Sexism at Uber from Female Management

Yes.

In the sense that there's a big, public, blowup about their culture? I think we're there.

>It's a source of constant amazement to me that people who will drill incessantly on red-black trees won't put in a modicum of effort to learn even a little bit about the inherently more complicated business of managing people.

This isn't really an issue if you promote an engineer to mgmt when they have demonstrated that can manage people, rather than before and assume they can grow.

Is this what happens when a company gets too large too fast? I've only worked at small companies that would not be able to afford the waste generated by a manager like this Tina character. (Who has time for 6 hours of meetings?)

I mean, I can imagine that characters like Tina existing in the world, hiring them, promoting them to management, and then learning that they have problems like this. It's hard to screen for these sorts of personalities a priori, and it can be difficult to fire them quickly also once that problems start manifesting. That could happen anywhere.

What's particularly odd about these stories coming out from Uber is that there are so many of them in a single company.

I'm not sure culture itself explains it. Even if you assume that "Uber has an evil culture", you would think that they would still be incentivized to keep turnover caused by bad management down.

>During that same meeting, we gave “anonymous feedback” on Post-it notes. She read off each Post-it and addressed each person that wrote the “anonymous feedback” if she knew who it was. She has done this multiple times, and each time it makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. The “anonymous” part of the feedback must be lost on her.

This sorta happened to me once in high school, in 10th grade English class. Our teacher (a highly religious female), near the end of the school year, had us write down our comments and criticisms anonymously. One big complaint a bunch of people had was how she talked a lot about her religion and church experiences in class. Being a public school, even though it was close to the Bible Belt, it was inappropriate and a lot of students were uncomfortable with this, and apparently commented about it (I was one of them). So she addressed this in the next class, defending herself and also commenting that she knew who many of the commenters were by their handwriting. So much for anonymity.

I believe some people complained to the administration, because she wasn't there the next year.

It's really strange how people in a position of power will solicit "anonymous" feedback, and then when they don't like the criticism will figure out how to identify the complainers and use that against them.

Anyway, the problem I have with this "sexism" claim here is that this anecdote doesn't seem to paint Uber itself in a bad light at all, and doesn't even have any complaints about bad behavior by any men (did I miss something?). It just complains about a single female boss. She sounds like a horrible boss, to be sure, but a crappy female boss telling you to not wear a tank top isn't really what I think of when I hear about a company that has a "culture of sexism". All the complaints this woman has are about this one boss, that's it, and also probably HR's refusal to do anything about it.

Honestly, this doesn't surprise me at all about the boss, and I don't think it's indicative of a major "sexism" problem within Uber, just another data point showing how crappy their management and especially HR are, but that's not a problem unique to Uber at all. Personally, I'll bet that the female boss isn't as pretty as this woman, or somehow views her as a threat. I've heard tons of stories about women in the workplace attacking other women, and many of these I heard from my now ex-wife (who I'm on good terms with). She has a bunch of stories about being singled out for abuse not from men, but other women, probably because she was prettier than them and didn't play their stupid social games. She had coworkers literally verbally attack her (screaming at her even), and even though she didn't do anything to instigate this or escalate or even respond, she'd get called into HR and treated as though she had started the problem somehow. (Other coworkers would then testify in her defense that the other woman was nuts, and then HR would then just tell her to "try to get along" and that "Julie is a little touchy" or some BS like that, instead of actually dealing with the toxic employee.) Strangely, she has no stories of abuse from men in the civilian workplace, but she was in the Air Force for a little while and had a few problems there, including an attempted rape (by someone she thought was a friend) wherein she stabbed the guy in the abdomen with her keys, but overall got along just fine with both men and women and got a bunch of commendations. But when she moved to the civilian world, she had no end of trouble with female coworkers and useless women in HR.