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Three Uber security managers resign after CEO criticizes practices

175 points by petethomas 9y ago

NelsonMinar 9y ago
It never fucking ends with this company, does it?
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  It will end when they run of money. Which is too bad. They make me wish there was such a thing as corporate death penalty. Corporations are people after all, aren't they?
  - dmix 9y ago
    > Corporations are people after all, aren't they? This was an effort to protect the economy from being ground to a halt by destructive litigious action and make courts more efficient. Not to increase liability and accountability within the corporation. Which is why nearly every western country has done the same... it wasn't a conspiracy to protect wealthy people from being punished. Like many regulations that fail to affect idealistic change, it was done with good intentions and there hasn't been a strong enough support for an alternative to solve this issue... or, less likely, maybe no rational alternatives really do exist. The simple fact is shit rolls down hill in all big organizations and I'm not convinced it won't happen if corporations weren't singular legal entities. Top tier executives have a way of protecting themselves, while the lower staff tend not to have such protections. Removing this 'corporations = people' legal structure would incentivize internal deflection to lower levels as a legal strategy instead of the company uniformly fighting back against allegations - making it risky to be a low-level manager and highly disincentivizing employees from taking any real responsibility that would involve legal exposure (aka a huge percentage of management and entrepreneurial jobs). Ultimately, the tough reality is that it might actually make sense to treat the company as a singular whole, as potentially there are hundreds of people involved in any major corporate incident. Which would be a nightmare in the bureaucratic mess that is the modern justice system. That said, I'm not 100% convinced that courts can't use common sense to figure out direct liability and involvement within the company, at an individual level. But common sense has never been something the courts or government policy have been known for, at least in the last half-century. The modern justice system has entirely been modeled around the lowest common denominator. Which is very apparent if you've ever tried to challenge something as simple as a traffic ticket in court. Given that legal/regulatory environment which it currently exists within I could see such a change being abused and being massively inefficient. Especially considering how difficult it is to prove a single persons involvement in a normal crime, let alone trying to sue a company then figuring out 100 individuals culpability...
    - enraged_camel 9y ago
      >>it wasn't some conspiracy to protect wealthy people from ever getting punished. That has been the result, however.
      - dmix 9y ago
        Regardless, my point is that it's entirely possible that without this current legal structure the alternatives will only increase low-level employees legal exposure, while having a marginal impact on the behaviour of wealthy top level executives (which is what people really care about, isn't it?), and while simultaneously flooding the courts with massive inefficient cases, consuming finite resources which could be better spent elsewhere. Just because you can point out the current system's flaws doesn't automatically mean a comparable better one exists. Plenty of systems in our economy and legal system are a matter of lesser-of-evils. It's easy to complain but unless you can propose a better alternative, an alternative that won't end up being worse for the poor/middle class average person, then you aren't really helping the situation. This disconnect from the on-the-ground reality is one of the big reasons I don't support many of these populist activist causes... and yes I've seen "The Corporation" film many times.
        enraged_camel 9y ago
        >>Just because you can point out the current system's flaws doesn't automatically mean a comparable better one exists. The flip side of the coin is we should never stop looking for improvements. IMO if executives were held personally liable for gross negligence, for instance, they would suddenly become more interested in things like security best practices (referring to the recent Equifax disaster).
    - focusgroup0 9y ago
      Thanks for this, feel like there is too much FUD out there on Citizens United.
    - forapurpose 9y ago
      > it was done with good intentions How can anyone know the motivations of the Justices? > Like many regulations Isn't it a court decision, not a regulation? Are we all talking about Citizens United? > This was an effort to protect the economy from being ground to a halt by destructive litigious action and make courts more efficient. Is there evidence that such a thing was at risk of happening? I know industry advocates commonly make the claim, but I haven't seen evidence. IIRC, the court decision was to enable corporations to make political contributions based on their free speech rights as 'people'. How does that serve the purposes quoted above?
  - philipov 9y ago
    That's some nice snark, but it is self-defeating: we should not be having the death penalty for people, because of its history of abuse against minorities, and the poor standards of evidence. A death penalty on powerful corporations makes more sense because these entities have the means to defend themselves. It is because they are not people that a death penalty is allowable.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Corporations are immortal, which violates the spirit of the original notion and definition of corporations as organizations with a limitied specific charter. Corporations need mortality.
- j4ship 9y ago
  it ends every time i get out of the car and give my driver 5 stars. And then it begins again with me being picked up damn near any where i want to at any time in the bay area. The scandals are for the company , the employees , and the gov to figure out. As a user (and Im also guessing for the drivers) its one of the best companies out there. Reliable , efficient, high quality.
  - NelsonMinar 9y ago
    Lyft and Flywheel provide this service in the Bay Area too. As a bonus, they aren't infected with a rotten core culture.
    - KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
      When I was going from South Bay to SFO two weeks ago, Uber quoted me $40, while Lyft $300. So not quite.
      - Bahamut 9y ago
        Way to cherry pick. Usually it’s under $60 from the South Bay to SFO on either service, and I flew about 40 times last year.
  - crpatino 9y ago
    You assume too much. Uber might be good for the customer, but it is a total jerk to the driver. Last scandal at my hometown, that is unlikely to reach the English speaking world, is as follows. Our airport, which lays on federal grounds, grants a monopoly of transportation services to certain well established company. Not even city taxis are allowed in (they can drop passangers, but cannot pick up anyone else while they are on premises). Uber attitude towards this situation is the standard one, basically an extended middle finger to every law, institution or authority of the land. The problem is that if airport security catches an unofficial taxi on premises, they call federal police, the car is taken to a seized and the driver cannot recover until he's paid a very considerable fine (think several months of blue collar wages). Uber strategy to deal with that is to swarm security, so they always catch someone, but the process to deal with the offender is very time consuming and all other Uber cars are free to do business while the guards are preocupied. Uber will punish any driver that refuses to take airport calls with bad karma, and will "gratiuouly" pay for your fine... once (if you get caught twice, it is on you), but they will not pay you any wages while your car is locked in federal grounds (a time that is measured in weeks, not days). They will also not pay for any damages to the car itself, which unfortunatelly is a rampant problem in this country when vehicles end up under the custody of the government. So, be very glad to have a car and a chauffeur at your fingertips beck and call, but please do not assume the driver is enjoying it as much as you do.
- x0x0 9y ago
  It seems likely kalanick encouraged this stuff. Combine that with weak controls and who knows what upper middle management has dreamed up across the company. I'm sure the CEO is grilling people about all the shit they're doing that will ruin his day when a newspaper reports on it as we speak...
mars4rp 9y ago
"The three managers who resigned were Pooja Ashok, chief of staff for Sullivan;" is it normal for a chief officer to has a chief of staff???
- praneshp 9y ago
  I don't know if you accept it as normal, but I've seen that in each of the four companies I've worked in. Sometimes the chief of staff at the VP level is not an engineer, but the chief of staff to CxO I've seen are usually engineers.
- bdod6 9y ago
  speaking from experience at Google, yes. Obviously depends on size of company, but many C-suite/SVP/High VPs would have a "chief of staff" type person reporting to them.
WisNorCan 9y ago
I wonder when Dara (CEO) will start being held accountable for Uber. So far his message has been, "That was them, not me". If he is sincere, he should ask the managers of Uber to share all the dirty laundry that they know. Then, he should disclose it publicly and get ahead of it. That for me would qualify as "that was them, not me". He has been there 3 months, but there are 8 years of scandals built into Uber's culture before he joined. I expect Uber to be on the front page of HN for years to come. That can't be the right PR strategy. He has to get ahead of it or he will lose credibility with the drip, drip, drip of bad news.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  He has personal credibility, but do you think he has any credibility with relation to Uber? At best I think the view is that he doesn't know about all of the likely scandals, so that he's being surprised along with us. That doesn't exactly breed credibility in his role at Uber, it just cushions his eventual exist when he realizes that he ran into a burning barn.
  - ProAm 9y ago
    No, before you take over CEO of a company with a 8 year track record of being a pretty horrific company, coming off the CEO before forced out due to yet another scandal you get all the dirt before you sign on the dotted line. He knew about this before he took the role. It's all about in how he handles it.
    - datahack 9y ago
      This is the key point. It’s too soon, the jury is still out on the new ceo... but these are encouraging signs. We’ll see in time, because at the end of the day the only real thing that matters is that the culture actually does reform, all while not wrecking the business (ideally actually improving it). That’s a result that will always take longer than 21 short days... It’s such a difficult challenge to change a company culture at a whale of a company like this one.
- valuearb 9y ago
ilamont 9y ago
Sullivan in August told Reuters that his security team totaled around 500 employees. Google says Uber has more than 12,000 employees. Uber is not a typical company, but how do other tech companies compare?
- valuearb 9y ago
  They probably have proportionately far fewer security employees, just far more effective ones. All snark aside, I'd guess that the vast amount of Uber security staff's role is investigating driver fraud. Uber grew so immensely fast because they offered compelling sign up inducements to drivers, and in lots of cases those were easy to game. It's why Uber got caught "fingerprinting" iPhones by Apple so they could detect whether the same phone was being used to sign up for multiple driver accounts to double dip the signup bonus programs.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Any two sided marketplace is rife with opportunities for fraud as well as money laundering.
  - greggarious 9y ago
    >All snark aside, I'd guess that the vast amount of Uber security staff's role is investigating driver fraud. I thought most companies separate out pure infosec from anti-fraud? Some orgs may house both under the bubble of risk management but there's a big difference between a security engineer and an anti-fraud analyst.
    - stickfigure 9y ago
      Since the third person mentioned in the article was "Jeff Jones, who handled physical security", I'm assuming Uber lumped anything possibly related to "security" in one org. Which does seem peculiar.
      - kenbaylor 9y ago
        You are correct. All things with even the vaguest hint of security and safety were lumped there. Antifraud, monitoring who touches which logs, being the sole provider of electronic evidence in all investigations, infosec, competitive information, investigating rapes, putting listening devices into the uber app .....very unorthodox.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"The three managers who resigned were Pooja Ashok, chief of staff for Sullivan ..." C-level execs have "Chiefs of Staff" at Uber? How bloated is that organization? They were literally Chief of Staff to the Chief of Security. EDIT: changed to gender-neutral pronoun.
- sumitgt 9y ago
  This isn't uncommon in large tech companies. People 1-2 levels from the CEO tend to have a chief of staff. Out of curiosity, why do you assume the person is a "he"?
  - kenbaylor 9y ago
    Pooja is female.
- arachnids 9y ago
  "Chief of Staff" is valley-speak for secretary.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    That's essentially what it is in Washington D.C which as far as I know is the origin of the title: >"The White House Chief of Staff has traditionally been the highest-ranking employee of the White House. The chief of staff's position is a modern successor to the earlier role of the president's private secretary."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Chief_of_Staff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Chief_of_Staff
    - late2part 9y ago
      In DC the word Secretary is CEO or EVP.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - appstateguy 9y ago
yalogin 9y ago
What is a chief of staff in a tech company?
- tptacek 9y ago
  My understanding: a masculine term for "executive assistant". Or: a technical secretary. Personal project manager.
  - vm 9y ago
    This article from First Round Capital outlines the modern tech company approach: http://firstround.com/review/why-you-need-two-chiefs-in-the-executive-office/ http://firstround.com/review/why-you-need-two-chiefs-in-the-... Tl;dr - CoS stands in for the CEO in meetings, fills her in on what's going on across the organization (or outside of it), and overall leverages her time. It's beyond someone who just does scheduling but short of being COO, which entails direct reports and accountability.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      I guess. That squares with Pooja Ashok's resume, too.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    As in the classic British "secretary" when it was a job for men named Hilary or Dana
- WisNorCan 9y ago
  The role varies widely. Typically, there is a lot of administrative work required to manage the cadence of an exec team: Examples - collecting tracking metrics ahead of meeting, tracking action items for completion, preparing materials for customer briefings, etc. A chief of staff helps the CEO get higher output by letting them focus on the decisions and not the process.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
>Uber’s general counsel, Tony West, on Wednesday sent a note to employees, which was seen by Reuters, saying that human surveillance of individuals would no longer be tolerated. The fact that this even had to be said is sickening on so many levels.
- ProAm 9y ago
  This has been an issue at Uber for many years. Google 'Uber god view' and the scandals that came from that one.
_pdp_ 9y ago
Physical security, digital security and fraud prevention are separate fields. They may all have something to do with "security" but the goals are very different and as a result, the management structure needs to be different. If you fail to do so you will simply dilute the key objectives each of these fields deliver.

175 points by petethomas 9y ago

NelsonMinar 9y ago

It never fucking ends with this company, does it?

enraged_camel 9y ago
It will end when they run of money. Which is too bad. They make me wish there was such a thing as corporate death penalty. Corporations are people after all, aren't they?
- dmix 9y ago
  > Corporations are people after all, aren't they? This was an effort to protect the economy from being ground to a halt by destructive litigious action and make courts more efficient. Not to increase liability and accountability within the corporation. Which is why nearly every western country has done the same... it wasn't a conspiracy to protect wealthy people from being punished. Like many regulations that fail to affect idealistic change, it was done with good intentions and there hasn't been a strong enough support for an alternative to solve this issue... or, less likely, maybe no rational alternatives really do exist. The simple fact is shit rolls down hill in all big organizations and I'm not convinced it won't happen if corporations weren't singular legal entities. Top tier executives have a way of protecting themselves, while the lower staff tend not to have such protections. Removing this 'corporations = people' legal structure would incentivize internal deflection to lower levels as a legal strategy instead of the company uniformly fighting back against allegations - making it risky to be a low-level manager and highly disincentivizing employees from taking any real responsibility that would involve legal exposure (aka a huge percentage of management and entrepreneurial jobs). Ultimately, the tough reality is that it might actually make sense to treat the company as a singular whole, as potentially there are hundreds of people involved in any major corporate incident. Which would be a nightmare in the bureaucratic mess that is the modern justice system. That said, I'm not 100% convinced that courts can't use common sense to figure out direct liability and involvement within the company, at an individual level. But common sense has never been something the courts or government policy have been known for, at least in the last half-century. The modern justice system has entirely been modeled around the lowest common denominator. Which is very apparent if you've ever tried to challenge something as simple as a traffic ticket in court. Given that legal/regulatory environment which it currently exists within I could see such a change being abused and being massively inefficient. Especially considering how difficult it is to prove a single persons involvement in a normal crime, let alone trying to sue a company then figuring out 100 individuals culpability...
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    >>it wasn't some conspiracy to protect wealthy people from ever getting punished. That has been the result, however.
    - dmix 9y ago
      Regardless, my point is that it's entirely possible that without this current legal structure the alternatives will only increase low-level employees legal exposure, while having a marginal impact on the behaviour of wealthy top level executives (which is what people really care about, isn't it?), and while simultaneously flooding the courts with massive inefficient cases, consuming finite resources which could be better spent elsewhere. Just because you can point out the current system's flaws doesn't automatically mean a comparable better one exists. Plenty of systems in our economy and legal system are a matter of lesser-of-evils. It's easy to complain but unless you can propose a better alternative, an alternative that won't end up being worse for the poor/middle class average person, then you aren't really helping the situation. This disconnect from the on-the-ground reality is one of the big reasons I don't support many of these populist activist causes... and yes I've seen "The Corporation" film many times.
      - enraged_camel 9y ago
        >>Just because you can point out the current system's flaws doesn't automatically mean a comparable better one exists. The flip side of the coin is we should never stop looking for improvements. IMO if executives were held personally liable for gross negligence, for instance, they would suddenly become more interested in things like security best practices (referring to the recent Equifax disaster).
  - focusgroup0 9y ago
    Thanks for this, feel like there is too much FUD out there on Citizens United.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    > it was done with good intentions How can anyone know the motivations of the Justices? > Like many regulations Isn't it a court decision, not a regulation? Are we all talking about Citizens United? > This was an effort to protect the economy from being ground to a halt by destructive litigious action and make courts more efficient. Is there evidence that such a thing was at risk of happening? I know industry advocates commonly make the claim, but I haven't seen evidence. IIRC, the court decision was to enable corporations to make political contributions based on their free speech rights as 'people'. How does that serve the purposes quoted above?
- philipov 9y ago
  That's some nice snark, but it is self-defeating: we should not be having the death penalty for people, because of its history of abuse against minorities, and the poor standards of evidence. A death penalty on powerful corporations makes more sense because these entities have the means to defend themselves. It is because they are not people that a death penalty is allowable.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Corporations are immortal, which violates the spirit of the original notion and definition of corporations as organizations with a limitied specific charter. Corporations need mortality.
j4ship 9y ago
it ends every time i get out of the car and give my driver 5 stars. And then it begins again with me being picked up damn near any where i want to at any time in the bay area. The scandals are for the company , the employees , and the gov to figure out. As a user (and Im also guessing for the drivers) its one of the best companies out there. Reliable , efficient, high quality.
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  Lyft and Flywheel provide this service in the Bay Area too. As a bonus, they aren't infected with a rotten core culture.
  - KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
    When I was going from South Bay to SFO two weeks ago, Uber quoted me $40, while Lyft $300. So not quite.
    - Bahamut 9y ago
      Way to cherry pick. Usually it’s under $60 from the South Bay to SFO on either service, and I flew about 40 times last year.
- crpatino 9y ago
  You assume too much. Uber might be good for the customer, but it is a total jerk to the driver. Last scandal at my hometown, that is unlikely to reach the English speaking world, is as follows. Our airport, which lays on federal grounds, grants a monopoly of transportation services to certain well established company. Not even city taxis are allowed in (they can drop passangers, but cannot pick up anyone else while they are on premises). Uber attitude towards this situation is the standard one, basically an extended middle finger to every law, institution or authority of the land. The problem is that if airport security catches an unofficial taxi on premises, they call federal police, the car is taken to a seized and the driver cannot recover until he's paid a very considerable fine (think several months of blue collar wages). Uber strategy to deal with that is to swarm security, so they always catch someone, but the process to deal with the offender is very time consuming and all other Uber cars are free to do business while the guards are preocupied. Uber will punish any driver that refuses to take airport calls with bad karma, and will "gratiuouly" pay for your fine... once (if you get caught twice, it is on you), but they will not pay you any wages while your car is locked in federal grounds (a time that is measured in weeks, not days). They will also not pay for any damages to the car itself, which unfortunatelly is a rampant problem in this country when vehicles end up under the custody of the government. So, be very glad to have a car and a chauffeur at your fingertips beck and call, but please do not assume the driver is enjoying it as much as you do.
x0x0 9y ago
It seems likely kalanick encouraged this stuff. Combine that with weak controls and who knows what upper middle management has dreamed up across the company. I'm sure the CEO is grilling people about all the shit they're doing that will ruin his day when a newspaper reports on it as we speak...

mars4rp 9y ago

"The three managers who resigned were Pooja Ashok, chief of staff for Sullivan;" is it normal for a chief officer to has a chief of staff???

praneshp 9y ago
I don't know if you accept it as normal, but I've seen that in each of the four companies I've worked in. Sometimes the chief of staff at the VP level is not an engineer, but the chief of staff to CxO I've seen are usually engineers.
bdod6 9y ago
speaking from experience at Google, yes. Obviously depends on size of company, but many C-suite/SVP/High VPs would have a "chief of staff" type person reporting to them.

WisNorCan 9y ago

I wonder when Dara (CEO) will start being held accountable for Uber. So far his message has been, "That was them, not me". If he is sincere, he should ask the managers of Uber to share all the dirty laundry that they know. Then, he should disclose it publicly and get ahead of it. That for me would qualify as "that was them, not me". He has been there 3 months, but there are 8 years of scandals built into Uber's culture before he joined. I expect Uber to be on the front page of HN for years to come. That can't be the right PR strategy. He has to get ahead of it or he will lose credibility with the drip, drip, drip of bad news.

QAPereo 9y ago
He has personal credibility, but do you think he has any credibility with relation to Uber? At best I think the view is that he doesn't know about all of the likely scandals, so that he's being surprised along with us. That doesn't exactly breed credibility in his role at Uber, it just cushions his eventual exist when he realizes that he ran into a burning barn.
- ProAm 9y ago
  No, before you take over CEO of a company with a 8 year track record of being a pretty horrific company, coming off the CEO before forced out due to yet another scandal you get all the dirt before you sign on the dotted line. He knew about this before he took the role. It's all about in how he handles it.
  - datahack 9y ago
    This is the key point. It’s too soon, the jury is still out on the new ceo... but these are encouraging signs. We’ll see in time, because at the end of the day the only real thing that matters is that the culture actually does reform, all while not wrecking the business (ideally actually improving it). That’s a result that will always take longer than 21 short days... It’s such a difficult challenge to change a company culture at a whale of a company like this one.
valuearb 9y ago

ilamont 9y ago

Sullivan in August told Reuters that his security team totaled around 500 employees. Google says Uber has more than 12,000 employees. Uber is not a typical company, but how do other tech companies compare?

valuearb 9y ago
They probably have proportionately far fewer security employees, just far more effective ones. All snark aside, I'd guess that the vast amount of Uber security staff's role is investigating driver fraud. Uber grew so immensely fast because they offered compelling sign up inducements to drivers, and in lots of cases those were easy to game. It's why Uber got caught "fingerprinting" iPhones by Apple so they could detect whether the same phone was being used to sign up for multiple driver accounts to double dip the signup bonus programs.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Any two sided marketplace is rife with opportunities for fraud as well as money laundering.
- greggarious 9y ago
  >All snark aside, I'd guess that the vast amount of Uber security staff's role is investigating driver fraud. I thought most companies separate out pure infosec from anti-fraud? Some orgs may house both under the bubble of risk management but there's a big difference between a security engineer and an anti-fraud analyst.
  - stickfigure 9y ago
    Since the third person mentioned in the article was "Jeff Jones, who handled physical security", I'm assuming Uber lumped anything possibly related to "security" in one org. Which does seem peculiar.
    - kenbaylor 9y ago
      You are correct. All things with even the vaguest hint of security and safety were lumped there. Antifraud, monitoring who touches which logs, being the sole provider of electronic evidence in all investigations, infosec, competitive information, investigating rapes, putting listening devices into the uber app .....very unorthodox.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"The three managers who resigned were Pooja Ashok, chief of staff for Sullivan ..." C-level execs have "Chiefs of Staff" at Uber? How bloated is that organization? They were literally Chief of Staff to the Chief of Security. EDIT: changed to gender-neutral pronoun.

sumitgt 9y ago
This isn't uncommon in large tech companies. People 1-2 levels from the CEO tend to have a chief of staff. Out of curiosity, why do you assume the person is a "he"?
- kenbaylor 9y ago
  Pooja is female.
arachnids 9y ago
"Chief of Staff" is valley-speak for secretary.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  That's essentially what it is in Washington D.C which as far as I know is the origin of the title: >"The White House Chief of Staff has traditionally been the highest-ranking employee of the White House. The chief of staff's position is a modern successor to the earlier role of the president's private secretary."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Chief_of_Staff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Chief_of_Staff
  - late2part 9y ago
    In DC the word Secretary is CEO or EVP.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - appstateguy 9y ago

yalogin 9y ago

What is a chief of staff in a tech company?

tptacek 9y ago
My understanding: a masculine term for "executive assistant". Or: a technical secretary. Personal project manager.
- vm 9y ago
  This article from First Round Capital outlines the modern tech company approach: http://firstround.com/review/why-you-need-two-chiefs-in-the-executive-office/ http://firstround.com/review/why-you-need-two-chiefs-in-the-... Tl;dr - CoS stands in for the CEO in meetings, fills her in on what's going on across the organization (or outside of it), and overall leverages her time. It's beyond someone who just does scheduling but short of being COO, which entails direct reports and accountability.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I guess. That squares with Pooja Ashok's resume, too.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  As in the classic British "secretary" when it was a job for men named Hilary or Dana
WisNorCan 9y ago
The role varies widely. Typically, there is a lot of administrative work required to manage the cadence of an exec team: Examples - collecting tracking metrics ahead of meeting, tracking action items for completion, preparing materials for customer briefings, etc. A chief of staff helps the CEO get higher output by letting them focus on the decisions and not the process.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

>Uber’s general counsel, Tony West, on Wednesday sent a note to employees, which was seen by Reuters, saying that human surveillance of individuals would no longer be tolerated. The fact that this even had to be said is sickening on so many levels.

ProAm 9y ago
This has been an issue at Uber for many years. Google 'Uber god view' and the scandals that came from that one.

_pdp_ 9y ago

Physical security, digital security and fraud prevention are separate fields. They may all have something to do with "security" but the goals are very different and as a result, the management structure needs to be different. If you fail to do so you will simply dilute the key objectives each of these fields deliver.