds me of 'Bystander Apathy'[1]: i.e. when there is a person in need, the greater the number of people, the less likely anyone will help. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
wvenable 10y ago
> What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved." The 20 other men on her team were probably as concerned with keeping their job and not being abused. The big difference is that they can appear to fit in because they're men; women have a much more difficult job of it. But whenever everyone is keeping their head down, it's hard to notice that other people's issues. The whole psychology of bullying comes into play and that is pretty complex. Yes, if everyone stood up against the bully they would win but how often does that happen in real life? Most people in this situation would likely just quit than put up with that environment so you're already left with those who can't or won't. I'd like to think I wouldn't let that stuff happen around me but honestly I'm pretty unlikely to work in that environment in the first place. Where I do work, the culture is great and we are near 30-40% women in IT/Dev without even trying to hire for diversity.
- rconti 10y ago
  It really sounds insane to me, too. No shop I've ever worked at is remotely like that.
- epx 10y ago
  20 idiots!!
- Aeolun 10y ago
  Trying to fight against bullying takes 300% of the effort it takes to bully :/
- uberengineer123 10y ago
  >It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved." Full disclosure, I work at Uber. I have been staying out of this until now, but this point particularly grinds my gears. If I heard anything remotely like what was discussed in this article you bet your ass I'm going to speak up. I know people do not speak of me, but watching my entire company be vilified is a bit difficult and hard to not take personally. I work with a lot of fantastic engineers that would not tolerate anything remotely like the behavior outlined in this article for a second. That's the problem with gigantic companies though, things often happen in dark corners that aren't apparent to the rest of the organization. People want to conflate specific incidents with the state of the entire company. I had one opportunity to speak up when my female teammate was being discriminated against, and I took it. It wasn't even blatant either, the guy could easily defend himself and say it's not a sexism thing, but that's what it was. He's a massive jackass too, but you can't fire people on the spot for being a massive jackass without a lot of evidence to back it up. I did my part. I cannot speak for anybody else, but I can tell you in my corner of the Uber world I take this shit very seriously, and so does everybody else I work with. The bullshit that is going on is not representative of my team, and it's very very hard to not take this personally. The problem I have is that everybody wants to chime in with how awful Uber is like they know something I don't. Now I'll admit, there's a lot I don't know about working at Uber, as I only know my corner of the company. If I'm saying that what does that say about everybody else? Do these people think for a second that I would have stuck around and stuck it out if I saw this bullshit going on first hand? I'm not going to be the one that stands up and defends leadership, or HR, or whomever else, they can speak for themselves just as I speak for myself.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. Agreed 100%, but maaaan I have seen it where you would defend someone just so they can turn against you because of the same fear that originally prevented them from speaking out loud. Then they make peace with the abuser and now you are the one left holding the burning candle. It is a very tricky situation.
pfooti 10y ago
This is the part that really hits me. When, in a meeting, Mike#2 says to "stop being a whiny little bitch", and he's not fired on the spot, something is not just wrong with Mike#2, something is systemically wrong. I don't work in Regular Tech (I'm in a teacher-education nonprofit), so I'm not as exposed to the SV bro culture. I'd like to think I'd speak up and fight for people who are marginalized in my workplace. I wonder if I actually would. It's so easy to be quiet, laugh it off, and go back to your daily, if it's not you.
- loopdoend 10y ago
  Let's not make excuses by blaming this on something like a widely-spread yet widely-derided culture. This behaviour is inexcusable, there is no excuse here. If you see something like this, as a man, you say something, and you stand up for your coworker. Otherwise, you lose your man license.
  - pfooti 10y ago
    Yeah, I think this is tricky. There's the individual accountability thing, which I agree with. If you are in that room and say nothing or laugh it off, you are complicit. But I think that the systemic misogyny is also something that needs to be addressed - the fact that the entire Uber culture seems to be saying 'this behavior is okay if you're a high performer' us up and down the chain and extends to people who aren't in the room where it happens.
  - kentrado 10y ago
    > you lose your man license. If you want men to do something, just threaten their masculinity. It seems you know the infallible trick of emasculation.

by tyre 10y ago

macsj200 10y ago

What specifically is the move forward here, though? I suppose hn as a community has the power to boycott applying to the company, but how else can we drive internal change from an external position? Uninstalling the app and simply choosing to use a competitor's services are another option, but sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if not more so. Do you think this merits organized public protest? Is the average Uber user aware of the issues/incensed enough to actually take to the streets? Obviously I'd like to see a change, but I'm struggling with how best to actually make this happen.

hsod 10y ago
Consumer action like boycotts and social media posting is nice, but I think the solution to this problem is lawsuits. Victims can seek redress through the courts, which both compensates them and holds the company directly to account for their actions. For a lot of reasons participating in lawsuits is challenging for the victims, and I am in no way criticizing any individual for not going through all of that. I just think that really making an impact is going to require more than a few hundred app deletions and some bad PR.
- mirimir 10y ago
  How about a class action? Lois E. Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. Jock v. Sterling Jewelers Inc.
Arizhel 10y ago
The drivers aren't going to be hurt; half of them are already working for Lyft anyway (they have two phones, one for each service), so the rest will just move to the competition if Uber goes under, and they'll probably be better off for it anyway. Same goes for the developers; there's no shortage of jobs in Silicon Valley. There is no way to change a company's internal culture from outside. The only thing you can do is punish it.
st3v3r 10y ago
This is kinda like saying, "We should never punish a company for wrongdoing, because they'll pass that on to customers and employees." It doesn't really hold water.
_yosefk 10y ago
OK Cupid blocked Firefox, a non-profit with less questionable business practices than most tech companies and certainly Uber, over Eich's quiet private donation which ought to be a smaller deal than systematic sexual harassment with consequences for victims instead of perpetrators (although the donation was proven while the harassment is alleged; I doubt this tips the scales of public sentiment though.) The overall reaction on HN was mostly positive. I'm sure an Uber boycott can be figured out. (Is it a good idea? I dunno, in Eich's case the question is different from this case and there's much to discuss, I'm just saying that people these days are fairly eager to boycott and fairly good at it once the proper mood sets in.)
- vacri 10y ago
  OK Cupid behaved poorly in that matter - after getting what they wanted (Eich resigning), they didn't act to resolve the reputational damage they'd done. All too quick to pop up a message saying "mozilla is the devil"[1], but afterwards, no message saying "okay, the situation has been resolved in our favour, you should go back and try it out". I lost a lot of respect towards the site from that. [1] despite gay and lesbian developers coming out and saying that Eich's personal opinions on the issue didn't translate to company culture and they felt a positive atmosphere working there.
- Justsignedup 10y ago
  an interesting debate. if i build my company on abuse and shady tactics, but i now employ 10,000 employees, is it okay to let me get away with it because so many depend on me? This is the too-big-to-fail issue.
  - CaptainZapp 10y ago
    This whole too-big-to-fail reasoning really galls me. When a company is too big to fail it means that if it fails there's a systemic risk for an entire economy. Banks (and it's mostly banks), which are too big to fail are so interewoven with other banks, multinational companies and the economy as a whole that a failure can bring other institutions to the brink of exctinction and by extension wreck havoc on the entire economy. Thousands of people out of a job does not mean too big to fail. No more being able to hail an Uber may be inconvenient, but it's no systemic risk to the economy. Look at Enron. They had north of 20'000 employees when they imploded. And they where in a far more critical sector of the economy than Uber can ever dream to be. While it was brutal for the employees (who partially lost their life savings) and while I think there should be a special place in hell for the responsible executives Enron's demise had hardly any effects on the economy as a whole. I'm not jumping on you personally. It's just that this too-big-to-fail nonsense in combination with Uber is thrown around an awful lot recently. And it's utter bullshit.
ForHackernews 10y ago
> sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if not more so. Drivers can easily move to Lyft or other competitors (at least in markets where Lyft is active). In fact, I would venture that most drivers already drive for both Lyft and Uber. Developers can (and should) look for jobs at other companies.
elsewhen 10y ago
i think public pressure of the board of directors is the right approach here: Shervin Pishevar, John Gurley, David Bonderman, David Drummond, Arianna Huffington, Garrett Camp, Ryan Graves some of these people have reputations that are worth more than their stake in uber. the desire to uphold their reputations may be enough to get them to truly act on this matter.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  At this point, the ouster of Kalanick is the only blood sacrifice that would be sufficient. The rot goes all the way up to the CEO.

mcmoose75 10y ago

A good deal of this is the entire system of control Uber has (or really, hasn't) implemented here. We already know that managers at Uber use reviews to punish those on their team that are at all critical of them (especially for ethic issues). The "20 men on her team", even if they did want to say something, could reasonably expect to have their careers (and potentially a material amount of Uber stock vesting) impacted by standing up. That's not to say that these men couldn't have or shouldn't have stood up, but they would've had to take some amount of risk to do so. In a company with better controls, these men would've felt comfortable criticizing this manager (and confident that they weren't endangering their careers or financial well-being by doing so).

tyre 10y ago
If Uber had implemented a good system of control, we wouldn't be talking about this in the first place. The question is what do we do when there isn't a good system. Yes, there is risk to speaking out. It wouldn't be brave to do so if there were no risk. I do think it takes people who are already in a relative position of power to minorities and women in tech–which includes men at the same level—saying that this will not stand, in order for real change to come about.
- solidsnack9000 10y ago
  > If Uber had implemented a good system of control, we wouldn't be talking about this in the first place. The system of control doesn't have to be optimized for good. In a situation like this -- where managers seem to operate without fear of reporting or push back from underlings -- there likely is a lot of control in place already. > Yes, there is risk to speaking out. It wouldn't be brave to do so if there were no risk. The same could be said of the victims themselves and highlights the problem with this attitude: betting on bravery is long odds. If workers are highly dependent on managers' approval -- not of their work, but of their opinions, character, manner -- then they will learn to keep their heads down and go along to get along. It's too late when something like this happens.
GauntletWizard 10y ago
One of the dirtiest tricks that Uber uses -And I found this out through firsthand experience - Is doing performance reviews where all feedback is public (I think technically it's only shown to your manager and team lead, except they're expected to make it public). This prevents you from writing negative feedback, and even damning with faint praise is a sure strategy to face retaliation. Rather than work out, privately, when one of your coworkers is underperforming, you only have the option of naming and shaming. I'd really like a culture where this was viable - I'd love for nearly everything to be done in the public sphere, and even 'backstabbing' to be handled in the clear, but since Diffie–Hellman exists, it's not viable.

gradstudent 10y ago

> What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. You're being surprisingly lenient in your assessment here. I'd argue they need to tell their bosses to fuck off and find another job.

stouset 10y ago
I don't disagree, but consider that many of these engineers are sitting on illiquid stock options valued at millions to tens of millions of dollars. You're asking people to stand up for what's right when it may cost them millions of dollars of incentives and the loss of years of their life in career investment. That doesn't make it right to look the other way when these kind of abuses occur, but is it any wonder that people don't speak up when the incentives are lined up so strongly against doing so?
- Kalium 10y ago
  It's always easy to ask someone else to make a significant sacrifice for the sake of your moral code. It's much harder to do so yourself.

huckyaus 10y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair

myblake 10y ago
That happens to be one of the quotes in one of the related articles Medium suggests at the bottom that's worth the read: https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea#.wqdpspoto https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-d...

TorKlingberg 10y ago

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

rapfaria 10y ago
Agreed, and I'm not defending Mike#2 in any way, but good men perhaps have children. Mortgage. Family plans and life goals. It's a really shitty situation. Perhaps evil triumphs if great men do nothing?
- ssalazar 10y ago
  Thats a little hyperbolic. These aren't rust belt coal miners. With a name brand like Uber on your resume you could quickly get plenty of competitive job offers in SF/SV without even trying. Its hard for me to see an excuse for this, other than widespread cultural acceptance/willful ignorance of these practices.
- flamedoge 10y ago
  Well it's great for them to have those, but they gotta do more for me to consider them as good. In my eyes, they're just looking out for themselves and their family.
- tehwebguy 10y ago
  The bar for "good" is lowered when there is money on the line?

nanolith 10y ago

If I saw a manager do what she described, no matter how high up the food chain he was, I'd frog march him to HR myself. I don't even care if they fire me for it. We don't tolerate stuff like this in this century.

aorloff 10y ago
I know. What I'm struck by in all this is that much of Uber's staff must be really junior. Not just the assholes at the center of these stories, but everyone else around these incidents. Which kind of contradicts the idea that they are a bunch of high performers.
- xapata 10y ago
  I had much the same thought. It's far easier to death march the youth. Try the same management style on someone older and they'd simply quit.
  - lokedhs 10y ago
    Are there any avail statistics on their age distribution? Based on what I've read, it seems like people over 30 is in a minority, not to mention the impossibility to find anyone over 40.
    - xapata 10y ago
      That'd be hard to find in a public company, let alone private.
revscat 10y ago
Have you seen who is President these days?
- zepto 10y ago
  Putin

gerbilly 10y ago

Reminds me of 'Bystander Apathy'[1]: i.e. when there is a person in need, the greater the number of people, the less likely anyone will help. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

wvenable 10y ago

> What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved." The 20 other men on her team were probably as concerned with keeping their job and not being abused. The big difference is that they can appear to fit in because they're men; women have a much more difficult job of it. But whenever everyone is keeping their head down, it's hard to notice that other people's issues. The whole psychology of bullying comes into play and that is pretty complex. Yes, if everyone stood up against the bully they would win but how often does that happen in real life? Most people in this situation would likely just quit than put up with that environment so you're already left with those who can't or won't. I'd like to think I wouldn't let that stuff happen around me but honestly I'm pretty unlikely to work in that environment in the first place. Where I do work, the culture is great and we are near 30-40% women in IT/Dev without even trying to hire for diversity.

rconti 10y ago
It really sounds insane to me, too. No shop I've ever worked at is remotely like that.
epx 10y ago
20 idiots!!
Aeolun 10y ago
Trying to fight against bullying takes 300% of the effort it takes to bully :/
uberengineer123 10y ago
>It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved." Full disclosure, I work at Uber. I have been staying out of this until now, but this point particularly grinds my gears. If I heard anything remotely like what was discussed in this article you bet your ass I'm going to speak up. I know people do not speak of me, but watching my entire company be vilified is a bit difficult and hard to not take personally. I work with a lot of fantastic engineers that would not tolerate anything remotely like the behavior outlined in this article for a second. That's the problem with gigantic companies though, things often happen in dark corners that aren't apparent to the rest of the organization. People want to conflate specific incidents with the state of the entire company. I had one opportunity to speak up when my female teammate was being discriminated against, and I took it. It wasn't even blatant either, the guy could easily defend himself and say it's not a sexism thing, but that's what it was. He's a massive jackass too, but you can't fire people on the spot for being a massive jackass without a lot of evidence to back it up. I did my part. I cannot speak for anybody else, but I can tell you in my corner of the Uber world I take this shit very seriously, and so does everybody else I work with. The bullshit that is going on is not representative of my team, and it's very very hard to not take this personally. The problem I have is that everybody wants to chime in with how awful Uber is like they know something I don't. Now I'll admit, there's a lot I don't know about working at Uber, as I only know my corner of the company. If I'm saying that what does that say about everybody else? Do these people think for a second that I would have stuck around and stuck it out if I saw this bullshit going on first hand? I'm not going to be the one that stands up and defends leadership, or HR, or whomever else, they can speak for themselves just as I speak for myself.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. Agreed 100%, but maaaan I have seen it where you would defend someone just so they can turn against you because of the same fear that originally prevented them from speaking out loud. Then they make peace with the abuser and now you are the one left holding the burning candle. It is a very tricky situation.

pfooti 10y ago

This is the part that really hits me. When, in a meeting, Mike#2 says to "stop being a whiny little bitch", and he's not fired on the spot, something is not just wrong with Mike#2, something is systemically wrong. I don't work in Regular Tech (I'm in a teacher-education nonprofit), so I'm not as exposed to the SV bro culture. I'd like to think I'd speak up and fight for people who are marginalized in my workplace. I wonder if I actually would. It's so easy to be quiet, laugh it off, and go back to your daily, if it's not you.

loopdoend 10y ago
Let's not make excuses by blaming this on something like a widely-spread yet widely-derided culture. This behaviour is inexcusable, there is no excuse here. If you see something like this, as a man, you say something, and you stand up for your coworker. Otherwise, you lose your man license.
- pfooti 10y ago
  Yeah, I think this is tricky. There's the individual accountability thing, which I agree with. If you are in that room and say nothing or laugh it off, you are complicit. But I think that the systemic misogyny is also something that needs to be addressed - the fact that the entire Uber culture seems to be saying 'this behavior is okay if you're a high performer' us up and down the chain and extends to people who aren't in the room where it happens.
- kentrado 10y ago
  > you lose your man license. If you want men to do something, just threaten their masculinity. It seems you know the infallible trick of emasculation.