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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

I hope Travis / execs are sincere and this was a healthy reality check, of course talk is cheap. Anyone know if Amazon culture changed significantly after the NY times article about their work culture came out?

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The article came out in Aug 2015 and one of the things it identified was lack of paid parental leave. Amazon announced paternity leave in Nov 2015. You can decide if it was the article that triggered it, or this would have happened anyway.

I have a question about this, though. It seems like many of the top, successful tech companies were started by "brilliant jerks": Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Travis Kalanick were all known for being brash, arrogant, hard charging and willing to do things anyone with a decent sense of ethics would reject (e.g. Jobs swindling Wozniak out of his share of an early payment, Zuckerberg hacking into the private email accounts of Harvard Crimson reporters by searching Facebook's auth logs, etc.) These leaders also seemed to mellow as they and their companies aged, perhaps realizing what gets you on top is not what keeps you there.

Thus, I do hope Uber improves it's ways, but I also can't help but wonder if this very brashness that allowed Uber to develop such a toxic culture is also what let it (and other companies) beat out their competitors to begin with.

Yes, it helped. But how much jerkery are we willing to tolerate? And, for how long? Uber isn't an early stage start-up anymore.

We? Investors vs users vs techies.

Users and investors never stopped worshipping Gates, Zuckerberg, or Jobs.

probably have to affect hiring or earning to effect some kind of change. my guess is it wont.

From what I hear, no, not really.

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