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Comment by otheraccount53 | Hacker News Reader

You know what? I am disgusted and ashamed that a message board that I read and participate in daily is reacting this way.

I'm sick of how Silicon Valley always puts money and internal graft ahead of inconvenient things like morals and acting like decent human beings. Beyond that, I'm tired of how everyone then tries to pretend that these actions that are taken out of greed and ambition to "rule the world" are somehow in the public's best interest.

I see no reason why you are reprimanding a pair of human beings who realized that the company that they have aided, abetted, and implicitly condoned through their investment, and then decided to do what little they could to try to influence that company to fix the situation.

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Well said. Either SV is different than business is usual... or it's not.

And if it's not (and not willing to self police to a higher ethical standard), then we should really start asking whether we're comfortable with these companies having the amount of access to our lives they do.

Would you trust Walmart with an Echo type device in your house?

>Would you trust Walmart with an Echo type device in your house?

Offtopic, but that's an odd example. I wouldn't trust WalMart to be fair to their employees, suppliers, etc. But, they aren't the company that comes to mind when I think "who would I least want to potentially listen in on me whenever they wanted?" The company I do worry about in that space does happen to sell an Echo type device...and it's not Amazon.

What company would you trust with an Echo type device in your house? I think the entire proposition is insane given the state of the law.

In terms of "business model", clearly Apple is the one I'd trust the most, Google/FB the least, and Amazon in the middle. But I agree with laws the way they are, it's very problematic. Either the tech needs to change, or the law -- I have a lot more confidence we'll finally see a (not really re)-surgence in privacy protecting consumer tech.

What's different about Amazon vs Walmart? What makes them trustworthy?

If you dig down a bit, you'll find that it's not much.

There's nothing at all special about Silicon Valley companies with respect to ethics.

I was trying to find a well-known company to illustrate the difference in how we look at tech companies vs "non-tech" companies.

For another example, if Comcast compiles user data, it's scummy. If Google does it, we might gripe about it a bit, but it's business as usual.

I think you're misplacing motives here.

The root cause for the founder sentiment in this thread is empathy.

The firestorm Uber is facing may be self-inflicted and justified, but the management team there is made up of real people that are in all likelihood good at heart.

When you have an ongoing PR crisis, a letter like this makes things impossibly difficult. And, the fact that it's written by someone who's supposed to be a trusted team member is an arrow through the heart.

I have absolutely no empathy for the management team at Uber. They are the ones that set their company up to be like this. They have known for a long, long time that their company culture was terrible. The only reason they're appearing to do anything now is because it became public.

I absolutely wish this "stress" on them, because they deserve it for letting their company get to this state. And people who are good at heart don't let their company's culture get like that.

> people who are good at heart don't let their company's culture get like that

This kind of comment is too harsh and over-simplifies the kind of decisions that growth-phase startups have to face. You have many battles to fight, and sometimes you have to make a trade-off. In Uber's case, they prioritized hiring and firing people to manage performance over dealing with culture issues. Not saying the trade-off they make is right - I think they all realize now they cannot treat themselves as a startup any more - but claiming the management at the company are not good at heart is just totally unjustified. Do you also think startups that lay off people when they don't need them or move operations to cheap regions to also have bad heart?

> lay off people when they don't need them or move operations to cheap regions to also have bad heart?

Those are always rather cold-hearted actions. Employees are not a disposable quantity that you can dump at Goodwill like surplus furniture; companies should make sincere efforts to avoid layoffs.

No. You can try to rationalize it all you want, but at the end of the day, as you said, they prioritized managing performance over dealing with harassment and sexism. And that is NOT what good hearted people do.

EVERY manager over at Uber has to own this. They are the ones at fault. And right now, they need to prove they are good hearted. That is not an assumption to make by default.

I'm sorry, but "PR crisis" continues the worrying (if thankfully rare) trend of people talking about this whole ... situation like it's an unfortunate but incidental bug that just needs to be ironed over, akin to some kind of "cost of doing business". There is a very important category difference between, say, Cloudbleed, and allegations of sexual harassment.

Bounds-checking errors and the like do happen, and in rare cases reach catastrophic proportions, as we saw today. Downplaying what happened in that kind of situation isn't quite right, but it's still victimless in a certain sense -- you're minimizing the PR damage to yourself while not exactly hurting any other party. But Uber's behaviour here is essentially an attempt to apply the kind of "mitigation" that a situation report for a security vulnerability documents to a human conflict. (Non-serious aside: do they have an in-house "Fowler incident report" being edited every ten minutes?) It'd be far more admirable if they could go the completely Homo economicus route and declare "We don't honestly care, as long as we're profitable, and we're going to do everything possible to combat this eventuality." or something along those lines that actually reflects what they think of this, but obviously that would be ... suboptimal.

Yes, Uber management may be (in fact, from the emails they're sending out to people "deleting Uber", they definitely are) suffering as a result, but the lack of a contrite "Yes, this happened, it shouldn't have" instead of the "This is contrary to our values, our ethos, and a few other words that conjure associations of fine, upstanding citizenship in our communities and such" (read "Lies!"), together with the obviously impartial steps they're taking to "investigate" the matter, make it difficult to find empathy for their pain here.

(Any strawmen or logically suspect arguments in the above are unintentional and I'd love being told about them. Damn, I'd use that for an HN signature if those were supported.)

> real people that are in all likelihood good at heart

So are the harassment victims and underappreciated employees. Spread your empathy around.

"Good at heart" is kind of meaningless anyway. Judge people by their actions, and their sincerity by how they respond to criticism and mistakes. It's a character test and they're failing it.

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