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Comment by Arizhel | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. On the face of it, this totally reeks of scapegoating.

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".

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> shouldn't they be first looking at people who have recently been accused of harassment

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 you believe the allegations, then Uber's entire management was complicit. Even without him assaulting anyone at Uber, the fact that he let it happen under his watch is his fault.

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.

Low-hanging fruit. Generally, it's far easier to get rid of someone for lying ("You lied about about your reasons for leaving your previous company, it seems") than to prove novel allegations against them.

Right. You can sack anybody for anything of course, but convincing the HR department there is low liability for a lawsuit is another thing.

I don't think they sacked him to look like they're "doing something". How could his subordinates have any confidence the culture would change when he's been accused of the exact problem behavior they're trying to fix?

So you think an accusation is all that is needed to sack an employee? I think the bar should be higher than that. There should be some minimal verification that the accusation--which happened in another company--is legitimate.

We don't know the details of the incident but the article states Google was going to fire him if he didn't resign. We also don't know how much verification Uber did.

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.

Yep, that's what I'm worried about here. If the guy were accused of inappropriate conduct at Uber, his current employer, then it's entirely appropriate for the HR department to investigate and decide to fire him.

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.

According to the article he left for failing to disclose the circumstances of his departure from Google. The article further documents that he acknowledges that he left under this cloud. As the article notes "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."

It is hard to see that this is generalizable to the circumstances of typical employees.

If he was falsely accused by Google then he could have filed a lawsuit against them to clear his reputation. It is fact very unusual for prior employers to badmouth an ex-employee, which is why firms usually limit their communications to confirming the fact of someone's prior employment between certain dates but not making any other public statements.

The article says there was an investigation at Google, where they found the accusations against him to be credible.

How about giving people a second chance? One punishment for one crime or something... Or just give them off time. I think these are personality defects that can be corrected with counseling, does not make them a serial...

Did you skip the part about Google finding the allegations credible enough to fire him?

Also, standards are higher for executives.

Personally I'd rather Uber fire the HR department who are handling the harassment complaint first. They're the one who are not doing their job.

HR department rarely has any discretion. They are the mouth piece of the management. They just put it in nicer words and polished corp speak.

> 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?

It's hard to can someone who (as mentioned in Susan's blog post) already left the company.

Well, obviously it is scapegoating.

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.

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