9 ms·

Interview with Susan Fowler

210 points by bmahmood 9y ago

jsemrau 9y ago
I think the notion of the article is wrong. She did not bring down Travis. The misogynist culture he helped to create did.
- kajecounterhack 9y ago
  Her writing exposing [the misogynist culture that he helped create] was a major catalyst, so the phrasing "she brought down the CEO" is fair. Maybe be better at picking semantic nits?
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't take this thread (or any thread) in a hostile direction, even if someone is picking nits. Your comment would be much better with just the first sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jrs95 9y ago
  I don't even know if it was that, honestly. I think the whole Waymo thing had more to do with it, or it would have happened sooner.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    The Waymo lawsuit was filed about a week after Fowler's blog post was published. The huge public outcry and massive customer switch to Lyft was based off of the news of the sexual harassment lawsuit. The general American public is largely ignorant about the Waymo lawsuit. The public is well-informed about the sexual harassment revelations. Right now, many potential customers have permanently associated Uber with sexual harassment. This is far more of an existential threat to Uber than a $1B lawsuit.
- dasil003 9y ago
  Are you kidding me? She took career-risking action to bring a problem to light, and you just want to point to an abstract non-entity as having responsibility for an outcome? Give credit where credit is due FFS, sheesh.
  - trentmb 9y ago
    > abstract non-entity as having responsibility for an outcome? The patriarchy is routinely responsible for despicable outcomes.
6841iam 9y ago
While her post did send shockwaves inside Uber and the Silicon Valley at large, I think, it was Mr. Kalanick's incriminating involvement in the Waymo - Uber lawsuit that ultimately sunk Mr. Kalanick. He simply had to go.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  That is kind of how I remember it happening. After the revelations in the blog, there was a lot of talk and discussion here and other sites. Some people were fired then. But only after Waymo became involved, there were rumors of the board moving to push him out. It would have been nice if her allegations brought him down, but sadly it doesn't seem that way. In other words until investors saw their money potentially going down the drain in a lawsuit with Google, they kind of looked the other way.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    You are somewhat right. Freada & Mitch Kapor (early Uber investors) published their blog post a few days after the Waymo lawsuit was filed. The lawsuit was filed within a week of Fowler's blog post being published. The Kapors' letter was exclusively focused on Kalanick's company culture, public conduct, and gross mismanagement of sexual harassment in Uber. The Benchmark lawsuit, brought in April, mentions the failure of Kalanick to disclose to the board the risks of the Otto acquisition as the second item of six grievances. My opinion is that it is unnecessarily cynical to assume that investors didn't care about the company's tolerance of sexual harassment and Kalanick's poor behavior, especially since it was central to their public repudiation of Kalanick.
- meddlepal 9y ago
  Susan's a great mind and I have had the pleasure of chatting with her in person, but there is definitely some historical revisionism going on here. Travis created a bad Uber culture in general. He was done in not by Fowler specifically but the fruits of his failures as a leader blossoming into several parallel disasters of which Waymo was probably the major major fiasco of the bunch.
atomical 9y ago
> “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea?" Why are people so worried about going to war with North Korea? There are concentration camps in North Korea. Are South Korean and American lives worth more than the lives of those in concentration camps? The USA tried to create a free Korea during the Korean War and failed because of China and Russia. We need to try again to clean up this mess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp
- farnsworth 9y ago
  I'm not at all confident in the ability of the US to "clean up this mess". Similar arguments were made before the war in Iraq. I won't defend Saddam but I don't think you can argue that the average Iraqi ended up better off.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    You are overssimplifying the situation. Iraq and NK are/were both dictatorships but the similarity ends there. Cultural differences go very far.
    - spamizbad 9y ago
      No, you're over-simplifying this by assuming we can resolve a humanitarian issue with a war. We can't. Even conservatives like Steve Bannon know this. The Iraq War plus its aftermath has a death toll approaching 1 million, 1/6th the size of the Holocaust. Conflict with North Korea will be even worse.
      - atomical 9y ago
        You're responding to the wrong commenter. No one knows how many people die in North Korean concentration camps every year. But you can be sure that the total number of deaths will increase every year that the Kims are in power. There is no solution but war.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
Her background is pretty non-traditional. Such people tend to be independent and consequently have a lot of integrity -- they do the career destroying things that almost nobody does. The only woman on the board then, Arianna Huffington, who had vowed that the culture of “brilliant jerks” must end, had been trying to help Mr. Kalanick by advising him to sleep more and meditate. But he caused another kerfuffle when he chose to meditate in the lactation room. This sounds like an environment where people were really banking on no one ever saying anything about anything -- which is just not a prudent thing to do.
- kajecounterhack 9y ago
  "Her background is pretty non-traditional. Such people tend to be independent and consequently have a lot of integrity" Uh is that something you can support with facts? She's just an independent person with integrity. I don't see how it has to be a consequence of what you qualify as a "non-traditional background."
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    It has been my observation over a few years of working but it is ultimately no more than that — a personal observation. For facts I could list people I have known or read about — but that is just anecdata, and my direct observations are not subject to verification. How would one structure a good solid study on integrity, to get solid facts of this kind? The absence of such a methodology does not, unfortunately, mean we don’t have to think hard about people and integrity.
- rockinghigh 9y ago
  Why would they have a lot of integrity? From what I heard, she actually exaggerated some events.
  - dang 9y ago
    > "From what I heard" That's not good enough. Please don't post inflammatory comments to HN.
akulbe 9y ago
She didn't bring him down... HE brought HIMSELF down. Kinda clickbait-y, if you ask me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- paul7986 9y ago
  So true. Karma!
philsnow 9y ago
Susan Fowler's narrative is sort of the "dual" of the myth of the "little dutch boy" who stuck his finger in a dyke, preventing disaster through a very small act. [0] http://www.pantheon.org/articles/l/little_dutch_boy.html http://www.pantheon.org/articles/l/little_dutch_boy.html
- atomical 9y ago
  I enjoyed reading that, but why did the boy put his finger in the hole if he was worried about being late to school?
  - dpiers 9y ago
    The phrasing is confusing, but I think it means the boy knew he would be late if he helped, and the consequences of being late, but chose to act anyway.
- EvanKelly 9y ago
  I'm glad the website you linked credited that "myth" correctly. I was surprised when I moved to the Netherlands that no one had ever heard of this child with his finger in the dyke to save the town.
baron816 9y ago
> “Did you read that interview with the C.E.O., Travis, where he talked about how Uber helps him get girls? He’s a misogynist. I could never use his product.” I know nothing of the interview he’s referring to here, but how is it misogynistic to use your company to get girls? Was he picking up Uber employees or potential hires?
- mhluongo 9y ago
  He called it Boober IIRC.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- combatentropy 9y ago
  It's the difference between loving someone and using them.
  - conradfr 9y ago
    Yes that's all there is to human interactions, either love or objectification.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  The phrase "get girls" is even itself misogynistic since it's already an objectifying phrase. That doesn't necessarily mean that the person using it otherwise deserves being judged and identified as a misogynist. But the judgment of Travis is probably based on a lot of other factors than that one phrase.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
fjsolwmv 9y ago
What ar we creating celebrities out of people who blogged about their experiences? She made a courageous public statement. Should she get to move forwards in her chosen technical career with this shadow behind her, or must she be turned into a social crusader? That weirdly distorts incentives of behavior.
- atomical 9y ago
  How is someone else doing this to her? I assume she allowed this interview to take place.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    I'm just saying this generally, not really weighing in on this case, but: If you've ever been the subject of an interview or two, there's a decent chance you've had the common experience of not being presented as you expected. Experienced folks know how to basically tell journalists what words to write because journalists otherwise put all sorts of strange things and misinterpretations in. You certainly can't put the style and overall presentation of the article on her in this case. Being interviewed doesn't mean you chose to present yourself the way the journalist ends up doing.
    - atomical 9y ago
      Why else would they interview her?
      - quadrangle 9y ago
        I'm not saying there's any malice here! The interviewer and interviewee have the same core understanding: describe stuff about the person relevant to the human-interest angle about the interviewee. What happens is as an interviewee is that you sit down with an interviewer and talk to them like you would meeting anyone, tell them about yourself and how you came to be involved in whatever the interesting thing that led to the interview. Then, you read the article in surprise about how they put some weird spin on a random little side-note or anecdote or made a connection between two things you said that aren't really connected. And it becomes obvious that they did those things because they actually don't know you at all and are grasping at telling an in-depth story about someone they just met and knew nothing about really. Go ask anyone who's been interviewed this way. You'll find it common that the published article presented things in ways the interviewee thinks are weird, inaccurate, just confused or out of proportion. The only real point is: don't assume the interviewee has any responsibility or desire for promoting themselves in the style of the article. That's not likely the case, even if it happens sometimes.
baron816 9y ago
I think the one good thing about the Harvey Weinstein scandal is that it has brought to light that the issue of sexual harassment is not just a Silicon Valley problem, it's a problem that is almost universal in our country. I've written here several times here that articles similar to this one are more likely to backfire as they help perpetuate the idea that the tech industry is hostile to women and they should stay away. I've been thinking the best way to eliminate sexism in tech is to bring more women in to the industry. But hopefully, this increased awareness throughout the country will bring it to an end, not just in tech, but in every sector of the economy.
- BadassFractal 9y ago
  Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species. I don't think any country at this point is particularly amazing at containing those primal tendencies, but happy to be proven wrong. Either way, just like with violence and crime, we need to continue the journey of education of what is and is not acceptable behavior in the civilized world in 2017 and hope that that, combined with the legal system, keep those primal urges (that evolve much slower than our technology and our moral progress) in check.
  - AnAnonyCowherd 9y ago
    > Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species I'm sorry, but did you just make a generalizing statement linking a difference in behavior to sex? Logically, you can invert your comment to say that females use sex to get power. Neither of these things can be said. Ever. Isn't this sort of thing precisely what got James Damore run out of town on a rail for, just a few months ago?
    - BadassFractal 9y ago
      http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
muninn_ 9y ago
Nah she didnt bring down Travis she’s pretty much irreverent.
bogomipz 9y ago
I wish the article connected the dots of her path from studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania to working as an SRE at a San Francisco tech company. It seems like that might be an interesting part of her story. I loved the anecdote of her buying her own leather jacket when Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women. Brilliant. The title is a bit unfortunate in that it makes her sound like an Attorney General but that's nothing to with her but the NY Time's Maureen Dowd who has a penchant for sensational titles.
- fizixer 9y ago
  I feel for what happened to her at Uber but, no offense, her description of her physics achievements appeared to be borderline bullshit (e.g., things like studying for quantum field theory exams a year and half after getting introduced to college level physics and math for the first time, after picking philosophy as a major originally. And then proceeding to blog about how everyone can do this because she can).
  - goseeastarwar 9y ago
    That deafening silence is hopefully encouraging you to reflect on why you decided to write this response.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    I'm not skeptical about her physics achievements, so I don't agree with your opinion. I don't understand why this post was flagged. Down votes are for communicating "I don't like this post." Flagging is for violation of community guidelines, or just plain abusive comments. To respond to your claim, I'd like to point to you her blog post on the subject. She does a good job of explaining how she went from zero to being knowledgeable about physics in this post: https://fledglingphysicist.com/2013/12/12/if-susan-can-learn-physics-so-can-you/ https://fledglingphysicist.com/2013/12/12/if-susan-can-learn.... Essentially she always was interested in the subject but didn't believe she was smart enough to pursue it, until she was encouraged to take an introductory course.
    - 9y ago
atomical 9y ago
> “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea?" Why are people so worried about going to war with North Korea? There are concentration camps in North Korea. Are South Korean and American lives worth more than the lives of those in concentration camps? The USA tried to create a free Korea during the Korean War and failed because of China and Russia. We need to try again to clean up this mess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp
jakelazaroff 9y ago
Good profile overall, but I think it should have delved a bit more into her visible accomplishments before the blog post. This wasn't some random person levying these accusations, it was someone who'd spoken on multiple occasions and written a book for O'Reilly. Had she had a lower profile, the blog post might have been received very differently.
fpoijasw 9y ago
Hey engineer at Uber here. I'm a male engineer started working at Uber two years ago. I'm seeing a lot of comments here that is discrediting Susan Fowler's accomplishments in taking TK down, and I would like to correct the notion that the culture/TK himself/Waymo is what brought TK down. To preface I've work both at Google as an engineer, and frankly speaking the engineering culture at Uber didn't differ all that much. Both org had the same amount of soft misogyny, politics, and HR that protected its highest performers. In fact a lot of characters mentioned in Susan's blog post works at Google today. So what led up to the downfall of TK? Susan Fowler's blog post. What she described is what a lot of people go through in every company, but she was brave enough to post her experience using her real name. I'm willing to bet if she never posted her blog post none of this would've happened, and it would've been business as usual at Uber. Susan Fowler exposed the weakness in our culture and it catapulted an internal French Revolution where every head had a possibility of getting axed. This put our executives in a disarray and naturally external enemies decided to strike at us when we were weakest. The Waymo lawsuit only happened when it did and only effective as it was because of the chaos Susan Fowler initiated. So please stop discrediting Susan Fowler, what she did was really the catalyst, the trigger, for Uber to set course on a better path. It's just too bad she wasn't able to stay and see the real impact of her words. Ubers a great place to work now.
- alphonsegaston 9y ago
  >Ubers a great place to work now. I’m sorry, but companies’ cultures don’t change that fast and it’s not even really clear how much power Kalanick has actually ceded. Was the entire chain of command from the HR staff that tried to shut women up to the execs that passed around a rape victims medical records cleared out? I don’t doubt that a place like Google has many of the same problems and agree that Fowler should get a great deal of credit for her courage. But actual change is a long and far more difficult process than what has happened at Uber.
  - 0xB31B1B 9y ago
    I’m also an Uber engineer > was the entire chain of command [...] cleared out? Yes, like 80% of the C suite left. The orgs that had been the worst have had high/mid level management departures too. Our Chief People Officer Lianne has been incredible.
org3432 9y ago
I don't see why teaching that ethics comes before career isn't a priority. There's a validation that either the victim or the enablers are put into a morale delma to worry about their career over ethics. Shouldn't we be addressing that too? That there is no dilemma, it's just a regrettable mistake to do that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dominotw 9y ago
All China has to do is encourage this and America will self destroy its own software companies . Meanwhile America can do no such thing to China due to their censorship and tight controls. Lets see what happens.
- sctb 9y ago
  > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
joefreeman 9y ago
Bit off topic. The article mentions a book about ants. Any ideas what it is?
- Alex3917 9y ago
  No idea, but just go on Amazon and buy a book on ants if you want to learn more about them. And you should. To quote E.O. Wilson, "If you're not interested in ants then you're probably not a very interesting person."
- bertil 9y ago
  Unlikely to be that one, but the most interesting book about ants that most of my friends read during high school was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel) It’s a novel that is SciFi-ish in its construction but actually, it’s more an expose of a general theory of complex systems build by naive agents, stigmergy (coordination by traces).

210 points by bmahmood 9y ago

I think the notion of the article is wrong. She did not bring down Travis. The misogynist culture he helped to create did.

kajecounterhack 9y ago
Her writing exposing [the misogynist culture that he helped create] was a major catalyst, so the phrasing "she brought down the CEO" is fair. Maybe be better at picking semantic nits?
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't take this thread (or any thread) in a hostile direction, even if someone is picking nits. Your comment would be much better with just the first sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jrs95 9y ago
I don't even know if it was that, honestly. I think the whole Waymo thing had more to do with it, or it would have happened sooner.
- linkregister 9y ago
  The Waymo lawsuit was filed about a week after Fowler's blog post was published. The huge public outcry and massive customer switch to Lyft was based off of the news of the sexual harassment lawsuit. The general American public is largely ignorant about the Waymo lawsuit. The public is well-informed about the sexual harassment revelations. Right now, many potential customers have permanently associated Uber with sexual harassment. This is far more of an existential threat to Uber than a $1B lawsuit.
dasil003 9y ago
Are you kidding me? She took career-risking action to bring a problem to light, and you just want to point to an abstract non-entity as having responsibility for an outcome? Give credit where credit is due FFS, sheesh.
- trentmb 9y ago
  > abstract non-entity as having responsibility for an outcome? The patriarchy is routinely responsible for despicable outcomes.

6841iam 9y ago

While her post did send shockwaves inside Uber and the Silicon Valley at large, I think, it was Mr. Kalanick's incriminating involvement in the Waymo - Uber lawsuit that ultimately sunk Mr. Kalanick. He simply had to go.

rdtsc 9y ago
That is kind of how I remember it happening. After the revelations in the blog, there was a lot of talk and discussion here and other sites. Some people were fired then. But only after Waymo became involved, there were rumors of the board moving to push him out. It would have been nice if her allegations brought him down, but sadly it doesn't seem that way. In other words until investors saw their money potentially going down the drain in a lawsuit with Google, they kind of looked the other way.
- linkregister 9y ago
  You are somewhat right. Freada & Mitch Kapor (early Uber investors) published their blog post a few days after the Waymo lawsuit was filed. The lawsuit was filed within a week of Fowler's blog post being published. The Kapors' letter was exclusively focused on Kalanick's company culture, public conduct, and gross mismanagement of sexual harassment in Uber. The Benchmark lawsuit, brought in April, mentions the failure of Kalanick to disclose to the board the risks of the Otto acquisition as the second item of six grievances. My opinion is that it is unnecessarily cynical to assume that investors didn't care about the company's tolerance of sexual harassment and Kalanick's poor behavior, especially since it was central to their public repudiation of Kalanick.
meddlepal 9y ago
Susan's a great mind and I have had the pleasure of chatting with her in person, but there is definitely some historical revisionism going on here. Travis created a bad Uber culture in general. He was done in not by Fowler specifically but the fruits of his failures as a leader blossoming into several parallel disasters of which Waymo was probably the major major fiasco of the bunch.

atomical 9y ago

> “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea?" Why are people so worried about going to war with North Korea? There are concentration camps in North Korea. Are South Korean and American lives worth more than the lives of those in concentration camps? The USA tried to create a free Korea during the Korean War and failed because of China and Russia. We need to try again to clean up this mess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp

farnsworth 9y ago
I'm not at all confident in the ability of the US to "clean up this mess". Similar arguments were made before the war in Iraq. I won't defend Saddam but I don't think you can argue that the average Iraqi ended up better off.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  You are overssimplifying the situation. Iraq and NK are/were both dictatorships but the similarity ends there. Cultural differences go very far.
  - spamizbad 9y ago
    No, you're over-simplifying this by assuming we can resolve a humanitarian issue with a war. We can't. Even conservatives like Steve Bannon know this. The Iraq War plus its aftermath has a death toll approaching 1 million, 1/6th the size of the Holocaust. Conflict with North Korea will be even worse.
    - atomical 9y ago
      You're responding to the wrong commenter. No one knows how many people die in North Korean concentration camps every year. But you can be sure that the total number of deaths will increase every year that the Kims are in power. There is no solution but war.

solidsnack9000 9y ago

Her background is pretty non-traditional. Such people tend to be independent and consequently have a lot of integrity -- they do the career destroying things that almost nobody does. The only woman on the board then, Arianna Huffington, who had vowed that the culture of “brilliant jerks” must end, had been trying to help Mr. Kalanick by advising him to sleep more and meditate. But he caused another kerfuffle when he chose to meditate in the lactation room. This sounds like an environment where people were really banking on no one ever saying anything about anything -- which is just not a prudent thing to do.

kajecounterhack 9y ago
"Her background is pretty non-traditional. Such people tend to be independent and consequently have a lot of integrity" Uh is that something you can support with facts? She's just an independent person with integrity. I don't see how it has to be a consequence of what you qualify as a "non-traditional background."
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  It has been my observation over a few years of working but it is ultimately no more than that — a personal observation. For facts I could list people I have known or read about — but that is just anecdata, and my direct observations are not subject to verification. How would one structure a good solid study on integrity, to get solid facts of this kind? The absence of such a methodology does not, unfortunately, mean we don’t have to think hard about people and integrity.
rockinghigh 9y ago
Why would they have a lot of integrity? From what I heard, she actually exaggerated some events.
- dang 9y ago
  > "From what I heard" That's not good enough. Please don't post inflammatory comments to HN.

akulbe 9y ago

She didn't bring him down... HE brought HIMSELF down. Kinda clickbait-y, if you ask me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

paul7986 9y ago
So true. Karma!

philsnow 9y ago

Susan Fowler's narrative is sort of the "dual" of the myth of the "little dutch boy" who stuck his finger in a dyke, preventing disaster through a very small act. [0] http://www.pantheon.org/articles/l/little_dutch_boy.html http://www.pantheon.org/articles/l/little_dutch_boy.html

atomical 9y ago
I enjoyed reading that, but why did the boy put his finger in the hole if he was worried about being late to school?
- dpiers 9y ago
  The phrasing is confusing, but I think it means the boy knew he would be late if he helped, and the consequences of being late, but chose to act anyway.
EvanKelly 9y ago
I'm glad the website you linked credited that "myth" correctly. I was surprised when I moved to the Netherlands that no one had ever heard of this child with his finger in the dyke to save the town.

baron816 9y ago

> “Did you read that interview with the C.E.O., Travis, where he talked about how Uber helps him get girls? He’s a misogynist. I could never use his product.” I know nothing of the interview he’s referring to here, but how is it misogynistic to use your company to get girls? Was he picking up Uber employees or potential hires?

mhluongo 9y ago
He called it Boober IIRC.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
combatentropy 9y ago
It's the difference between loving someone and using them.
- conradfr 9y ago
  Yes that's all there is to human interactions, either love or objectification.
quadrangle 9y ago
The phrase "get girls" is even itself misogynistic since it's already an objectifying phrase. That doesn't necessarily mean that the person using it otherwise deserves being judged and identified as a misogynist. But the judgment of Travis is probably based on a lot of other factors than that one phrase.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

fjsolwmv 9y ago

What ar we creating celebrities out of people who blogged about their experiences? She made a courageous public statement. Should she get to move forwards in her chosen technical career with this shadow behind her, or must she be turned into a social crusader? That weirdly distorts incentives of behavior.

atomical 9y ago
How is someone else doing this to her? I assume she allowed this interview to take place.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  I'm just saying this generally, not really weighing in on this case, but: If you've ever been the subject of an interview or two, there's a decent chance you've had the common experience of not being presented as you expected. Experienced folks know how to basically tell journalists what words to write because journalists otherwise put all sorts of strange things and misinterpretations in. You certainly can't put the style and overall presentation of the article on her in this case. Being interviewed doesn't mean you chose to present yourself the way the journalist ends up doing.
  - atomical 9y ago
    Why else would they interview her?
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      I'm not saying there's any malice here! The interviewer and interviewee have the same core understanding: describe stuff about the person relevant to the human-interest angle about the interviewee. What happens is as an interviewee is that you sit down with an interviewer and talk to them like you would meeting anyone, tell them about yourself and how you came to be involved in whatever the interesting thing that led to the interview. Then, you read the article in surprise about how they put some weird spin on a random little side-note or anecdote or made a connection between two things you said that aren't really connected. And it becomes obvious that they did those things because they actually don't know you at all and are grasping at telling an in-depth story about someone they just met and knew nothing about really. Go ask anyone who's been interviewed this way. You'll find it common that the published article presented things in ways the interviewee thinks are weird, inaccurate, just confused or out of proportion. The only real point is: don't assume the interviewee has any responsibility or desire for promoting themselves in the style of the article. That's not likely the case, even if it happens sometimes.

baron816 9y ago

I think the one good thing about the Harvey Weinstein scandal is that it has brought to light that the issue of sexual harassment is not just a Silicon Valley problem, it's a problem that is almost universal in our country. I've written here several times here that articles similar to this one are more likely to backfire as they help perpetuate the idea that the tech industry is hostile to women and they should stay away. I've been thinking the best way to eliminate sexism in tech is to bring more women in to the industry. But hopefully, this increased awareness throughout the country will bring it to an end, not just in tech, but in every sector of the economy.

BadassFractal 9y ago
Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species. I don't think any country at this point is particularly amazing at containing those primal tendencies, but happy to be proven wrong. Either way, just like with violence and crime, we need to continue the journey of education of what is and is not acceptable behavior in the civilized world in 2017 and hope that that, combined with the legal system, keep those primal urges (that evolve much slower than our technology and our moral progress) in check.
- AnAnonyCowherd 9y ago
  > Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species I'm sorry, but did you just make a generalizing statement linking a difference in behavior to sex? Logically, you can invert your comment to say that females use sex to get power. Neither of these things can be said. Ever. Isn't this sort of thing precisely what got James Damore run out of town on a rail for, just a few months ago?
  - BadassFractal 9y ago
    http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html

muninn_ 9y ago

Nah she didnt bring down Travis she’s pretty much irreverent.

bogomipz 9y ago

I wish the article connected the dots of her path from studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania to working as an SRE at a San Francisco tech company. It seems like that might be an interesting part of her story. I loved the anecdote of her buying her own leather jacket when Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women. Brilliant. The title is a bit unfortunate in that it makes her sound like an Attorney General but that's nothing to with her but the NY Time's Maureen Dowd who has a penchant for sensational titles.

fizixer 9y ago
I feel for what happened to her at Uber but, no offense, her description of her physics achievements appeared to be borderline bullshit (e.g., things like studying for quantum field theory exams a year and half after getting introduced to college level physics and math for the first time, after picking philosophy as a major originally. And then proceeding to blog about how everyone can do this because she can).
- goseeastarwar 9y ago
  That deafening silence is hopefully encouraging you to reflect on why you decided to write this response.
- linkregister 9y ago
  I'm not skeptical about her physics achievements, so I don't agree with your opinion. I don't understand why this post was flagged. Down votes are for communicating "I don't like this post." Flagging is for violation of community guidelines, or just plain abusive comments. To respond to your claim, I'd like to point to you her blog post on the subject. She does a good job of explaining how she went from zero to being knowledgeable about physics in this post: https://fledglingphysicist.com/2013/12/12/if-susan-can-learn-physics-so-can-you/ https://fledglingphysicist.com/2013/12/12/if-susan-can-learn.... Essentially she always was interested in the subject but didn't believe she was smart enough to pursue it, until she was encouraged to take an introductory course.
  - 9y ago

atomical 9y ago

> “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea?" Why are people so worried about going to war with North Korea? There are concentration camps in North Korea. Are South Korean and American lives worth more than the lives of those in concentration camps? The USA tried to create a free Korea during the Korean War and failed because of China and Russia. We need to try again to clean up this mess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp

jakelazaroff 9y ago

Good profile overall, but I think it should have delved a bit more into her visible accomplishments before the blog post. This wasn't some random person levying these accusations, it was someone who'd spoken on multiple occasions and written a book for O'Reilly. Had she had a lower profile, the blog post might have been received very differently.

fpoijasw 9y ago

Hey engineer at Uber here. I'm a male engineer started working at Uber two years ago. I'm seeing a lot of comments here that is discrediting Susan Fowler's accomplishments in taking TK down, and I would like to correct the notion that the culture/TK himself/Waymo is what brought TK down. To preface I've work both at Google as an engineer, and frankly speaking the engineering culture at Uber didn't differ all that much. Both org had the same amount of soft misogyny, politics, and HR that protected its highest performers. In fact a lot of characters mentioned in Susan's blog post works at Google today. So what led up to the downfall of TK? Susan Fowler's blog post. What she described is what a lot of people go through in every company, but she was brave enough to post her experience using her real name. I'm willing to bet if she never posted her blog post none of this would've happened, and it would've been business as usual at Uber. Susan Fowler exposed the weakness in our culture and it catapulted an internal French Revolution where every head had a possibility of getting axed. This put our executives in a disarray and naturally external enemies decided to strike at us when we were weakest. The Waymo lawsuit only happened when it did and only effective as it was because of the chaos Susan Fowler initiated. So please stop discrediting Susan Fowler, what she did was really the catalyst, the trigger, for Uber to set course on a better path. It's just too bad she wasn't able to stay and see the real impact of her words. Ubers a great place to work now.

alphonsegaston 9y ago
>Ubers a great place to work now. I’m sorry, but companies’ cultures don’t change that fast and it’s not even really clear how much power Kalanick has actually ceded. Was the entire chain of command from the HR staff that tried to shut women up to the execs that passed around a rape victims medical records cleared out? I don’t doubt that a place like Google has many of the same problems and agree that Fowler should get a great deal of credit for her courage. But actual change is a long and far more difficult process than what has happened at Uber.
- 0xB31B1B 9y ago
  I’m also an Uber engineer > was the entire chain of command [...] cleared out? Yes, like 80% of the C suite left. The orgs that had been the worst have had high/mid level management departures too. Our Chief People Officer Lianne has been incredible.

org3432 9y ago

I don't see why teaching that ethics comes before career isn't a priority. There's a validation that either the victim or the enablers are put into a morale delma to worry about their career over ethics. Shouldn't we be addressing that too? That there is no dilemma, it's just a regrettable mistake to do that.

deleted 9y ago
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dominotw 9y ago

All China has to do is encourage this and America will self destroy its own software companies . Meanwhile America can do no such thing to China due to their censorship and tight controls. Lets see what happens.

sctb 9y ago
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

joefreeman 9y ago

Bit off topic. The article mentions a book about ants. Any ideas what it is?

Alex3917 9y ago
No idea, but just go on Amazon and buy a book on ants if you want to learn more about them. And you should. To quote E.O. Wilson, "If you're not interested in ants then you're probably not a very interesting person."
bertil 9y ago
Unlikely to be that one, but the most interesting book about ants that most of my friends read during high school was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel) It’s a novel that is SciFi-ish in its construction but actually, it’s more an expose of a general theory of complex systems build by naive agents, stigmergy (coordination by traces).