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Interview with Susan Fowler

nytimes.com

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Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#101

Post by rectang »

crispyambulance wrote: post #99
fpoijasw wrote: post #56

Hey engineer at Uber here. I'm a male engineer started working at Uber two years ago. I'm seeing a lot of comments here that is discrediting Susan Fowler's accomplishments in taking TK down, and I would like to correct the notion that the culture/TK himself/Waymo is what brought TK down. To preface I've work both at Google as an engineer, and frankly speaking the engineering culture at Uber didn't differ all that muc…

Fowler did a very brave thing. Most people who do "blow the whistle", however, end-up with nothing more than a termination and blacklisting. People like to think that silicon valley corporations are very different than their traditional counterparts, they're NOT. HR will always, always, ALWAYS protect top-performers and the interests of the company in front of literally anything else, especially individual employees.…

The lesson you want us to take away from Fowler's victory is to accept that the status quo is impervious, to give up hope and never try?

How about we instead look at what Fowler did right so that she didn't get "termination and a blacklisting"? Then we can perhaps accelerate the progress that whistleblowers bring to industry and society.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#102

Post by sdenton4 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #87
linkregister wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Susan Fowler is the single most influential individual in Uber's history, even more so than Travis Kalanick. 1. #deleteuber was a flash in the pan. It fizzled because it was based on a falsehood, that Uber had broken an airport strike by cancelling surge. Uber cancels surge for all notable events. Lyft somehow avoided judgement, despite also failing to honor the strike. The impetus behind the campaign wa…

None of it happens without Kalanick, no Uber, no work machismo work culture, no blog post.

Without the joker, Bruce Wayne is just another wealthy socialite.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#103

Post by atomical »

dang wrote: post #48
atomical wrote: post #4

> “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea?" Why are people so worried about going to war with North Korea? There are concentration camps in North Korea. Are South Korean and American lives worth more than the lives of those in concentration camps? The USA tried to create a free Korea during the Korean War and failed because of China and Russia. We need…

Concentration camps? Good grief. Please don't. It is a poster child of what we don't want: off-topic, political, ideological, generic, inflammatory. Did I miss anything? Here's a tip: if we end up at "Stalin and Mao" we've reached internet information death. That's one of the black holes whence no thread emerges. If a tangent points there, please do it somewhere else.

> Concentration camps? Good grief.

So I shouldn't talk about this here but you're going to start with me? Please follow your own suggestions. Did I miss anything?

Please refer to the guidelines:

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Here's a tip: if we end up at "Stalin and Mao" we've reached internet information death. That's one of the black holes whence no thread emerges. If you need to go there, please do it somewhere else.

I read books. Here's a tip: Don't be condescending. It violates the rules here.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#104

Post by skybrian »

BadassFractal wrote: post #59
baron816 wrote: post #32

I think the one good thing about the Harvey Weinstein scandal is that it has brought to light that the issue of sexual harassment is not just a Silicon Valley problem, it's a problem that is almost universal in our country. I've written here several times here that articles similar to this one are more likely to backfire as they help perpetuate the idea that the tech industry is hostile to women and they should stay…

Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species. I don't think any country at this point is particularly amazing at containing those primal tendencies, but happy to be proven wrong. Either way, just like with violence and crime, we need to continue the journey of education of what is and is not acceptable behav…

Saying it's "fundamental hardwiring" is not science, it's speculation at best. Figuring out what's cultural versus genetic in humans is a difficult scientific problem that can't be solved by vague analogy to other species.

If you want to be "real" just avoid pseudo-scientific claims altogether. If you think there's science behind something at least cite a paper.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#105

Post by diebir »

poothrowaway wrote: post #90
bogomipz wrote: post #38

I wish the article connected the dots of her path from studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania to working as an SRE at a San Francisco tech company. It seems like that might be an interesting part of her story. I loved the anecdote of her buying her own leather jacket when Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women. Brilliant. The title is a bit unfortunate in that it makes her sound like an Attorney…

>Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women Let it be known the manager who made the decision not to buy jackets for women only worked at Uber for a year, made a magnificent mess of SRE, and went back to Google with a more senior position. This same guy made a data science manager (who has a PhD in theoretical chemistry) take notes during his meetings, and who coincidentally was one of his only female reports. F…

The fact that the old Uber HR did nothing to prevent sexual harassment clearly puts the blame on (upper) management. Yet, the specific cases involved people lower down the chain, and it is indeed a revolving door between Google, Facebook and other prominent tech companies. The same bad actors are still around and just have moved on.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#106

Post by [deleted] »

poothrowaway wrote: post #90
bogomipz wrote: post #38

I wish the article connected the dots of her path from studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania to working as an SRE at a San Francisco tech company. It seems like that might be an interesting part of her story. I loved the anecdote of her buying her own leather jacket when Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women. Brilliant. The title is a bit unfortunate in that it makes her sound like an Attorney…

>Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women Let it be known the manager who made the decision not to buy jackets for women only worked at Uber for a year, made a magnificent mess of SRE, and went back to Google with a more senior position. This same guy made a data science manager (who has a PhD in theoretical chemistry) take notes during his meetings, and who coincidentally was one of his only female reports. F…

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#107

Post by mcguire »

fpoijasw wrote: post #56

Hey engineer at Uber here. I'm a male engineer started working at Uber two years ago. I'm seeing a lot of comments here that is discrediting Susan Fowler's accomplishments in taking TK down, and I would like to correct the notion that the culture/TK himself/Waymo is what brought TK down. To preface I've work both at Google as an engineer, and frankly speaking the engineering culture at Uber didn't differ all that muc…

"I'm seeing a lot of comments here that is discrediting Susan Fowler's accomplishments in taking TK down, and I would like to correct the notion that the culture/TK himself/Waymo is what brought TK down."

I'd like to take this opportunity to plug Joanna Russ' book, How to Suppress Women's Writing. It's hard to find now, but a very entertaining read.

Specifically, in this case, I believe this is the "she didn't really do it" step, or possibly the "but it's not really very important anyway" step.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#108

Post by bertil »

BadassFractal wrote: post #59
baron816 wrote: post #32

I think the one good thing about the Harvey Weinstein scandal is that it has brought to light that the issue of sexual harassment is not just a Silicon Valley problem, it's a problem that is almost universal in our country. I've written here several times here that articles similar to this one are more likely to backfire as they help perpetuate the idea that the tech industry is hostile to women and they should stay…

Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species. I don't think any country at this point is particularly amazing at containing those primal tendencies, but happy to be proven wrong. Either way, just like with violence and crime, we need to continue the journey of education of what is and is not acceptable behav…

It’s far from perfect, but Scandinavia frowns upon anything too blunt in that direction. Depending on the country, they have influential female politicians, board members, etc. Trying to leverage position of power for sex is presumably highly unlikely to get you anywhere else than the front page of a scandal magazine.

I’d recommend interviewing men and women living there for some context on what a word like that could be like.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#109

Post by bertil »

6841iam wrote: post #3

While her post did send shockwaves inside Uber and the Silicon Valley at large, I think, it was Mr. Kalanick's incriminating involvement in the Waymo - Uber lawsuit that ultimately sunk Mr. Kalanick. He simply had to go.

The metaphor that I’ve used for a lot of things (notably “viral content”) and that was first suggested by I believe MEJ Newman (complex graph theory) is, paraphrasing: It’s like measuring the size of the match to predict the size of the forest fire.

Susan’s blog was a match; internal issues (entitlement that made something like Levandowsky thinkable) and the tension they created (among the dwindling number of female employees for instance) was the increasingly dry underwood. I suspect that, a year later, the same blog post would have had no echo because all the female engineers would have had left at that point.

Re: Interview with Susan Fowler

#110

Post by bertil »

joefreeman wrote: post #91

Bit off topic. The article mentions a book about ants. Any ideas what it is?

Unlikely to be that one, but the most interesting book about ants that most of my friends read during high school was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel)

It’s a novel that is SciFi-ish in its construction but actually, it’s more an expose of a general theory of complex systems build by naive agents, stigmergy (coordination by traces).

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