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Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

susanjfowler.com

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

#641
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the CHRO was hired in November.

If the investigation was serious, chief council or the CEO would be doing it. The new hire provides more cover for the rouge employees conclusion by providing a plausible 'it did not happen on my watch'. C-level positions hit the ground running and the sort of events described in the article are bread and butter regardless of industry. After three months there's no way this was a blind side.

Only because you did it twice...

"rogue".

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

#642
"The ramifications of these political games were significant: projects were abandoned left and right, OKRs were changed multiple times each quarter, nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be one day to the next, and very little ever got done. We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we'd have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline. It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos."

With the exception of a startup that was on the verge of failing, this is every organisation I've ever worked for. Including two of the big silicon valley giants (one who got cut down to size after 2000, one that's still big). I wonder if the underlying reason is the same.

I must say I've also reported people to HR, and I have regretted EVERY interaction with HR I've ever had. Initiated by me or otherwise. My attitude to meeting HR now is that there's 2 options: schmooze and snooze (as in have "a good meeting in which there is one and only one accomplishment: agreement between both parties that no other meetings are necessary"), or please contact my lawyer at ...

(And I do wonder if women's experiences are the same. WTF)

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

#643
post #576

By all indications, Uber has a toxic work culture that costs them both top talent and organizational velocity. I'm a college senior at a well-regarded engineering school. My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, in large part because of its reputation for internal misogyny and general assholery. Four classmates interned there last summer, and as far as I know none are interested in returning…

> My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber, The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it? I wouldn't want to be near any company that treats any of their employees like that.

When you are a new grad, you are more willing to put up with stupid nonsense for a year. Puts great experience on the resume and opens more door than previously before which sets up nicely for your 2nd job out of college. This is true for companies like Amazon.

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woman accuses Uber of systemic misogyny, but, no, "the real problem" is poor project management? So, systemic misogyny not a real problem for you?

There is a difference between misogyny and sexual occurrences. If OP had been a male, she would have had as bad, if not worse experience.

That doesn't explain the bizarre jacket drama, or reports from other female coworkers.

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

#645

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 think the "this is unbelievable" comments are coming from people who have worked in the industry for a long time -- but not at Uber -- who are surprised that this sort of thing not only goes on, but that HR appears to be advocating the behavior through inaction.

At least from my anecdotal experience, I've never seen anything like this among the four companies and 20 years I've been in software development and engineering. Granted, the percentage of women who were in technical, non-management, positions[0] hovered around 20%. In those cases, the skillsets of the women ranged as much as it did the men and all of the folks I worked with treated each other, regardless of gender, respectfully and professionally.

I wouldn't imagine seeking a date with co-worker. What happens when you break up? Do you want to bring that to work with you ever day? At the companies I've worked for, I know of one incident where a person was let go for "having a crap-ton of porn on his work PC" that someone from security noticed when the proxy logs flagged his workstation. This individual was a VP, a "high performer" and was very well like. He was also out on his hide a few hours after his laptop was seized and inspected. This was with no reports from women even hinting that he'd acted inappropriately on the job. And we had nobody inspecting proxy logs looking for this sort of thing -- that guy in security who happened upon his workstation ended up being there because he was investigating a malfunction, but because of corporate agreements we'd all signed, he was obligated to report what he found[2].

I hate to say it, but this is the kind of behavior I'd expect out of teenagers, not adult men. And it's one of those things you usually don't have to tell people not to do. Though I have no experience with this specific kind of behavior, I've noticed that when people fail on morally obvious things, they're often failing on many other things and I would be worried if I were an investor about having my money tied up in a company that had this kind of a reputation -- what other laws does this corporate culture find acceptable to break? I'd be twice as concerned if this were my employer -- not just out of fear of being harassed, but out of fear that a company with these kinds of ethical lapses is often quickest to screw those who work for them (or take them down with them). No way.

[0] Perhaps my experience is unusual, but for 17 years the VP level individuals in my teams have been women, I've reported to a Director level employee who was a woman and I've had a woman for a manager on more than one occasion.

[1] Thus far, I know only of this account, which without additional data is as anecdotal as my comment, here, but based on others piling on, I am inclined to believe that there's a real problem here.

[2] Paraphrased, we were basically required to report everything even if we were not directly involved, but if I saw something this inappropriate, I wouldn't need a signed agreement to persuade me -- I had full confidence in the HR teams at the places I was at and knew it would be handled appropriately.

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

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not square even a little bit with the software employment market I'm familiar with, not only in California but in the Midwest. If you believe that H1-B employees are abused in software development shops, that's all the more reason to organize.

I think we're getting a bit of a "you see a trunk, I see a tail" view of a very large elephant here. Think of the most scutwork of scutwork programming jobs in the industry, or even quasi-programming quasi-IT jobs like, I don't know, Sharepoint administrator at a regional insurance carrier or line programmer at a university (where most projects are "execute a SQL query to get a list of students in a particular course…

Guest workers aren't a reason not to organize though, they're just a reason it might be more difficult to organize certain shops (though not impossible, take a look at the FLOC who has been able to organize thousands of guest workers).

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

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hijacking this top comment to provide some personal experiences. I started as an engineer in the spring of 2014 and this was definitely the case there. Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering team. The misogynistic culture, in my mind, comes from most of the early employees being former frat bros. Culture was extremely heavy…

The booze thing gets exaggerated at many places. It is usually the marketing/HR/business dev/sales teams that indulge in that culture. The engineering team is usually much more constrained in their alcohol consumption, although the media groups them with the frat boys from sales.

I don''t agree with this at all. This certainly hasn't been my experience. Enthusiastic appreciation of craft beer and Scotch are very much a part of tech startup culture.

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

#648

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?

We've seen that with Github[1]. The debate on HN was much more lively and less one-sided[2], in that there were many more people trying to excuse what Github was doing or bring into question Horvath's story. Whether that's a good thing or not...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408055

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

#649

I hate stories like this, because there's such an easy solution: hire more women. Nobody should ever have to work with a single-gender reporting tree; in the five or so steps between each individual contributor and the CTO there should be at least one woman. It's not an impossible, or even implausible, goal. Throw a little money at it and widen the funnel, and you'll find plenty of absolutely incredible women. It's e…

Given how poorly she was treated by women in HR, and how many women left Uber per her statistics, I don't think "hire more women" sounds like a solution to their ills.

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

#650
post #394
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HR within companies has never done anything for me when I approached them.... The thing you need to keep in mind about HR is this: they aren't there to help you, to have your back. They're there to protect the company from you . Incidental to that, they've traditionally managed the benefits the company is either required or chooses to give you, and acts as a place for you to take concerns such as sexual harassment.…

How does one protect oneself in cases of sexual impropriety then? This seems like a pretty dangerous flaw. To be completely honest I've always felt that HR has been the "police" of the workplace, there to keep issues like this from getting out of control (as it most certainly did in the case of OP). Now I feel much more exposed...

Document everything then lawyer up. I noticed the OP never mentioned contacting a lawyer, which is a total "wow" after reading the story.
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