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Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

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Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#91

Post by randyrand »

ebcode wrote: post #83
randyrand wrote: post #57

I just want to say, for every person in disgust of Uber and their sexual harassment scenario, there are many more of us that just don't care. Of course, most that don't care don't comment. So the comment section is not a good view of public opinion. Just the vocal minority.

Yours is an interesting comment because of its paradoxical nature. You seem to be implying that you yourself "don't care", but then say that those that don't care don't comment, and yet here you are commenting, which would imply that you do indeed care. But then, you only care enough to say you don't care, and that there are "many more" people like you. But I don't see anyone else saying "hey, we don't care" on this…

I'll help solve the paradox. "Don't care" can refer to at least 3 things:

1. don't care that there is sexual harassment at Uber 2. don't care about sexual harassment like that occurred at Uber 3. don't care that other people think most people care

My comment is about those that check off all 3. They are the majority, and they don't comment. For me, I only check off #1 and #2, hence the comment.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#92

Post by fixermark »

mattzito wrote: post #27
komali2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell, Twitter is a great example. We know what Twitter looks like without enough staff: an unreliable MVP that fail-whales all the time. Twitter acquired the staff and capital to scale up and they became far more stable.

The economies of scale large computer systems offer are counter-weighted by the n-squared complexity of larger systems.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#93

Post by samstave »

zorpner wrote: post #17
ramshanker wrote: post #11

Does it make having "Uber" in your Career Profile look bad now? Even if someone wants to genuinely switch job within next few month out of Uber, It would raise eyebrows at next interview table. So Uber gonna have very mall attrition rate now. Every action has both side of coin. :)

Depending on where you are, it already has been. I recruited a friend recently who worked for Uber two jobs ago , and got objections at multiple levels (pulled them through because I knew they left Uber originally due to ethical objections and could speak to that directly). At this point having it in your job history needs to be addressed in your e-mail/cover letter.

What about a zenifits job?

They had to BAN sex in the stairwells and drinking on the job

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#94

Post by camus2 »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #51
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…

Um, it's not scapegoating if these people are harassing other employees. Scapegoating is when you hire underlings for projects that senior management was driving. No one forces you to harass another employee.

I think people are making the point that if the hierarchy covered the harassment up as suggested by the story so far, they shouldn't get off the hook if they allowed that environment to continue and didn't take appropriate measures as soon as they were notified. At least that's how I understand things.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#95

Post by fixermark »

rwmj wrote: post #9
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

About Facebook, yes. Google does genuinely seem to have fingers in very many pies so their headcount is not really a surprise.

Facebook also has fingers in many pies (their main product, the messenger, ads, VR...)

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#97

Post by 5ilv3r »

randyrand wrote: post #91
ebcode wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is an interesting comment because of its paradoxical nature. You seem to be implying that you yourself "don't care", but then say that those that don't care don't comment, and yet here you are commenting, which would imply that you do indeed care. But then, you only care enough to say you don't care, and that there are "many more" people like you. But I don't see anyone else saying "hey, we don't care" on this…

I'll help solve the paradox. "Don't care" can refer to at least 3 things: 1. don't care that there is sexual harassment at Uber 2. don't care about sexual harassment like that occurred at Uber 3. don't care that other people think most people care My comment is about those that check off all 3. They are the majority, and they don't comment. For me, I only check off #1 and #2, hence the comment.

Risky move.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#98

Post by ThrustVectoring »

StevePerkins wrote: post #90
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, what? Scapegoating is blaming and punishing someone in order to falsely claiming that the problem is fixed. Yes, the harassers should be fired for harassing. It doesn't fix the problem of management taking the side of harassers over the harassed.

You're both kinda correct... your original comment was just poorly phrased. The word "scapegoat" is commonly used to describe someone who gets blamed for something unfairly . Assuming these fired employees were harassing colleagues, then it wasn't "unfair" to fire them. But you seem to be using it in a manner similar to "fall guy". Where a lower-level wrongdoer ends up shielding higher-level wrongdoers from blame.

Yeah, that's definitely what I'm pointing at. Low-level wrongdoers getting scapegoated for higher-level misdeeds. There's two problems, really - sexual harassment, and a culture that tolerated it. The question is which issue Uber is firing people for, and which problem Uber is getting credit for fixing. I don't think Uber should get credit for fixing the second problem by firing the people contributing to the first problem.

Re: Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe

#99

Post by opportune »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #64
djsumdog wrote: post #14

Feels somewhat symbolic at this point. The massively corrupt shop decides to fire a bunch of people who max out the acceptable level of corruption. Even how they hired Holder feels like a PR tactic; a man who was against all the US torture techniques ( http://fightthefuture.org/articles/the-rescue-of-eric-holder... ) and yet prosecuted no one. He is the image of a career, PR frontman. I'm still going to take Lyft ove…

I disagree. This is the proper course of action when you have a harassment problem. Fire people. It's fine if you want to take Lyft... I have been choosing Lyft from the beginning. But I applaud Uber for doing this investigation. I'm honestly baffled that people are criticizing them for it. If there are people the investigation missed, that's a problem, but it's a separate issue and we have no evidence of it at this…

The problem is that the firing should have been done as the issues were discovered / brought to light. Waiting to fire perpetrators until after a critical mass of media scrutiny forces you to do so only reveals uber's true motives. Clearly they don't give a shit about actual sexual harrassment, they just want to preserve whatever perceived image they have to the rest of the world (not that an anti-competitive contract-slave-labor company ever had a great image to begin with).
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