The book "Corporate Confidential" is a must read.
Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
321–330 of 534 posts
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading between the lines of Mrs. Fowler's account, the company's goal was being nice to a more important employee than her: a common situation in sexual harassment cases and other workplace conflicts.
I'd also point out the possibility that Uber HR has no power... or upper HR management (formerly Renee Atwood, now Liane Hornsey?) is complicit. They have a management chain just like everyone else, and if the person at the top (or the person above them) says "We're not going to discipline this guy" then the best HR can do is try to deescalate the situation.
If true that HR has no power (and it's starting to look like that's the case), then it's clear that the company culture itself it so rotten as to remove any accountability chain just for the sake of a few (sexual predator) engineers spinning out a few more features that will make the company a few (or a lot) more dollars. Shame!
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#323As a meta, it seems to be an infallible rule of Hacker News that any discussion about the relationship between men and women turns into an angry painful mess in no time. Maybe we should look into this anger itself rather than draw all sorts of conclusions from cases of which we don't know half of what really happened.
It's similar to conversations between conservatives and liberals. Both groups have implicit assumptions about how the world works. They have implicit value judgements, in preferring one thing versus another. Conversation almost never describes these implicit assumptions. As a result, each side ends up thinking that the other side is stupid, obtuse, biased, etc. Getting to the underlying biases is hard. As evidence, s…
I think in a lot of cases it's more that:
1: We know the assumptions.
2: We know the differences are often intractable (I will never relent on full LGBTQ equality, for example)
3: We can't just split off and do our own thing because we need each other for civilization to function, so we have to deal with them.
Some of us can avoid dealing with it by moving to the city/suburbs/exurbs where there's more unity, but that just postpones dealing with the problems we ran from. Eventually, elections happen, and you realize putting 50-5000 miles between you and that person who finally motivated you to leave didn't actually resolve your conflicts.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Should be able to go Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
I'm an HR professional. I've done extensive consulting to organization of people processes and HR functioning. I've found that companies typically get what they pay for in their HR department. Many organization echo the sentiment that many contributors on HN have (i.e., that HR is a sometimes necessary evil; the people are marginally skilled; etc.). Organizations that have that mentality of HR hire HR teams that are…
From what I have observed, there is a tussle between Eng managers and HRs for supremacy, plus few HR folks have overly inflated ego. A friend of mine was asked to relocate in a firm, she refused due to personal reasons, she was harassed daily by the HR fellow, daily he asked her to come to his cabin to mert at 10am and never did meet her and when he did meet her he basically threatened her. (She lives next to a HR person, she was told by her neighbour that "this is what we are paid to do, you should have recorded his audio and threatened to leak audio in public, he'd have come begging to you").
This, well, this is what the dark side can be. Of course, at the end of the day it depends on the org and the kind of people we let grow, if the people in our org are good, capable then it is fine, but from the words of that HR friend of my friend, that's the job of HR.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#325One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect the company.
Sorry, their job is to protect the management.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#326Crisis PR 101. Announce an investigation, "discipline" a few anonymous people or fire the most egregious offender, announce a new code of conduct, and then hope the furor blows over in a week or two.
But nothing will really change if this is part of the ingrained culture at Uber. Fish rots from the head, as someone noted in yesterday's thread.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...pa ... I understand that English has absorbed that word and its meaning in the current sense. But please don't use that word. That is like the n-word in south india. It is specifically used to refer to people in a derogatory way.
Pariah is a perfectly valid and non-offensive word.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure..the thing I don't understand is why she didn't go to a lawyer? That would have been the next logical step for me. At least 1 person should get to prison if there is enough evidence collected by multiple women.
I think what Fowler did was very brave and perhaps far more impactful than hiring a lawyer. This is hitting all the major news outlets, the CEO and the board are already promising "urgent" investigative action. And, oh yeah, a company valued at multi-billions is about to be hit with publicity which they will pay dearly for as #deleteuber starts trending again, at a time when angry people are sick of reading about the…
Also, at the start of the week's news cycle... I don't know if she has any malice, but if one wants to metaphorically burn a company down, it's good timing. Also it's President's Day, so Dolan Trump will probably be want his day off instead of making headlines.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#329I just find the whole leather jacket incident incredibly baffling. It's just a few hundred bucks. Is Uber that short of cash? It's ridiculous.
They need that money to keep subsidizing my flat rate rides.
Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blacklisting employees for reasons like this is unbelievably crazy illegal, just so everyone knows. I strongly encourage anyone with knowledge of or possessing any such blacklists to blow the whistle on this, hard.
It's not necessarily really a blacklist, but when the court case comes up when the employer googles your name... companies like to claim to be pro-equality since they get good press for it, but they're not actually going to put that to any sort of test. Much easier to hire somebody who's not proven themselves willing to stand up for their rights.
It sounds like it was settled before anything went to court, so it's unclear that anything would even come up in a Google search. And yet employers are still finding out somehow.