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Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#421

Post by xenadu02 »

searealist wrote: post #74
rockshassa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR could totally act in the way the article describes. They exist to protect the interests of the organization, and to minimize boat-rocking. It would be easy for HR to dismiss her claims in the very same way that you are. Before we start down the path of victim-blaming, lets at least consider the possibility her claims are valid.

Telling a victim that they should expect to be abused further (in the form of a negative review) does not minimize boat rocking or protect the interests of the organization. It leaves them open to lawsuits and antagonizes the victim into further action. And if it was true that they were protecting the manager because he was high-performing, why would you make this explicit. It just makes no sense and reeks of one sid…

> It just makes no sense

I see you've never actually dealt with HR departments before.

I worked at a company where the director of IT/Dev hired his wife to the department; they were swingers and engaged in a variety of unethical and harassing behavior. If you got on his wife's bad side he would punish you by taking away bonuses. He was also regularly drunk at work (and later died of liver failure around age 45). They both propositioned women in the office.

Nothing was done. HR papered over any complaints and ensured anyone who did complain was given a bad performance review to ensure if a lawsuit were ever filed they could point to bad performance and claim it was just sour grapes. He was seen as critical to the success of the department and the company had grown quickly. The head of HR was old golfing buddies with the CEO and both were friends with the director in question.

He was only fired once he grabbed one of his manager's breasts while in a huge meeting with a bunch of people. This was not the first time he grabbed women around the office, but there were too many witnesses to punish the victim in this specific case.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#422

Post by ghthor »

asciimo wrote: post #379
hueving wrote: post #233

>Ms. Fowler’s account is another sign of Silicon Valley’s struggle with women’s issues and diversity in a male-dominated engineering environment. In 2015, the venture capital world was put under the microscope when Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, claimed in a lawsuit that she was discriminated against at the blue-chip venture firm because of her gender — a case she lost. This paragrap…

I'm curious, are you a man or a woman? I'm only asking because you cite your experience at 6 companies to support the assertion that this is not a widespread problem in SV. I assert that men would have a harder time detecting this problem.

I've been transitioning from male to female, starting 4 years ago. It was shocking to me when I started making friends with girls and listening to their stories. At first I didn't empathize and presented arguments such as, "they had best intentions" or "it was just a misunderstanding". After having friends and my mind/body being transformed by estrogen I began to understand and empathize with my female friends; I began to see similarities in the stories they told me and how others interacted with me. My point being that its quite surprising how different experience can be and how important it is to listen to how others experience the world.

Everyone experiences the world differently and it's important to take the time to understand how different or similar their experiences are.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#423

Post by xenadu02 »

camdenlock wrote: post #63
thinkloop wrote: post #51

These are allegations by one party against another with zero data either way, why is everyone on the anti-uber bandwagon.

It's trendy right now to "listen and believe." Outrage can score you some serious Internet popularity points, particularly when your claims are about men being sexist pigs. Don't ask for any evidence, just grab the pitchforks! That being said, it's tempting to just believe everything Fowler wrote and hope for sweet justice. We all love a good story, after all. Unfortunately, what makes for a gripping story of justice…

You're being disingenuous. Please stop.

This is far from the first time we've had people complaining about Uber's toxic engineering culture. Using stack ranking, managers building fiefdoms and undermining each other's projects... these are hardly secrets.

At this point there is so much smoke that yes: it is entirely appropriate to believe there is a fire.

The only thing unique about this case is it is a woman and her first negative experience was a manager sexually harassing her. The rest of her post perfectly matches Uber's reputation as an engineering organization.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#424

Post by mcherm »

st3v3r wrote: post #359
hueving wrote: post #233

>Ms. Fowler’s account is another sign of Silicon Valley’s struggle with women’s issues and diversity in a male-dominated engineering environment. In 2015, the venture capital world was put under the microscope when Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, claimed in a lawsuit that she was discriminated against at the blue-chip venture firm because of her gender — a case she lost. This paragrap…

Except this kind of behavior is endemic to the industry. Just about every woman I know in the industry has a story similar to this. All over Twitter, women are sharing their similar stories. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it hasn't happened. It means you haven't paid attention.

Mild sexism is endemic to a portion of our industry. But I honestly have not previously encountered allegations on the level of "my boss propositioned me on my first day and HR said they wouldn't do anything".

I would like to pay attention: we can't improve this problem unless we pay attention. If you would be willing to point me to a few examples of people making similar claims, I will commit to reading through them and trying to raise awareness of the issue within my own company.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#425

Post by danaliv »

logicallee wrote: post #389
Joeri wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you there when the alleged facts happened? If not, it is definitely he-said-she-said. It is probable that things happened as Fowler claims, but we have no way of knowing without evidence. The article mentions the facts, which are basically who said what, since neither side has shared any evidence. Personally I'm not going to pass judgment either way without knowing more, but this is definitely going into my some…

Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span. Honestly, it just sounds like an editor assigned him to report. If he had read it he wouldn't have summarized it as "a lengthy post on her personal blog": he would have written that Fowler wrote about her experiences which began " On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over compa…

> Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span.

I know Mike and I assure you that (1) he has the attention span to read a blog post, and (2) he was not just "assigned." He's on the tech beat. He lives in San Francisco, not New York. And he's paying very close attention to this story. Go look at his Twitter feed if you don't believe me. https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#426

Post by CydeWeys »

Retric wrote: post #417
SeoxyS wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYTimes is a news organization with a mandate to report on verifiable fact, not rumor or opinion. You're complaining that it's reported as a he-said-she-said type of story… but for now, that's exactly what it is. The claims are quite plausible and convincing (and likely true), but at this point they still are merely unsubstantiated claims. If I were to imagine the right way to report such a story at this point, it wo…

If you want an objective fact, there was a drop from 25% women to 3% women. Now, it's not just he said she said.

I don't doubt for a second that that it's true, but what is the likelihood that the New York Times was able to verify it in less than a day? Is that something Uber is going to fess up to? They can simply say "no comment", and likely have. For all we know they're scrambling to move women into that department so that when the actual verifiable statistics do come out they're not so bad.

To verify this comment well enough to publish it, the NY Times is going to have to go find enough SREs at Uber who are willing to talk to them (and likely risk losing their job if discovered) about these issues.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#427

Post by danaliv »

adekok wrote: post #291
random_upvoter wrote: post #185

As 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…

> It's similar to conversations between conservatives and liberals.

This is a terrible analogy. We're talking about one group's lived experiences, not a political issue where there are equally valid opposing viewpoints.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#428

Post by coredog64 »

rsynnott wrote: post #311
aisofteng wrote: post #60

> If they will discipline and fire people and put processes in place to keep the problem fixed You're assuming that that allegations are true. They have been neither proven nor corroborated, and the author advertises her book in her post. Edit: This comment has gone strongly negative in the matter of minutes. I offered no opinion and only stated fact; either there is vote manipulation on HN, or at least some portion…

> and the author advertises her book in her post. Hint; while it may be surprising to you, books about microservices are not where the big bucks are. Nobody is going to make dramatic libellous false claims merely to advertise a book on microservices; the idea is kind of absurd.

I would say that the value proposition for any technical book is not the sales but is the prestige. I have had a few brief interactions with published authors and the sense I got was that writing was equivalent to a minimum wage job.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#430

Post by tomlock »

benchaney wrote: post #276
tomlock wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Why would I argue that? It is a criticism. Just not of the content.

The only thing about a post that is rational to criticize is the content. What else could you criticize? The name of the person who posted it? The time when it was posted?

The blog post it was posted on? How posting it here would make people feel?
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