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I'm not excusing Uber at all because what they've done is extremely bad in multiple cases but find it strange all these hit pieces are coming out of the wood wo

I'm not excusing Uber at all because what they've done is extremely bad in multiple cases but find it strange all these hit pieces are coming out of the wood works. There is a large section of society that hates Uber and will spring at any chance to bring it down. Which is partially what I think happened with the whole #boycottUber thing and the new video of kalanick yelling at the driver. However, the sexism and dysfunction in the company is extremely disturbing. It almost starts to undermine the case against them when there are all these hit jobs coming out and it starts to seem that the media is biased or relishing their fall.

hyperbovine 10y ago
This was leaked by their own employees. Including current ones.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Yeah, all these "hit pieces" cooked up by Uber employees because of their ethics are really undermining the case against Uber. /s If anything, I have greater respect for Uber employees after this series of leaks than I did before.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Wait what? How does that make any sense? Edit: This comment was written before the parent added the /s tag.
    - alphonsegaston 10y ago
      Most of the Uber employees I've interacted with have taken a quite cynical "who gives a fuck - IPO" stance or will rationalize away their behavior to an absurd degree. With this series of leaks from current and former Uber employees, I'm glad to see that there are more ethical people at Uber than I had previously thought.
      - oculusthrift 10y ago
        i think the poster you're responding to didn't realize your first paragraph was sarcasm
        eridius 10y ago
        It was? That would make a lot more sense.
        alphonsegaston 10y ago
        I edited my comment to include a sarcasm tag.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
JamilD 10y ago
People generally feel more empowered to call out a company when others do. It's not so much about the media piling on Uber, as employees feeling safe in talking about their company's problems.
- vthallam 10y ago
  I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story. I can only guess of a negative PR campaign from an apparent competitor, it's very obvious if you see anonymous medium posts(minus the susan flower's) and the hyperbole created about Travis's video and now this. Like everyone, I want them to pay for the culture they created at their company which resulted in employee abuse, but this is not fair to feed the hate campaign against a company which basically revolutionized the transport system.
  - JamilD 10y ago
    We should hold governments and companies accountable no matter what they do. It's not a hate campaign to call institutions out on their transgressions. It's not unfair to call out injustice wherever it exists.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story. The "people" in question being empowered are not the NYT reporters, they're the other employees that feel free to come forward, respond to requests from proactive reporters, or contact reporters themselves. The idea presented is that after there starts to be negative press, more people come forward, thus more news. There are many reasons this might be true. A very simple one is that most people may think their concerns are isolated, and not mention it to others enough to learn how endemic they really are. In this case, the employees that have info about this program might not have been happy about it, but might have thought the company was just doing what it had to and were willing to overlook it. Other negative news may change their opinion of the company just enough to put them over the threshold of thinking it should be brought to light. Then again, some employees may have been perfectly fine with this program, but know the public will react negatively, and are using it to punish the company for other misdeeds (such as the reported sexism). There are many explanations for why people with knowledge of misdeeds may come forward once it's reported. This happens with victims as well (e.g. Bill Cosby). It's easy to think you're the only one when there's no evidence to the contrary.
colemickens 10y ago
Comments like this confuse me. Are you accusing the author of fabricating facts? Do you contest the facts or testimonies in the article? What is the justification for calling this a "hit piece"? Did you actually read it? Why is it surprising that a company under the spotlight... winds up with more journalistic investigations?
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  Do you not think the boycottUber thing was a little overblown? What about releasing the video of Kalanick being illegally recorded and framing it as him "exploding" when he was relatively calm? All I'm saying is that focuses on silly stuff like that undermines the larger disturbing cases of law breaking and sexism.
  - colemickens 10y ago
    So you shirk all of my questions and then question if boycotting a company for repeated, serious, abuse of their employees was overblown? I have a feeling we're not going to see eye to eye on this so I will bow out.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
    But you don't think this story is "silly stuff" do you? And besides it's not like Uber hasn't also benefitted from illegal recordings: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/15/12201134/uber-ergo-admit-lie-investigation-court-travis-kalanick http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/15/12201134/uber-ergo-admit-l...
    - oculusthrift 10y ago
      That story is legitimate and was released in July. My only gripe was that it seems some were holding onto stories like that, or sometimes even trivial stories and are now releasing them to essentialy dogpile.
      - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
derefr 10y ago
My running hypothesis is that many journalists have found "dirt" on various companies or individuals, and have written it up as ready-to-release hit pieces... and then let it sit, because it currently goes against the sociopolitical zeitgeist. The moment anyone or anything becomes disliked, all these pre-written stories get published.
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  I'm fairly certain that the Google lawsuit, the video of them running the red light, and the yelling video were timed. How long did they have them? They just happened to get them the week Uber was plastered all over?
rsanheim 10y ago
I don't think it is that strange, you often see this type of snowball effect of leaks and insider info after an organization or person hits a certain tipping point of negative press. See also the many reports of sexual abuse that came out around Trump pre-election when things like the access hollywood video came out.
TillE 10y ago
Well, yes. Dan O'Sullivan (who spawned #DeleteUber) is a socialist and not shy about it. Of course he hates Uber for many reasons, all of which are entirely legitimate if you share his values. Always more enlightening to talk earnestly about differing values than suspecting some kind of hidden agenda or irrational bias.
- george_ciobanu 10y ago
  Values can be nuanced. Yes to free market but guess what, it occasionally needs checks and balances because while it works for a particular company it might bring society as a whole down. Infrastructure like roads and electricity should not be controlled by a company because it's supposed to benefit everyone. Let's talk about Uber. Say they survive this situation and thrive as a business, taking over the global cab market. Imagine they also perfect self-driving cars and next month they fire all the drivers. Suddenly you have a company of ~10,000 people getting all the money from all rides around the world. And most of the money goes to the executives and a few thousand shareholders. You now have a group of millions of people unable to make a living, and support their families. Apply this to all jobs that require mostly drivers (trucking, busses etc) and we just destroyed ~10 million jobs (including supporting infrastructure) in the US alone. These people need to make a living - if Uber ends up paying super low tax (compared to what it displaces) we have a huge number of people making no money and a few getting all of it. Civil unrest follows naturally (in one form or another) and you end up with either 1. Segmented civilization with a few people defending their wealth with hired guns 2. Social reform - guaranteed basic income for a while, but long term? 3. Revolution where the mob takes over and the outcome is anyone's guess - an extreme form of socialism? It's not just about values, a lot of it is about long-term thinking. Which of the three outcomes is better may be a question of values - is it better that a few people do super well and everyone else suffers, or most do pretty well? Without some social stability and wellness companies cannot function - people need money to pay with, and without jobs there's not much money to go around.
  - Gibbon1 10y ago
    This an example of what I consider the fatal (probably for us) defect of the neoliberal ideology. As implemented you end up with societal organizations being unable to engage in coherent policy and action.
yestoallthat 10y ago
While I don't like the company either, I wouldn't be surprised if competing companies had some PR peeps trying to stoke the flames. Why would they pass it up?
- tyingq 10y ago
  Stoking the flames, perhaps, but... "Greyball and the broader VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees" The employees, current and former, are lighting the fires.
jobu 10y ago
There's definitely some piling on by former employees and reporters. It seems to be a bit of a human trait, and I remember some of this happening to Amazon in the wake of the NY Times piece a couple years ago (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...). That said, the dirt coming from Uber seems to be a lot worse and a lot more widespread for a company that is 1/30th the size of what Amazon was 2 years ago.
- MegaButts 10y ago
  > That said, the dirt coming from Uber seems to be a lot worse and a lot more widespread for a company that is 1/30th the size of what Amazon was 2 years ago. I assume this is ignoring drivers? Surely if you include the contractors the size difference isn't so stark. I would actually expect Uber to be larger, but I don't know.
  - dralley 10y ago
    But "they're contractors, not employees", remember. That's why Uber doesn't have to take any responsibility for their actions.
garrettr_ 10y ago
I think it's a mistake to interpret the wave of stories about Uber's misbehavior as indicative of a "hit job" or "media bias" against Uber. Courage is contagious, and as people have started to speak out publicly against Uber's abuses, it appears current and former employees are becoming emboldened to share their experiences as well. I hope that this wave of public backlash will demonstrate to Uber, and the tech industry as a whole, that the market is not blind to unethical behavior, and cutthroat competition at the expense of your employees and the law is not necessarily a winning strategy.
- sharkweek 10y ago
  Also note the author of all these pieces from the NYT is Mike Isaac, who is very well connected with Uber sources.
- azernik 10y ago
  There's a similar phenomenon with sexual assault allegations - often they cluster in time, because a single accuser is more likely to be taken seriously when there are others making similar accusations. This is, BTW, the motivation behind an app I've heard of where you can file a sealed sexual assault report against someone, with verified date of filing, to be unsealed only if some number of people make an accusation against the same person.
accountface 10y ago
A single leak will often embolden others to follow suit, it's somewhat typical.
hackuser 10y ago
> It almost starts to undermine the case against them when there are all these hit jobs coming out and it starts to seem that the media is biased or relishing their fall. Think of what this means: The more a business (or anyone) does wrong, then the more news stories there are about them doing wrong ... then more likely it is that the news stories are 'hit jobs'. You can see how that doesn't work. Everyone subject to criticism by the news media calls it a 'hit job', reporter bias, or something similar. I see nothing in this story that suggests such a thing; this seems like a serious problem and the allegations are seem well-supported.

hyperbovine 10y ago

This was leaked by their own employees. Including current ones.

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Yeah, all these "hit pieces" cooked up by Uber employees because of their ethics are really undermining the case against Uber. /s If anything, I have greater respect for Uber employees after this series of leaks than I did before.
- eridius 10y ago
  Wait what? How does that make any sense? Edit: This comment was written before the parent added the /s tag.
  - alphonsegaston 10y ago
    Most of the Uber employees I've interacted with have taken a quite cynical "who gives a fuck - IPO" stance or will rationalize away their behavior to an absurd degree. With this series of leaks from current and former Uber employees, I'm glad to see that there are more ethical people at Uber than I had previously thought.
    - oculusthrift 10y ago
      i think the poster you're responding to didn't realize your first paragraph was sarcasm
      - eridius 10y ago
        It was? That would make a lot more sense.
      - alphonsegaston 10y ago
        I edited my comment to include a sarcasm tag.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

JamilD 10y ago

People generally feel more empowered to call out a company when others do. It's not so much about the media piling on Uber, as employees feeling safe in talking about their company's problems.

vthallam 10y ago
I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story. I can only guess of a negative PR campaign from an apparent competitor, it's very obvious if you see anonymous medium posts(minus the susan flower's) and the hyperbole created about Travis's video and now this. Like everyone, I want them to pay for the culture they created at their company which resulted in employee abuse, but this is not fair to feed the hate campaign against a company which basically revolutionized the transport system.
- JamilD 10y ago
  We should hold governments and companies accountable no matter what they do. It's not a hate campaign to call institutions out on their transgressions. It's not unfair to call out injustice wherever it exists.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story. The "people" in question being empowered are not the NYT reporters, they're the other employees that feel free to come forward, respond to requests from proactive reporters, or contact reporters themselves. The idea presented is that after there starts to be negative press, more people come forward, thus more news. There are many reasons this might be true. A very simple one is that most people may think their concerns are isolated, and not mention it to others enough to learn how endemic they really are. In this case, the employees that have info about this program might not have been happy about it, but might have thought the company was just doing what it had to and were willing to overlook it. Other negative news may change their opinion of the company just enough to put them over the threshold of thinking it should be brought to light. Then again, some employees may have been perfectly fine with this program, but know the public will react negatively, and are using it to punish the company for other misdeeds (such as the reported sexism). There are many explanations for why people with knowledge of misdeeds may come forward once it's reported. This happens with victims as well (e.g. Bill Cosby). It's easy to think you're the only one when there's no evidence to the contrary.

colemickens 10y ago

Comments like this confuse me. Are you accusing the author of fabricating facts? Do you contest the facts or testimonies in the article? What is the justification for calling this a "hit piece"? Did you actually read it? Why is it surprising that a company under the spotlight... winds up with more journalistic investigations?

oculusthrift 10y ago
Do you not think the boycottUber thing was a little overblown? What about releasing the video of Kalanick being illegally recorded and framing it as him "exploding" when he was relatively calm? All I'm saying is that focuses on silly stuff like that undermines the larger disturbing cases of law breaking and sexism.
- colemickens 10y ago
  So you shirk all of my questions and then question if boycotting a company for repeated, serious, abuse of their employees was overblown? I have a feeling we're not going to see eye to eye on this so I will bow out.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  But you don't think this story is "silly stuff" do you? And besides it's not like Uber hasn't also benefitted from illegal recordings: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/15/12201134/uber-ergo-admit-lie-investigation-court-travis-kalanick http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/15/12201134/uber-ergo-admit-l...
  - oculusthrift 10y ago
    That story is legitimate and was released in July. My only gripe was that it seems some were holding onto stories like that, or sometimes even trivial stories and are now releasing them to essentialy dogpile.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago

derefr 10y ago

My running hypothesis is that many journalists have found "dirt" on various companies or individuals, and have written it up as ready-to-release hit pieces... and then let it sit, because it currently goes against the sociopolitical zeitgeist. The moment anyone or anything becomes disliked, all these pre-written stories get published.

oculusthrift 10y ago
I'm fairly certain that the Google lawsuit, the video of them running the red light, and the yelling video were timed. How long did they have them? They just happened to get them the week Uber was plastered all over?

rsanheim 10y ago

I don't think it is that strange, you often see this type of snowball effect of leaks and insider info after an organization or person hits a certain tipping point of negative press. See also the many reports of sexual abuse that came out around Trump pre-election when things like the access hollywood video came out.

TillE 10y ago

Well, yes. Dan O'Sullivan (who spawned #DeleteUber) is a socialist and not shy about it. Of course he hates Uber for many reasons, all of which are entirely legitimate if you share his values. Always more enlightening to talk earnestly about differing values than suspecting some kind of hidden agenda or irrational bias.

george_ciobanu 10y ago
Values can be nuanced. Yes to free market but guess what, it occasionally needs checks and balances because while it works for a particular company it might bring society as a whole down. Infrastructure like roads and electricity should not be controlled by a company because it's supposed to benefit everyone. Let's talk about Uber. Say they survive this situation and thrive as a business, taking over the global cab market. Imagine they also perfect self-driving cars and next month they fire all the drivers. Suddenly you have a company of ~10,000 people getting all the money from all rides around the world. And most of the money goes to the executives and a few thousand shareholders. You now have a group of millions of people unable to make a living, and support their families. Apply this to all jobs that require mostly drivers (trucking, busses etc) and we just destroyed ~10 million jobs (including supporting infrastructure) in the US alone. These people need to make a living - if Uber ends up paying super low tax (compared to what it displaces) we have a huge number of people making no money and a few getting all of it. Civil unrest follows naturally (in one form or another) and you end up with either 1. Segmented civilization with a few people defending their wealth with hired guns 2. Social reform - guaranteed basic income for a while, but long term? 3. Revolution where the mob takes over and the outcome is anyone's guess - an extreme form of socialism? It's not just about values, a lot of it is about long-term thinking. Which of the three outcomes is better may be a question of values - is it better that a few people do super well and everyone else suffers, or most do pretty well? Without some social stability and wellness companies cannot function - people need money to pay with, and without jobs there's not much money to go around.
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  This an example of what I consider the fatal (probably for us) defect of the neoliberal ideology. As implemented you end up with societal organizations being unable to engage in coherent policy and action.

yestoallthat 10y ago

While I don't like the company either, I wouldn't be surprised if competing companies had some PR peeps trying to stoke the flames. Why would they pass it up?

tyingq 10y ago
Stoking the flames, perhaps, but... "Greyball and the broader VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees" The employees, current and former, are lighting the fires.

jobu 10y ago

There's definitely some piling on by former employees and reporters. It seems to be a bit of a human trait, and I remember some of this happening to Amazon in the wake of the NY Times piece a couple years ago (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...). That said, the dirt coming from Uber seems to be a lot worse and a lot more widespread for a company that is 1/30th the size of what Amazon was 2 years ago.

MegaButts 10y ago
> That said, the dirt coming from Uber seems to be a lot worse and a lot more widespread for a company that is 1/30th the size of what Amazon was 2 years ago. I assume this is ignoring drivers? Surely if you include the contractors the size difference isn't so stark. I would actually expect Uber to be larger, but I don't know.
- dralley 10y ago
  But "they're contractors, not employees", remember. That's why Uber doesn't have to take any responsibility for their actions.

garrettr_ 10y ago

I think it's a mistake to interpret the wave of stories about Uber's misbehavior as indicative of a "hit job" or "media bias" against Uber. Courage is contagious, and as people have started to speak out publicly against Uber's abuses, it appears current and former employees are becoming emboldened to share their experiences as well. I hope that this wave of public backlash will demonstrate to Uber, and the tech industry as a whole, that the market is not blind to unethical behavior, and cutthroat competition at the expense of your employees and the law is not necessarily a winning strategy.

sharkweek 10y ago
Also note the author of all these pieces from the NYT is Mike Isaac, who is very well connected with Uber sources.
azernik 10y ago
There's a similar phenomenon with sexual assault allegations - often they cluster in time, because a single accuser is more likely to be taken seriously when there are others making similar accusations. This is, BTW, the motivation behind an app I've heard of where you can file a sealed sexual assault report against someone, with verified date of filing, to be unsealed only if some number of people make an accusation against the same person.

accountface 10y ago

A single leak will often embolden others to follow suit, it's somewhat typical.

hackuser 10y ago

> It almost starts to undermine the case against them when there are all these hit jobs coming out and it starts to seem that the media is biased or relishing their fall. Think of what this means: The more a business (or anyone) does wrong, then the more news stories there are about them doing wrong ... then more likely it is that the news stories are 'hit jobs'. You can see how that doesn't work. Everyone subject to criticism by the news media calls it a 'hit job', reporter bias, or something similar. I see nothing in this story that suggests such a thing; this seems like a serious problem and the allegations are seem well-supported.