https://medium.com/@smsowmya/harassment-at-apple-my-perspect...
For all the delete Uber folks do you also throw your iPhones?
Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
621–630 of 1001 posts
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have a pro-drinking culture at my company due to the nature of the business what? what possible nature of business are you in that makes drinking more (or less) acceptable. There is no such thing. at work, you work. if you want to get drunk, you aren't working.
> There is no such thing. Works at a bar or brewery? Wine related startup? Sales?
Agreed. I know some folks who worked in the alcohol industry and drinking on the job was expected.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's worth pointing out that this kind of male dominated culture doesn't just put off female engineers but male engineers too. As a male I've worked in environments with a high male to female ratio and it makes for a stifling homogeneous type of culture. I've never experienced the kind of sexist culture described at Uber but I imagine that must feel even worse as a male employee. I definitely see few women as…
I don't know what you mean by "even worse as a male employee", but I suspect you've drastically misspoken; you might want to fix that.
'spuz is familiar with male-dominated environments and finds them stifling. 'spuz is unfamiliar with a place as bad as what is described in the article and speculates that he would like that less.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hijacking this top comment to provide some personal experiences. I started as an engineer in the spring of 2014 and this was definitely the case there. Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering team. The misogynistic culture, in my mind, comes from most of the early employees being former frat bros. Culture was extremely heavy…
> Top engineers were being poached from Google/FB and these people > were trying to carve out territory in a quickly growing engineering > team. It is always a bit sad when one of the top characteristic of an engineer from organization X is their political ability to carve out an empire. I'm a bit surprised she doesn't have at least one law firm trying to get her to be the lead claimant in a class action lawsuit. See…
> I'm a bit surprised she doesn't have at least one law firm trying to get her to be the lead claimant in a class action lawsuit.
How do you know she doesn't?
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
You both should sit this one out. Talk to your women engineer friends to get a better understanding of the situation.
This isn't a sports match. What's wrong with what I said?
Because she shouldn't have to get the fuck out. I don't understand why that is hard to understand.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#626Uber is the worst company even to its customers that have the unpleasantries in having to deal with any customer service issue.
My uber got hacked and some jerk took a supposed $1k ride in London on my dime. As soon as I found out I wanted to cancel my account but uber didn't allow users to cancel their accounts. I had to send an email and wait. Also they know about the hack and blamed the users for letting their accounts being hacked via not having a crazy strong password.
They need to burn to the ground .... run by total greedy douchebag pigs!
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had this exact same conversation with a manager who seemed suprised when I told him people are not interchangeable cogs. He said that some people may be quicker at a particular technology / domain / whatever, or quicker to ramp up, or do slightly better work, but smart engineers can and do learn anything needed and do work that's good enough after a ramp-up that's short enough. Beyond that, he says, there are minor…
This is largely a natural difference in perspective. The typical interaction between manager & engineer is that a manager tells an employee what to do, and the employee does it. From the manager's perspective , any employee that's reasonably competent will do: success is binary, either you did the assigned task satisfactorily or you didn't. From the engineer's perspective , if you're good you considered a lot of alte…
> But it's worth remembering that every time you enter a transaction, you're having your work reduced to a pass/fail grade.
This is true as an employee and as a contractor and as a business. The nice thing about transacting as one of the latter two is there is no pretention of the transaction being anything other than a binary one.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#628Travis Kalanick's response: https://twitter.com/travisk/status/833480964315557888 > 1/ What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired. > 2/ I've instructed our CHRO Liane to conduct an urgent investigation. There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber.
How about independent investigation?
Exactly. Hire a credible outside investigative body to look at this. Even if the CHRO was hired after the alleged wrongdoing here, they're still biased.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#629Mike Isaac (reporter for the New York Times) is collecting more stories of harassment & toxic work environment at Uber: https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/833445850130944000
One of the things that this article got me thinking about is how much less effective that model is. Sure, some Sunday from now, maybe there's a NYT expose that reaches a national audience. Before that happens, the NYT reporters will reach out to Uber senior management for comment and give it time to compose some hollow PR about how seriously it takes the matter and that will run alongside the actual stories of proble…
The upside is that you get a professional team of fact checkers evaluating the claims. This allows (for instance) people to come forward anonymously but still credibly.
Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Software developers have incredible leverage right now, perhaps more than any cohort of employees in the country Hah hah, very cute. A trivial proof that this claim is false: H-1B. Indentured H-1B visa workers have absolutely zero leverage. American software developers are constantly reminded that if they don't behave and do what they're told that their jobs will be outsourced or they'll be replaced by H-1B workers…
This does not square even a little bit with the software employment market I'm familiar with, not only in California but in the Midwest. If you believe that H1-B employees are abused in software development shops, that's all the more reason to organize.
I think we're getting a bit of a "you see a trunk, I see a tail" view of a very large elephant here.
Think of the most scutwork of scutwork programming jobs in the industry, or even quasi-programming quasi-IT jobs like, I don't know, Sharepoint administrator at a regional insurance carrier or line programmer at a university (where most projects are "execute a SQL query to get a list of students in a particular course then, and this is the hard part, display it on a web page"). Tata doesn't simply manufacture billions of dollars in services revenue; actual companies pay them actual money to outsource work. Actual companies also pay actual money for Tata to send 6k engineers at $75k apiece to the US. That's like half-a-Google worth of engineers; add in Infosys and you approach a full Google, except at something like 30 cents on the dollar.
AppAmaGooBookSoft consume the H1B program in an entirely different fashion and Tata is more-or-less orthogonal to the startup world. You can fashion a career in software which never touches the ecosystem that Tata is a part of. You can also fashion a career in software which never touches AppAmaGooBookSoft, startups, or software development shops. These two worlds are separated by a titanic gulf in conditions and expectations, and transferring between them is difficult, for much the same reasons as transferring between social classes is difficult. This does not mean that either of the two worlds does not factually exist.
You might never have been explicitly threatened with "We can trivially replace you with cheaper foreign labor." You might not even know anyone who has been, depending on who you generally hang out with. I have been in the room when that threat was made, and (because life is hilarious!) I was the literal face of the threat.