Uber will have increasing difficulty attracting and retaining talent now that their toxic culture is public. When you're a rocket ship people are willing to gloss over a lot, but Uber no longer has 100x potential returns on options. The liability only gets worse as the stock matures.
Not to mention the wave of lawsuits that is likely coming as Uber employees are emboldened.
So we're starting to suffer from a "boy who cried wolf" syndrome, where when the complain is real, no one cares.
That's a big problem.
Er, have you? Fowler's post said she was sexually propositioned over Slack, by her manager, on her first day, and that HR did not do anything about it, even though multiple women had complained about the same manager doing the same thing. That's the most egregious story of harassment I've ever heard of, including the made-up scenarios in the "workplace sensitivity" training I had to take last week.
We are all reasonable people here and can agree that this behavior, if true, is disgusting and unacceptable. But is a "claim" evidence and should we assume it is by default "truth"? This is the crux of the issue.
If you stood accused of sexual harassment I'm sure you would hope society would take a moment to gather the facts before judging you, even if on an individual level you weren't a likeable person. Because being likeable and condoning sexual harassment are two different things.
Of course not. The comment I was replying to was saying (paraphrased) that this is typical, every company has these kinds of accusations, and I'm disagreeing and saying no, this isn't typical, either she made all this up out of whole cloth or Uber is an especially bad outlier.
> But is a "claim" evidence and should we assume it is by default "truth"? This is the crux of the issue.
That is emphatically not the issue, no one in this thread suggested that she should be believed (or disbelieved) uncritically. This stuff is murky enough to discuss without strawmen!
I was talking about "people make serious complains and get rebukked". Now, whilere there's quite a wide range of what a "serious complain" is, people say that everywhere.
Not all complains are equal. I'm not pretending they are.
She said what needed to be said. If Uber challenges her account, she can post more information, assuming she is telling the truth (which I am for now).
I am curious about your question. I read Fowler's post, and then subsequent posts,articles,tweets,comments by other women and men indicating that the observations approximately matched their experience at Uber as well. Even in this thread, I see: "I've been with uber for nearly 2 yrs and most of the article content are valid. Employees voicing out genuine concerns will be met with severe rebuke. " . The article this thread is about is from Mitch&Freda Kapoor who are also stating the same.
I'm wondering, do you believe that Fowler's claims are faulty or false in some way and that the issues raised about Uber are similarly faulty/false or are you speaking about other cases/companies?
A friend has worked on sexual harassment suits and says it's unfortunate that, as far as he's experienced, every single one he's been involved in has been bogus. Meanwhile, he knows there are several people with good cases who don't bring them, because the social penalties are too high.
Part of the reason I believe her is that she isn't bringing suit. She's not trying to make a payday out of this. Further, she has alleged specific acts which can be definitely proven or disproven. If she made it up, it would be trivial for Uber to show she did so.
It seems like you're somewhat sympathizing with Uber HR's decisions regarding this individual on account of the "boy cried wolf" syndrome.
This seems like hardly that at all. The events at Uber read like a systemic failure to deal with problems, and an extreme indifference to sexual harassment for the benefit of retaining "good" engineers.
Fuck this mentality.
edit: Forgive me if I am misunderstanding your comments.
But I have not seen the endemic spiteful complaints he has. My impression is this place is full of wolves that are seldom called out.
I was not even talking about the Uber case at all.
I'm saying how everyone who works at every company says they make complains about everything and never get heard. That makes it hard to figure out which companies are ACTUALLY bad at dealing with complains BEFORE something like the Uber bullshit actually happens. It prevents us from being proactive.
I did not mean that I see sexual harassment claims like this one everywhere.
When I said "Ive seen this type of complain", I was talking about the person I was replying to. Employees who say the company never do anything when they bitch about stuff. Employees bitch a lot, so its hard to tell apart companies like what Uber seems to be, from companies with a lot of whiny employees, without actually working there.
Short of the Apple and Googles of the world, or the little koolaid trendy startups, all companies have a percentage of fussy employees who will say their employers screwed them over, so we have to take what people say with a grain of salt. Because we have to take so much with a grain of salt, we can't proactively find real offenders (as easily).
Wow, I have never encountered that kind of thing (admittedly I've only worked at 3 companies)
I'm not saying that all companies are bad at dealing with complains.
I'm saying that for every company with a non-trivial amount of employees, there will be a bunch of said employees complaining that they made big complains that were ignored. "Management never listens to my brilliant ideas!" "We're all underpaid!" "People cry under their desk every day!" "The CEO doesn't understand my brilliant idea I figured out in 30 seconds!"
There's always people like that everywhere, and it makes it very hard to distinguish companies that actually take their employees seriously from companies like Uber without actually working there.
That's all I meant.
But. From experience I can tell you that it is absolutely not trivial for a company to simply claim a given allegation is false. Even if the company is correct and truthful about it. With a tiny kernel of truth to otherwise false allegations, enough bias will give clear answers and the public verdict becomes all the more damning.
So as much as it may be appropriate to damn uber in this case, please don't do so simpy because they didn't go for "a good offense is the best defense" here.