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Comment by ultrahate | Hacker News Reader

Yall, I'm down with Uber. I know there's a lot of mudslinging lately, but I am so damn excited about the future. A world where we can do pub transit + big data, freight + big data, air freight + big data, food delivery + big data et al.

Bad shit happens sometimes. There's a lot of shitty assholes in the world, but crucifying a worthy cause and successful business because a couple of morons work there just seems counter productive.

As other comments have noted, this smells like the github situation a while back, and I'm no fan AT ALL of github, but even I concede that they are making a real difference for open source. I think uber is making that difference for moving people/things.

I want to see some justice, I want to know exactly how it went down and how it was able to get to that point ie a dependency resolution as far as who shirked policy and who didn't, AND THEN I want business as usual. Shit happens, fix it, move on.

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First off, how cool and futuristic you judge a company's tech to be should have absolutely zero bearing on how an investigation like this is treated, and the fact that you even bring it up makes it hard to take the rest of your post seriously.

Secondly, Fowler did exactly the right things in response to these incidents, over and over: she kept evidence, and she talked to the people in the company who were ostensibly supposed to help her deal with them. For a year straight. The fact that things continued to steadily get worse for her throughout this process shows pretty clearly that this is not a couple of morons. This is an institutional problem at Uber that must be dealt with at an institutional level.

Fowler has submitted exactly zero proof that any of this even actually happened.

Obviously. She's presented her personal story in the form of a blog post - we're all well aware of that. And it seems you're perfectly willing to accept that story up to the point that it matches your preferred narrative (ie. "bad shit happened, couple of morons"), but anything more and it's "where's the proof?!"

Why not just call her a liar and show your real true colors?

It's not good to conflate healthy skepticism with the belief that one is an outright liar. We know so much about the fallibility of memory and how bias affects recounts of events these days.

Are you seriously claiming that ultrahate is just demonstrating healthy skepticism?

I made no such claims, however dandelany was strongly suggesting the contrary.

> show your true colors

Is very close to a personal attack. This doesn't need to turn into the CCN or Fox news comment section...

If somebody with "hate" in their name responds to credible accusations of sexual malfeasance with false interjections of "but there's no proof", then we're already approaching Fox-News-comments levels of quality.

If you aren't claiming that ultrahate is displaying healthy skepticism, then what do you think he's doing? And why is that valuable enough that you took time to defend it?

Perhaps you're technically right, but she claims to have it documented, and has already shared it as per her tale in her HR efforts. The NYTimes would not likely publish nor Kalanick contritely move to investigate so thoroughly if it were so easy to repudiate her claims as hearsay. We'll know in short order as the company rushes to save face.

I mean, it sounds like basically all of Uber's HR was shirking policy here. I kind of agree with you that "shit happens and it needs to be fixed..." but there seems to be a lot of fixing that needs to be done here.

Uber's "crucifixion" is well-deserved in this case. Time after time, Uber has proven itself to be an irresponsible company. Whether it's "God View" or the weird data blog they published on people's private data or this sexual harassment thing, they deserve some backlash.

I don't think "crucifying a worthy cause" is a good idea either. But I also don't think that Uber is a company working towards a brighter future. The future's definitely not brighter for their employees- I mean, contractors-, as those people's rights as employees are currently in the middle of a legal battle.

I think it's cool that Uber's breaking down the monopoly that taxi companies had. I think it's great that people are trying new things.

But Uber has proven time and time again that it's an irresponsible company and the sooner we realize it's probably not going to bring us the future we need, the better.

Uber isn't making the world a better place. Not in any meaningful way. Not in the way they exploit drivers; not in the way they feel they can dare and do anything. Uber is the worst face of the "sharing economy", which is a fitting definition of these kind of businesses only if by "sharing" you mean: "dear worker use your own property to make money for us while we centralize profits without even having to own the means of production". It's a metastasis of capitalism.

I sympathize with your viewpoint here, but recognize that a 'crucifixion' may help change the culture and retain Engineers and improve their daily lives which would help Uber deliver it's product faster.

You are assuming that without Uber, peer to peer taxiing (and more generally people selling stuff to each other through a marketplace with someone spying on the data) is dead. However that is clearly not the case.

When you smell this does it recall the GitHub CEO resigning due to inappropriate behaviour per the findings of the investigation?

Surely you must understand how, if these inappropriate actions truly occurred at least in part and management was complicit up the line the company must be held accountable as a whole? That accountable is what effects systemic change at organisations.

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