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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

#881

Post by dllthomas »

asabjorn wrote: post #422
RodericDay wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft kept operating, Uber reacted to the strike by fixing low prices ensuring good will with desperate customers.

That's not the effect of turning off incentives that get more driver to go tot he area. Instead Ubers actions made it so that an increase in demand was not followed up with an increased amount of available drivers at the airport. It doesn't help you if prices are low if there are no cars available. This was in my opinion a very appropriate way to respect the strike without forcing drivers to not make money unless the…

Yeah, it seems to me that optimal treatment of a strike would be something like: 1) cap surge (maybe to the typical value for the given time/area), 2) notify drivers when a request is from an affected area, 3) exclude cancellations of those rides from the drivers' metrics.

The biggest concern is that this puts Uber in the position of determining what is and isn't "legitimately a strike".

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

#882

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #100
brudgers wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If taking a billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia says something about a company's stance regarding women's equality, what it says is not terribly inconsistent with Fowler's story.

That's an interesting angle that I had not considered. That money is such a weird thing from another viewpoint as well, it means that Uber doesn't have to perform at all for the next decade or so, they can basically wait out all of their competition. It removes every incentive to actually perform which might be just what it takes to kill them.

[deleted]

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

#883

Post by varelse »

Ya know, it's not like this was some dude who asked a co-worker out, got turned down, and that was the end of it.

Nope, this is full-on sexual harassment enabled by HR that went so far as to ambiguously punish the victim. Every time I think the 21st century is finally here, $h!+ like this happens.

The guy should have been terminated immediately once she produced the chat logs. The end. Even from a pure cold-blooded business perspective, if he's showing such poor judgment in this area, god only knows what kind of engineering decisions he's making and how they'll come back to haunt down the road.

Also, fire all of Uber's HR implicated in this nonsense. Sure, they're there to protect the company, they failed here, and they'll just fail again.

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

#884

Post by sb8244 »

zigzigzag wrote: post #784
knucklesandwich wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No comrades of mine would see guest workers or immigrants as a threat. I wouldn't join a union that didn't stick up for all workers, regardless of their citizenship status. Maybe we have different perspectives on how popular the anti-immigrant position is in tech (and how many neo-reactionary/dark enlightenment dipshits there are), I guess I'd just ask that you keep an open mind about this and make a decision if and…

> No comrades of mine Ouch. Was that choice of word deliberate?

The parent comment used that word choice.

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

#885

Post by tptacek »

ahh wrote: post #880
tptacek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is this true, but the NLRA also bars employer retaliation against concerted actions by employees both to organize and also to take actions in protest of work conditions. It's a huge exception to at-will employment. I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started talking to the Tech Solidarity people. I'd always thought the reason nobody goes on strike is that you'd simply be fired for doing so. But, no…

Wait a minute, wait a minute: if I just decide I'm not going to work anymore, they can't fire me if I say it's because I'm protesting for higher wages? And they have to keep paying me?

Google "protected concerted action" and spend $75 on a consult with a labor law attorney. Some catches:

1. The protest has to involve more than one team member, and depending on circumstances that other person possibly can't be a manager.

2. The protest has to be defensibly about some kind of working conditions issue. You need a concrete, defensible ask.

3. You can in fact have your pay docked for not working, though you (probably) can't be fired. But remember, you're an FLSA exempt employee (if you're a developer), so you can make it difficult for them to dock your pay, too.

I probably wouldn't make the protest about higher wages.

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

#886

Post by OliverJones »

Hmm. This kind of stuff is not usually isolated. It's clear from Ms. Fowler's article that it wasn't isolated in her case.

It seems likely that a large company that treats trusted headquarters employees like this article described may also have ethical lapses in the way they treat field people. Mistreatment makes people angry.

In the waning days of the late unlamented Eastern Airlines, the airplane mechanics were angry. If you ride in an airplane maintained by angry people, you're placing great trust in their professionalism. You're trusting the line workers to leave their anger in their lockers.

In the same way, if you get into a car driven by an angry person, you're trusting that person to put his anger in the glove box. I'm sure most of Uber's drivers do that.

But isn't worker satisfaction a critical success factor for a business like Ubers?

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

#887

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #870
shoover wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good to see the support here. I am unpleasantly surprised at the comments admonishing her for not lawyering up, though. She bothered to write publicly, which is more than anyone outside the situation could rightly ask. She wrote very well on painful, personal events and I think can be proud of how she handled it. It opens the door for others, and Uber management is going to have to deal with it one way or anoth…

I give stuff like that a pass. We're the "well, actually" capital of the Internet (or at least one of the "well, actually" major metros). I think we all just want to be able to participate in the discussion and are not very tactful about crowbarring our way into it. I don't feel like I read a lot admonishment (which would take forms like "by not suing you're complicit in harm to other women" or "if your story was rea…

[deleted]

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

#888

Post by shoover »

tptacek wrote: post #870
shoover wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good to see the support here. I am unpleasantly surprised at the comments admonishing her for not lawyering up, though. She bothered to write publicly, which is more than anyone outside the situation could rightly ask. She wrote very well on painful, personal events and I think can be proud of how she handled it. It opens the door for others, and Uber management is going to have to deal with it one way or anoth…

I give stuff like that a pass. We're the "well, actually" capital of the Internet (or at least one of the "well, actually" major metros). I think we all just want to be able to participate in the discussion and are not very tactful about crowbarring our way into it. I don't feel like I read a lot admonishment (which would take forms like "by not suing you're complicit in harm to other women" or "if your story was rea…

"Well actually" capital indeed. I must remember where I am :)

Admonishment was probably too strong on my part, but I read the lawyer comments as more, "You should..."

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

#889

Post by rdtsc »

arkh wrote: post #765
rdtsc wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why do men end-up in dangerous yet good paying jobs? Because testosterone. Most young men are more willing to work a shit job if they can get good money than most women who value quality of life.

If we are going to go that route and using testosterone, I posit having more "testosterone" means standing up for what's right even if it means not getting the highest paying position.

> work a shit job

Right working as a developer at Uber with a high paying 6 figure job is now called a "shit job". I remember when collecting trash and mining was considered a "shit job", I guess we are from different generations...

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

#890

Post by Throwadev »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #171
knucklesandwich wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech workers (across all disciplines) need to unionize to combat this kind of thing. As has been pointed out below, HR that is staffed and incentivized by the company management only serves the interests of the management. A union is the only structure that can actually win demands for workers by organizing workers to withhold their labor. It's not a panacea, and there are several historical examples of union leaders…

That speaks to me. After salary negotiations, HR within companies has never done anything for me when I approached them. They seemed to be there only to defend the boss and register me as a complainer. It took me several jobs and this post to learn that.

Every time I hear advice along these lines (which is precisely every single time anyone talks about HR), I always wonder what these HR people are taught in school. I think they have Human Resources related majors in school right? And I'm assuming a good amount of the people in HR have studied that, so then is this what they learn in school? To treat employees like shit and lie to them? I'm really curious.
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