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The Holder Report on Uber
- sjbase 9y agoLink to the report itself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3863782/The-Holder-Report-on-Uber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3863782/The-Holde...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sbarre 9y agoSo is this the full report, or an abridged version for public consumption (as was indicated might be released a few days ago)?
- danielvf 9y agoThis is a list of recommendations. Many are stated as blandly as possible. This is definitely not the full report.
- dragonwriter 9y agoIt's just the recommendations from the report with an added introduction about the process that motivated the report and what the Board did (accept all the recommendations) with the report. It is not, misleading headline aside, the report itself.
- tmh79 9y agoVery interesting recommendations, but no mention of the CTO, Thuan, who was called out by Fowler herself in her blog post.
- boxcardavin 9y agoI think this whole Uber situation is a good reminder to the valley that the "No Assholes" rule is still a good policy.
- rhizome 9y agoThe rule falls apart when there are assholes at the top of the org chart.
- jazzyk 9y agoWhich is, sadly, almost always the case.
- rhizome 9y agoI think it's more that "asshole" is never defined in terms of the behavior of the people at the top of the org chart, unless it's like this case where people at the top start spraying their asshole-ness outside of the company. Absent that, all criticism is chalked up to disgruntlement.
- compuguy 9y agoSadly, that is where they seem to coalesce, in management positions.
- pyrophane 9y agoI dunno. Uber's "mostly assholes" approach seems to have gotten them pretty far. Perhaps the message is rather that you can be as awful and unscrupulous as you like because by the time it bites you you you'll either be long gone or far enough along to bring on Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington to rehabilitate your image.
- boxcardavin 9y agoWe'll see, Kalanick has said that without self-driving in Uber's future they are dead.
- dekhn 9y agothat's the sort of statement that bay area CEOs say when they want something to happen. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.
- thogenhaven 9y agoIf someone can write 13 pages in bullet forms about things you need to change, you're not doing your job very well...
- tptacek 9y agoThere are very few companies I have ever worked with that had the majority of these bullets covered, so no, I don't think this particular snark is very biting.
- valuearb 9y agoIf you can't write 13 pages of bullet pointed recommendations to any client, you aren't going to be successful consultant. Move the catered dinners to earlier times? Now that's padding.
- adjkant 9y agoThat's actually a crucial part of the culture to me - my company does dinner at 6PM, which everyone in the company knows is motivation for keeping people at work until then. I'm very thankful it's not 8:15PM. I don't want to be expected to work late daily and then have it disguised as a perk.
- devdas 9y ago6 pm is way too early for dinner. We don't work on farms without electricity.
- adjkant 9y agoFor the US, 6 PM is a normal dinner time, electricity or not. If you're in Europe, I understand where you're coming from. Mind you, that's the start - you can come and get food as late as 8PM if you please. The point is that for the most part, everyone can get their dinner at the time they want to.
- creepydata 9y ago
- ProAm 9y agoSo long Travis.
- valuearb 9y agoIs he firing himself? Because he still has absolute voting control and at least another $6B in the bank.
- terryjsmith 9y agoWhile there are some concrete next steps in here (hire a COO, management training, HR training, the "Rooney Rule"), what is the goal and how do these steps connect to it? As far as the harassment stuff, I think the solution is clear: have a zero tolerance policy and enforce it. But it otherwise says the words "inclusion" and "diversity" a lot, but never really connects those words to achievable outcomes and seems superficial. Maybe the end result is to restore Uber's image - in which case doing those things makes sense - but without any goal posts or authority, many of these recommendations seem to fall short.
- xapata 9y agoWhat measurements do you propose?
- gameshot911 9y agoLess sexual harassment by at least... half!
- rjeli 9y agoWell, it's the responsibility of the special committee to determine that.
- bastawhiz 9y agoYou don't "measure" zero tolerance. And there's no success here--that is, there's no point at which you say "this problem is solved." You commit to throwing out the bad apples, you throw out the bad apples, and promise to throw out any bad apples as you find them in the future.
- xapata 9y agoClaiming zero tolerance is a desire to stay ignorant of your measuring precision. You need to know how accurate your tools are before you can estimate how many incidents occur.
- 9y ago
- paulsutter 9y agoThe meat of the document is missing. It states the situation that triggered the investigation, describes the process followed, and gives the recommendations. But it doesn't tell us what they learned through the process.
- SilasX 9y agoI agree. The thing everyone wants to know is (stuff like), how did it get to the point that HR employees believed: 1) They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense". 2) A bad performance review for reporting someone's sexual advances "isn't retaliation because we said you could transfer". 3) It's better to just buy jackets for the men than to buy no jackets or to pay more for the women's. I mean, you can kind of loosely guess at it from the recommendations, but nothing direct.
- jldugger 9y ago> They should lie about "oh it was this guys first offense". There's some implied reasons in the language, though we can't tell whether that was a direct consequence. > Human Resources Record Keeping > Uber should ensure it has appropriate tools, including complaint tracking software, to keep better track of complaints, personnel records, and employee data. > For example, if a complaint is substantiated but results in discipline other than termination of employment, relevant stakeholders should be able to easily identify whether prior complaints have been lodged to ensure that appropriate action is taken with respect to repeat offenders. Likewise, senior managers should be able to track whether certain organizations or managers give rise to multiple complaints such that intervention with the manager is needed. Uber should also emphasize the importance of recordkeeping to all Human Resources staff, and impose consequences for failure to adhere to recordkeeping requirements. Seems unlikely, given that Uber released it themselves, that the report would provide any sort of self-incriminating evidence. So all we can really do is read between the lines and #deleteuber.
- azernik 9y agoThere's some stuff that is interesting in that the recommendations indicate what wasn't done. In addition to what jldugger pointed out, for example, they apparently were not doing any training for: 1. HR about how to handle complaints. 2. Managers about... well, anything? But particularly, they did not include any policies on harassment. 3. Employees in general for how to interview candidates. EDIT: And reading through: On harassment policies: "Human Resources should emphasize the importance of adhering to the existing policies and codes of conduct for work events such as offsite conferences and meetings, including those held at hotels and resorts. It should not be necessary to draft separate policies for these events. Policies should be applied consistently throughout the organization. No special treatment should be given to any employee, regardless of level, tenure, or past performance." Seems to jibe pretty well with Fowler's story and others. EDIT 2: And they even emphasized it in a separate bullet point! "Policies and practices should be applied consistently throughout the organization. No special treatment should be given to any employee, regardless of level, tenure, or past performance." On substances: "With respect to alcohol consumption at after-hours work events and at other work-sponsored events, Uber should consider limiting the budget available to managers for alcohol purchases, restrict reimbursement for alcohol-related events, and include training for managers on appropriate events for retreats and out-of-work events." That whole section on the internal transfer process ("Remove Transfer Barriers") speaks to a lot of issues Fowler brought up, e.g. "An individual evaluator can determine whether the employee is requesting a transfer for reasons relating to a difficult or divisive work environment, or if a supervisor is attempting to block a transfer for improper purposes." Etc. etc.
- dingdongding 9y agoTLDR version. Anyone?
- spenczar5 9y agoGive more independence to oversight groups and more authority to the board, and institute basic, common HR practices like keeping track of complaints of employees, doing performance reviews of executives, and clarifying how promotions/pay work. [edit] Oh, and number one: decrease Travis Kalanick's power.
- cozzyd 9y agoI especially like: "Uber should consider moving the catered dinner it offers to a time when this benefit can be utilized by a broader group of employees, including employees who have spouses or families waiting for them at home, and that signals an earlier end to the work day." Note to Linux users: this PDF looks terrible without msttcorefonts installed. I guess MS Word neglects to embed fonts? Also, as someone who is not used to seeing documents generated by MS Word, I'm surprised at how bad the typography is in general (although maybe this due to user error...for example it looks like hyphenation might be disabled.)
- jfoutz 9y agoFont rights are ridiculously complicated. Word probably plays it safe and never embeds, because it's so easy to break a copyright.
- hsivonen 9y agoMS fonts have the embedding permission bit set, IIRC.
- gsnedders 9y agoIf msttcorefonts solves it, then it'll just be relying on the fact that historically the PDF format guaranteed access to 14 basic fonts. The guarantee was that Helvetica, Courier, Times and a few others were always available, or metric-equivalent alternatives were provided, and almost any OS today meets that requirement.
- cozzyd 9y ago[cozzyd@cosmogenic]$ pdffonts The-Holder-Report-on-Uber.pdf name type encoding emb sub uni object ID ------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- --------- TimesNewRomanPSMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 272 0 Georgia TrueType WinAnsi no no no 274 0 Georgia-Bold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 276 0 Georgia-Italic TrueType WinAnsi no no no 278 0 TimesNewRomanPSMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 48 0 Georgia-Bold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 49 0 Georgia TrueType WinAnsi no no no 47 0 Arial-BoldMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 46 0 Georgia-Italic TrueType WinAnsi no no no 53 0
- netvarun 9y agoRandom thought: Marissa Mayer (who hacker news informs me, just quit her previous job) could potentially be their COO
- jmccaf 9y agoThe 2 posts do seem serendipitous .
- khazhoux 9y ago"quit"
- jdmichal 9y agoI don't understand the scare quotes. The division she was hired to actually lead was sold. There's no reason for her to stay. They can easily find a bean counter type -- and pay them a hell of a lot less -- to manage the remaining investments.
- gertef 9y agoA bean counter can't destroy value nearly as quickly as an experienced CEO
- yesbabyyes 9y agoApparently, they're paying the bean counter twice as much. http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-net-worth-salary/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-ne...
- jdmichal 9y agoWell that certainly looks like a pretty sweet deal.
- aemachado94 9y agoFeels like Uber just paid a load of money to get patronized by a well-respected official. Nothing(as far as this public version suggests) in this document should be surprising to a growing company. "You mean if we create a patriarchal company culture that preys on personal weaknesses and demeans women and minorities we're going to have a bad public image? Gee, who would've thought!"
- davidbrent 9y agoUnfortunate as it may be, sometimes in large corporations, it takes paying an outsider to identify and document something, before anything will be done about it.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoThat's not what it takes: it's what they prefer to be done by the kinds of people who won't disrupt them too much with reforms. There's been many internal assessments in companies that did even better. Usually just have to survey and interview the workers to see what's going on. The supervisors and managers, too, but the big problems usually start from them on up.
- beager 9y agoNot sure who said it first, but "a consultant is someone you pay to take your watch and tell you what time it is"
- joshualross 9y agoI think the point was to have an independent party give the recommendations in order to avoid any bias or partiality in the matter.
- an27 9y agoHow do you define "patriarchal" in the context of that sentence?
- jonstewart 9y agoBlind Résumé Review stands out.
- misterbowfinger 9y agoI'm mostly unimpressed. Most of the suggestions are just process changes, which often just obfuscate organizational issues and cripple performance. The only value is the signal it sends to employees that affect the culture negatively. The most substantive recommendation, IMO, is that they suggest a COO that controls most of the day-to-day. It's a clear move to reduce the CEO's power, and most likely a path to remove the CEO in the future unless the CEO regains power, which is unlikely.
- danpalmer 9y agoI disagree. There are lots of things here that are very widescale, and as the board accepted _all_ of these suggestions, assuming they all happen, I think real change can be realised within Uber.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThis is not the Holder (well, Covington would be more accurate) Report. The Introduction to this document makes reference to report Covington prepared for and presented to the Special Committee of Uber's board, and to the fact that the full board adopted all of the recommendations in that report. Beyond the Introduction, this seems to just be the recommendations from the Covington report; the full report (per the Introduction ) was to cover “(1) Uber’s workplace environment as it related to the allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in Ms. Fowler’s post; (2) whether the company’s policies and practices were sufficient to prevent and properly address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace; and (3) what steps Uber could take to ensure that its commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace was reflected not only in the company’s policies but made real in the experiences of each of Uber’s employees.” This document only includes the part addressing (3), which implicitly indicates that the bottom line conclusion on (2) was “no”, but doesn't really provide any clear information on (1).
- logicallee 9y agoSo is the report available anywhere? (I guess not, or you'd link it.) However, if it's internal, then what happened - just the recommendations were leaked to the Times? Also, for the moderators: you may want to update the title to "Holder Recommendations on Uber".
- smackfu 9y agoThey were always planning to release the recommendations, at least according to the article I read on Saturday before this board meeting.
- theCricketer 9y agoThe recommendations weren't leaked. It was made publicly available by Uber. It is even on their website: https://newsroom.uber.com/covington-recommendations/ https://newsroom.uber.com/covington-recommendations/
- logicallee 9y ago
- wonder_bread 9y agoMy eyes are bleeding from all the bureaucratic jargon. "Special Committee", "Oversight Committee", "Independent Committee" for the promotions process, checklists for alcohol consumption, human resources training, etc. I dearly hope it doesn't take this many layers of control within a company to ensure a livable atmosphere for its employees.
- blatherard 9y agoAccording to Wikipedia, Uber has about 12,000 employees. Especially given how bad things apparently got, it seems reasonable to require a few layers of oversight to achieve lasting positive change.
- vkou 9y agoYou can have controls, or you can work in a frathouse. So far, they've opted for option #2.
- djrogers 9y agoOr you can start from day 1 with a culture that doesn't need that level of oversight to keep people from acting indecently. I see all this oversight as something that a company like Uber needs to clean up it's toxic culture, but if the pool is kept clean from day one, you don't need nearly as much chlorine...
- CamelCaseName 9y agoIt's much easier to keep a group of 12 people clean. It's much harder to keep a group of 12,000 clean.
- stupidcar 9y agoYou're just demonstrating the same facile mindset that plagues experts of every discipline, so convinced that the problems of every other field -- of which they are largely ignorant -- are obviously trivial, and could be solved with a bit of common sense. This XKCD cartoon, basically: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/ Consider the difficulty most people on this site will have encountered just getting a handful of software components to cooperate successfully. Now imagine trying to do the same with an organisation of thousands of human beings. Left to their own devices, large groups of human beings easily fall into horrendous anti-patterns. Avoiding or fixing these anti-patterns is not just hard, it is probably the hardest problem human beings have ever faced, given that we have been working on it for the duration of our existence, and we're still mostly terrible at it. This is not trivial, it is mindbendingly difficult. The "bureaucratic jargon" you mention is just the specialist language that the field of management of human resources has created to talk about the problems they're trying to solve, and the structures they've designed to solve them. And really, it's hardly impenetrable in comparison with even a mildly technical blog post. When you dismiss problems like this as easily solvable, or the recommendations of experts as bureaucratic jargon, then you're the pointy-haired boss waving away technical arguments why something is infeasible. You're the politician saying ISPs need to put more filters on the tubes to censor the internet. You're the cable host smugly dismissing climatology as fake news.
- killjoywashere 9y agoEvery new grad: read this. Then file it away and review it as soon as you have people reporting to you. This should be required reading for every start-up founder and every manager at every mid-size and large org, and every person who criticizes the decisions of those people or hopes to be in those positions. Which means every creative, every knowledge worker, engineer, designer, lawyer, physician, all of them. And therefore, almost without exception, everyone reading this comment. Edit: This is the executive symmary. It contains a lot of what to do. Going forward, you don't need to know so much how Uber got into the mess they're in. You need to know how to stay out of similar messes. This is a good plan for how to stay out of such messes.
- djsumdog 9y agoWell, not this one. If we see the actual Holder report, that one maybe. This one .. just looks like a lot of frivolous non-sense bullshit.
- nl 9y agoThis is the recommendations of that report.
- bduerst 9y agoYeah, this is some free management consulting. While it's tailored to a very specific problem at Uber, it's still a set of good best practices to consider.
- killjoywashere 9y ago> free management consulting For additional context, I'm certain Holder's hourly rate would wreck most any start-up's budget! This is free good consulting.
- stupidcar 9y agoIt's also interesting for those looking for startup ideas. The procedures and practices recommended here are ways to reduce institutional maladies based mostly on human activity, but it's probable that many of them could be be achieved, or augmented, through technological solutions. Think about it: If you can build an innovative piece of tech that genuinely helps implement these policies, or achieve the same outcome in a different way, then you've got a huge market of large, rich organisations who'll be interested. Worth considering.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago> Uber should establish key metrics to which its leaders will be held accountable in the performance review process. This would include, for example, metrics that are tied to improving diversity, responsiveness to employee complaints, employee satisfaction, and compliance. Every metric has the power for evil. This will be gamed, simply by measuring these things behaviour will be affected in unpredictable ways. I understand the challenge they're up against but I absolutely cringe at turning some of these subjective items into metrics.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoThis smells a lot like a pentesting report: pay people a lot of money to make a report, persevere with current bad practices, then when litigation comes up say "Hey, we took this seriously. Look at all the money we spent on this report!"
- fullshark 9y agoIdk, a lot of heads rolled, including the supposed right hand man of the CEO that was supposedly behind some egregious things. What more can we say should have been done without seeing the information behind the report?
- jstewartmobile 9y agoThis may just be my cynicism creeping in here, but I suspect the head rolling had more to do with quarterly results, and this was just an opportunity to cover those up with "virtue" signaling. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-loss-exceeds-800-million-in-third-quarter-on-1-7-billion-in-net-revenue https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-lo...
- jstewartmobile 9y agoCynicism vindicated: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13/a-top-uber-board-member-just-cracked-a-joke-about-women-at-the-worst-possible-time https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13...
- bjl 9y agoAs long as Kalinick is CEO they haven't done enough.
- mandevil 9y agoAccording to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13/a-top-uber-board-member-just-cracked-a-joke-about-women-at-the-worst-possible-time/?hpid=hp_rhp-more-top-stories_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.5480b857d3c7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/13... One of the Uber board members made a misogynist joke during the company-wide meeting explaining how Uber was going to fix its culture. This is... special.
- ljk 9y ago> fix it's culture its*
- Twirrim 9y agoYou'd almost expect that to happen on an episode of The Office.
- mandevil 9y agoOh God, it gets worse: he interrupted the only female board member to make this ?joke?. His apology has already been emailed to the entire company. This isn't quite a defenestratable offense, but does illustrate the scale of the challenge ahead of Uber.
- c3534l 9y agoDid you just use question marks as quotation marks?
- 9y ago
- sywan 9y agoWhile some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup as a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered dinner, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during the weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.
- s73ver 9y agoWell, for one, Google does offer the catered dinners. If Uber didn't, then the engineers either wouldn't stay late (ideally; workaholism is bad), or they'd go somewhere that does offer that kind of thing.
- alanh 9y agoAnyone have plain text or HTML of this content? Update: https://pastebin.com/L0Qf7Ddp https://pastebin.com/L0Qf7Ddp
- sywan 9y agoWhile some of the points in the report are legit, I feel most of the content is so general that you could literally change the title of the company to any other tech firms and it will probably still work. I genuinely believe that people work hard because they believe what they do has a meaning, not because the company serves free dinner/beer/water at 7pm or 8:15pm. I don't understand why you should run a fast-paced startup like a non-profit. As someone who used to work in law firms, not only we don't have catered anything, we regularly stay till after 10pm and on-call during weekends/holidays so we make barely the same, if no less, than a first-year engineer. And you let a law firm make "better workplace culture" recommendations. I am so lost.
- OliverJones 9y agoAgreed. These could be the speaker notes for the mandatory "don't be an asshat" training I've taken at three or four different workplaces. Doesn't mean anything in it is wrong. It's missing the obvious "theory of operation" part though, which could be stated as "don't be an asshat" or "behave like you have to explain your behavior to your mother when she's on her deathbed," or maybe even "what if your sweetheart's sister worked here?"
- saalweachter 9y agoI'm willing to believe that at a certain point in a startup's life cycle, it is reasonable to expect the early employees to work non-stop. It's also reasonable to sell your product early on at a loss, to garner interest. But at a certain point, if your customers are not willing to pay enough for your product to cover the costs, you've got a problem. Likewise, if your business only works if your employees are working 80+ hours a week, you have to ask yourself if you really have a viable business. I think this point comes a lot earlier than most people are willing to admit. If your startup needs 10 people to get off the ground and you can only afford 5 who work 'round the clock, that's one thing; if your startup needs 20,000 people and you have 10,000 working 24/7/365, that's another. I will also concede there are jobs worth devoting every waking moment to, because they are worth doing, because they satisfy you intellectually or emotionally, because they save lives, because you will benefit greatly, personally from the work, materially or in reputation. But a lot of tech and other professional jobs are a lot more predatory than that. You take a lot of young people straight from one environment which lionizes the all-nighter and accomplishing arbitrary assigned goals (college), drag them to a new place where they don't have friends, family, or anything else which either makes demands on their time or gives them meaning and validation, and then encourage them to work non-stop on projects with no clear moral pay-off and a financial payoff that accrues to other people.
- favorited 9y agoAccording to Yahoo reporting[1], a board member made a sexist joke at their all-hands meeting to address this report today. Huffington: There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board Bonderman: Actually what it shows is it’s much likely to be more talking What a garbage fire. [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-travis-194232221.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-tr...
- Tycho 9y agoI suspect Uber has a Hudsucker Proxy situation going on.
- Cyclone_ 9y agoDon't think for a second that these are isolated incidents. These things happen all the time, it just so happened that people like Susan Fowler fought back. I've seen these things happen constantly.
- theprop 9y agoI think a new charge of "criminality" must go to Holder & his law firm who probably charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for these bland, obvious recommendations.
- theprop 9y agoLet me guess...lawyers are downvoting me ;-)
- blacksqr 9y agoSo Mr. Holder, were you able to confirm the veracity of Susan Fowler's descriptions of her experiences at Uber? Mr. Holder? Is this thing on?
- blacksqr 9y agoThis wouldn't just be an attempt to bury culpable behavior under a mountain of legalese, would it?
- bb611 9y agoOn what planet would any company publicly release a document that creates a slam dunk civil case against them, unless required to do so by law? The goal was for Uber to get the value insight of outside counsel, not for all of us to do so. Susan Fowler can file a civil case and get a copy of the full report to read to a jury, but Uber's lawyers and outside counsel would have to be incompetent to let them release the full report publicly.
- blacksqr 9y agoA planet on which a $70 billion company was facing an existential threat which required it to convince the public it was serious about change, which it could do with an acknowledgement, an apology and a settlement of a few million.
- 1dundundun 9y agoBottom line is this... At some point EARLY on, you're going to want to put some thought into casting a wider net for talent and wrapping your heads around the fact that people from different (age, gender, racial, ability, socioeconomic) backgrounds can be a strategic asset to developing a world class orgs. Throw away the notion of cultural fit where you assume people have to like what you like and think how you think to "fit in". That's bullshit and extremely limiting. Build an environment where everyone feels whole and contributes. You WILL sacrifice some of the benefits of that frat boys club environment a lot of early stage startups have. You will gain the type of insight that will allow you to navigate an increasingly divese workforce and (US and global) consumer base. Be willing to make mistakes. It's a clumsy process. Uber is going to have a hell of a hard time retrofitting a less toxic culture and the numerous leaks we're seeing points to an employee base that's begging for change. Successful high growth orgs of tomorrow are gonna be the ones stumbling towards getting this shit right today.