Don't ever talk to HR in a situation like this. HR is there for only one reason: to protect the company, NOT to protect you. If anything like this happens to you, lawyer up. Immediately.
Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#972Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then don't write "I guess it is common", state the number of women who told you such things. Personally I haven't heard many such stories from women in tech. Also differentiate between some colleague being interested in them and boss proposing sex on first day.
> Personally I haven't heard many such stories from women in tech. Women learn from a very young age to be very selective about who they trust, in a much more nuanced way than men do. If you haven't heard such stories from women, it's quite probably because they're not comfortable telling you such things.
There aren't even that many women in tech who could tell such stories. Your argument is really quite worthless because it could be used to prove anything.
In any case, as I mentioned in another comment, a collection of stories is not a good way to gauge the problem. You need to put it into context - number of women in total, and also, what happens to men. Stories like this suggest that only women ever have bad experiences at companies. But you can find lots of male reports of being unhappy at a company, too. Why isn't that reason for men to quit in droves? Presumably the Uber-woman is happy with her new job at Stripe, too.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#973Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Personally, I'm certain she's lawyered up, and has all the screenshots she needs to defend against a defamation lawsuit. There's no way a smart person like her would write this without all her ducks in a row.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#974Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am utterly persuaded at this point that the software industry workers need a union. Software engineering hiring practices are profoundly flawed; this is something a union could address at an industry level. It's also deeply problematic for me to take home $fat_paycheck when, say, $sales_guy two tables over is paid minimum wage + commission (disclaimer: I have no knowledge of this occurring at my current company; it…
>A company of people work together, and should share in the returns as they cover each other's deficiencies. This is not an economically rational way to behave, so it's not sustainable for a company to do this and keep talent for high market-value positions. People are compensated based on the minimum required to get them to join and stay at the company, so their compensation is going to be driven by the market value…
You're jumping to conclusions I didn't advocate for...
There's no reason one person who contributes one thing gets to scrape by and one person who contributes another gets to live like a prince. Sales pay the bills of SW devs; SW devs make what Sales sells. Both should be comfortably compensated.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#975Earlier quoted context omitted.
My "data" is every woman I know in tech sharing this story with a comment like, "A version of this happened to me" or "I know so many people who have had this happen to them." Also multiple stories of women reporting harassment and being forced out of companies, as well as multiple women I know signing NDA's as a condition of receiving severance pay to avoid discussing a company's poor treatment or management of hara…
Then don't write "I guess it is common", state the number of women who told you such things. Personally I haven't heard many such stories from women in tech. Also differentiate between some colleague being interested in them and boss proposing sex on first day.
Consider that you may not be a safe person for women to tell such stories too, if your first instinct is going to be to minimize and dismiss.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#976Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? A person in need of a lifeboat will take one. Also, the author repeatedly used the percentage of women engineers as an index of workplace quality/sanity. So we'd expect Stripe's to be much higher, right? Is that the case?
Going from 26% to 6% of any particular description of employees that quickly is probably not a good sign for quality/sanity. I'd feel the same way if, say, s/women/conservatives/ or s/women/$minority/.
I am surprised that you would include an active political choice with immutable personal characteristics. Some companies are purposefully political; it is why they hire lobbyists. They may also take positions, such as support of their own transgender employees or buying insurance that fully covers women's health care, that are objectionable to many conservatives. I could see things unrelated or even positive for business repelling conservatives.
The same is true of some other dynamics. I've seen an exodus of young men from a team because a new boss came in who didn't think sexual harassment was acceptable workplace behavior. The excuse was "the workplace isn't fun anymore", but before that it wasn't fun for people who didn't enjoy spending all of lunch talking about how to pick up chicks. Or for technical quality, if a company is successful the engineer who didn't want to write tests or get code reviews is going to rage-quit at all the "extra process" that keeps them from breaking the build on a Saturday night like they used to.
Sometimes when conflict emerges, a company has to take a side and whichever side is alienated is going to end up leaving. The question then is which side did the company come down on.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#977Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything, OP's subsequent employment by Stripe is a very strong endorsement for the workplace culture of the company.
Stripe seems to hire an unusual amount of really talented engineers who are also really good at explanatory writing. (Though this may just be an availability bias thing for me.) Fowler is one. Julia Evans is another that comes to mind. I wouldn't be surprised if they had amazing internal documentation for their engineers.
Etsy is another company with extraordinarily talented writers. Their engineering blog "CodeAsCraft"[0] is superb and I invariably learn something everytime I read it.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#978Earlier 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…
Personally, I'm certain she's lawyered up, and has all the screenshots she needs to defend against a defamation lawsuit. There's no way a smart person like her would write this without all her ducks in a row.
That's a good point, and it's perhaps insulting to assume otherwise given the available information at this point.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anecdotal. Sure, but I'm not entirely sure what else you expect. Isn't your statement also anecdotal? > If drinking is done outside work/events this isn't what is being described in the article. Sorry, what article? It's not mentioned in the main OP, and the person a few parents up is talking about what sounds very much like events or after work happy hours. I can absolutely see how that can turn bad, I'm just sayi…
Are you really supporting drinking at work? Tell me about the great experiences through the eyes of other people. "talking about what sounds very much like events or after work happy hours" The number of engineers bleeding from uber suggests, drinking isn't ^the problem^ but one part of a bigger culture problem. Do you work at Uber?
>Are you really supporting drinking at work?
We have beer on tap at work. If I'm in the office late, having an occasional beer at 6pm or so seems perfectly reasonable.
Getting hammered is obviously way out of line but one beer is hardly the same thing.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Culture was extremely heavy on the drinking;" For me this is a red flag. Booze + programming == pissed programming This leads to bad code also bad team dynamics. Ultimately this will reflect on the product and bottom line. For individuals this reads like a culture where the barrel is creating ^bad apples^. Not a good look on a resume.
I have to be honest, I know a lot of people who claim that they can write really good code if they've been drinking. I just absolutely do not understand how that is even possible. If I have ONE beer, it throws off my ability to write good code, or hold all of the concepts in my head. One of the weekly coworking meetups I go to always ends at a brewery (there is a brewery next door to the hackerspace where it is held)…
>I just absolutely do not understand how that is even possible. If I have ONE beer, it throws off my ability to write good code, or hold all of the concepts in my head.
There are times when a problem is intractable and I get frustrated through thinking too much about an issue. Alcohol, like caffeine, has its place. I want to stress that I'm not talking about getting hammered at the office, or even mildly drunk, I'm talking about the fact that for some people, a single beer after many hours of work can be helpful in calming them down enough to focus on the whole problem again.
Alcohol can certainly have performance-enhancing effects: comically, the first Olympic disqualification for doping wasn't for steroid use or anything similar - it was for a man drinking "two beers" before his shooting match to calm himself down enough to operate at peak levels.