Uber launches 'urgent investigation' into sexual harassment claims
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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 - https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/65776main_noaa_np_mishap.pdf (summary on pages 8-10)
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?
At the very least, this should dissuade managers from soliticing open-relationship sexual partners, on employees' first day. I consider that a major win! :-\
Impossible. From Susan Fowler's post:
"We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that. Eventually he "left" the company. I don't know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him. "
It may well still be true, but assuming that it is true is, at this point, premature and probably itself biased.
In three sentences.
It may well still be fake, but assuming that it is fake is, at this point, premature and probably itself biased.
There have also been knee jerk reactions and witch hunts orchestrated via the internet based on one side's story or an incomplete story that were later regretted. I do not wish to sugges to cast doubt, but to give a chance for the full story to be heard.
Maybe it's all true, maybe it's totally made up, maybe it's basically true but exaggerated and missing important information. We don't know, but plenty of people are happy to pile on.
Making an untrue statement, this publicly, would mean Uber's lawyers would have a strong civil case to sue her for defamation: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-defamation-law
Susan was brave to share her story. There's very little upside for her, and tons of potential downside.
Deserved or not, public shaming of users on forums like Yelp or Twitter has become a common business tactic to battle bad press.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY
Paradoxically, most companies are really good at some things, whilst being simultaneously bad at others.
Seems like it'd be easier to have them sign the NDA when they arrive. True, that doesn't solve the problem of current employees.
We have heard a story given by one person, uncorroborated by others, and without any of the supposed abundant evidence. It may well be a true account, but it is premature and wrong to assume it is true right now.
+ average stay of an employee
+ percentage female employees over time
It's not so hard to assume something is wrong in HR or company culture if these figures show anomalies.
I think if Uber was more data minded about their own progress and efficiency, the board would have catched it even if they are in some kind of ivory tower.
However this doesn't seem to have helped at Zenefits, and I guess it didn't help at Uber either.
Even more concerning is I would guess (and Linkedin corroborates this a bit) that the SRE org where this harassment occurred was basically lifted from the Google org tree.
And, oh, yeah - I had three managers in that six months. One was fired, one quit precisely at his one year, and the third had 70 direct reports.
If you see candidates coming from Uber, tenure past a year is a warning sign. I knew a few I'd want to work with again - A lot more I wouldn't.
[1]https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...
You do see it happen. Dropbox was known to have a bro-y, male dominated engineering culture in 2013 and earlier, but since then has become significantly more diverse due to cultural changes. (To be fair though, it never suffered cloak-and-dagger problems described in Fowler's post, making it more plausible to alter the culture)
From the claims, if you can go all the way up to the CTO and still not have a resolution then it's beyond hope at that point. They can't claim ignorance. In this case they valued performance > integrity.
It'll be interesting to see if this is a PR stunt or if it's for real.
The CHRO is now being asked to investigate their own department? Doesn't seem very effective.
Presumably, all of Fowler's email complaints should still be on file (and if they're not, the company is potentially guilty of spoliation [0]). If they're not, I hope Fowler kept a copy.
Let's also see if Uber starts reporting the percentage of women, as other top tech companies do.
While many people do that via Glassdoor or similar websites, she opted for doing it in a non-anonymous way, which means that Uber may retaliate legally if they can, or that future employers might try to avoid someone who is perceived as being "problematic", to name some few scenarios.
Now, HR departments operate in borderline illegal ways. Many contract clauses are non-enforceable, but they all insist in doing it anyways.
If you feel collectively pissed off, get all the women employees to unionize and start a collective bargain for better terms of employment and even go on strike.
* waving away sexual harassment because the offender is a "high performer"
* repeatedly lying about the same person committing their "first offense"
* telling the reporter that retaliation should be expected and there's nothing HR can do about it
* implying the reporter must be the problem because the common element in all of her complaints is her
* telling the reporter that it's unprofessional to report these problems via email and to keep records of them
These are all responses of an HR department that is going out of their way to not hear complaints, and any company of Uber's size should be very, very concerned about this attitude coming back to bite them in the ass. If these responses all came from one HR contact, that person should be out on their ass ASAP. If they came from various people, then HR management is completely fucked.
- fire the entire chain of command to the HR person that she spoke to, probably the HR person too.
- institute a deep policy around fixing the performance review issue, the transfer issue, and the harassment issue.
- firing whoever they find who has engaged in any of those issues, which is probably at least 20 mid-level managers and some of their bosses who knew about it but didnt fix it
- put a huge amount of work into hiring more women and retaining more women, including broad policy and culture changes.
That is, if @travisk means what he says. If not, they'll fire 3 scapegoats and declare the problem solved.
The people involved should've been fired long ago, and for Kalanick to come out and say what happened is "against everything Uber stands for and believes in", thus suggesting he was unaware, only serves to reinforce his failure as leader. Blame ultimately lies with the CEO, no matter what.
Women shouldn't need to put their careers on the line to publicly shame a company before justice is seen.
(edit: apologies to the parent, was not pointing fingers at you...anger was misdirected)
I can't imagine that HR allowing repeated sexual harassment claims to go without any consequences, not to mention a manager feeling comfortable propositioning a direct report OVER WRITTEN CHAT, comes from anything but people certain the company allowed their actions.
It's pretty suboptimal, but whatever works.
If you didn't fucking automatically rely on things like Slack, etc, this should be a five minute lookup to verify.†
† My organization switched to slack from our own IRC too... :-(Anyone could write an article saying that Uber was misogynistic towards them in some way, and everyone will eat it up because they already hate Uber over the JFK airport stuff.