Uber's SVP of engineering is out
recode.net
recode.net
I think that Kalanick made the right decision by asking him to resign. They can't afford to have any more controversies surrounding them especially at this time.
I hope all that has happened at Uber can overall make the tech industry better for everyone.
Uber has many allegations right now that its current culture tolerates harassment, meaning that current employees (including managers most notably) are alleged to have committed harassment while at Uber.
This guy is accused of harassment not at Uber (according to the article), but at a previous job at Google. There's no mention of any allegations of harassing behavior at Uber. So maybe he did harass someone at Google, or maybe he didn't and someone bad-mouthed him.
If Uber intends to clean up its culture, shouldn't they be first looking at people who have recently been accused of harassment, such as Susan Fowler's first boss, and can those people first? Instead, they find some guy who's been bad-mouthed by a prior employer (which isn't unusual when a company or manager is mad that someone left), and sack him to try to appease everyone and show that they're "doing something".
I'm not sure it has to be either/or. If they found out about Singhal's past and are trying to change their culture, then they should ask him to resign. Letting him stay because they have other higher priority harassment issues doesn't seem like a great solution. They can ask him to resign and keep looking into other recent claims, like Fowler's.
If their goal is to show that they've turned a corner they need someone who can credibly lead that change; someone who left their former job due to sexual assault allegations and presided over the cultural failings in their department is not the right person.
Not to say this is isn't scapegoating, but firing low level managers would be the same, since it sounds like the culture of turning a blind eye to transgressions of high performers seems to have stemmed from Travis.
I don't believe an accusation is all that is needed. However, in a situation like this optics do matter. Employees need to trust that their superiors won't be part of the problem. He clearly didn't have that trust.
Also, standards are higher for executives.
But firing someone for allegations of something that happened at a previous employer, where there is no possible way the current employer's HR department can investigate it, seems entirely wrong. This means that someone can be wrongfully accused of something by some vengeful former employer/boss, and never get a job again because they'll be blacklisted. It is not unusual for employers to badmouth their former employees.
It is hard to see that this is generalizable to the circumstances of typical employees.
It's hard to can someone who (as mentioned in Susan's blog post) already left the company.
It's interesting to see this move-before-being-fired thing that happens in the valley quite often as a sort of mirror image of the issues the Catholic church had to deal with for years. It would be interesting to know if the investors at Uber knew about his issues regardless of whether Uber did. They tend to be better connected.
> Indeed. According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time. He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story.
> To be clear, Singhal’s dispute with Google has nothing to do with that situation or the recent lawsuit that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has waged against Uber’s Otto division.
The part that worries me about "perfect storms" like this when two competitors are in multiple disputes (both legal and in the marketplace) is it is a convenient time to leak information that will remove key players from the other company and it does appear that Recode got the information from someone who likely is currently a Google employee.
I'm not saying this time it is false but I have seen that pattern play out before where accusations from a previous employer who is a competitor for the current employer get "released" to ruin someone's reputation at a critical juncture. Although, in that case it wasn't sexual harassment but the same principle applies imo.
I'd like to see something more verifiable than a business competitor's employee acted as a source for a news article. It is like trusting someone's enemy to be honest rather than slip the knife into their back. If that is the standard of evidence we are using to destroy people's careers, it is a lower bar than I'd like.
To me, the chain of events seems to be, Recode goes to sources at Google for dirt on ex-Google employees at Uber, gets fed exactly what it would take to get an employee that is valuable to Uber terminated.
Often, information that is leaked benefits the leaker in some way from their point of view. Deepthroat leaked as part of a plan to advance his career which is quite similar to Uber's culture of getting other people to fall so you can advance as well.
There are just too many odd angles to this that imply it might have been motivated by something other than a genuine commitment to see justice done that I think some greater level of evidence should be expected before you convict someone in the court of public opinion.
This is a lot more than idle gossip. If that's how you view this matter, I hear Uber is hiring!
It very much reads as if a HR employee is the source. HR works for the company and only hands that information out if legally compelled or its to the company's advantage. They don't give internal memos on HR issues to the employees involved because it provides them with no advantages.
Yes. I just would have expected it to be closer to the actual event rather than waiting ~2 years.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-uber-probably-never-will-...
[1] https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...
Except that it seems to come up every 8 months or so with Uber, so there's a constant reminder of what kind of company it is.
Uber is very international while Lyft is only in the US, Uber has all of these side businesses beside transportation like UberEATS, which is the most reliable food delivery service in my experience.
I've been thinking about the two like: Uber is building the transit infrastructure, and Lyft is building the best personal transportation experience.
An interesting point. What value does he add by remaining? It's a serious question; what are his strengths and weaknesses as a CEO?
A major part of the CEO's job is to be the public face, to maintain the business' reputation, and to handle crises. The results don't look good right now in terms of those requirements, but of course it's also not accurate to rely on a snapshot taken at someone's worst moment.
Also, we all know that many founders don't make good CEOs of large organizations. Those are different skill sets.
Given that he joined Uber on January 20th [0], he's out in 5 weeks total.
His interest in running his own philanthropic foundation also didn't last much more than a year [0].
Sounds like he needs to rethink what he's going to do for the next 15 years.
[0] Uber Hires Former Google Search Chief Amit Singhal as SVP of Engineering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445597
Heh. A not too subtle burn.
>But having Singhal at the head of an organization under siege over sexual harassment issues when he was not candid with Uber over his departure from Google was considered untenable.
Which makes it sound like "we don't know what to believe but we're getting rid of him because it looks bad."
This framing seems unenlightened and also not so flattering to Uber. I wonder if that's the framing Uber presented to recode, or if it was their own.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to say that this might be an admission that their HR department has sucked for a very long time, and this is part of dealing with it?
It does not seem appropriate to fire someone who hasn't acted badly in his current job. The opportunity for finding out about his past was before he was offered the position.
It seems completely appropriate for a company to take steps to limit their liabilities.
The more we learn about Uber's culture I think the inescapable conclusion is that it might very much benefit from a different CEO.
http://www.gadgette.com/2016/01/19/what-i-learnt-from-being-...
https://prezi.com/jtikgiukl0tl/sexual-harassment-in-google/
http://nypost.com/2014/05/28/staffer-slaps-google-with-sexua...
More light on todays news: http://gizmodo.com/former-google-engineer-blasts-companys-hr...
I just don't get the mindset that results in someone thinking "yeah man, it is totally ok to make a pass at a coworker in a professional environment"
That was, however, the first and probably last time for me. And given the context, we were both kidding ourselves as long as possible about the mutual attraction. By the time anything resembling a pass happened, it was obviously desired on both sides.
The truth is that we are human. No matter how much people try to avoid romantic entanglements at work, it happens. Regularly. And sometimes they don't work out. The challenge is how to handle that situation. And this is a difficult challenge indeed.
and some of these stories...
Like your opening day at a company having received an IM from your immediate boss/hirer, by lunchtime saying "Hey, btw, I think you're attractive, I'm in an open relationship and maybe we can have sex sometime." (which, although paraphrased, is still startling close to the verbatim exchanges alleged to have occured).
Exactly. Like simply wait for enough (obvious) green lights before making a move. Like, you know, mature, consenting adults. A modicum of tact and subtlety couldn't hurt, either ;)
No matter how much people try to avoid romantic entanglements at work, it happens.
And indeed, it's silly (and borderline delusional) to pretend otherwise.
The standard male cognitive bias is to become convinced that there are green lights when they may not exist. And a bias towards pushing the point so that women who might be convincible can be convinced.
This makes evolutionary sense because there is little cost to receiving extra rejections, and a definite reproductive benefit to a hard to predict acceptance. However this bias means that women naturally receive more unwanted offers than wanted ones. And dealing with unwanted offers on top of workplace dynamics (particularly when there are power dynamics) is a real problem.
In short, biology ensures that men will tend to screw up. And workplace requirements make it important to push back against this natural tendency.
As an analogy, you can weave in out of traffic at 120 mph or drive appropriately. The crazy driver would sound absurd if they explained it by saying, 'driving is a necessary part of modern life; lots of people do it'.
What gets me is the poor judgment on display in all of these cases. Yeah, you did Gwen in HR, good job. I hope you guys blew the roof off the house, because now you get to deal with the entanglements that come with sex in a place you spend most of your waking hours. Are these people truly unable to think that far ahead? If their judgment is so poor in this arena, how am I supposed to trust their judgment in professional matters?
It boggles the mind.
(Also, are you btilly from the xkcd forums? If so, long time no see!)
Yes, we dealt with it fairly well. BUT not perfectly. And having gone through the emotional rollercoaster, I cannot fault anyone else for doing it poorly. Particularly (as didn't happen in my case) if the relationship failed to work out.
Looking back I can't feel pride in success. Only humility from knowing how lucky I was to avoid disaster. And said humility has taught me to be less quick to judge others as people, while being painfully aware of the importance of being firm with the consequences of their actions.
I have a personal bar of acceptance in the work force but it's different for every person.
What is a problem is if you keep doing it even when the other person communicates a lack of interest and a desire for you to stop. That and, of obviously, other forms of sexual harassment. Note though that "sexual harassment" has a specific legal meaning and it doesn't necessarily include every incident that sometimes gets reported as such.
To be fair, though, that's a relatively recent perception (one I hasten to add that I agree with!). Up until fairly recently no-one saw anything particularly wrong with a man marrying his secretary (or a professor his student, or similar situations), or just found it a bit off-colour rather than 'automatically wrong.'
As a product of our generation, I have a knee-jerk, 'no no no heck no!' reaction to subordinate-superior relationships, but that's just my culture; there are others in both space & time.
The odds are pretty good that I'm older than you, and I do not recall a time that someone running off with their secretary or student, married or not, was not cast in a negative light. Maybe the secretary would be okay under the right circumstances, but student-professor has always been creepy. It's "wrong" now that we've codified that creepy feeling into law.
EDIT: it came to mind that I haven't heard the phrase "sleeping her way to the top" in a long time. It used to be used commonly amongst those around me. IOW, manager-subordinate relationships were often not viewed positively. Of course now that we "just don't do that", I haven't heard the phrase in ages.
> To be fair, though, that's a relatively recent perception ...
That doesn't make it any less important or wrong. On the historical timescale, democracy and the evil of slavery are recent perceptions, yet we don't say that's just my culture; there are others in both space & time.
Combine that with the socially inept male dominated software environment and you can pretty much expect scandalous things to happen.
Two things occur to me: 1) neither of those things means those students were engaging in "flirting their way to favor": maybe, just maybe, they were dressing comfortably for them or they absorbed our discussion better by sitting closer and my biases and (mis-?)perceptions were at work; 2) even if they were "flirting," as a responsible adult male it was my responsibility to ignore it, or even raise a concern if I felt it were intentional and damaging to the student-teacher relationship.
The socially inept thing probably accounts for a lot of the problem.
Coworker or not, consent and respect is essential.
I've had sex with coworkers and never been accused of inappropriate behaviour, turns out if we're all adults it works out.
And definitely a reality of most industries, especially if you spend a lot of time in the office and little time socialising externally.
Maybe that's the problem.
Kids will be kids.
That means this is where they learn to be adults and make mistakes. They will make occasional misjudgments in this context, and when they do, we should offer them an easy out.
And to answer your question: sexual assault is not one of these cases. Partaking in this safe space kind of presupposes that your kid knows how to tell the difference between right and wrong.
Should he have disclosed it? Of course, because that would have lessened the impact when it did come out.
Maybe he thought it was over and done with. And, since it was an allegation vs proven maybe he didn't want to muddy waters.
However, to say that an allegation must be reported when taking a new job is pretty harsh. Innocent till proven guilty surely?
>> "Uber execs found out about the situation after Recode informed them of the chain of events between Singhal and the search giant this week."
Punish the person responsible in Susan's case. If anything, this feels like a person's career was taken down due to a witch hunt.
To me, this action by Uber's executive team is not one of cleaning house: it shows a lack of spine.
That's for the courts. Not for me hiring my executive team. I have enough damn headaches as it is; I don't need someone coming in and causing more. Especially because, let's be honest here, there's not exactly a shortage of people that could do that job.
Why? Golden rule: given a role reversal, I would like the same consideration.
Please note that the "headache" this seems to have caused is purely an external optics one. Not sure how great of a team you would have if you cut off members at first sign of issues.
Maybe the sort of dysfunctional mess Uber seems to have.
Internal, not external, optics are vastly more important in a company.
It's not about calling one person a liar vs the other. Rather, it's about accepting that there are multiple sides to every story. Without an unbiased third party, it devolves into he said/she said.
If formal charges aren't brought forward (which would allow for more facts/third party analysis), then why should one person be denigrated? Should a hint of an accusation, sourced by third parties, be enough to fire someone over? If so, what does that firing actually solve?[0]
Anyway, I understand this is a trigger issue, esp. after Susan's post, but to over-react is as bad under-reacting: you want to fix the problem, and you can't do that when you are busy scapegoating.
[0] I'm talking about this specific case, not sexual harassment cases in general.
Your two sides dodge is the same thing used by sexual harassers: oh, well, if it wasn't on video, then I guess opinions differ!
This is more than a hint of an accusation: Google HR investigated, and found some evidence to create a belief that Amit acted improperly enough to warrant termination. That's far from a foregone conclusion (how many execs are fired for sexual harassment? Not many.)
But, this firing has the smell of being one for appearances, rather than actual culpability.
But then again, I don't know the actors so if anyone with additional info confirms that it's a fair firing, I would be happy to listen.
Expecting a guy who clearly believes he was let go due to an unfounded malicious accusation to tell every future employer about it seems extreme. He obviously expected that Google would not leak his personnell notes, apparently that was a mistake.
> Expecting a guy who clearly believes he was let go due to an unfounded malicious accusation to tell every future employer about it seems extreme.
Sorry, but not at the SVP level. You are a semipublic face of the company and its culture, and it's in both your and the company's interest for them to know about these things to be able to get out in front of revelations like this.
You: "Accused of a crime he didn't commit, he escaped into the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by feminists and SJWs, he survives as a soldier of fortune"
If you are an executive, who is expected to be the face of the company, yes, yes you should disclose anything at all that could look bad to the company.
It is disappointing that because this guy was a superstar, Google acted like nothing happened.
- Syriana
> “As I entered the fifteenth year of working at Google, I've been asking myself the question, ‘What would you want to do for the next fifteen?’ The answer has overwhelmingly been: Give back to others. It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate, and make time for my family amidst competing work constraints — but on both fronts, I simply want to give and do more,” he wrote. “Now is a good time to make this important life change.”
> But within a year, rather than do good, Singhal had gotten a top job at Uber.
There's nothing inherently "not good" with changing jobs. If anything, you get an opportunity to make more money, make a bigger impact on new projects, and bring in others that you've worked with prior to join you. The latter can markedly improve their lives as well through the same (pay bump, new work, etc).
Implying that leaving Google for Uber is inherently not "do[ing] good" is pretty slanted.
Says you.
If you have the opportunity to make a bunch of money moving on to a new gig, hire your old co-workers, and work on new technologies like self driving cars[1], I'd say that's going to have a much larger impact than picking up a hammer and building houses Jimmy Carter style.
Also, using the Bill Gates, who's probably 2+ orders of magnitude wealthier than Singhal, as a comparison point isn't fair either.
[1]: Guessing on this one as I have no clue what projects he personally oversaw at Uber.
You don't have to be Gates-wealthy to be a philanthropist. Hell, I did some philanthropy when I was earning only $35k a year - I saved up $2k and sent out an invite to a dozen friends for them to do any short course of their choosing up to $150 and I'd pay for it. And that's small potatoes - there are thousands upon thousands of people out there working long-term as volunteers for good causes despite also being on or near minimum wage.
The idea that philanthropy is only the domain of the ridiculously wealthy is just bizarre.
Certainly, there are ways to "do good" by optimizing your earnings and using them to bankroll the good, but then that no longer works as an explanation for leaving -- a different job in basically the same role would be the same "work constraint"; his MO for "doing good" would be unchanged, just with possibly a bigger source of income for it.
His statement makes much more sense as a cover for the bad reasons, as when you hear "resigning to spend more time with his family [and totally not because of accounting fraud that we're still untangling]".
[0]: www.singhalfoundation.org/about
> I want to give and do more
> life change
These are not descriptions of moving from Google to Uber. The quote obviously implies some kind of philanthropic activity, not just getting a different good job.
In some circles, some companies are inherently evil and "do[ing] good" seen as fundamentally incompatible with private enterprise. With that in mind, leaving Google for Uber and wishing to "do good" becomes the height of hypocrisy.