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No, this is bullshit. Since I joined, Uber has been behaving very ethically. Yes, there have been problems, which are mainly with unchecked culture in some gro

No, this is bullshit. Since I joined, Uber has been behaving very ethically. Yes, there have been problems, which are mainly with unchecked culture in some groups, but I think things have turned around for the entire company. There have been major issues with a very aggressive culture but unlike most other companies, the management is really trying to change things. We will see if any differences are really made but I'm optimistic. All you hear about from the media is the shitty things from the past, but if you had visibility into the great things that uber does that I see every day, you would think differently. Case in point, the new exec from Apple and the Harvard business professor who both joined this week. They have complete clarity into what kind of company Uber is right now, and they both joined. Yes, Uber has made mistakes in the past, but since 2015 I think it has really grown up. It has issues just like any other large company but unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry and is at least trying to change. I have no qualms with working for Uber and i have no trouble with my ethics or morals working here. If someone has a bigoted view on Uber or Uber employees without knowing all the facts, then I have no issues never working for or with them, because they probably have other unchecked bigoted views as well, and would probably be terrible to work with.

gpawl 9y ago
Are these not since 2015? http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-scandal-recap-2017-3/#friday-february-24-losing-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-scandal-recap-2017-3/#fr...
mikeisaacNYT 9y ago
I'm a reporter for the New York Times. You are dead wrong. This account is accurate. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/uber-driver-in-india-is-found-guilty-of-rape.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/uber-driver-in... I imagine you're a lower-to-mid-level employee and don't have knowledge of this incident firsthand.
- employee8000 9y ago
  When did I say that the account was wrong?
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    I think he read "This is bullshit" and assumed you were referring to the report in the article, not the comment you actually replied to.
  - urbanj 9y ago
    Well done for typifying the culture at Uber.
  - sctb 9y ago
    Personal attacks are not OK on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - urbanj 9y ago
      I guess as an Uber employee, he gets away with a light warning, as that's what Uber employees typically get after crossing a line.
  - urbanj 9y ago
    Oh, nice cowardly ninja-edit. In case anyone missed it, employee8000 said something like "on the behalf of Uber employees, I take great pleasure in telling Mike Isaac to fuck himself"
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- icpmacdo 9y ago
  Mike please stay on Hacker News! You're a great journalist!
urbanj 9y ago
Yeah, this Alexander guy was in place a couple of days ago, and once this story broke, he's no longer with Uber. Definitely completely above-board, transparent and ethical.
kevinburke 9y ago
> since 2015 I think it has really grown up The lie to this statement is that all of Uber's actions to fix their problems (fire people, outside investigation, hire new HR heads) have come in response to bad PR, not an internal recognition that things weren't OK. Travis Kalanick, who was 37 years old when he sanctioned all of this behavior, is still the head of the company. I am sure many of the people who turned a blind eye when star performers were protected, or women were leaving the company in droves, are still there. This story is a case in point: Alexander wasn't fired, even after half of the executive team knew what he did, and the legal team ordered him to destroy the documents, until Recode started asking about the incident. If the company had really "grown up" as you suggest he would have been gone before the reporters started asking about him. If the company had "grown up" then one of the many people Susan Fowler talked to (in 2016) would have sounded alarms, before she wrote her blog post about it. > unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry It's a well known phenomenon that people tend to overestimate the extent to which their habits and behaviors are shared by others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect. A simpler explanation for the series of bad headlines attributable to Uber and not other companies is that Uber was involved in worse behavior than those other companies.
- employee8000 9y ago
  Yes, star performers were protected in the past. Not anymore. Many top performers were fired due to this recent investigation. Hopefully more are fired after the Holder report. "Women leaving in droves" is a lie. The recent demographics report shows that, although we could do better, the female ratio is about equivalent to other tech companies. And there is a concerted effort to change our processes and training to reduce or remove unconscious bias in our hiring process to make it even better. And powerful women are joining as well. We just had two major female execs with a huge list of accomplishments join. They know full well the company as it is today and wouldn't join if it was a piece of shit like many of you think it is. I can't speak of the Alexander case because I know nothing of it. But it's still in that 2014 era that I was talking about. That would not fly now, and I think his firing is in line with how the company is today in 2017. Since Susan Fowler, I think there has been a major change in company culture. Travis revealed in an allhands that he himself needs to change. He had strong opinions on what he wanted the company culture to be but he finally understood that he was wrong. He wanted a hard-driving, ultra-logical company that squeezed the best out of every single employee but rewarded them well with stock. But after seeing the unintended consequences, that it didn't work. It worked well when you have a handful of employees that love doing this, but it doesn't scale at 10,000+ employees and he finally admitted that. As well, the qualities that made him a great startup CEO do not translate to a 10,000 person company and he finally realized that in March. These are all things he admitted in the all hands, and it seems like The company is rapidly changing to becoming much more empathetic. He is giving full reins to the New SVP HR and she is doing a great job in my opinions. I really do believe that the changes will be transformational.
forgottenpass 9y ago
You often post here as if your position inside Uber gives you enough insight to exonerate the soul of that company. But how much do you really see? How high on the totem poll are you? How many small "well, that [system/data/etc] could be abused, but I trust us"-es do you live with every day? Edit: Just realized you're the same guy that said there were scary warnings in the UI when you touched production data, but didn't have a clue if there were actually logs, if those logs got audited, and if those audits could get the C-level fired. But you were still confident enough to assess Uber as taking security seriously.
- employee8000 9y ago
  You can choose to believe the anecdotes of an Uber employee who presumably is drinking from the Kool Aid, or media reports that demonize Uber and don't report on any of the good things that have been going on.
  - dang 9y ago
    It's easy to understand why you'd want to defend your employer and coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with doing so. Unfortunately, you've broken the HN guidelines repeatedly while doing it. You've also used this account almost exclusively to get involved in flamewars. For those reasons I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe you'll follow the site rules in the future. From a moderation point of view this has nothing to do with who you happen to work for. It hurts your employer to have you defending it in such uncivil ways in public, though, so they're probably better off with this account banned, too.
    - employee8001 9y ago
      Right. So I civilly answer allegations that uber employees are somehow unethical or complicit in harassment or unethical behavior, and the perpetrators of this libel are safe, and I'm the one that's banned. Got it. You may not agree with what I wrote but I stand by everything I wrote as being respectful. Except to Mike Isaac who has an agenda against Uber with his reporting. Besides that, can you point to a single comment that was "uncivil"?

gpawl 9y ago

Are these not since 2015? http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-scandal-recap-2017-3/#friday-february-24-losing-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-scandal-recap-2017-3/#fr...

mikeisaacNYT 9y ago

I'm a reporter for the New York Times. You are dead wrong. This account is accurate. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/uber-driver-in-india-is-found-guilty-of-rape.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/uber-driver-in... I imagine you're a lower-to-mid-level employee and don't have knowledge of this incident firsthand.

employee8000 9y ago
When did I say that the account was wrong?
- kevinburke 9y ago
  I think he read "This is bullshit" and assumed you were referring to the report in the article, not the comment you actually replied to.
- urbanj 9y ago
  Well done for typifying the culture at Uber.
- sctb 9y ago
  Personal attacks are not OK on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - urbanj 9y ago
    I guess as an Uber employee, he gets away with a light warning, as that's what Uber employees typically get after crossing a line.
- urbanj 9y ago
  Oh, nice cowardly ninja-edit. In case anyone missed it, employee8000 said something like "on the behalf of Uber employees, I take great pleasure in telling Mike Isaac to fuck himself"
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
icpmacdo 9y ago
Mike please stay on Hacker News! You're a great journalist!

urbanj 9y ago

Yeah, this Alexander guy was in place a couple of days ago, and once this story broke, he's no longer with Uber. Definitely completely above-board, transparent and ethical.

kevinburke 9y ago

> since 2015 I think it has really grown up The lie to this statement is that all of Uber's actions to fix their problems (fire people, outside investigation, hire new HR heads) have come in response to bad PR, not an internal recognition that things weren't OK. Travis Kalanick, who was 37 years old when he sanctioned all of this behavior, is still the head of the company. I am sure many of the people who turned a blind eye when star performers were protected, or women were leaving the company in droves, are still there. This story is a case in point: Alexander wasn't fired, even after half of the executive team knew what he did, and the legal team ordered him to destroy the documents, until Recode started asking about the incident. If the company had really "grown up" as you suggest he would have been gone before the reporters started asking about him. If the company had "grown up" then one of the many people Susan Fowler talked to (in 2016) would have sounded alarms, before she wrote her blog post about it. > unlike other companies, they have aired their dirty laundry It's a well known phenomenon that people tend to overestimate the extent to which their habits and behaviors are shared by others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect. A simpler explanation for the series of bad headlines attributable to Uber and not other companies is that Uber was involved in worse behavior than those other companies.

employee8000 9y ago
Yes, star performers were protected in the past. Not anymore. Many top performers were fired due to this recent investigation. Hopefully more are fired after the Holder report. "Women leaving in droves" is a lie. The recent demographics report shows that, although we could do better, the female ratio is about equivalent to other tech companies. And there is a concerted effort to change our processes and training to reduce or remove unconscious bias in our hiring process to make it even better. And powerful women are joining as well. We just had two major female execs with a huge list of accomplishments join. They know full well the company as it is today and wouldn't join if it was a piece of shit like many of you think it is. I can't speak of the Alexander case because I know nothing of it. But it's still in that 2014 era that I was talking about. That would not fly now, and I think his firing is in line with how the company is today in 2017. Since Susan Fowler, I think there has been a major change in company culture. Travis revealed in an allhands that he himself needs to change. He had strong opinions on what he wanted the company culture to be but he finally understood that he was wrong. He wanted a hard-driving, ultra-logical company that squeezed the best out of every single employee but rewarded them well with stock. But after seeing the unintended consequences, that it didn't work. It worked well when you have a handful of employees that love doing this, but it doesn't scale at 10,000+ employees and he finally admitted that. As well, the qualities that made him a great startup CEO do not translate to a 10,000 person company and he finally realized that in March. These are all things he admitted in the all hands, and it seems like The company is rapidly changing to becoming much more empathetic. He is giving full reins to the New SVP HR and she is doing a great job in my opinions. I really do believe that the changes will be transformational.

forgottenpass 9y ago

You often post here as if your position inside Uber gives you enough insight to exonerate the soul of that company. But how much do you really see? How high on the totem poll are you? How many small "well, that [system/data/etc] could be abused, but I trust us"-es do you live with every day? Edit: Just realized you're the same guy that said there were scary warnings in the UI when you touched production data, but didn't have a clue if there were actually logs, if those logs got audited, and if those audits could get the C-level fired. But you were still confident enough to assess Uber as taking security seriously.

employee8000 9y ago
You can choose to believe the anecdotes of an Uber employee who presumably is drinking from the Kool Aid, or media reports that demonize Uber and don't report on any of the good things that have been going on.
- dang 9y ago
  It's easy to understand why you'd want to defend your employer and coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with doing so. Unfortunately, you've broken the HN guidelines repeatedly while doing it. You've also used this account almost exclusively to get involved in flamewars. For those reasons I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe you'll follow the site rules in the future. From a moderation point of view this has nothing to do with who you happen to work for. It hurts your employer to have you defending it in such uncivil ways in public, though, so they're probably better off with this account banned, too.
  - employee8001 9y ago
    Right. So I civilly answer allegations that uber employees are somehow unethical or complicit in harassment or unethical behavior, and the perpetrators of this libel are safe, and I'm the one that's banned. Got it. You may not agree with what I wrote but I stand by everything I wrote as being respectful. Except to Mike Isaac who has an agenda against Uber with his reporting. Besides that, can you point to a single comment that was "uncivil"?