721–730 of 841 posts
Without getting into any details this: "Once in a group chat, team members referred to a new Asian American recruit as slanty eye joe" seems very strange to me. The Uber tech org is like 80%+ foreign born, this makes pretty much zero sense. Disclaimer: I work for Uber.
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You work for Uber but are you in the SV offices? The culture probably varies quite a bit depending on where you are.
I meant the San Francisco offices. I think this office is something like half (corrected) Asian American. I thought about this a bit more and it makes even less sense. I have worked for a number of old generation US companies and some were a part of the military-industrial complex. The employee population in them was significantly biased to the right (white, male, middle aged), up to the point that it would be "Trump…
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I feel like you didn't really read my post. You don't fire somebody the first, or even second, time they mess up. There are plenty of people at plenty of companies that /should/ be fired, but have not yet because you generally don't fire somebody without overwhelming evidence. This is not a problem exclusive to Uber. Despite the fact I pretty clearly explained the problem, you still read into it the way you wanted th…
If the "mess up" is deliberately discriminating against somebody over a protected class like sex, I think firing them immediately is a fair and arguably ideal action to take. I would be surprised if this wasn't the standard operating procedure in most companies. I assumed from the phrase "massive jackass" in your post that cruel behavior from him was typical and dramatic enough to be a marked pattern. Most companies…
I understand you're outraged at people for their discriminatory behavior but you need to recognize you don't know the facts.
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I had a similar experience at a previous company I worked at, and a similar reaction. When people heaped criticism on them for sexism I essentially said "no way, I've never seen any of that, this is outrageous, you're slandering the good guys". Well, as it turns out, they weren't. A female engineer I knew in passing wound up writing an essay similar to this one describing her horrible treatment at the hands of one of…
Thanks, this is pretty much exactly what I'm going through, especially because I personally know Susan. It is outrageous to hear what has happened to her, and has affected me quite personally.
Uber clearly does a lot of things very well, and although I posted in a different comment that perhaps Travis should go I think that the best outcome would be that the company can learn from these events and become better as a result.
I consider the HN community to be one of the most thoughtful I've found on the web, yet am stunned by how quickly a righteous mob is formed based on an anonymous, cartoonish, and IMO barely plausible account of what it's like to work for a large US tech company. Having spent years working at multiple SV tech companies, where even the slightest tinge of a racist or sexist affront would land you in an office in front o…
>I wonder (doubt) if they've ever been abused. It's hard for someone who has been abused to come forward, let alone stand up to an abuser. If they dont stand up for themselves on any level, then they simply arent being abused i dont believe. If you cant express your own discomfort, its not anyone but your fault youre uncomfortable. This is a hard truth. (copied from my other comment in this thread) I'll give you a cl…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13748377 and marked it off-topic.
If its clearly abusive and discomforting, of course. But often times the problem is the "victim". I'll give you a clear example. Suppose you have a pattern of behavior around me that offends and discomforts me. If I speak out, and complain, and you continue, you are probably being abusive (although not necessarily.) On the otherhand, if I make no attempt to express my discomfort in any way (doesnt mean verbal, could…
>Besides, men outnumber women in tech by a very large margin. It's on our shoulders to help women fight back. Strength in numbers is a thing, and having men who speak up on their own, and who support and reinforce women who come forward can only a be a good thing. Yes, but the problem is that most men in tech these days are "brogrammers" who approve of this behavior and engage in it themselves. Tech is no longer the…
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> What I really want to see is the other 20 men on her team tell their bosses to cut that shit out. It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved." The 20 other men on her team were probably as concerned with keeping their job and not being abused. The big differen…
>It sounds like the abuse is pretty universal, from the article: "It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn't participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved." Full disclosure, I work at Uber. I have been staying out of this until now, but this point particularly grinds my gears. If I heard anything remotely like what was discussed in this article you bet your ass I'm going…
In any case, it is good you took the opportunity to speak up. Even if the company does not change anything, knowing that it is not all colleagues who consider you to be less helps to put things into perspective. For me personally, when something similar happened, it mattered a lot. Not just felt better, but really made difference in how I seen my position, how I was confident afterwards and how I trusted colleagues in general.
I am trying to say that the action like yours may have positive impact on colleges even if you did not seen it.