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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

#981
post #369

If you are sexually harassed, and HR doesn't do anything about it, you should sue. Don't expect HR to change. If the stories in this article are true, and if the evidence is as strong as the article says it is, this is a slam-dunk case for sexual harassment, hostile work environment, retaliation, etc.

Her choice to write about it might end up being a bigger incentive for change there than a lawsuit. She tells the story quite well. Probably an ideal story for some journalist(s) to pick up and expand on.

For once, I appear to have guessed correctly :)

Enough impact that Uber is now hiring Eric Holder as a lead investigator.

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

#982

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMA doesn't advocate for physician interests? How so? As a student member of the AMA, I can attest that they aren't the most effective organization, but they do plenty to further physician interests. I think what you're likely getting at is how heterogenous physician interests are considering each specialty.

> The AMA doesn't advocate for physician interests? How so? The AMA sometimes does things that align with doctors' interests, but only incidentally. It's allegiance is to itself as an institution, not to doctors, and it will further its own interests over doctors' every time the two collide. As one example listed upthread, they advocate increasing the supply of physicians to lower physician salaries, which is directl…

I agree that in its current state, the AMA does not do a whole lot for physicians. However, I would argue that if more physicians took an active interest in policies that benefitted all specialties, the AMA wouldn't be this shell of an organization that benefitted themselves more than others.

That being said, maybe sticking with state organizations might be a more fruitful endeavor.

Additionally, while physicians are a heterogenous bunch, there are many issues that almost all physicians agree with. Use the AMA to collectively lobby for those, and stick to the specialty organizations to push for more individual issues.

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

#983
post #850
post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's my feeling too. It's inappropriate to even wonder if the person complaining was in fact harassed . And that leads to a country where every manager is absolutely terrified to be accused because they know they'll be automatically guilty. In the OP case, the manager clearly behaved completely foolishly, but i have actually met people in some offices that were into open relationships, and talked extremely fre…

> i have actually met people in some offices that were into open relationships, and talked extremely freely about sex, just like any other subject 1. He was propositioning her; not just "initiating a topic". 2. That person was her manager, which changes the picture altogether (see this comment by 'calcsam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682117 )

The manager must be an amazing 100x manager. I cannot imagine why his fellow managers and superiors would keep him around.

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

#984
post #929

>On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. Totally normal behavior! Who hasn't spoken about their sex life the very first day of interactions? "Welcome to the team, we use Git for source control, all of our company knowledgebase is…

What kind of weirdo? Here... I'll help. They're male. They're engineers. They work in tech. That's what kind.

Please stop posting uncivilly and unsubstantively like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#985
post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely a natural difference in perspective. The typical interaction between manager & engineer is that a manager tells an employee what to do, and the employee does it. From the manager's perspective , any employee that's reasonably competent will do: success is binary, either you did the assigned task satisfactorily or you didn't. From the engineer's perspective , if you're good you considered a lot of alte…

> ... it's a major cause of startup failure among technical founders...including, quite possibly, mine Now that you've brought it up, is a postmortem of your startup written up somewhere?

There's a postmortem of my first startup's failure (pre-Google) up here:

http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/

I'm still working on the 2nd (or 5th, or 11th, or ~50th, depending on how you count)...not exactly ready to declare it a failure, just, well, a whole lot of pivots.

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

#986

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not read the article? Literally has an example of everything you are referring to.

The person I'm responding to actually worked at Uber, so they can potentially give more information than what the article contains. What do you have against talking to other witnesses 'of the crime' so to speak?

My bad, I have nothing against talking to other witnesses of the crime and wasn't paying attention and didn't know the person you were talking to was an Uber employee and had additional context to provide.

I just thought you were being a jerk and didn't read the article. Oops.

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

#987

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not read the article? Literally has an example of everything you are referring to.

The person I'm responding to actually worked at Uber, so they can potentially give more information than what the article contains. What do you have against talking to other witnesses 'of the crime' so to speak?

[deleted]

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

#989

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The whole Julie Ann Horvath incident was way more than hula-hooping. Although, I think your underselling how things like that can create a deeply uncomfortable work environment for women. I don't consider the dongle situation to be a story of institutional sexism at all, but one of a positive feedback loop of poor judgment and/or overreaction, by many of the people involved. I would caution you from believing that an…

How many mental cycles does it take to deal with any amount of bullshit? Claims of specific "institutional oppression" rightly deserve skepticism. It's like a Rorschach test; squint hard enough and you can make anything look like oppression. We all deal with a lot of bullshit at work, and in most cases, it's best just to accept that people are complicated and messy, but mostly well-intentioned, rather than stressing out over the "potentially discriminatory" institutional patterns.

Hula-hoops? Oppression because men may ogle. No hula-hoops, only video games and ping-pong? Oppression because the management isn't sensitive to the feminine interest in softer recreational activities, like expression through movement and dance. Either of these are plausible complaints.

Open-plan office? Great, creativity-boosting boon for employees that ensures everyone will build strong working relationships, and shows the employer's interest in fostering an open, collaborative environment where there are literally no barriers, physical or metaphorical, between teammates.

Or, wait, is it open-plan offices: Degrading, dystopian wage slave farm that ensures one manager can see all 50 monitors in the room at once and pounce at the first moment that someone switches to a Facebook tab, and a disrespectful mockery of a professional's need to concentrate on their important and serious work which could literally stop the company's cashflow if a minor mistake gets made in the wrong spot?

The point here is not to trivialize or to necessarily equate sexual harassment with other types of uncomfortable working situations, but to demonstrate that when what you admit is a "complex judgment call" is presented, flaws can usually be found no matter what decision is made. Judgment calls become complex rather than simple because there are substantial tradeoffs involved in all available options.

That's a lot different than having timestamped messages and strong documentation backing up explicit and clearly inappropriate advances from your immediate superiors. There's a lot less gray area to defend there.

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

#990

Earlier 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.

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.

I didn't minimize or dismiss any woman's story: the isssue here is the reference to imaginary women's imaginary stories. I can not dismiss an imaginary story, because it doesn't exist.

The issue is that because of bias against men, few people even realize that they are talking about completely fabricated assumptions in this thread.

And again: there are not even that many women who could tell such stories. I'd say 1 in 20 software developers at companies I worked for were female. So it is not a case of me not being told things by women on a significant scale. The women didn't tell me such stories because those women don't exist to begin with.

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