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 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.
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.
Also, standards are higher for executives.
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.
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'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.
It's hard to can someone who (as mentioned in Susan's blog post) already left the company.
> 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.
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.
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.
[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.