My prediction: the manager gets fired, we are treated to a hand-wringing "What We Learned" Medium post, and the cultural disease behind this particular symptom continues unabated.<p>What would be nice instead: A serious and in-depth analysis going from incidental to systemic to cultural, like NASA's "oops we dropped NOAA-19" report - <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf</a> (summary on pages 8-10)<p>Most companies could stand to learn some lessons from NASA, where cultural failure means dead astronauts rather than bad PR. When their culture is bad, they change the culture. What will Uber do?
This reminds me why calling out a company on twitter for something that goes wrong is way more effective than calling customer support. Basically a life lesson: Public shaming is way more effective than the processes set up to handle these things.
Total armchair observer viewpoint - In reading Susan's blog, there are a lot of sexual harassment claims but there are many claims of cloak and dagger behavior. This points to a dysfunctional organization that lacks trust. And in that, I couldn't help but think of Conway's law [1] and the video from the goto; conference [2] about Uber's infrastructure. "We have so many services in production we don't even know how many there are." This may reflect a few different trust issues. One of which includes "Not invented here" thus building services that are duplicative. The goal of which is to show value and get promoted. Given the blog, the communication and reporting structure is also broken. Which, results in >1000 services in production and it being unclear how many there are and what they all do. Most likely, this is how the teams are structured as well.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law</a>
[2] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY</a>
It's yet another source claiming that Uber is a dysfunctional organization. At this point it's hard for me to expect they're going to rise to the challenge here.
The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?", everything else is likely to be the good old game of "let's pretend we're doing something while people forget about this".
I'm glad to hear this has gotten the CEOs attention. I read her account and was absolutely horrified at how she, and other women, we're (are?) treated at Uber. Livid is more like it. I'm also disappointed in the men who work there, some of whom worked with her, but who apparently didn't behave like honorable human beings and demand the behavior stop. Granted, I'm assuming other men knew of this behavior, but I don't think that is likely to be much of a stretch. We all have a responsibility to look out for each other, no matter our gender. So yeah, Uber screwed up massively, and made me and my wife rethink ever using their services again, but I'm also disappointed in their whole workforce for not rooting out this behavior organically. "But I needed a job," isn't a good excuse, when the fundamental value we should all hold is decency. If you run across this shit in your own organizations make sure you speak up. Keep records. Make sure they know that retaliation will be handled with legal representation and with outreach to the state Department of Labor. Will there sometimes be negative repercussions for you personally? Yes. Will you sleep better at night? Yes. Will things improve in the aggregate over time? Yes, if enough of us simply refuse to stay quiet when we see and hear this kind of thing.
Im going to assume that this is just damage control to handle the media accusations. Ive never been an Uber employee but have been apart of previous large SV companies that were driven by what I perceived to be management structures plagued (or driven?) by in-fighting and unethical behaviors. Perhaps Im being presumptive about Uber's internals but from my experience once you define a company culture its almost impossible to turn it around in any meaningful way. From what I hear about Uber internally and externally it smacks of the same cultures of places of the past like Zynga or Groupon. It seems to me watching SV over the years companies of this profile follow a pattern of hype, exuberant growth and then an unabated fall over a long period of time after which the CEO gets thrown out and the company survives on life support. I guess we'll see if Uber is different.
Unless people are fired and policies are changed and enforced, this will only be a PR stunt.<p>It'll be interesting to see if this is a PR stunt or if it's for real.
The accusation is not only against the managers but mainly against their HR department.<p>The CHRO is now being asked to investigate their own department? Doesn't seem very effective.
Well that was certainly quick. Context (Not that anyone needs it) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022</a>
I think it is common to have incompetents running HR in these high-valued startups, when the VP is probably just a beer-buddy or the wingman of the founder, with no formal HR education or experience. I have had one of those asking the big no-no questions in an interview and I can't stop rolling my eyes.
It seems like widespread change only happens at Uber in response to a media inquiry (privacy violations, now sexual harassment offenses).<p>It's pretty suboptimal, but whatever works.
This reminds me of the one-week safety investigation that Tesla promised to undertake after one of their workers published a blog post. <a href="http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/" rel="nofollow">http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/</a>
The non-independent format of investigation potentially compromises effectiveness. Given the size of the company, nature of allegations and how systemic the alleged infractions appear to be, the better course would have been to source an investigator externally.
The original poster <i>had screenshots</i><p>If you didn't fucking automatically rely on things like Slack, etc, this should be a five minute lookup to verify.†<p><pre><code> † My organization switched to slack from our own IRC too... :-(</code></pre>