My prediction: the manager gets fired, we are treated to a hand-wringing "What We Learned" Medium post, and the cultural disease behind this particular symptom continues unabated.
What would be nice instead: A serious and in-depth analysis going from incidental to systemic to cultural, like NASA's "oops we dropped NOAA-19" report - https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf (summary on pages 8-10)
Most companies could stand to learn some lessons from NASA, where cultural failure means dead astronauts rather than bad PR. When their culture is bad, they change the culture. What will Uber do?
"We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that. Eventually he "left" the company. I don't know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him. "
Wouldn't firing the manager, plus the inevitable internal memo, plus the fact that everyone there will be talking about this tomorrow, enough to cause meaningful change within the company?
At the very least, this should dissuade managers from soliticing open-relationship sexual partners, on employees' first day. I consider that a major win! :-\
I am not assuming they are fake. In fact, I find it highly likely, given Uber': reputation and the clarity of the exposition given, that it is probably true in substance, if not in entirety.
There have also been knee jerk reactions and witch hunts orchestrated via the internet based on one side's story or an incomplete story that were later regretted. I do not wish to sugges to cast doubt, but to give a chance for the full story to be heard.
This reminds me why calling out a company on twitter for something that goes wrong is way more effective than calling customer support. Basically a life lesson: Public shaming is way more effective than the processes set up to handle these things.
You're not wrong, but at a certain point public shaming as a method will lose it's efficacy or become so ubiquitous that everybody is publicly shaming everybody else. Is public shaming, just another name for mob justice? I guess what I'm saying is, it is a powerful weapon, so we should be really careful with how we use it.
Especially since we have absolutely nothing to go on, in this case, except the word of one disgruntled former employee.
Maybe it's all true, maybe it's totally made up, maybe it's basically true but exaggerated and missing important information. We don't know, but plenty of people are happy to pile on.
Furthermore, she says she has evidence in the form of emails. I'm not suggesting she will, or even should, make them public, but it would be a hell of a gamble to claim publicly to have them if she didn't, as she will need them if she finds herself in court.
Sadly, it goes both ways. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't "leaks" or outright statements which attack Susan from Uber or other Uber "employees" showing up on Twitter and in the news.
Deserved or not, public shaming of users on forums like Yelp or Twitter has become a common business tactic to battle bad press.
True, Indian "startups" who just are a VC money sink spammed me with emails and texts, for emails, I can set rules and I am not mandated to read their propaganda, with text messages, I can't block them! One tweet and they got me out of their spam list
Total armchair observer viewpoint - In reading Susan's blog, there are a lot of sexual harassment claims but there are many claims of cloak and dagger behavior. This points to a dysfunctional organization that lacks trust. And in that, I couldn't help but think of Conway's law [1] and the video from the goto; conference [2] about Uber's infrastructure. "We have so many services in production we don't even know how many there are." This may reflect a few different trust issues. One of which includes "Not invented here" thus building services that are duplicative. The goal of which is to show value and get promoted. Given the blog, the communication and reporting structure is also broken. Which, results in >1000 services in production and it being unclear how many there are and what they all do. Most likely, this is how the teams are structured as well.
From my brief interaction with Uber - you got a point about teams building their own product to get a promotion. It looked to me like an unnessassry and waste of resources endeavour but it totally makes sence now.
It's yet another source claiming that Uber is a dysfunctional organization. At this point it's hard for me to expect they're going to rise to the challenge here.
The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?", everything else is likely to be the good old game of "let's pretend we're doing something while people forget about this".
I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber. Livid is more like it. I'm also disappointed in the men who work there, some of whom worked with her, but who apparently didn't behave like honorable human beings and demand the behavior stop. Granted, I'm assuming other men knew of this behavior, but I don't think that is likely to be much of a stretch. We all have a responsibility to look out for each other, no matter our gender. So yeah, Uber screwed up massively, and made me and my wife rethink ever using their services again, but I'm also disappointed in their whole workforce for not rooting out this behavior organically. "But I needed a job," isn't a good excuse, when the fundamental value we should all hold is decency. If you run across this shit in your own organizations make sure you speak up. Keep records. Make sure they know that retaliation will be handled with legal representation and with outreach to the state Department of Labor. Will there sometimes be negative repercussions for you personally? Yes. Will you sleep better at night? Yes. Will things improve in the aggregate over time? Yes, if enough of us simply refuse to stay quiet when we see and hear this kind of thing.
The CEO should have access to the mentioned metrics.
+ average stay of an employee
+ percentage female employees over time
It's not so hard to assume something is wrong in HR or company culture if these figures show anomalies.
I think if Uber was more data minded about their own progress and efficiency, the board would have catched it even if they are in some kind of ivory tower.
>I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber.
We have heard a story given by one person, uncorroborated by others, and without any of the supposed abundant evidence. It may well be a true account, but it is premature and wrong to assume it is true right now.
Im going to assume that this is just damage control to handle the media accusations. Ive never been an Uber employee but have been apart of previous large SV companies that were driven by what I perceived to be management structures plagued (or driven?) by in-fighting and unethical behaviors. Perhaps Im being presumptive about Uber's internals but from my experience once you define a company culture its almost impossible to turn it around in any meaningful way. From what I hear about Uber internally and externally it smacks of the same cultures of places of the past like Zynga or Groupon. It seems to me watching SV over the years companies of this profile follow a pattern of hype, exuberant growth and then an unabated fall over a long period of time after which the CEO gets thrown out and the company survives on life support. I guess we'll see if Uber is different.
> s but from my experience once you define a company culture its almost impossible to turn it around in any meaningful way
You do see it happen. Dropbox was known to have a bro-y, male dominated engineering culture in 2013 and earlier, but since then has become significantly more diverse due to cultural changes. (To be fair though, it never suffered cloak-and-dagger problems described in Fowler's post, making it more plausible to alter the culture)
Its an interesting point, interacting with both Zenefits and Uber I got the same impression, the "bros" from the early days were being pushed out by the "pros" from Yammer (Zenefits) and FB/Google (Uber).
However this doesn't seem to have helped at Zenefits, and I guess it didn't help at Uber either.
Even more concerning is I would guess (and Linkedin corroborates this a bit) that the SRE org where this harassment occurred was basically lifted from the Google org tree.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily indicative of harassment at FB/Google. I've heard rumors that SRE at Uber was pretty bad. I had classmate who interned out in the bay area and was thinking about working in SRE. They mentioned that Uber was poaching a lot of engineers to do SRE work with crazy high offers. But they wouldn't stay around a long time because apparently both the technical and non-technical cultures were pretty bad. Sometimes jobs can be a lot a lot worse than you expected, and you can't really change much as a new hire.
I just quit Uber SRE after only six months. There was a combination of really bad tech and really bad culture - There was a huge seniority culture despite the face that nobody had been there for more than three years. There was a focus on 'big impact' that felt just like a recent article[1] about feature mills - Despite being, you know, the division charged with keeping things going. They'd drilled and drilled on solving simple problems, but hadn't fixed the engineering reasons why those problems kept showing up. And they couldn't keep technical staff who knew what they were doing. The people I actually liked and respected at Uber were leaving in droves. Even new hires barely stuck around - A full third of my new hire orientation class left before me.
And, oh, yeah - I had three managers in that six months. One was fired, one quit precisely at his one year, and the third had 70 direct reports.
If you see candidates coming from Uber, tenure past a year is a warning sign. I knew a few I'd want to work with again - A lot more I wouldn't.
IMO company culture has to come from the top or at least be enforced from the top, because when there's a lot of pushback or things going wrong there needs to be a clear authority who can determine who or what is "right".
From the claims, if you can go all the way up to the CTO and still not have a resolution then it's beyond hope at that point. They can't claim ignorance. In this case they valued performance > integrity.
I really hope they're able to corroborate some of the claims about how HR responded, because there was a whole list of responses that make it clear that at least one person in HR is a liability to the company:
* waving away sexual harassment because the offender is a "high performer"
* repeatedly lying about the same person committing their "first offense"
* telling the reporter that retaliation should be expected and there's nothing HR can do about it
* implying the reporter must be the problem because the common element in all of her complaints is her
* telling the reporter that it's unprofessional to report these problems via email and to keep records of them
These are all responses of an HR department that is going out of their way to not hear complaints, and any company of Uber's size should be very, very concerned about this attitude coming back to bite them in the ass. If these responses all came from one HR contact, that person should be out on their ass ASAP. If they came from various people, then HR management is completely fucked.
Maybe, but given the allegations and how quickly it has gotten traction, I would expect them to act and make pretty large changes. Here's what I think they'll need to do:
- fire the entire chain of command to the HR person that she spoke to, probably the HR person too.
- institute a deep policy around fixing the performance review issue, the transfer issue, and the harassment issue.
- firing whoever they find who has engaged in any of those issues, which is probably at least 20 mid-level managers and some of their bosses who knew about it but didnt fix it
- put a huge amount of work into hiring more women and retaining more women, including broad policy and culture changes.
That is, if @travisk means what he says. If not, they'll fire 3 scapegoats and declare the problem solved.
I think the problem is, and all the comments here seem to pretty much infer this, is that if the institution is corrupt, then the process of it cleansing itself will also be corrupt (Who's the scapegoat?). It seems very rare to me that once a corporation loses its ambition for a greater calling and sinks into "let's play business" that it should ever recover.
According to the article, the CHRO is newly appointed.
Presumably, all of Fowler's email complaints should still be on file (and if they're not, the company is potentially guilty of spoliation [0]). If they're not, I hope Fowler kept a copy.
Let's also see if Uber starts reporting the percentage of women, as other top tech companies do.
I think she achieved her objective which is shedding light on the internal problems at Uber.
While many people do that via Glassdoor or similar websites, she opted for doing it in a non-anonymous way, which means that Uber may retaliate legally if they can, or that future employers might try to avoid someone who is perceived as being "problematic", to name some few scenarios.
Now, HR departments operate in borderline illegal ways. Many contract clauses are non-enforceable, but they all insist in doing it anyways.
If you feel collectively pissed off, get all the women employees to unionize and start a collective bargain for better terms of employment and even go on strike.
No, it wasn't quick. It is way way too late. It shouldn't require someone to publicly shame them before taking action. Acting now, after what was known privately is now public, is a cynical effort to appease the masses whilst continuing to condone ongoing practices within their organisation.
The people involved should've been fired long ago, and for Kalanick to come out and say what happened is "against everything Uber stands for and believes in", thus suggesting he was unaware, only serves to reinforce his failure as leader. Blame ultimately lies with the CEO, no matter what.
Women shouldn't need to put their careers on the line to publicly shame a company before justice is seen.
(edit: apologies to the parent, was not pointing fingers at you...anger was misdirected)
You're right of course, but to be clear I only meant it was a short period of time from the story breaking, to a response. I'm not praising Uber, I'm not noting the intensity and rapidity of their, "Oh shit" reaction.
Not to mention the (presumably) millions of dollars she was forced to walk away from.
I can't imagine that HR allowing repeated sexual harassment claims to go without any consequences, not to mention a manager feeling comfortable propositioning a direct report OVER WRITTEN CHAT, comes from anything but people certain the company allowed their actions.
Well, with something so public and damning, an organization so exposed to public opinion has to _do Something_ --even if that includes collateral damage or whether it actually accomplishes something internally. It has to do something for public relations reasons, if nothing else. That's not being cynical, that's just how it is. It's not very different from companies who sell directly to the public having to fire people who make inexcusable statements which become public --it's not as though in private, out of customer's earshots, lot's of unbecoming things aren't said. But when something becomes public, they have to do something, with cause or not.
I think it is common to have incompetents running HR in these high-valued startups, when the VP is probably just a beer-buddy or the wingman of the founder, with no formal HR education or experience. I have had one of those asking the big no-no questions in an interview and I can't stop rolling my eyes.
This reminds me of the one-week safety investigation that Tesla promised to undertake after one of their workers published a blog post. http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/
The non-independent format of investigation potentially compromises effectiveness. Given the size of the company, nature of allegations and how systemic the alleged infractions appear to be, the better course would have been to source an investigator externally.
>What was the message actually sent to the girl? I feel like this is a vital piece of information.
From the posting, she supposedly had screenshots. I'd love to see them. Also, I'm betting the screenshots are of a system that doesn't easily allow for others to look in to abuse such as Slack, Basecamp, etc.
Errr, a lot of places have retention policies for chat, and that is a platform independent thing. After that retention time anything else is the same level of screenshots.
You can implement retention policies on IRC, slack[1], mattermost, hipchat, etc. On-prem / open vs hosted it doesn't change that.
Wow. To assume that I am sexist from that comment is beyond ignorant. I typed as I normally do and in 90% of America it is the norm to type girl in that sentence. Maybe this is shifting but it is not sexist to type commonly used terms in certain contexts.
Do you genuinely think we should assume guilt on someone because their feelings are hurt? That's a dangerous path to go down and we have to rely on hard evidence or else witch hunts have real consequences.
It's not hard to imagine the tides turning and false acquisitions becoming as big as a problem as sexism.
PS. I am a firm believer in removing sexism from all cultures.
You're so non-sexist you're willing to be the bigger man and read her messages to make sure she didn't just get her feelings hurt and isn't being too emotional.
And call her a child, which is -- contrary your bullshit -- a deliberate insult. Unless you're in the habit of calling men who seem to be well over 25 boy. No? Didn't think so.
If you are genuinely interested in dismantling sexism, start by avoiding defensiveness when someone calls out your sexist behavior. If you don't even do that much, then how can anyone believe your claims about your own motives?
This past year has been filled with a vast amount of false accusations; in my opinion, it would be wise to be sceptical of any claims that aren't backed up with any evidence.
Anyone could write an article saying that Uber was misogynistic towards them in some way, and everyone will eat it up because they already hate Uber over the JFK airport stuff.
He might done something against the guidelines on HN, but the way to counter it is not by violating the guidelines yourself. That's what the downvote button is for.
People might be less inclined to call you a shitlord if your account did something other than post one- and two-liners about hot-button political events that largely just express your opinion. OK, great, you're skeptical about her account because "too often these stories are lies", says Mr Instant Facts. Have you got anything to back this up, or are you just making things up because it's fun to post things to the Internet? The woman in question at least posts her stuff under her real name...
Have you read the article though? Often hearing one-side isn't enough to render a verdict, but in this case it's incredibly hard to hear Susan's side and witness the poise with which she retells it and be able to imagine any version of events where the organization did nothing wrong.
Skill at composing a narrative does not lend additionally credibility to a narrative. This is emotional thinking; there is a very good reason that thousands of years of developing legal systems has led to an alleged victim providing proof.
What would be nice instead: A serious and in-depth analysis going from incidental to systemic to cultural, like NASA's "oops we dropped NOAA-19" report - https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf (summary on pages 8-10)
Most companies could stand to learn some lessons from NASA, where cultural failure means dead astronauts rather than bad PR. When their culture is bad, they change the culture. What will Uber do?