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Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

bloomberg.com

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Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#21

Post by ASinclair »

hueving wrote: post #7

I wonder if events like this turn Uber employees who leave around this time into a market of lemons. Obviously nobody will put on their resume that they were fired for sexual harassment so hiring managers will have to wonder if a person who left Uber recently was fed up or fired. Seems risky to hire a recent Uber employee at this point because bringing a toxic sexist into the company can inflict massive damage.

The easy way to avoid this would be to hire people still employed by Uber. I'd say most people don't quit their job then start the interviewing process. Usually people quit once they have a new job lined up.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#22

Post by mikeyouse »

hendzen wrote: post #20
ng12 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a valuation of $6m/employee it's hard to argue with.

In the business world, people typically cite profit/employee or revenue/employee. It's only in SV that people cite valuation/employee..

They're on a run rate of ~$14 billion in 2017 revenue based on their Q1 numbers, so call it $1.2 million per employee in revenue.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#23

Post by k-mcgrady »

komali2 wrote: post #15
austenallred wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help manage the 1 million rides that happen every day in 450 cities. Multiple products, localization, recruiting, customer support, operations, etc etc etc. Look at their job openings to get a sense of how massive of an operation Uber is: https://careers-uber.icims.com/jobs/search?iis=joindot-V101A...

>manage How do they manage the rides? I thought it was handled by the app?

I'm guessing they deal with a lot of complaints from both riders and drivers. They're usually really responsive to that stuff so probably a lot of staff handling it.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#24

Post by nevir »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #18
komali2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>manage How do they manage the rides? I thought it was handled by the app?

Someone has to write the app and maintain the backend.

Also deal with all the crazy situations that arise from cars driving humans through cities

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#26

Post by ProfessorLayton »

Interesting how this contrasts with what Uber's new HR head said 2.5 weeks ago:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/05/25/ubers-bi...

Its also great to see that no company is too big to be raked over the coals over workplace sexual harassment.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#27

Post by mattzito »

komali2 wrote: post #16
oculusthrift wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you the type to ask that question about google and facebook too? uber is facebook minus a few years and has similiar numbers

I ask that about Twitter - these companies always seem to have more than I would expect necessary.

i think you underestimate the massive amount of backend and internal optimization that's required. Sure, the MVP of Twitter is a few thousand lines of code, but think about ad buying, ad display, abuse detection, customer service, content management, APIs, mobile, mobile web, etc., and that's just on the engineering side of things. For every engineer you'll need business folks, PMs, designers, operations, etc.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#28

Post by austenallred »

komali2 wrote: post #16
oculusthrift wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you the type to ask that question about google and facebook too? uber is facebook minus a few years and has similiar numbers

I ask that about Twitter - these companies always seem to have more than I would expect necessary.

Adding manpower doesn't make product/shipping grow linearly. At a certain point the majority of work is coordination costs, but is mostly requisite to eke out a wide range of coordinated and successful products.

At scale things can become massively difficult.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#29

Post by mavelikara »

macspoofing wrote: post #19
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #6

The article doesn't discuss the seniority of the fired employees. It's very hard to distinguish between scapegoating and actually working to fix the problem without that information. The problem with Uber isn't that some employees engage in sexual harassment. The problem is that there's a culture where sexual harassment isn't taken seriously, is tolerated if the perpetrators are "high performing" in other respects, a…

>The problem is that there's a culture where sexual harassment isn't taken seriously Is there? I've seen people claim this but I haven't seen any evidence for it. I know Susan Fowler's account is used frequently as basis for that statement and though I don't doubt her sincerity and truthfulness, you can't just extrapolate her experience to the entire (global) company.

You stated: I haven't seen any evidence for it.

In the very next sentence you offer one such evidence, and then go on to discredit it with you can't just extrapolate.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#30

Post by danso »

bgun wrote: post #13

The article contains so little information (that isn't already revealed in the nicely succinct headline) that clicking through is almost certainly not worth your time.

Here's Recode's version, which is just as slim as Bloomberg's: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/6/15747446/uber-fires-20-emplo...

However, Recode notes that Bloomberg was the first to report this info. So, the OP is the best that we have so far until the Holder report is released.

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