81–90 of 216 posts
>“I felt a wave of relief wash over me when I remembered that I worked at a large company, one with a sizable human resources department,” I feel like someone needs to run an education campaign on what HR is and who it works for. HR is there to protect the business. They aren't there as some moral arbiter. If you reported sexual harassment to HR you are going to be part of an equation - is it better for the business…
>“I felt a wave of relief wash over me when I remembered that I worked at a large company, one with a sizable human resources department,” I feel like someone needs to run an education campaign on what HR is and who it works for. HR is there to protect the business. They aren't there as some moral arbiter. If you reported sexual harassment to HR you are going to be part of an equation - is it better for the business…
What I still don't understand is why the uber HR acted this way. I think people understand that HR is there for the company, but the assumption is that they want to avoid any bad press.
If they protect a person who is a multiple offender. And this person is not C*E or high ranking manager, just a regular "high performer" (what does it even suppose to mean). What's the outcome going to be. Isn't it obvious that at some point this will generate a bad press for the company. And the bad press will be more costly than replacing the offender.
Also, when they fire an offender they are likely to "send a message" and avoid some offenses in the future.
I totally don't get how on earth protecting a "high performer" and sexual offender is good for the business.
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Unrelated but I wonder what happened to the HR folks that handled these cases. What would have been their line of defense — "I was only following orders", "I didn't want any trouble in the team"?
Do they have good careers now because the next employers consider them loyal? Do they have hard time because they did poor job protecting uber?
Cry me a river, the overwhelming majority of sexism in the IT-industry is towards men and white men in particular. Men also don't get the privilege of getting any media outcry or changes for the sexism against them. Just to give a few examples on top of my head: There has been no conferences that has been [1] shut down or postponed [2] because of the skin color or sex of the speakers. It has definately been so for me…
> and white men in particular It's difficult for a man to experience sexism at the level a woman does for the same reason that it's nearly impossible for a white person to experience racism. Going this out of your way to "defend" white men is in direct opposition to the cause of feminism and fighting racism for a simple reason: centrism favors the status quo, and the status quo is still in 2020 that a baby born in Am…
> I downvoted because of this bad faith portion of the comment.
He predicted downvotes, and you provided them. Maybe the faith of that comment was good, after all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were people who authorized either employees or contractors to harass her, dig the dirt out on her, etc, etc, etc. There were people who read/compiled/presented that information to the higher ups in management/executive levels. Did those people write memos/emails to their bosses saying that based on their view they should not be doing it but since they may not be fully aware of the full context they need their b…
Absolutely. Maybe you don't have the full context of the story - the CEO at the time that Fowler got harassed, Travis Kalanick, ended up being that someone who's accountable.
It is far more likely that there were dozens if not hundreds of people that actively and willingly participated in it. Were those people terminated? That's the real question. I'm, frankly, shocked that it is presumed that by replacing a CEO rather than replacing everyone who thought going after Susan was "just doing their job, not a big deal, no need to have a boss sign off on it" is considered to be acceptable.
That first article she wrote, exposing the culture at Uber, was profoundly upsetting and an important moment in the history of our industry. Kudos to her for standing up to one the most egregiously hostile work environments I've ever read about.
I remember reading that post and being surprised how little of it was actually sexism (the only thing I saw that qualified was the thing about the shirts), and how much of it was just maltreatment of programmers of all types. But I guess if you have to slap the label "sexism" on it to get it to be taken seriously, we take what we can get.
You're probably correct in thinking this maltreatment extended to men, or generally in ways that weren't specifically sexist. That doesn't mean that the sexist aspect of the maltreatment isn't also true, or an additional or more specific problem.
I'd say it's completely fine that the problems at Uber were presented from a sexist perspective, as that is a more salient and quite likely more damaging perspective.
That said, I do think there's some value to your comment in that it's very likely this kind of culture probably hurt many people in ways that weren't sexist. Highlighting Fowler's perspective, hopefully, doesn't bring to attention sexist problems at the expense of others. I don't feel it does, so far.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember reading that post and being surprised how little of it was actually sexism (the only thing I saw that qualified was the thing about the shirts), and how much of it was just maltreatment of programmers of all types. But I guess if you have to slap the label "sexism" on it to get it to be taken seriously, we take what we can get.
This is the typical maltreatment you experience as a programmer? > After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time find…
Later, one of my sisters told us about how she applied for some job at a startup (not an IT related job), and after the interview she was told she wouldn't get the job because of other strong applicants and her lack of experience in the field, which is fine and true. But then one of the interviewers asked her out for drinks right after that, at which point she couldn't lose the feeling that maybe she was refused the job only so that this interviewer could hit on her later (which he probably couldn't have if she got her job and he became a superior to her).
When - as a young(er) man - I did my mandatory civil services (which I had to do because I refused military service) in a hospital, there were not just one but few female nurses[1] who engaged in what I would consider inappropriate remarks ("I'd eat you up", "nice tushy, you should wear tighter pants", "if I was a few years younger I would...") and one nurse going so far as "jokingly" slapping me on the butt. There were a sizable amount of patients who also engaged in such remarks, as well as male patients non-nonchalantly asking me "how many of those nurses have you banged so far?".
I am still mad at myself that I didn't report at least the slapping up the chain, thinking at the time "I don't wanna be that guy getting angry over a joke" and "I don't want to be seen overreacting or considered to be a victim"; and I didn't even have the additional problem of having to care about my career as this job was something I didn't want to keep doing anyway as soon as my mandatory time ran out.
I talked to my dad about it, who happened to have done his own civil service in the exact same hospital in the late 1970s; his experiences were more or less the same, tho he said he didn't even consider reporting such behavior at all.
What I guess I am trying to say is that this kind of vile behavior is in fact pretty common, unfortunately, and also not necessarily only something men do to women (although I am sure it is more prevalent in that direction). But most of it I wouldn't attribute it to sexism, but to assholes being assholes.
[1] most of the people, especially the nurses, were nice or at least professional
>“I felt a wave of relief wash over me when I remembered that I worked at a large company, one with a sizable human resources department,” I feel like someone needs to run an education campaign on what HR is and who it works for. HR is there to protect the business. They aren't there as some moral arbiter. If you reported sexual harassment to HR you are going to be part of an equation - is it better for the business…
> someone needs to run an education campaign on what HR is and who it works for. HR is there to protect the business What I still don't understand is why the uber HR acted this way. I think people understand that HR is there for the company, but the assumption is that they want to avoid any bad press. If they protect a person who is a multiple offender. And this person is not C*E or high ranking manager, just a regul…
For all we know, that guy might be a friend of a CEO, a relative of HR, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the status quo is still in 2020 that a baby born in America white and male is among the luckiest babies in history." Millions of these "luckiest" babies are suffering from crippling illnesses, yet they are treated like they are awash with privilege solely because they are white and male. This is racism and sexism. Disabled white men are not privileged.
The point of "privilege" is not that all white men have lives of luxury and pleasure, but that society is arranged so that people of type X get cut a certain amount of slack that non-X people don't get. Disabled white men certainly have their own struggles; disabled black men would have even more struggles.
This is a bizarre take. It sounds like you're saying that no matter what the individual circumstances are, race is the ultimate decider of one's struggle. It could be argued that this is the exact line of thinking that leads to "systemic racism". It's surprising how prevalent this view is, on HN especially. Not two months ago there was a top voted article about how dangerous and stifling the "victimhood mentality" can be. If that is true, why would you so willingly put an entire race of people in the victim bucket? It smacks of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I am and always will be on your side if you're advocating for personal empowerment of people and groups but I disagree with the tactic of using group membership as the most important deciding factor of someone's experience and a means to discredit one person over another due solely to the nature of their group intersections.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. Maybe you don't have the full context of the story - the CEO at the time that Fowler got harassed, Travis Kalanick, ended up being that someone who's accountable.
It is highly unlikely that the CEO did it all himself. It is far more likely that there were dozens if not hundreds of people that actively and willingly participated in it. Were those people terminated? That's the real question. I'm, frankly, shocked that it is presumed that by replacing a CEO rather than replacing everyone who thought going after Susan was "just doing their job, not a big deal, no need to have a bo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Susan Fowler is a hero; it must have taken a tremendous amount of courage to hit the 'send' button while knowing her life was going to change. My niece is about to graduate into the SDE work force and I have little doubt that the culture is incrementally better because of Fowler.
> the SDE work force Google didn't help with this acronym.