101–110 of 234 posts
Surprise surprise, managers behave badly and it doesn't matter what their background is. Usually engineers have to go through rigorous interviews; maybe it's time that was stepped up for managers with better behavioural questions.
If you've got Uber on your CV I would not hire you, no matter how talented you are. No talent is worth the risk of poisoning the team and potentially driving out my other talents.
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Acculturation takes time, which HR and upper management is pyschopathically unwilling to provide. They're too busy moving fast and breaking shit.
Is complete acculturation practically possible? It seems that all cultures have foundations that never go away. How about partial acculturation? Has it successfully been done before? Has a company ever managed to completely change their inner workings without becoming something unrecognizable?
Upper management's pervasive refusal to pay anything more than token lip service to this standardization makes 99% of technology organizations a political hell to work in.
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...if the CEO and I didn't see eye to eye on something, that was never going to change while this person was CEO. This advice may be reliably true but I would also argue there are major exceptions. For example, take founder & ceo of any billion dollar company and you will find that they evolved drastically (in good and bad ways) over the years. Zuckerberg has radically transformed himself from an immature frat boy to…
Totally agree with your point about zuckerberg. Zuckerburg evolved over time, but the culture did not, to my knowledge, radically diverge from zuckerberg. Facebook as a whole made that same cultural journey to maturity, which I think only reenforces the point. Re: "founders can change" - I don't think it's the role of the staff to wait around while a guy spends years in management learning not to be a dick. If they p…
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Which racist thought made you reach that conclusion?
I am an Indian and I hear these things daily, "you are wearing a top which discloses too much of your body" blah blah bullshit even in the 2017. Note: I don't understand HN's algorithm, apparently, I can downvote every comment except yours :D
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see anything that the manager is doing wrong. We can debate whether the manager is effective at her job, but it seems clear to me this is not an example of sexism. The only citation I can find relevant to the claim of sexism is that she was asked not to wear a tank-top to work. It may very well be that a tank-top is inappropriate attire at Uber's workplace. At IBM and many o…
Easy fix: Mandatory dress codes. Men in suit, with tie from the time you enter the office until the time you leave. Women in suits, pants or skirts. Or go whole hog and require everyone to wear grey coveralls when in office. Institutions with dress codes generally have less BS distractions because the distractions simply can't exist.
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Easy fix: Mandatory dress codes. Men in suit, with tie from the time you enter the office until the time you leave. Women in suits, pants or skirts. Or go whole hog and require everyone to wear grey coveralls when in office. Institutions with dress codes generally have less BS distractions because the distractions simply can't exist.
That's a reasonable accommodation in a high school, where students are expected to have out-of-control hormones and not-fully-developed judgment. In a professional office, if you have a grown-ass adult who is critically distracted by the sight of bare arms, that's their problem, not anyone else's. If they can't manage the barest scraps of self-control, they need to consider a different line of work.
The Bill Belichick and Nick Saban enforce strict behavior and dress codes for their employees to simply eliminate distractions. Break the rules and they fire you. They're the most successful "mission oriented" teams of the past two decades.
Uniforms contribute to the sense of "unity in direction" that the best companies have. They should be something that you're proud to wear as a signifier of your work, see IBM in the 70s and 80s.
So... Tina's an asshole/jerk/bitch, but where's the sexism?! (I'm not disputing sexism in Susan Fowler's case.)
The manager wasn't telling male workers to wear long sleeved shirts, so that's the most obvious one. It was also obviously the last straw. Often in stories like these the last straw seems pretty stupid compared to a larger problem. People have a breaking point but it's often a small thing that puts them over it, the straw that broke the camels back. Although the story doesn't spell out the gender of everyone on the t…
Where does it say the manager "wasn't telling male workers to wear long sleeved shirts?" Even if so, how's that sexist? To say that something's sexist because a man gets different advice than a woman with no context is unacceptable criteria for sexism.
Re: WFH, she's a junior employee (graduated in 2015) whose boss told her to "be at [her] desk to 'ensure that [she's] collaborating with the team and getting the support [she] need[s]."
She's complaining about getting reprimanded for "working from home for one hour in the morning." That sounds like she was expected to be in the office and didn't clear ahead with her manager. Why was she WFH for just one hour? How's the reprimand sexism?
Taking her claims at face value, she's not making a strong case for sexism.
Usually toxic work environments are a symptom of an underlying issue-they resemble the people who created it. Even if they are nice, grossly overlooking toxic individuals might be part of a results over process type of mentality. Another possibility is Uber is fucked and people are kicking the can down the road based on chauvinism. Reading her nightmare reminds me of this quote from The Sopranos. "Money flows uphill,…
During my exit from a previous employer over a CEO whose sexual misconduct makes Uber look like the ACLU, one of our investors gave me the advice that "the CEO sets the culture". The context there was that if the CEO and I didn't see eye to eye on something, that was never going to change while this person was CEO. In the time since, I've found that advice to be so reliably true that it's one of the core things I use…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy fix: Mandatory dress codes. Men in suit, with tie from the time you enter the office until the time you leave. Women in suits, pants or skirts. Or go whole hog and require everyone to wear grey coveralls when in office. Institutions with dress codes generally have less BS distractions because the distractions simply can't exist.
If tech companies were to ever have a dress code, it would be jeans, a graphic tee and a full sleeve hoodie. Or a collared shirt. The hoodie might still be required.
Come now child, learn your history.