Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

susanjfowler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#541

Post by mightykan »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #139

I may have experienced a little bit of sexual harassment in my youth when working at a local McDonald's but, being a guy, it was the only time and I was able to put a stop to be rather quickly. However, being in software engineering for the past 12 years, I have seen the sexual harassment of several women all of which never saw a proper resolution. For instance I worked at a small company that was later bought by a l…

We should teach our sons to truly respect women. We should teach our sons to be respectful honest decent human beings. We should teach our sons to not be assholes who think they are entitled to a woman’s body. We should teach our sons to be humans with emotions and empathy for others. We should teach our sons to not be toxic despicable entitled pathetic beings. It’s on us (men). If we behave badly, it’s squarely on us. No external factor (law, regulation, social status, etc) would have any effect if we don’t know how (or don’t want) to be good.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#542

Post by nostrademons »

YPCrumble wrote: post #420
minimaxir wrote: post #414

Travis Kalanick's response: https://twitter.com/travisk/status/833480964315557888 > 1/ What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired. > 2/ I've instructed our CHRO Liane to conduct an urgent investigation. There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber.

It's a shame that he condones harassment until it reaches the top of hacker news.

It's also going viral on Facebook and getting picked up by media; I've had 4 Facebook friends share it in the last couple hours, and my wife (not in tech) was just reading it.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#544

Post by tezka »

ben_olive wrote: post #219

HR fucked up and the manager should not have talked to her that way. Absolutely agree. I believe she has grounds to sue if she wishes. Now, I think it's easy to take this type of situations and overeact. The behavior Susan described is not appropriate. That said, I think there is a trend to classify any romantic behavior or advances as sexual assault and innpapropriate behavior. Nowadays I would have a very hard time…

"Is it really that crazy that you might meet a girl/guy you might want to date at work?"

Yeah it's really, really crazy if you are in the position of authority over whomever you are harassing. It's still a huge problem even if you have the other person's consent. Uber HR is a real shitshow for not even realizing the basic fact that this is not just bad for the employee but is colossally hurting the company's interest too. I have worked in companies in third world countries and don't think this level of hostility and lack of principle is even present there.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#545

Post by jacquesm »

emmelaich wrote: post #376
jacquesm wrote: post #44

What's with all the 'this is unbelievable' comments here? This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound. You'd never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks. Fish rots from the head.

I absolutely believe it but find it astonishing that a company can behave like this. So, not sure what you're referring to but perhaps people are using unbelievable as a synonym for astonishing. ie. not literally.

Ok, thanks for pointing that out. Even so, I also don't find it astonishing. It's about as surprising as the sun rising tomorrow.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#546

Post by mightykan »

fermigier wrote: post #36

What do you expect from a company that has been so many times on the wrong side of the law? http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-fine-chicago-idUSKBN1... http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/14/10772412/uber-fine-califor... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/09/uber-fined-... http://time.com/4632430/taiwan-uber-fines/ http://economia.icaew.com/en/news/january-2017/uber-fined-20... http://www.pcworld.com/articl…

I honestly wonder how people here would react if a blog posts like this came out about a company that hasn’t necessarily been in the news for this many past bad behavior. Would we still condemn that company or would we blame the victim, as is the case usually?

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#547

Post by mathgenius »

mendelk wrote: post #439

Uber CEO responded in this article[0]: > I have just read Susan Fowler's blog. What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no pl…

> It's the first time this has come to my attention

the guy must be asleep at the wheel.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#548

Post by parennoob »

tptacek wrote: post #252
jacquesm wrote: post #44

What's with all the 'this is unbelievable' comments here? This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound. You'd never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks. Fish rots from the head.

I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don't see much much "this is unbelievable" at all. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Maybe because it is more of a clear-cut case of sexism and workplace intimidation, than, say, ones about “watching your co-workers hula-hooping” (https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe...) or “making a joke about dongles”? (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...)

Those cases invoke skepticism because they twist otherwise innocuous situations and try to blow them up into witch hunts where people lose their livelihood. No one should lose their job because an accusatory party happened to overhear them making a stupid juvenile dongle joke.

Susan's case on the other hand has clear, well-defined accusations of people acting in what sounds like unprofessional and sexist behavior to anyone with common sense. People should get fired if they ask their subordinates for sex multiple times. No wonder it (rightly) gets a lot of support.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#549

Post by bkirkby »

syswsi wrote: post #433

I'm curious if it's actually worth keeping high performing people on your company if they create a lot of internal conflict and employee turnover. Have there been studies that have looked into this? Are there HR tools that track this? This situation reminds me of the Jeremy Clarkson Effect ( https://blog.vanillaforums.com/help/how-to/dealing-with-toxi... ) where you keep people on board because they are high performe…

maybe not an exact match, but the "dark triad" traits are shown to be effective for individual career progress, but negatively correlated to organizational performance. Harvard Business Review did an article ("Why Bad Guys Win at Work") about a few relevant pieces of research in this vein: https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-bad-guys-win-at-work
Post reply on HN