> It's surprising to me that neither have pursued Uber in this regard. Reasons to pursue sexual harassment litigation: * You may make some money. Reasons to not pursue sexual harassment litigation: * You will have to devote an enormous amount of money, time, energy, health, and your emotional well-being. * Your lawyers will take half the settlement, either in up front fees, or as a portion of the bounty. * You will g…
I completely agree with all this, I just think it's frustrating for a lot of people when you see a terrible situation that's supposed to have judicial remedies, but in practice that system just doesn't work.
So offer to fund a lawsuit and the living expenses and career setbacks of fighting one.
I'm not in the business of defending Uber - quite the contrary - but reading through the comments it seems that most people are assuming that this post by an anonymous person is 100% true. These types of posts are worrying to me. Why could this post not have been crafted by someone at Lyft? Or one of Uber's many other detractors? Given the PR nightmare that Uber is in why not pile on while the public seems primed for…
Fowler's post established that this was happening to many women in the company. If we accept that Fowler is a credible witness, which I think is a fair assessment, we already know that this is a systemic problem. It's safe to assume then that if more women come forward, they are more likely to be telling the truth than not. Additionally, it's in Lyft's or other detractors best interests not to fake additional claims.…
Is Uber a company with a horrible culture? Pretty much. Are the details of these reports 100% accurate? Hard to tell. When talking about the subject, I'd recommend to think about the big picture and not the details (ehy, have you heard at Uber people call colleagues "dirty whore" during meetings?)
> It's surprising to me that neither have pursued Uber in this regard. Reasons to pursue sexual harassment litigation: * You may make some money. Reasons to not pursue sexual harassment litigation: * You will have to devote an enormous amount of money, time, energy, health, and your emotional well-being. * Your lawyers will take half the settlement, either in up front fees, or as a portion of the bounty. * You will g…
I completely agree with all this, I just think it's frustrating for a lot of people when you see a terrible situation that's supposed to have judicial remedies, but in practice that system just doesn't work.
This is why I think state Attorney Generals should be given the authority to sue on behalf of those affected when a systemic problem like this comes to light.
>Travis is well known to protect high performing team leaders no matter how abusive they are towards their employees. The HR team was known to be deftly[sic] afraid of Travis’s tendency to blame and ridicule the women and yell at HR whenever they went in with complaints of abuse. I heard about Travis personally congratulating Mike#2 for meeting strict deadlines months after I complained to HR about my abuse. This is…
Maybe I've watched too much Suits and The Good Wife, but it just seems that it's all futile. They're a huge corp, if you file suit against them they'll hit back harder with bigger and badder lawyers, and you either settle out of court, or play the lotto with the court system and try your hand at a judgement with whatever lawyers you can afford. It's really sad how stacked the odds seem.
Uber is sitting on billions of dollars of VC money. I'm sure that there are some very high-powered law firms out there salivating at the chance to represent these women in a class-action lawsuit.
Maybe the victims won't get as much recompense as they deserve (because so much of the judgement will go to attorneys), but I would not be so sure that Uber will have them outgunned in court. At the very least, it could teach Uber a lesson by putting an expensive crater in their VC runway.
> It seems both women who've come forward would have open-and-shut cases against Uber for multi-millions in damages. Is it possible that their contracts are written in such a way as to preclude this? Which if so is gross and shouldn't be allowed by contract law IMO, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I severely doubt such a contract would hold up in court.
Are you certain enough of that you'd personally risk taking on Uber's legal team using your own time, money, and reputation?
>Once in a group chat, team members referred to a new Asian American recruit as slanty eye joe. It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn’t participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved. It was normal for guys to openly refer to attractive female colleagues as sluts when they refused to go out with them. They had private chats where guys wrote sexual fantasy stories about female colleagues and supervisors where they performed all sorts of demeaning acts on the women.
This feels so unreal, just incredible! Amy Anon, time to sue Uber and get yourself a piece of the Uber VC. What kind of cretins work at Uber?
I'm one of the flaggers. This is an entirely anonymous complaint with no particular reason why anyone would believe it. A lot of it read to me as too perfect. Too designed to hit all of the right buttons to generate outrage. I won't deny that it could be true. But I'd also give that possibility under even odds. And if stories like this are true, then we'll likely have enough opportunity to learn that later to give th…
I don't think that's an appropriate use of flag: > Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link. If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. The story is not spam, not off-topic, and has a good chance of being non-egregious. It'…
My stated belief was that there are greater than even odds that it is propaganda. Propaganda is a form of spam.
Even worse, propaganda is a particularly nasty form of spam since it tries to alter your belief system such that future propaganda will seem more reasonable to you. Therefore maintaining a keen sense of what is possible propaganda is very important. A healthy brain should immediately try to verify anything that could be propaganda from any ideological position, and reject out of hand anything that cannot be verified.
This will only become more important as the world continues its slide towards fake news and echo chambers.
I'm not in the business of defending Uber - quite the contrary - but reading through the comments it seems that most people are assuming that this post by an anonymous person is 100% true. These types of posts are worrying to me. Why could this post not have been crafted by someone at Lyft? Or one of Uber's many other detractors? Given the PR nightmare that Uber is in why not pile on while the public seems primed for…
Fowler's post established that this was happening to many women in the company. If we accept that Fowler is a credible witness, which I think is a fair assessment, we already know that this is a systemic problem. It's safe to assume then that if more women come forward, they are more likely to be telling the truth than not. Additionally, it's in Lyft's or other detractors best interests not to fake additional claims.…
I'd argue Fowler's claims are similarly unchallenged.
I'm really happy she felt comfortable doing this. What an incredibly brave and strong person—I can't imagine what she must be feeling. What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. We cannot rely on the abused to stand up for themselves; for every one who does there are thousands who cannot. It is on every one of us to report abhorrent behaviour, even if we think so…
What specifically is the move forward here, though? I suppose hn as a community has the power to boycott applying to the company, but how else can we drive internal change from an external position? Uninstalling the app and simply choosing to use a competitor's services are another option, but sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if…
> sapping the entire organization of revenue seems like it would hurt drivers and developers at least as much as management, if not more so.
Drivers can easily move to Lyft or other competitors (at least in markets where Lyft is active). In fact, I would venture that most drivers already drive for both Lyft and Uber.
Developers can (and should) look for jobs at other companies.
I'm not in the business of defending Uber - quite the contrary - but reading through the comments it seems that most people are assuming that this post by an anonymous person is 100% true. These types of posts are worrying to me. Why could this post not have been crafted by someone at Lyft? Or one of Uber's many other detractors? Given the PR nightmare that Uber is in why not pile on while the public seems primed for…
To be frank? Uber gets the benefit of the doubt when they demonstrate that they've earned it. Every bit of smoke I have seen, both online and in my social circles, has had fire behind it. Every one , without exception. So I'm going to believe this until I have a compelling reason not to, and "but it could be fake" isn't one.
I come from the country that gave birth to Cesare Beccaria and I won't stop believing that everyone is innocent until proven otherwise. Besides this is exactly smoke, blocking us from seeing the majestic damages Uber is doing to labour ad mobility all over the world. there will always be a woman who'll accept to work for them if the pay is good enough, the ones harassed will be maybe compensated one day with a few million dollars, but the elephant Uber will still be in the room. No matter what, they are still growing, and doing it fast.
That's what really scares me, and all the engineers who did a great job of building their infrastructure are, IMHO, somewhat responsible for giving them the power to abuse it. I'm sure they all thought "let's give'em time and see what happens". This happens! every f*ing time. will we learn someday? will we stop to go west looking for the gold? I'm not sure we'll ever understand.