Uber blocks employees at work from chatting on Blind App

The idea sounds nice, but it ends up just reinforcing cronyism. If you belong to the right in-group, usually stratified along some social injustice, you'll display the merits that in-group wants.

Solving underrepresentation issues is, in my opinion, more about changing the perception of the industry for those poorly represented groups and performing outreach at younger ages, rather than having companies hire disproportionately more women or people of colour so that their employees look more diverse. That doesn't really solve anything.

>This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.

From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong.

Since we're clearly not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S

To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted.

>I'm curious though, what tipped her off?

I'd wager an employee.

Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands / CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a while.

For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written. Never raised to management though.

But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling" value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle, sweetheart") to skewer it.

Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking).

Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little dramatic for me.

Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.

I agree with your suggestion that encouraging women and minorities to apply, and ensuring that one's company culture is inclusive, is a good start. However, this doesn't really help with the core issue, which is that the number of women and minorities getting into the field in the first place is disproportionately low to their demographic representation. I'm not well-positioned to suggest why that is, being a white man myself, but until the underlying issues are solved, decrying meritocracy as promoting white men over other candidates is not a valid criticism.

Merit is for each company to decide for itself. I'm sure there are many companies, Uber included, that consider themselves a meritocracy but the way they measure individual merit just leads to toxic culture. Fowler made mention of a number of bad actors who were not fired because they were high-performers in the company's eyes - and this is a valid concern for companies that aim to be purely numbers-based in their evaluations. Personally, I'd say that there has to be a baseline of decency for an employee to be valuable at all, and that how someone interacts with others should be considered as a metric for their individual merit. Quantifying that, however, is a whole 'nother question.