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Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

susanjfowler.com

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Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#861

Post by weberc2 »

grey-area wrote: post #842
weberc2 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by your comment. How does it fit with the parent comment? Your comment doesn't seem to make sense as either agreeing with the parent comment (as it nothing about giving advice) nor does it seem to contradict the parent comment (which isn't giving advice or giving Uber some kind of pass). Could you clarify?

We should be talking about the actions of uber and her manager, not what she should or could do. I don't think the author really needs commentary on what comes next, and if she wants it I'm sure she'll know who to ask. We could all usefully reflect on how to stop this happening though. I hope that helps; if it doesn't perhaps consider why she wrote the article (I doubt it was to solicit comments on what her actions c…

Personally everyone knows what Uber (and her manager) ought to have done and ought not to have done, and if there were any confusion, the article covered it in depth. I don't know what would be gained by restating it. OTOH, it seems at worst harmless and at best beneficial to offer advice on how to maximize her case against Uber, or to help others who find themselves in similar circumstances (especially those who may not be surrounded by subject-matter experts).

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#863

Post by 67726e »

Steuard wrote: post #858
67726e wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scares me is that there is no evidence, only allegation. Yet people are jumping on the bandwagon, making sure to pillory anything they disagree with in connection to an alleged incident. Guess what? People lie. Until some proof is offered, you should treat the accuser with dignity but assume the story is false.

If Party A accuses Party B of misconduct and Party B claims that the accusation is false (explicitly or implicitly), then someone is lying. If you aim to be nobly impartial until compelling evidence is available, the logically appropriate response is not "assume the story is false" but "assume the truth of the story is unknown". There's no purely logical reason to treat one story or the other as the one that should b…

Until you have proved something has happened, it must be assumed that it did not happen. There is no reason to assume something is true just because someone claims it happened. Especially when it is a claim that can severely damage reputations, livelihoods, and lives.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#864

Post by alexashka »

"I went home and cried that day, because even aside from impacts to my salary and bonuses, it did have real-world consequences - significant consequences that my management chain was very well aware of. I was enrolled in a Stanford CS graduate program, sponsored by Uber"

This deserves to be all caps, and in bold.

Ambitious people tend to eat shit sandwiches until they are either immune to them, or realize there's more to life.

She pointed out that the number of women at Uber was dwindling - women are smart, they take the 'more to life' route oftentimes.

It's just life playing itself out - as long as people are willing to eat shit, for money, like Susan did for a whole year - Ubers are going to be around.

No amount of blogging about it is going to help - if you're willing to eat them shit sandwiches, someone out there is going to make em for you :)

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#865

Post by owenmarshall »

smm2000 wrote: post #567
kartickv wrote: post #430

Earlier 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…

Outside of truly unique skills, it's basically true - engineers are interchangeable with sufficient time to ramp up. I learned this lesson pretty early in my career when most senior engineer on the team left. I and everyone else freaked out because he was the only one on the team who fully understood how everything works. But you know who was not freaked out? My manager. And he was right, we did not even miss deadlin…

> I learned this lesson pretty early in my career when most senior engineer on the team left. I and everyone else freaked out because he was the only one on the team who fully understood how everything works. But you know who was not freaked out? My manager. And he was right, we did not even miss deadlines. In two month everything was back to normal with other people filling his shoes.

Have you ever looked around the room and asked yourself "gee, why do we have so many coworkers on this project?" Or said "isn't it nuts that there are some weeks when I can measure my productive output in a handful of hours?"

The current vogue in management is cramming teams into an open floor office and micromanaging scrum points; these measures are introduced because they demoralize and _average_ output, thus introducing slack into the system. That's not a bug -- that's a feature! When someone important leaves the workers can be motivated or "motivated" to increase their output until the proper amount of slack is reintroduced from a hire.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#866

Post by acjohnson55 »

hueving wrote: post #722
smm2000 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of truly unique skills, it's basically true - engineers are interchangeable with sufficient time to ramp up. I learned this lesson pretty early in my career when most senior engineer on the team left. I and everyone else freaked out because he was the only one on the team who fully understood how everything works. But you know who was not freaked out? My manager. And he was right, we did not even miss deadlin…

>Outside of truly unique skills, it's basically true - engineers are interchangeable with sufficient time to ramp up. That qualification at the end makes it false. If I have to give someone 1 year to learn all of the minute details of the behavior of TCP across the various operating systems clients use, the behavior of packet re-ordering in LAG algorithms, convergence times of BGP, etc, then they are most definitely…

Everything's a matter of degree. So maybe it takes longer or shorter depending on how big the shoes are. But that bundle of knowledge you cited seems learnable in a year.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#867

Post by MrAwesomeSauce »

This is the third most popular story in Hacker News of all time [1], and I couldn't be happier. This can't have been easy to write but the more posts like this, the more likely people who suffer the same issues at their workplace will share their experiences.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#868

Post by sah2ed »

nostrademons wrote: post #536
kartickv wrote: post #430

Earlier 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…

> ... it's a major cause of startup failure among technical founders...including, quite possibly, mine

Now that you've brought it up, is a postmortem of your startup written up somewhere?

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#869

Post by acjohnson55 »

parennoob wrote: post #548
tptacek wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don't see much much "this is unbelievable" at all. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Maybe because it is more of a clear-cut case of sexism and workplace intimidation, than, say, ones about “watching your co-workers hula-hooping” ( https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe... ) or “making a joke about dongles”? ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes... ) Those cases invoke skepticism because they twist otherwise innocuous situations and try to blow them up i…

The whole Julie Ann Horvath incident was way more than hula-hooping. Although, I think your underselling how things like that can create a deeply uncomfortable work environment for women.

I don't consider the dongle situation to be a story of institutional sexism at all, but one of a positive feedback loop of poor judgment and/or overreaction, by many of the people involved.

I would caution you from believing that anything less than a serious of incidents this meticulously documented shouldn't be taken seriously (e.g. Horvath's report). Most people are firstly concerned with being good at their jobs, not identifying the thread of sexist or harassing behavior underlying a bunch of incidents separated in time. Often, only in retrospect can the trend be seen. And by that time, it's difficult to find all the hard evidence.

Institutional sexism is rarely someone deciding to treat another person poorly, because they are a woman. More often, it's someone making a judgment call in a complex situation that turns out (due to their biases or lack of empathy) to exclude or demean women. The pattern of such things is what creates an unwelcoming and taxing environment. How many mental cycles must it take to cope with all of that bullshit? Most people's performance would suffer, leading to the conclusion that women just can't hack it. It's pretty incredible that the author thrived professionally, in the meantime.

Note that an environment of baseline hostility toward women may or may not be garnished with openly sexist behavior, as it was in this case.

Re: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

#870

Post by tptacek »

shoover wrote: post #855
tptacek wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don't see much much "this is unbelievable" at all. I'm pleasantly surprised.

It is good to see the support here. I am unpleasantly surprised at the comments admonishing her for not lawyering up, though. She bothered to write publicly, which is more than anyone outside the situation could rightly ask. She wrote very well on painful, personal events and I think can be proud of how she handled it. It opens the door for others, and Uber management is going to have to deal with it one way or anoth…

I give stuff like that a pass. We're the "well, actually" capital of the Internet (or at least one of the "well, actually" major metros). I think we all just want to be able to participate in the discussion and are not very tactful about crowbarring our way into it.

I don't feel like I read a lot admonishment (which would take forms like "by not suing you're complicit in harm to other women" or "if your story was really credible it would involve a lawyer"). I do feel like I read a lot of "you know, you could also..." or "this is a good example of why...".

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