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Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#331

Post by bogomipz »

cmdrfred wrote: post #281
letientai299 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel sad that there's are so many reasons that stop you to d the RIGHT THING. What is the better way then, beside leaving the company despite doing your job very well?

My advice, save some money, get your resume ready and sue. If they fire you, then sue for retaliation as well.

Well this individual did those first two things. I think damage has been done to the company already even if litigation wasn't involved. Sadly a lot of companies only get the message when they need pay damages. I get the impression that money doesn't seem to much of a concern for this company however.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#332

Post by ygjb »

obstacle1 wrote: post #306
ygjb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great! It sounds like you have worked at places that follow the rules. Please don't use your personal observations to discount the growing collection of evidence that this sort of thing is happening at tech companies around the world, and not just in the bay area.

Think about what you are saying using your brain. It is equivalent to "please stop giving me your anecdotes, because they conflict with these other anecdotes that I like better". If you're going to use personal experience as evidence for some phenomenon, you need to accept personal experience from every angle, not just the angle that agrees with your perception of the phenomenon.

Fortunately I don't need to think too much about what I am saying on this topic, because this has been an area that's been examined by lawyers, law makers, and researchers for at least 20 years. There is a growing mountain of evidence that can only be ignored by those who are uneducated or unaware of the topic (and no-one in tech other than recent graduates should be at this point). It's time for everyone in tech to stop ignoring the problem, and start publicly and privately calling out any and all bad actors on this even if it destroys the careers of a few "high performers" (even setting aside the fact that said high performers with bad behaviour often drag down the performance of the teams and organizations they are a part of, offsetting any of the gains). Since this is hacker news and not a blog post or paper, I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to find more evidence of that claim - why not start with this http://lmgtfy.com/?q=impact+of+bias+on+team+performance

These are just a short list of samples of articles that are based on surveys, studies, and legal opinions (and that's all I could find in literally the time it took me to pour my espresso this morning).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1229336?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...

http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/men-and-women-biased-...

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/gender-gap/

https://theestablishment.co/new-study-finds-60-of-women-in-t...

https://mic.com/articles/132285/most-women-in-tech-say-they-...

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#333

Post by halbritt »

gydfi wrote: post #146
genericpseudo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. Nothing should be off the table if this is nearly as wide-ranging as alleged, up to and including Travis Kalanick's termination for cause as CEO.

Sure, whatever, because of one mid-level manager being a perv?

Assuming the events happened as described, the fact that the manager was not immediately terminated makes the CEO directly culpable for illegal behavior.

So, yeah.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#334

Post by mcculley »

baloneyman wrote: post #317
mcculley wrote: post #304

It's very common that startups have such issues. You've got a bunch of younger inexperienced managers and an inexperienced HR department. What I don't understand is, why don't investors compel such valuable startups to get experienced HR? Do they calculate that the lawsuits will cost less than outsourcing HR or otherwise getting adult supervision? Or are they just blind to it?

I think startup is a pretty generous term for the growth stage that Uber was in at the time

I agree in that I think startup is a vague term. I think what is important is that it's a young company funded by external investment, not organic growth. Why don't investors care about such issues enough to be proactive?

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#336

Post by yummyfajitas »

freyr wrote: post #142
ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I wonder how much impact this will have. If they will discipline and fire people and put processes in place to keep the problem fixed, or if they will make a lot of noise about investigation and saying how terrible they feel and not have anything change. Someone here once asked me how I differentiated between a corporation run by people and a corporation structured as an institution. In the latter there are processes…

> I wonder how much impact this will have. What were the consequences when Uber management was caught behaving badly in the past? In November 2014, Uber’s senior vice president Emil Michael suggested Uber hire a team of opposition researchers—equipped with a million-dollar budget—to dig into the personal lives of journalists who reported negatively about the company in order to dox, target and harass them and their f…

What actually happened: "Emil was pushing Ben to answer why it was OK for journalists to publish false stories or attack a businessperson’s personal life. Ben was quiet. It was a pretty normal conversation about hypotheticals. There was no malice or yelling or fighting. It was a chat between the two of them that I happened to overhear. The last comment that I heard was when Emil hypothesized about creating a coalition for responsible journalism. Ben said that would likely fail because companies have no expertise in journalism. Emil flippantly said he could hire professional journalists for $1 million to get the expertise to make sure that they could respond when negative articles come out."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicole-campbell/what-was-said-...

Since when is discussing a philosophical hypothetical "behaving badly"?

And again, the actual hypothetical is worth answering. Suppose Emil did, in fact, drop $1M on hiring journalists to do journalism to other journalists. Why is it "behaving badly" if Uber does journalism, but not if Techcrunch or Gawker does?

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#338

Post by CydeWeys »

hatsunearu wrote: post #308

I just find the whole leather jacket incident incredibly baffling. It's just a few hundred bucks. Is Uber that short of cash? It's ridiculous.

It's only baffling until you realize that it really just is horrible, blatant sexism of the worst kind. That entire department had turned so corrosively sexist (going from 24 to 3% women) that it needed to finish the job and get the rest of the women out by making it plain that they weren't welcome. We're talking about the people in power here being so horribly sexist that they have to force the women out in order to feel comfortable being themselves.

Any company that cares one inkling about diversity will go out of its way to make minorities feel comfortable. We're dealing with the opposite situation here: A department actively working to drive out diversity.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#339

Post by stale2002 »

cmdrfred wrote: post #281
letientai299 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel sad that there's are so many reasons that stop you to d the RIGHT THING. What is the better way then, beside leaving the company despite doing your job very well?

My advice, save some money, get your resume ready and sue. If they fire you, then sue for retaliation as well.

You missed a step, which is "make sure you have a competing offer in hand".

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#340

Post by CydeWeys »

zatkin wrote: post #183
bflesch wrote: post #173

I find it disconcerning that they did regular performance reviews, and she aparrently scored very highly on them. But later those ratings were discounted by some "hidden" factor. Why would I waste time on performance reviews when I'm not openly giving feedback to the employee? How can an organization efficiently distribute team members based on metrics derived from performance reviews when there is such an impactful…

I think that the "undocumented component" is undocumented for the very same reason that companies have an undocumented component with technical interviews - they're trying not to get themselves into a potential legal situation.

That's not what I got out of it at all. My take on it was that the "undocumented component" was made up after the fact, as a retroactively fabricated excuse to remove her eligibility to transfer teams. The same situation happens all the time in a gender-neutral way in the form of raises and promotions that are promised but then fail to materialize, with some new excuse being created out of thin air.

Also, my company very explicitly does not have an undocumented component to technical interviews, as that could open up all sorts of legal liability. The interviewers write up their feedback and the feedback is then evaluated by a neutral hiring committee who never met the interviewee in question. Keeping the paper trail of 100% of the information that went into the hiring decision is the best defense against possible discrimination claims.

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